What an Estuarine map is
Estuarine mapping is a method from Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co for finding out what you can realistically change in a complex situation. Instead of starting from a desired future, you map the present: everything that shapes the situation, placed by how hard and how slow it would be to change.
- Vertical axis — energy. How much effort, money or political capital it would take to change the thing.
- Horizontal axis — time. How long that change would take to happen.
Things that are cheap and quick to change are where you can act now; things that are expensive and slow are better worked around than pushed on.
What the template gives you
The energy and time axes, and a legend naming the four kinds of thing you place, each with its own colour:
- Actants — things with agency: people, groups, systems.
- Constructors — things that build or maintain a constraint.
- Constraints — what limits what can happen.
- Affordances — what the situation makes easy.
Three example items show the idea — a team lead who can veto a change, the quarterly budget cycle, a CI pipeline everyone already trusts. Delete them and map your own situation; keep the legend and the axes.
Mapping in ogof
- Double-click the canvas to add an item, then give it the colour of its kind.
- Drag items as the group argues about energy and time — the argument is the point.
- Any item can hold a submap: drill into it to unpack it without cluttering the map.
- Download gives you a
.canvasfile that opens in Obsidian or any JSON Canvas reader.
Credit
Estuarine mapping was developed by Dave Snowden and The Cynefin Co, who teach and document the method in full. This template is a starting layout, not a substitute for that guidance. ogof is an independent editor and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Cynefin Co.