Tom Graves / Tetradian

How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect our enterprise-architectures?

This is Part 2 of this exploration: the first part is in the post ‘Decision-making – linking intent and action [1]‘. (Once again, please note that this is ‘work-in-progress’, so expect rough-edges and, uh, partly-baked ideas in various places?)

What we ended up with the previous post is that we what we do want is strong ‘horizontal’ connections across the modalities at the same time-distance to action, and strong ‘vertical’ connections across the time-scales at the same modality:

What we usually don’t want – unless intentionally, and with considerable extra care – is ‘diagonal’ connections across both timescale and modality in the same link:

The key point for architecture is that at the moment of action, no-one has time to think. Hence everything that we build in the architecture to support real-time action also needs to support the right balance between rules and freeform, belief and faith, in line with what happens in the real-world context.

It needs to ensure that we have the right sets of rules for action when rules do apply, and the right experience such that the fallback into faith is as effective as possible whenever the rules don’t apply.

What this implies is that, within the architecture, we’ll need to include:

• services to support each sensemaking/decision-making ‘domain’ within the frame
• services to support the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ paths within the frame
• governance (and perhaps also services) to dissuade following ‘diagonal’ paths within the frame

It also implies the need for a radical rethink of ‘command and control’ as a management-metaphor, which is where we finished in the previous post. What we’ll turn to here is the other items in that list immediately above.

Before we start, though, one important point to note: all of this is recursive. For sanity’s sake, I’ll need to keep things as Simple as possible here, using bullet-point lists and the like: but in reality all of it is also Complicated, Ambiguous and None-of-the-above – and each of those aspects likewise has components that are simple, not-so-simple and so on. It’s clear-cut and simple, and it’s blurry and messy – all of it recursive, ‘self-similar’ and different, all at the same time. Which gets more than a bit complicated or complex or even chaotic if we try to describe it all in one go…

So for now I’ll take the easy way out: I’ll aim for just a brief-as-I-can-make-it summary, and go into more detail where necessary in later posts. Or you can ask for clarification in comments here: it’s up to you. Point is that, of necessity, this is only scratching the surface: I’m well aware that it ain’t as Simple as I may make it seem, and I’ll trust that you’re aware of that too.

On services to support each domain:

For this section we’ll explore both sensemaking (left) and decision-making (right) together:

In both cases, the domains here split into two distinct sets, ‘horizontally’ either side of the Inverse Einstein test:

• on the left-side (‘order‘), our sensemaking and decision-making tactics (Simple / Complicated, Belief / Assertion) assume that things are predictable – and hence that doing the same thing should lead to the same result
• on the right-side (‘unorder‘), our sensemaking and decision-making tactics (Ambiguous / Not-known, Use / Faith) assume that things may not be predictable – and hence that doing the same thing may lead to different results, or achieving the same results may require doing different things

The vertical distinctions between the domains are often rather more subtle, but it’s crucial that our architecture does provide support right down to the exact moment of action. We need to make a point of this, because there’s an all too common tendency to assume that what works well distant-from-action – Complicated analysis and Complex experimentation, for example – will also work well at the point of action. Yet as the old joke warns us:

In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

‘Distant-from-action’ and real-time action are related, yet qualitatively different, in much the same way as Newtonian physics differs from quantum-physics. Hence these pairs of domains in the ‘vertical’ dimension as well.

So: order-domains:

What support do you have for Simple sensemaking: ordered, ‘controlled’, at real-time? What kinds of sensemaking are needed within the work at or close to the exact moment of action?

• examples: checklists, comparison-charts, mechanical sensors, real-time signals

What support do you have for Complicated sensemaking: ordered, ‘controlled’, predictable, but some distance away from real-time – either before the event as preparation, or after it, to make sense of what happened? What different types of support do you need for different ‘distances’ from real-time, from seconds to minutes to hours to days to months to years to decades and beyond?

• examples: analytics, dashboards, computational filters, aggregation

Going back the other way, from sensemaking to decision-making:

What support do you have for Assertion-based decision-making: decisions that assume the existence of order, ‘control’, predictability, yet also are some distance from – usually prior to – the moment of action? What different types of support are needed over the different timescales that we might describe as strategic, tactical and operational?

• examples: algorithms, hard-systems theory, computation or business-rules IT-systems

What support do you have for Belief-based decision-making: real-time decisions based on certainty, on rules, on assumed predictability? In what ways does this decision-making differ when there’s no time to think, no separation between decision and action?

• examples: rule-sets, rote-learning, step-by-step checklists and work-instructions, physical machines, real-time IT

And: unorder-domains:

What support do you have for Ambiguous sensemaking-contexts: some distance from the action, yet still known-uncertain? What different types of support do you need before and after action, and for different ‘distances’ from real-time?

• examples: experimentation, pattern-matching, statistics, trend-analysis, futures techniques, crowdsourcing

What support do you have for None-of-the-above sensemaking-contexts: right at the moment of action, yet inherently uncertain in some or all aspects? What kinds of sensemaking need to take place here?

• examples: listening, ‘flow‘, managing panic, social structures for ‘safe to fail’

(Note that most of that last set of examples would address not so much the sensemaking itself, but providing appropriate conditions for real-time sensemaking in inherent-uncertainty.)

From sensemaking to decision-making:

What support do you have for Use-based decision-making: decisions that are some distance from the action, yet do not assume certainty or predictability? What different types of support are needed over the various different timescales of distance-from-action?

• examples: patterns, guidelines and values, soft-systems theory, prioritisation, probability and necessity (modal-logic), social methods (from meetings to voting-systems etc)

What support do you have for Faith-based decision-making: decisions that must be made in the heat of the action in the midst of inherent-uncertainty?

• examples: principles (i.e. actionable values), skills and experience, context-design to maximise safe-fail or ‘graceful failure’, trust in ‘that which is greater than self’

(That last item is by far the hardest to describe, but it’s a key reason why I use the term ‘Faith’ here. I suppose this might perhaps be a kind of ‘hive-mind’ effect, but the point is that decisions here will often carry a feeling of ‘it was the right thing to do’, an ‘intuitive’ decision that aligns with a broader collective-purpose without conscious knowledge or certainty of how it does so. Deep familiarity with shared principles and values is a known key driver and anchor for this type of decision-alignment – hence their importance as and at the core of an enterprise-architecture.)

Review those lists above: which of those items would you currently include in your enterprise-architecture or process-architecture? Most conventional architectures will describe only the left-side (‘order’) items – yet support for all of these forms of support will need to be in place for the enterprise and its architecture to work well. Note any gaps in the architecture, and, even more important, gaps in support; and then move on.

In the next part of this series we’ll explore the architecture of how we link all these domains together. Any questions for now, though? Over to you, anyway.

It’s customary at this time of year to do some kind of review: what’s happened in the past annual cycle, hopes and intentions for the next.

[Sometimes these reviews can be a bit too predictable in their over-focus on prediction? As Forrester enterprise-architect Brian Hopkins put it in a nicely ironic Tweet this morning, "I predict that the volume, velocity and variety of tech predictions will require #MapReduce to analyze by Dec 2012."... Hence, uh, no predictions as such here: apologies if that disappoints you... ]

For me, though, it’s been an interesting exercise to explore cycles within cycles, and the often urgent need to avoid the ‘gumption trap‘ of what Johnnie Moore terms ‘the Tyranny of Excellence‘:

We flounder when we over-react or repress failure. … [O]rganisations flounder if they set up procedures and practices that appear to be about excellence but are more about being in denial of our variability and complexity as human beings. Efforts to make meetings a guaranteed success quite often just lead to the repression of doubt or criticism. …

The risk is that we set impossible standards for ourselves and then get demoralised by not reaching them. The demand for perfection makes us hypercritical and we fail to appreciate what we are actually achieving. When we lose that sense of reality, ironically, we’re more likely to fail or perhaps to give up altogether.

(‘Flounder‘ seems a painfully-accurate metaphor there: a flatfish whose eyes have both migrated to the same side of the head, able to see only one side of the story… But I digress… – return to the story.)

That gumption-trap of floundering can be particularly destructive for those of us who have distinct peaks and troughs in our work-patterns. For example, looking back, I did quite a lot last year: amongst other things, I presented at three very different enterprise-architecture conferences, edited two books, and wrote coming on for two hundred blog-posts on enterprise-architecture and related themes – often three to four thousand words or more each, adding up to the equivalent of several entire books. And I spent a fair bit of time travelling for work, too: a longish stay in Australia, a shorter one in Brazil, and a couple other brief trips as well.

Yet there were distinct patterns in all of that. All of the conferences happened in the first half of the year, as did all of book-editing and most of the travelling; by contrast, most of the blog-posts were in the second half of the year, with a lot of intense work on themes such as metamodels, service-architectures, management-structures and ‘really-big-picture’ enterprise-architecture, and, currently, on tools-ideas and SCAN for sensemaking. Every now and then there would be a definite slump, a kind of ‘mini-burnout’ – I’m in one now, as it happens, where I’m struggling to get much of anything done at all, and on previous experience may well go on for another few days yet.

Within each day, there are definite cycles too. For me, my peak creative-time is usually in the mornings: best time for writing, anyway. The less- creative time in the afternoons tends to get used for editing, for doing diagrams, for – oh joy… – all the administrivia that our ‘sensible’ business-world currently requires. Sometimes in the evening I find myself back in the creative space; sometimes not.

If I try to force myself to do creative work in the off-cycle, I risk ending up doing no work at all, because the all-too-predictable feeling of failure can trigger that gumption-trap of floundering. Just to make things worse, as Paul Graham warns in his classic 2009 essay ‘Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule‘, one interruption during that creative-time – or even just the threat of an interruption – can destroy creative productivity for the entire day: which again reinforces that sense of failure.

[The mindsets of 'makers' and 'managers' really don't mix - a fact I've been discovering to my cost whilst living in the same household as an elderly person who needs every day's activity to be regimented hour by hour on a rigid timetable, and who now literally cannot cope with any significant change of plan... Not fun, I can tell you: and seriously damaging to creativity, too... ]

And everyone has their own cycles, all of them somewhat different; and often those cycles will change over a lifetime, too, as the lethargic teenagers who can’t get out of bed before midday will change their habits when they become the parents awoken by a crying child at three in the morning. Daily cycles, yearly cycles, the cycle of a lifetime: cycles within cycles.

Yet what happens within most organisations? That’s right: we design systems that assume that people are machines, that they always work exactly the same all the time, in a measured, certain, predictable way. Or that they’re creative geniuses, every possible moment of every possible day.

And we then wonder why it doesn’t work.

Duh…

And then punish people for failing to work to our expectations. (Or teach them to punish themselves for ‘failing to meet expectations’, which comes to much the same thing.)

Oops…

So perhaps it might be a bit more wise to create organisational architectures that actually respect the fact that people are people? That they do each have their own cycles within cycles within patterns within flows within feelings, each subtly or strongly different? That some people indeed do not and cannot give their best work on a ‘manager’s schedule’? That that so-popular Taylorist attitude that regards people as second-class machines is perhaps a guaranteed path to mediocrity and poor performance?

Perhaps it might be more wise to respect people for who they are?

Strange idea for many managers, I know. But perhaps it’s the one that works?

And perhaps a reason why we really need to remind those managers that sometimes the best service they can provide to the whole organisation is to keep out of everyone’s way – such that the people who do actually make things can get their work done on their own natural schedules, rather than the ‘manager’s schedules’ of unusable, fragmented, discombobulated time?

Hmm…

Just reflecting on the passing year, the passing day, the passing time, that’s all.

[Update: as is so often the case, a perfect Tweet came up between writing this and checking Twitter - this time from Michelle James:

• CreatvEmergence: We need workplaces where people can engage and express more of their whole creative selves, not a reduced fraction of themselves

Expresses the point just as well as all of the above, really, and a lot shorter, too. Oh well. ]

How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, so that we do ‘keep to the plan’, at the individual level, and across the enterprise? And once again, what implications does this have for our enterprise-architectures?

This extends the previous posts on SCAN sensemaking and real-time decision-making, ‘Belief and faith at the point of action‘ and ‘Decision-making – belief, fact, theory and practice‘, this time to explore the linkage – or lack of it – between ‘considered’ decision-making and real-time decision-making.

[As before, most of this is 'work-in-progress', so be gentle with it, okay? It should be usable as-is, but do expect odd gaps, rough-edges and wobbly-bits in various places, and please give constructive feedback where you can. Thanks!]

We started from the SCAN sensemaking-frame:

And reviewed it from a perspective of decision-making rather than sensemaking:

It’s actually the same frame, so the two axes are the same in both views:

• a ‘horizontal’ axis of modality of sensemaking and decision-making, from simple true/false on the left, to infinite-possibility on the right
• a ‘vertical’ axis of time-to-decision or time-to-action, stretching from a real-time ‘now!‘ to a potentially-infinite future (and some symmetry with time-from-decision etc, into the past)

The vertical-axis is essentially continuous, but the horizontal-axis has a distinct phase-shift where the modality of decision changes from a simple-true/false [0..1] to an open n-ary [0..n] choice. To the ‘left’ of this point, the apocryphal Einstein dictum applies: doing the same thing should lead to – or is believed to lead to – the same results; whereas to the ‘right’ of that point, doing the same thing may lead to different results, or doing different things may lead to the same results.

On the left-side, there is what purports to be ‘objective certainty’; on the right-side, there is, by definition, some degree of inherent-uncertainty, always somewhat context-specific, and often somewhat personal and subjective. A conventional ‘control’-based concept of the world assumes that everything can somehow be forced onto the left-side of the frame; Reality Department and real-world practice indicates that such concepts of ‘control’ are still wishful-thinking at best, and that alternate decision-strategies must be available, dependent on context.

Hence one of the key tasks of an enterprise-architecture is to ensure that all required decision-methods are supported, and also ensure that appropriate methods are applied to each context.

The previous post, ‘Decision-making – fact, belief, theory and practice’, mainly looked the ‘horizontal’ dimension of this frame; here we’ll explore the impacts of the ‘vertical’ dimension – specifically, the separation between intent and action.

Read more…

A kind of announcement, really: a knowledge-base wiki for whole-enterprise architecture is now available and ready for content and use.

I’ve given it a temporary home on my Sidewise server:

• http://ea.sidewise.biz

No doubt it should have a proper domain of its own, but that’ll do for now to get us started.

[By the way, this is another follow-up to my post 'Helping others make sense of my work' - the need for a wiki was a suggestion that came up several times in the comments there.]

It’s a fairly straightforward wiki, based on the WikkaWiki framework – probably the cleanest and simplest wiki-framework I’ve come across. (I’ve struggled with many such frameworks over the years, of which Wikipedia is almost the worst…) Like all wikis, though, it does have its own quirks, hence some quick comments:

– Anyone can read, write or comment. (That’s the default: there’s actually a full access-control system for read, write and comment, all the way down to individual page-level, but that’d take too long to explain here.)

– However, to write, comment or edit, you’ll need to register a user-account. (There’s no charge for this, of course, and should be no privacy-implications: it’s just to stop spam-bots using the site.) There’s a quick summary on how to do this on the wiki home-page.

– One minor ‘gotcha’ is that user-names need to be in wiki-format – what’s known as ‘CamelCase’, beginning with a capital-letter and with at least one additional capital-letter after the start. For example, my user-name is ‘TomG’; you might make yours ‘FredBloggs’ or VikusVdM’.

– Editing is straightforward: click the ‘Edit’ link on the left side of the page-footer, or double-click on the page itself. The ‘Store’ (save) and ‘Preview’ buttons are at the lower-left when you’re editing.

– Formatting is a lot simpler than most wikis: in many cases it’s two repeated-characters. See the ‘Wiki formatting guide’ that’s linked from the home-page. Links are straightforward: ‘[[', then the page wikiname (internal link) or URL (external link), then a space as separator, the link-text, and ']]’.

– Usefully, a page can include a FreeMind-format mindmap: paste the FreeMind XML into the edit-space as the page-content. Read-only, unfortunately, but it’s an easy way to share mindmaps.

– Upload of images and other files is a bit more difficult, and at present only administrators can do it. I’ll hack the code as soon as I can, to allow a broader range of users to upload, but in the meantime, if you want to upload a file, send it to me and I’ll upload it for you.

I’ve put up some initial content to get started – a few dozen definitions, a couple of articles, and a whole load of links to other posts elsewhere – and I’ll continue putting more material up there over the next few days and weeks. But the rest is up to you, really: it’s everyone’s site, not just mine.

Anyway, it’s there, and usable: over to you?

In what ways do ideology and experience inform decision-making in real-time practice? How do we bridge between the intentions we make before and after action, with the decisions we make at the point of action itself? And what implications does this have for our enterprise-architectures?

This extends the previous post on real-time decision-making, ‘Belief and faith at the point of action‘, to crosslink with the earlier ideas on SCAN and sensemaking, and especially about where there is more time available to review and reflect on action.

[A gentle warning and polite request: much of this is still 'work in progress', so do beware the rough edges and knobbly bits, and use it with some caution; and whilst I do need critique on this, please don't be too quick to kick down the scaffolding that's holding it all together. Fair enough?]

The previous post was about how options for sensemaking become more constrained as we approach real-time. Right at the point of action, the options reduce to either a Simple interpretation in terms of of true/false categories, versus a Not-simple interpretation based on a modal-logic of possibility and necessity, which is much harder to explain or even to describe to anyone else. In SCAN we’d depict that compression as follows:

In much the same way, decision-making becomes compressed down to Simple belief versus Not-simple faith – neither of which are actually explainable, and both of which, at the root, are primarily emotional rather than ‘rational’:

In both sensemaking and decision-making, the crucial distinction – indicated in SCAN by where the red-line time-axis crosses the green-line axis of decision-modality – is what I’ve termed the ‘Inverse Einstein test’. Einstein is said to have asserted that “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”: but whilst that’s true in a simple rule-based world, it’s not true – or not necessarily true, anyway – in a more complex world where many things are context-specific or even inherently unique.

So our ‘horizontal’ test is this: if doing the same thing leads to the same results – or is believed to lead to the same results – then it’s a Simple decision; if doing the same thing leads to different results, or if we need to do different things to get the same results, it’s Not-simple.

[Yes, I do know that that's a Simple true/false distinction across a spectrum that in reality is fully modal. If you want to apply the appropriate recursion here, please feel free to do so: I thought it wisest here to keep it as simple as possible, because this can get complicated real fast, and unless we're careful to keep the complexities at bay we could end up with a right old chaos of confusion. Which is, yes, yet another recursion... Hence best to keep it simple for now, as best we can, acknowledge that much of it isn't Simple, and allow the recursions to come back in later when there's a bit more space to work with it.]

The crucial point about real-time is that there’s no time available for a distinct sensemaking-stage: decision links directly to action, and vice-versa. (That’s why it’s called ‘decision’: the same linguistic roots as ‘incision’, it’s literally ‘cutting away’, ‘cutting apart’, the cutting-edge for action in the ‘now’.)

For sensemaking to take place, there must be a gap in time between one decision to the next. The key to John Boyd’s ‘Observe, Orient, Decide, Act’ (OODA) loop – which, importantly, is also not a loop as such – is that it still allows distinct sensemaking (‘Orientation’) to take place, but keeps it as close to real-time as possible: that’s what’s meant by ‘getting inside the opponent’s OODA loop’.

As time-available – the red-line ‘vertical’-axis in SCAN – extends outward either side of real-time, the OODA-’loop’ can become recursive, and thence, given enough time, simplified-out to a Deming-style ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act’ (PDCA) continuous-review cycle, such as is also implied in the US Army’s ‘After Action Review‘:

• “What was supposed to happen?” – what was our Plan?
• “What actually happened?” – what did we Do?
• “What was the source of the difference?” – what do we need to Check?
• “What do we need to do different next time?” – about what do we need to Act?

As I’ve described in other posts, sensemaking-choices tend to split as described in SCAN: there’s a ‘bump’ on the path, indicated by the jump between simple true/false logic versus fully-modal logics of ‘possibility and necessity’ on the ‘horizontal’ axis, contrasted with a much smoother spectrum of choices as available-time extends in the ‘vertical’-axis. Although the ‘vertical’ boundaries are less clear-cut than the ‘horizontal’ ones, this gives us the four SCAN quadrants – Simple, Complicated, Ambiguous, Not-Known:

Those distinctions determine the appropriate tactics for sensemaking, as described in those earlier posts.

Decision-making seems to follow a similar, closely-related pattern – though that’s the part I’m having trouble pinning down right now.

[Boyd's OODA is in part another attempt to pin down the same relationships; likewise Snowden's Cynefin, if rather less so. Jung's frame of 'psychological types' is probably a closer fit than Cynefin for this: I've used a generic decision-types adaptation of it for some decades now, though it's still not quite right. Hence this exploration here.]

So again, it’s ‘work-in-progress’, but this is where I’ve come to at present:

It’s a decision-making frame based on the same horizontal (decision-modality) and vertical (time-available) axes as in SCAN, and hence the same sort-of-quadrants but with a decision-oriented re-labelling: Belief (Simple), Assertion (Complicated), Use (Ambiguous) and Faith (Not-known).

On the left-side of the Inverse-Einstein test, the mechanism that links Assertion and Belief is a drive for certainty, for ‘control’. On the right-side, linking Use or ‘usefulness’ with the real-time openness of Faith, is more a focus on experience, underpinned by a deeper kind of trust – a trust which is often conspicuously absent in any concept of ‘control’.

[For this post I'll focus more on what happens across the horizontal-axis, the relationships between theory and practice, or 'truth' versus 'usefulness'. I'll explore more closely the interactions along the vertical-axis - between what we plan to do versus what we actually do - in a following post.]

In terms of decision-making tactics:

• on the left-side, theory takes precedence over practice – or, in some contexts, ideology rules, which is much the same
• on the right-side, practice takes precedence over theory

In essence, this is CP Snow’s classic ‘The Two Cultures‘, the sciences (left-side) and the arts (right-side). Notice, though, that technology sits on the right, not the left: it uses theory, but that isn’t its actual base – hence the very real dangers in the often-misleading term ‘applied science’.

Bridging the gap, from left to right, is praxis,”the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practised, embodied, or realized”; and from right to left, is pragmatics, “a process where theory is extracted from practice”. As enterprise-architects would be all too aware, the latter always starts from pragma, from “what is expedient rather than technically ideal”: and it usually includes the joys of ‘realpolitik’, of carefully filtering reality to fit in with other people’s prepackaged assumptions…

That boundary denoted by the Inverse Einstein Test is all too real: whether the beliefs in question are ‘scientific’, religious, political or whatever, the ‘need’ for certainty will often trigger huge resistance against anything that doesn’t fit its assumptions. For example, there’s a very close mapping between this frame and the classic scientific-discovery sequence of idea > hypothesis > theory > law, which align with Faith, Use, Assertion and Belief respectively.

In real scientific practice, it’s not a linear sequence, there’s a lot of back-and-forth between each of the steps. And in principle, it should be a continuous-improvement cycle, a broader-scope form of PDCA. But as Thomas Kuhn and many others have documented, that same ‘need’ for certainty often places a near-absolute barrier between supposed ‘scientific law’ and any new ideas – in other words, between Belief and Faith – that brings that cycle to a sudden halt, sometimes for years, decades or even centuries. All too often, in practice, if we take the real-time ‘short-cut’ from Belief to Faith, we will be forcibly forbidden to return along the same path: instead, we’re forced to go ‘the long way round’, via Use and Assertion (hypothesis and theory) – which we may not have time to do. Which is a very real problem. And one that applies as much in enterprise-architecture as in any other field – as we’ve seen with the inane IT-centrism that has dominated the discipline for far too long.

It gets complicated…

What I’ve been seeing, as I’ve explored this frame, is a whole stream of often-subtle misunderstandings and ‘gotchas’ that I’ve noticed time and again in practice in enterprise-architecture and elsewhere. These seem to be where many unnecessary complications and confusions arise – so it’s worth noting them here.

For example, fact arises from experience: its basis is on the right-side of this frame – not the left. What’s on the left-side often purports to be fact: yet it’s not fact as such, but interpretation of fact – a very important difference. The left-side operates on information, an interpretation of raw-data – but it often has no means to identify the source or validity of that information, or its method of interpreting it. (This is the same inherent problem whereby a logic is incapable of assessing the validity of its own assumptions: by definition, it must call on something outside of itself to test those premises.) So on the left-side, there’s actually no difference between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ – which can lead to all manner of unpleasant problems if the left-side is allowed to over-dominate in any real-world context…

Importantly, there’s no real difference here between ‘objective’ versus ‘subjective’: that distinction is actually another dimension that’s somewhat orthogonal to this plane. What I feel, or sense, is subjective, but it’s still a fact; whereas how I interpret that feeling or sensation is not a fact – it’s an interpretation. Telling someone that they should or shouldn’t feel something is just plain daft: the feeling itself is a fact – something about which we don’t actually have any choice – whereas the ‘should’ is an interpretation arbitrarily imposed by someone else.

[What we do in response to a feeling is a choice - literally, a 'response-ability' - and is something that can be guided by 'shoulds' and the like: but not the feelings themselves. That's a very important distinction which, sadly, surprisingly few people seem to understand...]

There is a specific sense in which subjective versus objective aligns somewhat with the ‘less-time’ versus ‘more-time’ on the SCAN vertical-axis. More-time means more time available for experimentation and analysis – and that can allow us to identify what’s shared (‘objective fact’) across many people’s experience, versus experiences that are more specific and personal (‘subjective fact’).

But there seems instead to be a tendency to conflate the objective/subjective distinction with the SCAN horizontal-axis – objective-fact as ‘truth’ on the left-side, subjective-fact as ‘not-truth’ on the right-side. There are ways in which that conflation can work – it’s at the core of the Jungian frame, for example – but we need to be careful about it. Using that conflation to dismiss all subjective-fact as ‘irrelevant’ – as the classic ‘command and control’ models would do – not only makes no sense at all, but is extremely unwise in real-world practice…

There also several other key distinctions across either side of the Inverse-Einstein test:

– ‘science’ versus technology, which also parallels ideology versus practice: on the left-side, there’s an assertion that something is ‘true’, whereas on the right-side we proceed as-if it’s true – which is not the same at all.

– organisation versus enterprise: the nature of an organisation is that it’s about left-side themes such as control, beliefs, repeatability and certainty; the nature of an enterprise is that it’s not certain, “a risky venture” and suchlike – with all that that implies.

– structure versus story: most structures within current enterprise architectures will, again, have a left-side focus on providing repeatability and certainty; story and other forms of narrative-knowledge provide an alternate kind of ‘structure’ that holds many of the right-side themes together

– sameness versus uniqueness: another key enterprise-architecture theme, sameness and repeatability is very much a left-side theme, whereas uniqueness is just as much a right-side theme

– ‘best-practice’ versus ‘worst-practice’: the notion of ‘best-practice’ assumes that practice that worked well in one context will be directly applicable to another, the same success repeatable in another; by contrast, maintenance engineers and others who work extensively with unique or near-unique contexts share their learning more through ‘worst-practice’, stories of what didn’t work in a given context. (I think I first heard that one from Dave Snowden? – credit where credit’s due, anyway.)

The trade-offs across each of these dichotomies all have direct implications for the design and structure of any enterprise-architecture.

Implications for enterprise-architecture

Take a look at those dichotomies again: which side do you think is emphasised by current enterprise-architectures?

The obvious answer is that, almost invariably, the left-side is given priority over the right.

However, this has huge consequences for the effectiveness of the overall enterprise, and for the enterprise-architecture that describes it:

• interpretation takes priority over fact: never a good idea…
• theory and ideology takes priority over practice and experience: that’s almost a definition of (misused) Taylorism…
• the need for (spurious) ‘certainty’ and ‘control’ takes priority over trust of anything or anyone: ditto on Taylorism…
• the reliance on true/false decision-methods can render the organisation unable to cope with any form of uniqueness
• the need to force-fit everything into sameness of content – ‘best practice’, IT-centric BPR and the like – fails to grasp the differences of context
• the over-focus on organisation – ‘the letter of the law’ – literally kills off the spirit of enterprise…

Look at most of our existing EA toolsets, too: can you find any toolset that’s actively designed around anything other than true/false logic? Other than in rare model-types such as ORM (Object-Role Modelling), there’s no means to describe modality in relationships – hence, for example, no directly-supported way to describe a usable reference-model that allows for real-world ifs, buts and perhapses.

And whilst every toolset focusses on structure – and most do that very well, too – how many of those toolsets also help us to focus on the counterpart of story? They might support few use-cases, perhaps, but that’s about it: there’s a huge gap in capability there…

What we need, urgently, is a better balance between structure and story, between theory and practice, between organisation and enterprise. And without adequate support in the toolsets, that means that we have to create that balance ourselves.

The crucial point is that this balance is not an ‘either/or’, but a much more modal ‘both/and’:

• theory and experience
• ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’
• ‘science’ and technology
• certainty and trust
• true/false and fully-modal
• organisation and enterprise
• structure and story
• sameness and difference
• ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense‘
• certainty and uncertainty

We will only achieve a real effectiveness in the architecture via a fully-nuanced ‘both/and’ balance across all of these dimensions, and more.

So take a careful look at your own organisation, your own enterprise-architectures and the like: where is it out of balance, in this sense? In SCAN terms, how much does it over-emphasise the left-side at the expense of the right-side? And what can (and must) you do to bring it back into a better balance overall?

Comments/suggestions/experiences on this, anyone?

Another follow-on to the earlier post ‘Helping others make sense of my work‘, just a quick note to let you know about two current book-projects.

The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years or so: more than 40 posts here on various aspects since ‘The enterprise is the story‘. And as in the post ‘The no-plan Plan: architecture as story‘, it’s one of the five key-themes in my ‘no-plan plan‘ for my current and future work-direction. So it’s something I need to get down on paper, in more direct, usable form.

There’s a definite deadline of end of February for this one, because I’ll need it available in time for my presentation ‘The enterprise is a story: a narrative approach to enterprise-architecture‘ at the Integrated EA conference in London on 6-7 March 2012.

The second has a working-title of The business-anarchist: enterprise-architectures for the edge of chaos. This has perhaps been a less prominent theme on the blog, but it’s turned up quite a few times, such as in the post ‘Analyst, anarchist, architect‘. In essence, it’s about being deliberate and responsible about working with disruption in the business-context, preferably before that disruption is thrust upon us – a concern which is rapidly becoming more and more important almost by the day.

I’ve been nibbling at this one since mid-2009, and even wrote a fair chunk of it at various points last year, but didn’t finish it then, in part because it didn’t feel like the right time. Now, post-Occupy and suchlike, it does feel more like the right time, so I need to get it done. It’ll have to come after The enterprise as story, but with luck and lack-of-distraction it should be ready somewhen in April.

There’s also another enterprise-architecture book I’ve been working on for quite a while now with a colleague in Guatemala, Michael Smith. We don’t have a working-title for this one yet, and it’s rather further away in time – somewhen mid to late next year, probably – but it’s probably worth mentioning at this point. It’ll focus on the Five Elements theme that comes up in quite a few places in my work – for example, the structure of the effectiveness model used in SCORE strategy-assessment and the book Real Enterprise-Architecture, and the core of the market-cycle that’s used in conjunction with Enterprise Canvas.

Will let you know when any of the books become ready and available, but thought I’d keep you up to date with this part of work-in-progress, anyway.

Coincidensity – a really nice neologism that I first saw in a Tweet by social-business specialist David Cushman:

• davidcushman: RT @stoweboyd: the right word isn’t serendipity, it’s coincidensity: the likelihood of serendipity
• jonhusband: @tetradian @davidcushman @stoweboyd … I much enjoy the #neologism coincidensity .. bravo !

From the Tweet, I’d assumed that the term had come from Stowe Boyd: but being the gentleman that he is, he was quick to assign the credit elsewhere:

• stoweboyd: Coincidensity was coined by Matt Biddulph, though. I’m just a user/thief @jonhusband @tetradian @davidcushman

The link between serendipitous ‘coincidences’ and innovation has a very long history. For example, one of my favourite books, Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation, includes a whole chapter on the role of chance in science, and points outs that it’s nothing like as ‘random’ as it might seem:

If these discoveries were made by chance or accident alone, as many discoveries of this type would be made by any inexperienced scientist starting to dabble in research as by Bernard or Pasteur. The truth of the matter lies in Pasteur’s famous saying: “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” It is the interpretation of the chance observation which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

For me, in enterprise-architecture, two distinct themes come to mind from this.

One is the crucial role of uniqueness: the ‘one-off’ that stands out just enough to make itself distinct and noticeable – much as in Common Ground‘s concept of ‘particularity’ or local distinctiveness – yet is also in some way useful. I’ve explored uniqueness in enterprise-architecture from quite a few different directions over the past few years, so I’ll just mention again that it’s important, and that we need to take note of it, and leave it at that for now.

The other theme is about how, in an architecture, we can design for coincidensity – or design against it. Coincidensity can indeed be left to chance: but exactly as in that quote of Pasteur’s, “chance favours the prepared mind” – or, in this case, the prepared architecture.

So, for example, in a high-innovation environment, we can design for high coincidensity. In a physical building, we can ensure that the natural pathways encourage ‘accidental’ meeting between disparate groups. In social networks, this is a key part of the role of the ‘super-node’, he brings together people in ‘unexpected’, seemingly-serendipitous ways. We can do much the same in virtual-spaces, either by structures that are designed to create ‘accidental’ cross-connections between different groups, or through simple ‘randomisers’ such as Google‘s archetypal ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button.

And in some cases, where we need to break out of too-entrained thinking, we might even sort-of trick people into a high coincidensity of ideas, using a flood of deliberate mismatch and cognitive-dissonance – much as described in Raymond F Jones‘ classic science-fiction short-story Noise Level. Some aspects of the context-space mapping sensemaking-methodology, of which SCAN is a simplified version, are structured to support that kind of intentional not-quite-mismatch.

We can also design to reduce the coincidensity of a context. That’s not as strange as it might sound, because random variation or random interruption is the one thing we don’t want in a high-control or high-repeatability context. We want some types of business-processes to be as predictable as possible: for example, to put it the other way round, we probably don’t want strange surprises in our lunchtime salad.

Some low-coincidensity contexts are rather less pleasant: the design of a high-security prison, for example, will aim to minimise uncontrolled or unplanned connections between individual prisoners. One of the fundamentals of 18th-19th large-house design in Britain and elsewhere was the notion of the ‘invisible servant’, that the house should be structured to prevent – or at least minimise – any contact between servants and owners: house-plans show hidden passageways and stairways and service-areas that servants and maintenance-staff would be required to use, to scurry literally between the walls without being seen or heard. And some present-day executives are infamous for enforcing complete separation between themselves and their staff, hiding away in the top-floor suite – and then expressing surprise when the business fails because the structure had ‘successfully’ blocked out key information that they needed to know.

So coincidensity is a design-choice: we can design for high-coincidensity, low-coincidensity, or anywhere in between. (Or we can just ignore it and hope for the best – which is rarely a good design-strategy…) To do this in enterprise-architecture and the like:

• identify the types and levels of coincidensities that we need
• identify tactics and design-features that will support the required coincidensities
• work with others to develop and implement the required features

I’ve summarised some example-tactics above, though there are plenty more, of course: it’s up to us what we do, really. The key point is to recognise the principle of coincidensity – its nature as the density of ‘unplanned-for coincidences’ in any form – and design our structures to promote or dissuade such coincidences according to the need.

Again, will leave it there for now, though do let me know if you want me to explore this further here.

As usual, comments or suggestions, anyone?

Yes, I know I’ve gone a bit quiet in the past couple weeks, and no, I haven’t abandoned those ideas about SCAN sensemaking and real-time decision-making and the like.

Reality is that those ideas are very much in the ‘work in progress’ stage at the moment, and as yet still quite some way from a form that might make much sense to anyone else. To illustrate, for the past couple of weeks I’ve spent rather too many hours staring at and tweaking of a set of whiteboards that look like this:

In other words, it’s coming together, sort-of, but it’ll take a bit more time yet to clean it up into usable form. Watch This Space, perhaps?

What is it that drives decisions at the exact moment of choice and action? – even in the most mundane, everyday action? If the choice-point itself is a true moment of chaos – a point where literally anything is possible – then what is it that guides us through each of those infinitesimal yet ubiquitous moments?

A lot of this is still tentative, very much ‘a work in progress’. Yet what I’ve found myself returning to again and again over the past few days, whilst working on the design and workflows for the SCAN app, is a pairing of two words: belief, and faith.

[Don't worry, I'm not going to go all religious on you. (Well, probably not, anyway. ) This is still the same enterprise-architecture exploration about the context of SCAN, about sensemaking and decision-making at real-time, particularly in what some would term the 'Chaotic domain'.

Minor warning, though: this is written in English, and from the perspective of an Anglo culture. I think (believe? guess?) that what follows is close to generic across all human cultures, but note that you may well need to do some translation here, both linguistic and cultural.]

Where SCAN’s ‘Simple’ and ‘Not-simple’ are about about how to describe sensemaking, belief and faith seem more about decision-making – the actual moment of choice that immediately precedes each moment of action. In other words, decision-making in real-time. And because sensemaking, decision-making and action are all intertwined with each other within real-world practice, belief and faith also map onto the SCAN frame in much the same way as for real-time sensemaking.

[There's also a mapping to the full SCAN, that extends this outward to the scope where there is more time available for review, but I'll describe that in another post.]

In short, belief maps to the known, the certain, the Simple; whilst faith maps to the unknown, the uncertain, the Not-simple:

As in sensemaking, the crucial distinction occurs where the modality of the decision-choice changes from a Simple deontic true/false to a Not-simple true alethic logic of ‘possibility and necessity’:

– over on the left-side, belief provides a straightforward black-or-white choice: true or false, right versus wrong, culturally ‘proper’ versus ‘politically incorrect’;

– over on the right, choices are more blurry, more uncertain, more ‘shades of grey’ – or more colourful, perhaps – and the only guide we have is faith or trust that what we do is right. (Right in its own way, but still ‘right’ in some sense.)

Both of these are actually about the individual, about ‘I’. Which it should be, of course, because that’s all we have at the exact point of action: our own choice, and our own ‘response-ability’.

Belief is fast, and importantly doesn’t demand any personal skill as such: the whole point is that they’re deemed to be ‘true’ for all who enact them, regardless of who or what enacts them. (A belief may be believed to apply only to self – such as ‘nothing goes right for me’ – but is still held as an ‘absolute truth’ in that sense.) This has both advantages and disadvantages, mainly relating to how well the belief does match up to actual reality. Advantages include:

• simple beliefs are useful when the person enacting them has only a limited level of skill and ‘response-ability’ – “just follow the instructions, kid…”
• even for those with skill, simple beliefs are useful as a structured fallback for whenever the faith falters in the context and in one’s own ability – “when all else fails, follow the instructions”
• advising acceptance that some contexts are constrained by ‘laws’ of some kind – particularly the physical-world constraints implied by ‘scientific law’ and the like
• beliefs are also useful as a disciplined means to temper excess enthusiasm – “trust to Allah, but tie the camel first”

A classic example of a structured belief of that last type is the checklist - mapping out essential safety-checks and other ‘known truths’ prior to or during any activity that is inherently uncertain.

The disadvantages of ‘prepackaged’ belief-structures are more complex, and often rather more subtle:

• the usefulness of beliefs ultimately depends on the myth of ‘control’, the myth of predictability and certainty – none of which may be valid in a real-world context
• beliefs themselves can and do act as perceptual filters, potentially rendering invisible essential contrary information from the context
• as guides for choice and action, beliefs can apply inappropriate constraints to action in any given context – following ‘the letter of the law’ rather than ‘the spirit of the law’
• in much the same way, beliefs can be used to evade difficult or challenging choices – for example, ‘morals’ as ‘the lazy-person’s ethics’

Faith is often the only choice-mechanism available whenever the context is inherently uncertain. It also correlates closely to skill – so much so that, in essence, ‘skill’ is a proxy for the real-world reliability of faith in one’s own ability to work with the inherent uncertainties of a given type of real-world context. In other words, skill is what determines whether we really can do what we believe or hope we can do in that kind of context.

Sometimes, though, it isn’t about skill: it’s just about faith, or trust. Every change of belief requires ‘a leap of faith’; innovation or experimentation always requires us to accept that we don’t know what the outcome will be. (That’s very different from belief, where we do expect the outcome to be what we expect.) A modal-logic of possibility and necessity is the only place where ‘the impossible’ first becomes possible – and thence, through skill, becomes probable, then predictable, and eventually something resembling certain, a kind of ‘law’ in its own right. It may end up as a checklist or some other pre-packaged set of beliefs – but it always starts with faith, in the midst of a moment of inherent uncertainty.

As with belief, there are disadvantages to faith too: not least what we might describe as ‘misplaced faith’, where lack of skill – or plain old lack of awareness – leads to inappropriate outcomes. Whether we like them or not, sometimes the constraints of belief do apply – such as in most (though not all) assertions of ‘scientific law’ and the like.

So in practice we need to be able to bounce back and forth along SCAN’s ‘horizontal’ axis of modality. Sometimes we need to hold to a Simple true/false belief; sometimes we need to let go into the Not-simple world of faith and trust. And of course, recursively, there are no set rules about which one should always apply at any given moment – which means that this too is a skill in itself. It’s Complicated, perhaps, or Complex… yet in real-time action we don’t even have time for either of those. All we have is this decision, right here, right now – no time for anything else. Belief that we know what to do; or faith that the results we need will arise from within the chaos itself.

All of which means that, as enterprise-architects, we need to understand how belief and faith work within our organisation and enterprise, and provide structures to support them in real-world practice.

Enterprise-architecture implications

It’s essential to draw a distinction here between the individual and the organisation. Belief and faith are expressed in practice directly by the individual, or indirectly by proxy, such as via the design or operation of a semi-autonomous machine or IT-system. Yet in an organisational context, it’s the collective belief and faith that we want expressed in action – expressed by the individuals on behalf of the organisation, the collective.

In effect, that’s the key role of organisational culture – and despite the wishes of executives and others, it’s not as simple as it looks… For enterprise-architects, it also means that we often have to address aspects of organisation-architecture that are more usually the territory of HR and change-management and the like – which means that we have to tread carefully at times, and engage in some potentially-challenging negotiations. But the payoff is an enterprise-architecture that really works – for everyone.

The organisation’s beliefs-in-action are expressed in definitive statements such as work-instructions, reporting-relationships and business-rules. One of the architectural concerns here is to provide support such that these business-rules and the like are actually implemented in practice, in real-time decision-making.

To make this work, we in effect need each individual to take up those shared-beliefs as if they are their own personal beliefs. This is especially important wherever these rules must normally be followed ‘to the letter’ – such as in regulatory compliance.

It’s crucial to understand, though, that rules cannot be imposed onto individuals from outside, whether by fiat or threat of force. Although as an organisation we can give ourselves the illusion that this has been done, it rarely works in practice: instead, there will usually be a myriad of small ‘failures’, ranging from unconscious errors to covert rebellion, which effectively sabotage the intended functional impact of the rules. (The former will tend to occur more often in collective-oriented cultures, the latter especially so in individual-oriented cultures.)

What does work is to engage people in the rules – the ‘why’ as much as the ‘how’ and ‘what’. To use the terms from Hagel, Brown and Davison’s The Power of Pull, we create that engagement by shifting from ‘push’ to ‘pull’. In an enterprise-architecture, we do this by treating organisational-beliefs in much the same way as for organisational-values. The Enterprise Canvas model describes a generic structure for this purpose:

• create awareness of the rules-structure, its purpose and rationale, and the context for its use
• build capability to apply the rules-structure in real-time practice
• apply the rules-structure in run-time decisions
• verify and validate the usage of the rules-structure
• derive lessons-learned from the (attempted) usage of the rules-structure

Working with HR, change-management, process-management and others, we create what is in effect a PDCA-type learning-loop, to develop, apply and revise the business-rules and other belief-structures for the organisation.

The faith-in-action side of that decision-making modality-spectrum deals with anything that isn’t covered appropriately by business-rules and the like – which is a large part of most real-world organisational contexts. For enterprise-architecture, the two key focus-areas are skills-development, to enhance individual ‘response-ability’; and vision, values and principles, to enhance consistency in decision-making across the collective.

The skills-issue is one that is almost completely missing from most current-enterprise-architectures, especially those of an IT-centric bent. That’s rapidly becoming a lethally-dangerous oversight – see the Sidewise post ‘Where have all the good skills gone?‘ – and one that we need to address, working in conjunction with HR, organisational-development units and suchlike. EA will come into the picture by mapping out skills-requirements and competency-levels needed within enterprise-capabilities; the actual skills-development would usually be out of scope for EA, of course, though overall much of it would follow that generic structure for values as above.

The values-issue is one I’ve been pushing for a very long time as the true core of the enterprise-architecture: for example, it forms the topmost layer of abstraction in Enterprise Canvas, and thence acts as the anchor for the generic structure described above for values-management services. The reason why it’s important is that if the organisation isn’t clear about its values, then what will be used instead – as the drivers for ‘faith’-type decision-making – will be whatever values happen to be around for that individual. Which could be anything at all. Including not just a destructive ‘me-first’, but a really destructive ‘me-only’. In other words, not a good idea… clarity on values matters.

A lot more that could be said on all of that, but I’d probably best leave that for the moment. The only point that does need to be added here is the importance of story – the enterprise as story, the enterprise is the story – as the ‘glue’ that holds all of this together.

Overall, the real point here is this: that at the point of action – and despite whatever we might plan beforehand – decisions seem to be taken primarily on the basis of belief, or of faith or trust. Which means that, architecturally, we need to design for that fact. Not a trivial point, then.

More on this in another post soon, but any comments so far, anyone?

What do we do when we don’t know what to do? – and how do we ensure that whatever we do is the right thing to do? How do we make sense fast, at business-speed?

I’ve been tussling with this one for quite a while, most recently culminating with a simple sensemaking framework called SCAN:

The horizontal green-line axis here represents the decision-type, from a simple true/false choice to a not-so-simple modal choice of possibility and necessity; the vertical red-line axis is the amount of time available before must make a choice and take action.

[For more on SCAN and its technical background, see the posts '"Let's do a quick SCAN on this"' and 'Domains and dimensions in SCAN'.

In a sense, though, that red line of 'available-time' goes both sides of the 'now', extending outward both into future plans and past record:

Time and distance and even social-distance all compress down towards the point of decision, the moment of action, the now. That 'now'-moment is the only one that matters: prior to that point, every 'decision' may be nothing more than a vague statement of intent, which may not actually happen in practice - as I know only too well...

At each moment of 'right here, right now', it's always our responsibility - our 'response-ability', our individual and personal ability to respond.

The 'now' is the still-point at the centre of action. Yet it's an active stillness, and there are still choices there in that moment. So what we aim for in this kind of real-time sensemaking is to create just enough space to enhance that 'ability to respond' - enough space to enable appropriate choice for appropriate action.

If we don't create that space for choice, the only 'choices' we have come from habit - which may not be appropriate to to the context - or the various 'hard-wired' reflex-responses, such as 'fight', 'flight' or 'freeze'.

[The other natural-reflex is 'fornicate', but we'd, uh, best leave that out of the conversation for now...? ]

Whilst it’s easy enough to describe what goes on either side of that choice-point, it’s surprisingly hard to describe the choice-point itself without sounding somewhat mystical. Rather like the cosmological moment of the Big Bang, it’s both technically and literally a moment of chaos, within which the ‘normal rules’ break down, and which contains within itself every possibility and every other point.

This is the literal meaning of Pan, by the way – ‘the everything’. If we can’t cope with this infinity of (im)possibility, we’re like to fall into panic. And that’s what leads to those three reflex-responses – each of which rejects the uncertainty in their own distinct way:

• fight: grab at a single possibility and ‘take control’ (whether or not that single chosen option is appropriate to the needs of the context)
• flight: ‘run away’ from the choice (such as to a ‘considered-sensemaking’ framework which cannot work at real-time, and hence leads to some variant of ‘analysis-paralysis’)
• freeze: do nothing and hope that the need for choice will go away (which only works if there’s no actual need for choice or action)

What we need to do instead is stay within the ‘chaos’ for as long as we can, to allow the appropriate choice to emerge from and with the context itself. Describing this as ‘act / sense / respond’ is way too simplistic: it’s more like a real-time dance of choice and action, a transitory yet immensely powerful condition of flow that is often experienced as a kind of ‘no-time’ that is seemingly beyond time.

[People who can hold that space are often described - or derided - as 'eccentric', 'the crazy ones'. Yet 'eccentric' is literally away from the centre - and that's the place where change can happen, because that distance also provides leverage for change. Being seen as 'eccentric' can be difficult at times, but it's certainly important...]

What I’ve been working on over the past few days or so is trying to a detailed mapping of what actually happens in the real-time space, using this specific question of real-time sensemaking as the ‘target problem’ to keep in focus.

[As usual, I've gone back to first-principles to do this, so in effect I've been watching myself at work whilst doing this work. What I've been seeing may not be the way that others do this, of course, but it actually does match up quite well with what's in the rather eclectic mix literature that I happen to know, from Lao Tse's Tao Te Ching to Csíkszentmihalyi's Flow, and from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, to The Art of Scientific Investigation. So no claims to be 'academic' as such, but that isn't the point: I'm a practical toolmaker, not a 'pure' theorist, after all.]

For this, I’ve used the ‘time-compressed’ version of SCAN, in which everything is squeezed down to a real-time choice of tactics, between ‘Simple’ and ‘Not-simple’:

The crucial boundary on this dimension is what I’ve called ‘the Inverse Einstein test’:

• if we do the same thing and get the same results, it’s on the Simple side of the story – so we would attempt to use Simple-side tactics
• if we do the same thing and get different results, it’s on the Not-simple side of the story – so we would need to use tactics from the Not-simple side

In real-time sensemaking we actually swing back and forth between these ‘domains’, using a variety of real-time checks to tell use which side we need to be on at any one moment. They’re different disciplines: but by swinging back-and-forth in a conscious and deliberate way, we maintain an overall discipline at all times.

[First-hand example: doing a formal back-massage. At first, I'll follow the rules, following the standard sequence of moves and work-patterns, using that pattern itself as a focus. At some point it switches into that 'flow-state', and I'll find myself doing something subtly different, applying pressure in a different way, following kind of 'inner instructions' that seem to come through my hands themselves. Then, just as suddenly, the 'flow-state' fades, leaving me feeling a bit lost, like I don't where I am, I don't know what to do. That's when the key-phrase 'Don't Panic!' comes in, and reminds me to go back to 'the rules' - back to the Simple-side - and follow that pattern until the 'flow-state' returns. Which it may not, of course - but at least I'll have done something useful simply by following 'the rules'.]

If I use the tags ‘[S]‘ for Simple-side, and ‘[N]‘ for the Not-simple side, these are some of the points I’ve noticed during this week about that real-time back-and-forth:

– [S] is about following the instructions, following ‘the rules’; [N] is about allowing ‘the answers’ to arise in whatever way they seem to choose.

– [N] is what we do while that ‘inner knowing’ lasts; [S] is what we do when the knowing fades.

– Both sides need calm, and need discipline – including the discipline about how and when to switch back and forth between them.

– [S] has notions of ‘truth’, of ‘control’, of certainty, “I know what to do”; [N] calls for a kind of faith, a lot of trust, perhaps Susan Jeffers‘ “feel the fear and do it anyway” – and often a difficult balance between “do something, don’t just stand there!” and “don’t ‘do something, just stand there…”.

– In a rework of the old slogan “think global, act local”, [S] seems to focus on ‘act local’, whilst [N] seems to allow the broader space of ‘aware global’ – no time to stop and think at real-time, yet use that deep-space of ‘the everything’ to help maintain the big-picture awareness.

– [S] seems to work best with rules or checklists – which is hardly surprising since in essence it thrives on real-time certainties. Some of the rules and checklists I use a lot in real-time sensemaking for enterprise-architecture include:

• allow the uncertainty to be uncertain (i.e. keep gently returning to the Not-simple side)
• don’t try to control – allow ‘the answers’ to arise in their own way
• use the ‘checklist for checklists‘ to create checklists on-the-fly with whatever ideas I’ve gleaned from the Not-simple side
• use quick enquiry-techniques such as ‘Five Whys‘ to push into the Not-simple side for new ideas and information
• use Five-Whys to move up the scale of abstraction towards core-purpose
• use Five-Hows to move down the scale of abstraction towards real-world implementation
• use the R5 set of system-thinking principles – rotation, reciprocation, resonance, recursion, reflexion – to look for factors and patterns in the context
• use the REAL checklist – reliable, efficient, appropriate, elegant – to test for effectiveness themes (sometimes extended to ‘LEARN’ with the addition of ‘integrated’)
• use the tetradian set – physical, virtual/conceptual, relation/emotional, aspirational/spiritual – to review asset-dimensions in a context
• use the Five Elements set – Purpose, People, Preparation, Process, Performance – to assess balance across strategy, tactics and operations (which also aligns with the Tuckman project-lifecycle sequence ‘forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning’)

– Almost by definition, [N] doesn’t seem to have any clear patterns: the only ‘patterns’ I see myself doing all too often on that side are ones about how to avoid making sense, such as running away to check emails or make yet another cup of tea…

Anyway, that’s it for the moment. It’s just a work in progress, as usual, but make of it what you will.

Comments/suggestions, anyone?