Consolidating Utilities - Patterns of Digital Strategy using Wardley Maps

Digital strategy isn’t just about products, platforms, or customer experience. The real game is played underneath — in the utilities that make those strategies possible.

In this next session of our Patterns of Digital Strategy series, we explore one of the most consequential — and often invisible — plays of the modern era: Consolidating Utilities.

This is the pattern where organisations secure strategic advantage not by polishing the customer-facing offer, but by controlling (or creating) the critical utilities that the entire value chain depends on.

It’s how Tesla built not just cars, but a proprietary fast-charging network that reshaped buyer behaviour.
How Starlink sits atop the cheap, repeatable launch system created by SpaceX.
And now, how Google, Microsoft and others are exploring the revival of power generation capabilities simply to feed the insatiable demands of AI.
All those strategies played out at lower levels of the value chains.

Utilities start as enablers. In the hands of strategic operators, they become weapons. And eventually, they can evolve into standalone, market-wide services.

Using Wardley Maps (no prior experience needed), we’ll:

• Break down the Consolidating Utilities pattern and why utilities sit at the heart of long-term strategic advantage
• Map real examples to reveal how underlying components evolve and when investing in them creates leverage
• Explore when to use existing utilities, when to extend them, and when to build your own — despite the cost
• Examine how proprietary utilities create early-stage power, and how spinning them off later can unlock new markets
• Help you assess which enabling components in your value chain are strategic… and which you’ve been blindly outsourcing

Expect a practical, high-clarity session with live mapping, grounded cases, and a deeper look at the architectural decisions that separate short-term tactics from durable strategy.

You’ll walk away with:

• A working understanding of the Consolidating Utilities pattern
• Clarity on how foundational components shape — and constrain — strategic options
• Insight into when controlling a utility becomes a competitive advantage, and when it should become a market service
• Greater confidence using Wardley Maps to reason about value chains, not just customer-facing features

This session continues our strategy series, alongside Absolute Convenience, Disintermediation, Adjacent Moves, Intelligence Advantage (data & AI), and more. Further dates will be announced soon.