Creating competitive advantage doesn’t come from adopting the same technologies as everyone else, but from merging the new with the old to satisfy user needs better than rivals. This requires a shift from tasking static, unconnected teams to ‘Run, Change and Disrupt’ (RCD) current systems, to a more dynamic, whole-of-organisation focus on what to Run-Disrupt-Change (RDC) — in that order!

Wardley Mapping is the operating system for this approach.

Every organisation runs on components that were once a ‘source of wonder’ — electricity, computing, LLMs — but have become costs of doing business today. A Wardley Map shows us which components we should RUN our operations on, and where we should build the higher-order systems that DISRUPT the old ways of working and create new sources of value.

Extracting value from the new requires continual adaption. Leading players in their industries, such as AirBnB and GovTech Singapore, use a trimodal model to facilitate this. A system of Pioneers-Settlers-Town Planners helps manage the hand-offs between diverse teams, so the organisation adapts quicker and more effectively to CHANGE.

This article presents research from the World Economic Forum (WEF), cases from a tech startup and Fortune 500 company, and provides insights into how Amazon is eating industries today: by supplying the platforms others RUN their operations on, stimulating ecosystems to DISRUPT them, and integrating whatever gains traction to CHANGE how they operate.

This is how we shape the landscape to our advantage.

A 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) report, Technology Convergence: The New Logic for Competitive Advantage, argues that competitive advantage comes from combining different technologies, rather than mastering a single one.

Winners are rarely the most technologically advanced, but those able to orchestrate better — integrating new sources of value into existing workflows. The WEF presents the 3C framework (Combine, Converge, Compound) as a guide for this.

The WEF’s framework draws on Wardley Mapping — a way to see how landscapes are changing — but the report provides no maps showing how to turn insights into action. We address that deficiency and argue that competitive advantage comes from what we Run, Disrupt and Change — in that order!

Breakthrough innovation doesn’t come from a single technology alone, but from technological advances in one area creating opportunities in adjacent areas. For example, advances in AI augment robotics, and advances in materials science open new pathways for next-generation energy systems.

Economist Carlota Perez demonstrated that the integration of complementary technologies triggers industrial revolutions: the spinning jenny (1764), water-powered mill (1771) and power loom (1785) mechanised the cotton industry; while advances in iron bar production helped build the infrastructure — canals, waterways and turnpikes — that launched the first industrial revolution. This pattern of converging technologies, backed by entrepreneurial financing, has repeated across every revolution since. And Perez’s work suggests our current technological revolution is unlikely to be different.

The question businesses should be asking therefore is: how do we create competitive advantage from these changes? The WEF explains why betting on a single technology alone is not the answer:

“Electric vehicles (EVs) emerged as early as the late 19th century, but their adoption stalled for decades. This was not only due to immature battery technology, but also the fact that there was no ecosystem to support manufacturing, charging and maintenance for everyday use.”

We create competitive advantage by overcoming constraints in our landscape — scarcity, risk, coordination challenges — without creating new, equally severe constraints. The WEF proposes the 3C framework for guiding this, but we argue it doesn’t go far enough, nor deep enough. Let’s address its shortcomings and provide a better source of guidance.

The central argument of the WEF report is that:

“At the heart of technological innovation lies combination: the integration of discrete complementary technologies to create something fundamentally new .… [and] the most valuable combinations tend to involve an interlock of technologies at different maturity levels – for example, pairing experimental innovations with stable, scalable infrastructure [as] these combinations strike a balance between novelty and deployment readiness”.

Here, the WEF is describing the Componentisation Effect — the idea that complex systems run on hierarchies of sub-components. We see this in every business value chain. Components (controllable assets we provide or consume) that were once new to the world, evolved to become the reliable, efficient platforms on which new, higher-order systems are built. Think electricity, which was once a thing of wonder, which begat computers, which begat LLMs, which are begetting AI agents today.

The WEF uses the evolution axis from Wardley Mapping to identify the components stable enough to build the future on. These technologies have evolved from the novel and uncertain to the widespread and reliable, moving from Genesis through Custom-built and Product to Commodity.

The strategic implication of this is clear: build new sources of value on top of evolved components, rather than carrying the cost and uncertainty of continually reinventing the wheel.

Yet, the WEF mistakenly calls the ‘evolution axis’ in Wardley Mapping a ‘measurement of maturity’. Maturity refers to a product’s lifecycle: how established, feature-complete or ‘finished’ a product is. Evolution is concerned with supply and demand competition — how this drives components from novel and uncertain to widespread and reliable. It measures how markets understand an activity.

Confusing ‘evolution’ and ‘maturity’ leads to muddled strategic thinking, such as McKinsey, who, in 2009, claimed that cloud computing was an immature product not yet viable for large enterprises. Investments in cloud, they argued, were following a “familiar IT hype pattern” diverting “attention from technologies that can actually deliver sizeable benefits”. Of course, they were wrong.

Anyone with a Wardley Map of the landscape back then would have seen a very different picture — one showing ‘cloud’ as the next evolutionary stage of a widely understood activity (computing).

With EC2, Amazon offered CFOs a way to switch fixed computing costs to variable costs, paying only for what they used. CFOs didn’t need to understand the technology to see the value. CIOs were also relieved of their biggest headache: investing in spare capacity to deal with sudden surges in demand.

Decision-makers understood they could run cloud as a reliable, efficient sub-component in their value chain and redirect resources to build new sources of value on top of it (the componentisation effect). And those new sources of value would eventually disrupt entire industries (e.g. mobile-only banks, ride-hailing apps, on-demand streaming). Evolution and maturity measure different things.

The WEF also advises organisations to get a common language — “both technical and operational” — to reduce friction across stakeholders as they try to answer three essential questions:

1. Which underlying systems should we build on top of?
2. Which new value-creating activities should we develop?
3. How do we get these different components working together?

Despite Wardley Mapping being a shared visual language, the WEF report fails to include a single map to guide readers in answering these questions. Let’s address this gap with a map of a real case:

Our client, an investment company, had a problem: one of their portfolio companies (a tech startup) was burning through capital and would soon be out of runway.

With a small team, we took an hour to map it out. On the (anonymised) Wardley Map below we’ve added a value chain (vertical axis) showing components visible to end users (at the top) and those less visible (towards the bottom). Can you see the startup's problem?

They were custom-building their entire technology stack! It makes sense to build components higher up the value chain, since these are visible to end users and matter to them. But it makes less sense to custom-build components lower down the value chain that users can’t see and won’t care about.

Re-inventing the wheel is a widespread problem in innovative organisations. What looks good on a CV (“I created an alternative to a market-leading technology”) doesn’t look good on the organisation’s bottom line as it carries all the cost of development, but earns no revenue from it.

With a map, problems — and solutions — become clearer.

The CEO announced that any technology that could be sourced using commercially available products or services would be. Anyone who thought they should keep custom-building something that didn't differentiate them would have to provide a compelling reason (no-one did).

Engineering talent was then redirected to developing the company’s solution (top left), or invited to leave (some did). This extended the startup’s runway, while refocusing efforts on the product that differentiated them, accelerating its evolution in the market.

Mapping out the problem helped the team see which methods they should use where (see fig.4): outsourcing commoditised components on the right, buying commercially off the shelf products in the middle, and only building the novel themselves on the left.

An existential problem that had plagued the company for months was resolved in hours.

This is how Wardley Mapping quickly helps decision-makers answer the first of our three essential questions: which underlying systems should we build on top of?

We run our value chains on commoditised components that are impossible to differentiate on and, rather than competing with providers, we use their products to build higher-order systems on top of them — new value-creating activities that disrupt the status quo.

Few organisations run their own data centres today, as computing is a cost of doing business, not a source of competitive advantage (which cloud provider does your smartphone use? Do you even care?). We create advantage by building the new on top of sub-components that were once a thing of wonder but are now reliable, efficient platforms that reduce the cost of exploration.

Once we’ve determined the underlying systems we should build on top of, the question becomes: which new value-creating activities should we develop? Which higher-order systems will disrupt the old ways of working — as ride-hailing apps did to taxis, or e-comm did to physical retail?

There are two routes to disruption:

1. Identify unmet user needs — or underserved markets.
2. Identify constraints in the value chain — preventing us from satisfying existing user needs better.

1/ Unmet User Needs
Users are not just customers who buy from you, but the others they buy for as well. Taking the user perspective helps identify anything missing from their lives. If we satisfy that, users will turn to us, as no rival offerings exist. This gives us time and the feedback we need to become better.

Unmet needs sit top left on a map — high in potential value, but also uncertainty (novel practices). To reduce the cost and risk of exploration, we build the new on top of efficient platforms (bottom right) — launching multiple, safe-to-fail bets to learn what works, then amplify what gets traction.

2/ Overcoming Constraints
The second route to disruption is overcoming constraints in current value chains. For example, Amazon created cloud computing to stop internal teams continually rebuilding the same systems, and “it became immediately obvious that every company in the world was going to want this.”

The WEF explains how overcoming constraints for EV batteries disrupted other industries as well:

“Battery performance was historically constrained by the use of heavy materials and inefficient chemistries. That bottleneck was relieved when advances in lightweight materials combined with improved battery chemistry, making lithium‑ion batteries practical. This shift unlocked an explosion of innovation in small devices, from smartphones to wearables, because designers could suddenly rely on compact energy-dense power sources that enabled new product categories.”

Let’s see how one company turned a constraint into a new multi-million dollar product.

Our client ran the sales centres of a Fortune 500 company in multiple countries, which were struggling with sluggish sales. A small team from the business and IT sides mapped out a typical sales centre — giving them the shared language they needed to discuss what might be wrong. It didn’t take them long to identify the main constraint: the ‘ERP interface’.

The ‘ERP interface’ connected the ‘Inventory Management System’ to the ‘ERP d-base’. It was a necessary, but expensive and cumbersome piece of technology. Training staff to use it took up 80% of onboarding time and, even then, it took 15 mins to process a standard order, with customers often baulking if there was even a small queue at the sales centre — negatively impacting sales. This was a problem being replicated thousands of times across the Fortune 500 company’s global operations.

The business side saw this as an IT problem, but IT felt constrained by an ERP system that had to be used. With the map as a common language, they could ask questions and challenge assumptions. After 30 minutes of discussion, someone suggested using a self-service ordering screen as a work-around to the ERP interface. At first the IT side resisted this. But together with the business side they mapped out the ‘technical and operational’ components needed and saw that it was feasible.

Within weeks they had a minimum viable product, which they piloted in their smallest sales centre. Over several months it exceeded every KPI: quicker throughput times, increased sales, less staff training, higher employee and customer satisfaction. They licensed their solution (at a lower cost than the ‘ERP interface’) to the Fortune 500 company, who rolled it out globally. This new product today earns our client millions in annual recurring revenues.

A simple, elegant — even obvious — solution, once they had a map.

In Clayton Christensen's classic definition, disruptive innovation is not a better product but a simpler, cheaper one that satisfies the unmet needs of users.

A Wardley Map enables us to identify the constraints and challenge the assumptions holding us back. This triggers insights — sudden and unexpected shifts to better stories — into the new, value-creating activities we should develop next.

The new only creates value when it finds its market. Once we’ve identified the underlying systems to build on top of, and the new value-creating activities to develop, we need to integrate the new into how we work so we can commercialise it effectively.

Anything genuinely new threatens to disrupt our current ways of operating. This triggers inertia, or resistance to change. The ability to change at speed therefore — integrating new sources of potential value into current value chains effectively — is where the game of innovation is won or lost.

IBM, for example, knew the future of computing would be a utility-like service, but they remained stuck behind barriers of inertia, leaving the door open for Amazon to steal their future. The success of electric vehicles has also been driven by outsiders, such as Tesla and multiple Chinese brands, rather than dominant industry players like Ford or Toyota because change is hard when you’re successful.

The iPhone is another example of an outsider (a computer company) capturing value in an adjacent industry. Christensen claimed Apple’s iPhone was not a disruptive innovation and predicted it wouldn’t succeed. But he failed to see that entire industries would change in an effort to capture the value from a new object of material desire that also met user needs for mobile connectivity and computing.

"The smartphone didn’t just plug into new systems – it had to run on top of existing telecom networks while layering in new capabilities … This shift forced an industry-wide change. Network operators had to change how they managed capacity and priced data. Phone makers had to add software teams to hardware-led organisations .… The device was widely adopted not only because of its features, but also because companies orchestrated the systems around it.”

To extract value from new components, organisations must integrate the new into their current value chains. This creates friction between those focused on the potential value for the business tomorrow, and those focused on protecting the tangible value the business provides today.

These tensions often resolve in favour of the status quo, as the known past has the data to support its position that an uncertain future lacks. Overcoming such deep internal resistance to change requires skilful orchestration. A dynamic trimodal structure helps address this.

Leading organisations — such as AirBnB and Singapore’s GovTech — organise their teams by attitude as well as aptitude (skills). Each of us has a natural problem-solving style, meaning we’re more suited to certain types of challenges than others. We group these into three archetypes:

1. Pioneers — those most likely to discover new sources of gold.
2. Settlers — those most likely to build the mines and get the gold to market.
3. Town Planners — those most likely to open factories making shovels for other Pioneers.

Matching attitudes to challenges in the landscape allows us to take advantage of this diversity: Pioneers focus on what to DISRUPT on the left, Town Planners focus on what to RUN on the right, and Settlers focus on the CHANGE needed to bridge the gap between the two (see figure 10).

Key to making this trimodal approach work is an internal mechanism of theft:

• Pioneers build new, higher-order sources of value on top of the reliable, efficient platforms RUN by Town Planners (commoditisation effect); or seek to overcome constraints in current value chains.
• Once Pioneers have shown the potential in the new, Settlers ‘steal’ their projects to commercialise (or discard) them, forcing Pioneers to keep exploring the new.
• Eventually, Town Planners ‘steal’ commoditised products from Settlers and RUN them as reliable, efficient platforms for Pioneers to build the new on top of (commoditisation effect again).

This is a continuous cycle of change.

Much is needed to develop a trimodal structure. But competitive advantage comes from knowing the systems to RUN, markets to DISRUPT, and how to CHANGE faster than rivals (RDC) — in that order!

The WEF report states that:

"As combinatorial technologies solve problems that individual technologies could not, they do more than shift where value accumulates – they increase the total value available to the market.”

Here, they are describing Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction — how higher-order systems create new sources of value, which attract capital away from components whose value has now peaked. This fuels the creation of the new on the destruction of the old.

No organisation owns every component in its value chain. All RUN on efficient, reliable sub-components that are widely available — from electricity, to cloud, and now LLMs.

Ecosystems form and seek to create new sources of value on top of these platforms. Most of these innovative efforts fail, but the few that find their market DISRUPT the current ways of working.

As more organisations start to adopt the new, the pressure to CHANGE grows for everybody — at first, this is about extracting value from the new, but eventually, it’s required just to stay in the game.

This cycle of creative destruction repeats endlessly — what was once a potential source of future value evolves to become a platform on which a new, as yet uncertain, future will be RUN.

The question is: how to monetise these stages.

The future is uncertain, but not everything is unpredictable. A Wardley Map provides us with situational awareness — the ability to see how value is created today and where this is changing. Now we can identify strategic moves to extract value from the cycle of creative destruction.

Run-based Strategies
1/ Scan weak signals: Do users complain about value for money? Does the idea for a utility service exist? Is the technology available? Can we build something suitable? This is a potential platform.

2/ Industrialisation: With predictability about WHAT will appear (a utility-like service) but not WHEN (as incumbent players are stuck behind inertia barriers) be a first mover and occupy the future.

Disruption-based Strategies
3/ Componentisation effect: After a sub-component industrialises there’s high predictability about WHEN the new will appear (now) but not WHAT it’ll be. Be a fast follower so you don’t fall behind.

4/ Explore the uncharted: On the left of a map there’s low predictability about WHAT will appear or WHEN. Action is full of uncertainty and risk. Here you experiment and gamble with the new.

Change-based Strategies
5/ Focus on evolution: Here there’s predictability about WHAT will appear (a more evolved version) but low predictability about WHEN. Get close to users and respond quickly to emerging needs.

All organisations have different types of people — Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners — who are adept at different types of challenges. By utilising aptitudes intelligently organisations can make moves across their entire landscape and out-compete rivals. One master of this game is Amazon.

Frustrated at continually re-building the same, low-value adding components as they expanded, Amazon sought to turn computing into a utility-like service. The idea and technology were already there. They only had to make something that would satisfy their own needs first (all weak signals).

As an industry outsider, Amazon faced minimal internal resistance to this change. They were able to build a service (EC2) they — and every organisation — could RUN their value chains on. Eventually, this led to an explosion of new products and services that DISRUPTED multiple industries.

Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, had glimpsed this future and forced his organisation to CHANGE to take advantage of it. He told every internal team to expose their systems through service interfaces, “or be fired”. This mandate became the architecture EC2 was built on.

Entire industries adopted the new ways of working — such as DevOps and Agile — that the cloud unlocked. Those that adapted best captured new sources of value. Those who didn’t saw a trickle of talent and users leaving turn into a flood, with capital following them.

Today, Amazon continues to play a sophisticated game: providing platforms on which industries RUN, stimulating ecosystems to innovate and DISRUPT markets, then integrating the components that CHANGE the game into their ever-growing platform — squeezing out the competitive space for rivals.

Amazon’s gameplay has given it a reputation today for:

1. Cost-efficiency: due to economies of scale that the platforms they RUN enjoy
2. Innovation: despite their ecosystems, not Amazon itself, being the force that DISRUPTS markets
3. Customer-orientation: adding the CHANGES that markets choose to their ever-growing platform.

Amazon eats industries through superior situational awareness. With a Wardley Map, you too can start to see how the game can be played in your industry.

In a changing technological landscape, competitive advantage comes from how well we combine novel technologies and practices with established ones to unlock new sources of value.

Wardley Mapping helps us see our landscapes more clearly, identify the technologies to run on and where to disrupt the status quo. The trimodal model: Pioneers - Settlers - Town Planners enables us to make the internal changes we need to exploit the potential in the new.

We have to move on from a static understanding of ‘Run, Change, Disrupt’ (RCD) to a dynamic one, where we ’Run - Disrupt - Change (RDC) — in that order!’ and shape the landscape to our advantage.