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Building Capability

Tool: The Business Landscape Map

Chapter 2 — What You Actually Have (And What You Don’t Know You Have)

Purpose

Before you can build anything meaningful, you need a shared, honest picture of how your business actually works right now — not how it’s supposed to work on paper, but how it really operates day to day.

The Business Landscape Map does this in two layers:

  • The Base Layer — a diagrammatic map of your operation: your people (by role), your systems, your customers, your suppliers, and your external influencers.
  • The Process Overlays — transparent layers placed over the base, one per business process, tracing the sequence of events from trigger to outcome.

The result is a visual that everyone in the organisation can read, contribute to, and build from. It becomes the shared reference point for every conversation about what to improve, what to automate, and what to build next.

Part 1: The Base Layer

The Base Layer is a map of your business as it exists today. It is not an org chart. It is not a process diagram. It is a picture of the people, systems, and relationships that make the business run.

Layout

Draw your map using this orientation:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              CUSTOMERS                  │  ← Top of diagram
│         (segments / types)              │
├─────────┬───────────────────┬───────────┤
│         │                   │           │
│ SYSTEMS │   YOUR OPERATION  │  SYSTEMS  │
│ &       │                   │  &        │
│ VIRTUAL │  [Roles / People] │  VIRTUAL  │
│ ELEMENTS│                   │  ELEMENTS │
│         │                   │           │
├─────────┴───────────────────┴───────────┤
│     SUPPLIERS & EXTERNAL INFLUENCERS    │  ← Bottom of diagram
│  (suppliers / partners / government /   │
│   regulators / industry bodies)         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

What goes in each zone

Top — Customers
List your customer types or segments. Use descriptions, not individual names. For example: Residential homeowner / Small business owner / Referring GP / School principal. If different parts of your business serve different customer types, list them all.

Centre — Your Operation
This is the core of the diagram. Place the roles your business runs on — not individual names. One person may hold more than one role; show that by listing both roles in the same position or connecting them. Use your actual titles or working descriptions, not formal org chart language.

Focus on the roles that touch the work — the people who create, deliver, manage, check, and communicate. If a role is critical to day-to-day operation, it belongs here.

Sides — Systems and Virtual Elements
On either side of the operation, place the systems, platforms, and tools that support the work:

  • Software platforms (CRM, accounting, scheduling, communication)
  • Data sources (spreadsheets, databases, shared drives)
  • Automated processes or integrations
  • External platforms you depend on (booking systems, portals, government databases)

These sit alongside the operation rather than inside it — they support the people, they don’t replace them.

Bottom — Suppliers and External Influencers
At the base of the diagram, list the suppliers, partners, and external entities that affect how the business operates:

  • Suppliers of materials, services, or inputs
  • Subcontractors or delivery partners
  • Regulatory bodies, government agencies, or compliance requirements
  • Industry bodies or certification authorities
  • Any third party whose actions or decisions affect your operation

How to draw it

You don’t need specialist tools. A whiteboard works. A shared online whiteboard (Miro, FigJam, or similar) works well for teams in different locations.

Use sticky notes or boxes for each element. Keep the language simple — the goal is that anyone in the business can look at this and immediately understand where they fit and who they interact with.

Allow 60–90 minutes for the initial Base Layer. Do it with a representative group — at least one person from each part of the operation. The conversation that happens while you’re building it is often as valuable as the diagram itself.

Part 2: The Process Overlays

Once the Base Layer is complete, it becomes the foundation for a series of Process Overlays — one per significant business process.

Each overlay is a transparent layer placed over the Base Map. On it, you trace a single process from start to finish: the sequence of events, the handoffs between people and systems, and the involvement of any third parties.

What triggers a process?

Every process starts with one of two things:

  1. A customer action — an enquiry, a booking, a purchase, a complaint, a renewal
  2. A timing event — end of month, a scheduled task, a periodic review, a recurring obligation

Start each overlay by naming the trigger clearly.

What to trace

From the trigger, follow the sequence of events:

  • Who does what — which role takes action at each step
  • What system is involved — where does information go, what gets updated, what gets generated
  • What the customer experiences — what they see, receive, or wait for at each stage
  • Where third parties are involved — suppliers, platforms, regulators, subcontractors
  • Where decisions are made — the points where a person applies judgement rather than just following a step
  • Where handoffs happen — the points where responsibility passes from one person (or system) to another

Draw these as a flow across the Base Map — arrows connecting the roles and systems involved, in sequence.

Colour coding (optional but useful)

If you want to add a layer of analysis as you go:

  • Green — this step works well, adds clear value
  • Amber — this step is inconsistent, manual, or fragile
  • Red — this step is a known problem, bottleneck, or risk
  • Blue — this step is a candidate for improvement, automation, or elimination

What to map first

Start with the processes that matter most:

  1. New client onboarding — how does a new customer go from enquiry to active client?
  2. Core service delivery — the main thing you do, from start to finish
  3. Invoicing and financial close — how does revenue actually get captured?
  4. Handover or offboarding — how does a client relationship end or transition?

You don’t need to map everything at once. Four to six overlays usually reveal the most important patterns.

Part 3: What You’re Looking For

Once you have the Base Layer and two or more overlays completed, step back and look at the whole picture together. You are looking for:

Concentration risk — are too many critical steps sitting with one person or one role? If that person is unavailable, what breaks?

System gaps — are there steps that should be supported by a system but aren’t? Are people doing manually what a platform could do automatically?

Handoff friction — where do things slow down, get lost, or require chasing? Handoffs are usually where the most value is lost.

Decision bottlenecks — where does work wait for a senior person to make a call that could potentially be guided by a documented rule or a system?

Hidden knowledge — where does a step rely on someone knowing something that isn’t written down anywhere? That’s your intellectual property — and it’s at risk.

Duplication — where is the same information being entered, checked, or communicated in more than one place?

What Comes Next

The Business Landscape Map and its overlays become the input for everything that follows in this book.

  • The Three Horizons exercise (Chapter 3) uses the map to ask: which of these processes could look fundamentally different at each horizon?
  • The Entry Point selection (Chapter 5) uses the overlays to identify where a first capability build would create the most value with the least disruption.
  • The Proof of Value (Chapter 6) uses the overlays to define what “before” looks like — so that “after” can be measured clearly.

You don’t have to have a perfect map before you move forward. But you need enough of a map to be building from reality, not assumption.

Want to go deeper?
The full version of this tool — the Business Landscape Mapping Kit — includes a facilitated workshop guide for building the Base Layer and Process Overlays with your team, a library of trigger types and process templates for common business functions, a structured analysis framework for identifying the highest-priority areas for improvement, and a guide for translating your map findings into a capability-building brief.

Available in the members area at [website]