Tom Graves / Tetradian

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

Right now I should be writing a formal paper on enterprise-architecture and social-media. Instead I’ve been tracking one small yet deeply fascinating (literally…) aspect of the rebellion in Libya: the social-media ‘war’ that’s happening on the LiveBlog pages (e.g. April 27, April 28) of the Al Jazeera English-language website.

I’m a complete outsider, of course, relative to the (again literally ) bloody mess that is happening at present in Libya. Yet it’s important to me because it’s an all too real example of what I see as the fundamental shift that’s needed for our future survival: from possession (represented in all of its extremes by Colonel Gaddafi) to responsibility (represented by at least the hopes and aspirations of the rebels, freedom-fighters or whatever you want to call them).

After two months, the conflict has all but vanished from most of the mainstream media – but the conflict itself continues, as bloodily as ever. Given that it’s very much an Arab conflict, Al Jazeera is one the few media-outlets that continues to keep track – though even that is a lot thinner than it was even a week or two. Instead, as in this quote, it seems the real reporting is happening in the Comments sections of those daily LiveBlogs:

This blog is the most up-to-date source of information on Libya, and it has been for several days.

According to the BBC maps, there is still a stalemate.

According to the other organizations, Libya has fallen off the top of the page.

And according to Al Jazeera, the stalemate has rapidly receded

and has given way to an electrically charged prophase of victory.

You would only know that if you had been paying attention to Al Jazeera.

We aren’t there yet – and this is no time for complacency or for turning our backs,

but Daffyland is in the swirling vortex of history,

and Free Libya is emerging into the sun, in dignity:

bloodied, but unbowed.

At present there are well over 6000 comments each day on those LiveBlogs. Almost all of them come from people with strong opinions, of course. Nothing is certain; one of the few things that does seem certain is that quite a few people there are not what they claim. Yet between them the commenters do seem to have a surprising range of skills, experience and information. For example, one of them, ‘Gerhard Heinz’, does appear to have near-real-time access to a satellite-feed, because much of his information, if opinionated, is precise, specific, and usually subsequently proven as fact:

[27April] my update for this morning
daffis troops are spotterd over the country and most in defensive positions.
what kind of aktion they do?
firing from distance and waiting to be destroyed.
some useless infanterie attacks in outskirts of misrata area with toyotas
in the west daffi lost position after position just shelling towns or try to hide inside towns.
the new satelites show that most of the troops have poor suply-lines,they get their last amu 4 days ago in the west.
diesel-suply is very short most of his diesel burning vehicels have left only the containment .
troops in the west start to give up now.
brega
most of daffis troops there are not good trained fighting troops .only the 200-300 are from the first push left.
the rest are from the supley lines to sirte and not realy fighting troops.
you hear not much from nato airstrikes this night becouse the targets are most on his supley

[28April] daffis troops in the east recive a ultimatum to surrender from somebudy who dominate the sky.
we will see how they react.
round misrata
daffis troops have not only to look into the sky ,they also have to look arround ,becouse more and more ff-groops are aktiv by night.
nato tornados are aktive tonight with a target-list of 26 targets
we count 167 clashes tonight.
tripoli
clashes between ff-groops and daffi -merc. increase tonight.ff control large areas of tripoli by night
western
daffis troops trey to hold positions ,but without supley they can only surrender .
3 armed suply convois wiped out this night ,also a reinforcment convoy for western mountains.
diesel supley from algeria burning still now 170 km from border.

It usually takes two or three days, if at all, for any of this information to turn up in the mainstream media.

Another commenter, ‘Glen Parry’, keeps up a running commentary on aerial activity, from listening in to air-traffic control:

[27April] USAF, by the sound of it, Shadow 61, just cleared by Luqa ATC, Sigonella. Sounds like things could be getting started for the night. Not gone tactical yet, so might actually be returning to base.
Another flight’s just gone tactical, cleared to to the east (won’t say where for OPs reasons). They could be Canadians by the accent).
Another sortie, Dagger 31, cleared to Libyan destination going tactical.
Fourth flight is being held until airspace clears; no destination given.
French appear to be up at the moment as well.

Other commenters bring information from other sources, such as Twitter, other websites and even, it seems, direct phone-calls:

['beardyk', 27April] hlk01: RT @ChangeInLibya: Misrata BREAKING: A big group of Gaddafi soldiers is surrounded in Kirzaz after they tried to sneak in and fell into a rebel ambush #libya

['hisham', 27April] zintan has been liberated, mercs force puched back, then defeated….after trying to surround the town…

Then there are the ‘trolls’ – commenters such as ‘AntiNaziGuy’ or ‘DefiantFighter’, often very active, pushing a pro-Gadaffi theme. Unfortunately for them, many of the other commenters are very skilled at fact-checking, such as this example in respense to a purported video of pro-Gaddafi supporters marching in Benghazi and being shot at by the rebels:

['Rod_Hagen', 27April] Well spotted! That really is laughable, Bart!
The couple of hundred marchers shown are clearly entering Tripoli’s “green square” from Mizran St. The video at http://www.youtube.com/all_com… has nothing to do with Benghazi, and doesn’t show anyone shooting at anyone. There is no “depth” to the crowd, (see the car headlights behind the marchers).
If all Gadaffi & his pals can come up with is fake videos of a couple of hundred army age men marching to a? major tourist site in Tripoli, but pretending to be in Benghazi, he can’t have very long left at all!

And there are heartfelt pieces from those who are personally involved. This comment, for example, also shines light on the difference between an extreme possession-based societal context and a responsibility-based one:

['LibyaInAbsentia', 27April] Living in Benghazi before the revolution was hard. Every day was covered by a cloud of oppression and a shadow of suspicion that someone could be watching and listening. People became tired and frustrated living like this and were less kind toward each other. Often people had little patience or compassion.

When the revolution began it was terrifying. We couldn’t sleep at night listening to the gunfire and tanks, hoping that in the morning we would not hear that loved ones had been killed. So many died and were hurt and everyone had a connection somehow. We didn’t know what was happening in other cities because the phones and internet were cut.

Then Benghazi was free! It was like the sun had finally come out of the clouds after so many years. Benghazi felt lighter and brighter than it ever has. Everyone has the same goal. Men and women, elderly and children, all the citizens of Benghazi stand together for freedom. Everyone has hope for the future and pride in their city. Young men and boys volunteer to direct traffic and clean streets. Women cook and distribute food to the fighters. Patience and compassion have returned to the city and oppression and suspicion have left.

As communication has been restored in Benghazi, we have learned that all the other cities, towns and villlages in Libya are fighting for the same freedom. As the people of Benghazi are untied in support of their city, they are untied in support of their brothers and sisters in all the other cities, towns and villages of Libya. We want the sunshine of freedom to break through the clouds of oppression and shine on all of united Libya.

So in effect this is a real-time social-media community, coming together in a classic emergent form. The only controls here are the ‘Like’ and ‘Reply’ buttons, and the ‘Flag to moderator’ link. The ‘Like’ button enables the comment to be promoted in the ‘Popular now’ and ‘Best rating’ sorts of the list (there is no matching ‘Dislike’-button to demote posts). The ‘Flag’ link reports a post to the moderators for breach of conditions-of-use, such as repetition, abuse and ‘shouting’ (excessive all-caps) – the ‘trolls’ being the most common offenders here, which results in many of their posts being deleted.

All in all, a lot of interesting lessons and examples here for anyone involved in social-media – and, given the drivers of the overall ‘enterprise’ in this context, for enterprise-architectures too.

For all the talk of supposed ‘rights’ to this-that-and-the-other, there is one ‘right’ that we do not, can not and must not have: the right to not care.

There is no right to not-care.

And yet so many aspects of our society and culture and everything else are built upon exactly that ‘right’. Everyone who drops a piece of litter is exercising their ‘right’ to not-care – and dumping the burden of caring on everyone else. Many so-called business-models depend entirely upon the ‘right’ to not-care about long-term consequences. Most of the arguments between political-right and political-left are merely about who has the greater ‘right’ to not-care, and export the costs of care onto the other.

This matters, because in the longer term we survive only because of care. We survive because we care. Those of us who know this, who live this, know that yes, we will at times end up carrying the burden of those who haven’t yet learnt this bald fact. Most children do take time to learn how to care. But it gets hard – and harder – to keep going in a society where those who do care are actively punished for doing so, and those who don’t receive all of the rewards.

In our present-day world, people lose because they take responsibility, because they care; whilst others ‘win’ because they don’t.

Madness.

Not merely madness: suicidal madness. A cultural behaviour that embodies and enacts a slow, painful collective-suicide, for everyone. Not a good idea…

I’m perhaps extreme: I believe that the entire concept of ‘rights’ is a literally deadly delusion, and that only responsibilities are real. Yet it seems clear to me that if our society is based around that ‘right’ to not-care – and it certainly seems to be so – that kind of implies that there are some very big changes ahead if we are to survive. An almost literal change of heart, for a start.

And the core of that change is the recognition, by everyone, by every aspect and institution of every society, that the one right that no-one can ever have is a ‘right’ to not-care.

Something to think about as you go to work on your busy weekday morning, perhaps?

If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with huge problems arising from a massive earthquake and tsunami all down its north-east coast, and collateral impacts such as damage to and failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

It should be obvious – more like blindingly-obvious, I hope – that there is a massive need for resources there, of all kinds. The human impact is huge: the immediate fact that so many have died is almost trivial compared to the inner-work that each of the survivors will need to do, over years and decades to come. Many villages and towns and even cities have been all but erased from the map: the physical costs of rebuilding the homes and shops and workspaces and infrastructure need to be matched by all the other types of costs involved in rebuilding human community. It’s clear that whatever happens onward, the power-plant is already seriously damaged, possibly beyond repair: which means that Japan has lost a significant proportion of its power-generating capacity, partially crippling its entire industrial and social base, not just for a few days or weeks, but probably for several years to come, until a replacement can be brought on-line. (The costs of decommissioning the damaged plant are another story again…) And right now, all of those people directly affected by the disaster – at least half a million people, and probably many more – need food, clothing, shelter and much more; and in the long term, rebuilding not just the physical spaces and work and everything else that goes with it, but rebuilding hope as well.

A responsibility-based economy matches the resources to the need. It prepares for that need, too – as can be seen in Japan’s rapid, well-rehearsed response, including mobilising 100,000 troops in the disaster-recovery effort (a distinct non-warfighting role for its armed-forces). Around the world, nations and NGOs alike have sent not just words but practical aid: and even if the sheer scale of the problems tends in practice to render many of these well-meant efforts down to little more than token gestures, the fact that mutual-responsibility is acknowledged there is important, with more than just token effect.

Contrast that with the response from the possession-economy – in other words, that which currently presents itself as ‘the economy’. In a sense that response could best be summarised by an, uh, unfortunate ‘Freudian slip’ by US economics-commentator Larry Kudlow, as reported by the largely apolitical lifestyle-magazine Vanity Fair:

In these tough economic times, isn’t it nice to know that calamitous natural disasters needn’t have an adverse affect on your investment portfolio? After the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan failed to induce a market nosedive, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow expressed his relief in terms that seemed to appall even his fellow cheerleaders for capitalism: “The human toll here,” he declared, “looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”

Yet whilst the disaster “failed to induce a market nosedive” in the US, the immediate ‘economic’ response to Japan has been very different. The national bank, for example, ‘released’ trillions of yen (hundreds of billions of dollars) to protect the national economy – yet in effect diluted and devalued the price-worth of every other yen currency-unit by doing so, because the price/resource balance has to come from somewhere. And in almost every other market elsewhere in the world, share-values in just about anything Japanese – car-companies, electronics, whatever – have taken a steep nosedive, already by 10% or more, and going down further with each new item of bad news. Insurance-companies worldwide have also been badly hit. In other words, the possession-economy’s response to a disaster of any kind is to reduce the available resources to recover from that disaster – just at the point where they are most needed.

In short, the possession-economy is driven not merely by the myths of ‘possession’ – the purported ‘right’ to claim exclusive access to shared resources, and to withhold those resources from others on personal whim or for personal gain at others’ expense – but also by anti-possession – the purported ‘right’ to avoid any inherent responsibilities that arise from that claim of possession. This is the dysfunctional side of entrepreneurship – where an entrepreneur acts not as a symbiotic catalyst in the economic ecosystem, but as a literal ‘between-taker’ ['entre', between; 'prendre', to take], a parasite whose sole ‘service’ is to take, and take, and take, whilst giving little or nothing in return.

Like a ‘fair-weather friend’, the possession-economy demands its (often excessive) ‘cut’ whenever times are good, but is nowhere to be seen whenever times are bad. In fact that’s when we discover that our so-called ‘friend’ has instead taken away whatever we need for recovery, and may even actively hinder us as we struggle to recover, creating an enforced dependence in order to maximise any future ‘take’. Responsibility accepts the costs of caring; whilst possession ‘succeeds’ because it does not care – placing itself above all others, demanding responsibility from those others, but evading the duty and mutual-responsibility of care for others in return.

There will always be some parasites in every ecosystem, of course. But to put it in its bluntest form, the paradigmatic parasitism of the possession-economy is a ‘luxury’ we can no longer afford. If we are to have any chance to survive in the longer term, we have no choice in this: somehow – and even if as yet we have no idea as to how – we must bring the possession-economy to an end.

Following on from the previous post on ‘Possessed by possession‘, if it’s true that there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable, then it seems worthwhile to take a look at some of the implications.

First, though, a story, and a warning, from history.

I’ll admit I’m no true scholar of Australian Aboriginal history or law; yet from what I’ve gleaned so far, a few things stand out. First, its economic model is (or was) responsibility-based: most forms of law throughout the country had a very clear concept of ownership, based on explicit and formally-accepted responsibility. In some forms, this was described as ‘singing the site’: someone would take on ownership of some region by demonstrating that they knew the songs of the place better than anyone else, and were thus best suited to take responsibility for it. This model had remained stable for literally tens of thousands of years, through entire ice-ages, serving an overall population well into the millions. Until the Anglos came, barely two hundred years ago. And they asked one question: “who does this land belong to?” To which the local peoples replied, correctly in accordance with a responsibility-based model, that “the land belongs to no-one but itself: we belong to to the land”. To which the instant response was “it belongs to no-one? then this is terra nullius, land by possessed by no-one – how very convenient!” And then, as one Aboriginal elder described it, “the priests came, and they had the Bible, and we had the land; and they said ‘Close your eyes, let us pray!’; and when we opened our eyes again, we had the Bible, and they had the land”. In short, the ‘legal basis’ of modern Australia is nothing more than the blatant theft of an entire continent: and to say that the results of that theft have been devastating to Aboriginal lives and culture would be an understatement in the extreme…

Yet unless we take extreme care, that’s what always happens whenever a responsibility-based culture meets up against a possession-based one. Responsibility loses because it cares; and possession ‘wins’ because it doesn’t. Ouch…

And yet here we are, faced with the bald fact that the economic model that we live in, the model that we know, of ‘rights’ of possession, cannot be made sustainable, and that we somehow have to find a way to turn the whole thing round to a responsibility-based economics. Even a few minutes’ observation should be sufficient to make it clear that vast swathes of our culture are focussed on evasion of responsibility; most of what most people call ‘profit’ is actually the accumulation of future debt in some form or other. Above a surface veneer of ‘normality’, just about everything that we think of as ‘fact’ in our economics is either outright false, or at best based on some kind of fallacy – and yet at present just about everyone believes those fallacies to be true. More serious is the fact that many people – especially the supposedly ‘wealthy’ – have a huge investment in the belief that those fallacies are true, and will at first believe that they must back up that fallacious belief with weapons or worse. Also ouch…

And we also can’t afford to wait around until the supposedly ‘wealthy’ – or worst thieves, as some would put it – come to realise that there’s a problem here that they can’t simply buy their way out of with other people’s money and other people’s lives: because by then it will be way too late, for everyone.

So to put it bluntly, just about everything in our entire society is against in this in some way. And yet every indicator we have shows us that if this change doesn’t happen, and soon, we’re dead – all of us. Kind of high stakes here, then.

So where do we start? How can we start?

My suggestion would be to tackle it like any other enterprise-architecture task:

• find a vision that makes sense across the whole shared-enterprise
• identify the values that arise out of that vision
• identify the drivers and constraints

…and so on, and so on, and so on.  (Identifying the stakeholders is easy, though: it’s everyone. And everything. ) The rest of it, as is usual with enterprise-architecture, is what’s called ‘relentlessly political’ – which, in a sense, is exactly what we have to avoid, because of the, uh, rather serious problems described above. Which means we need to do it in what might be called ‘open stealth’ – make it clear what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, and then let most people go quietly back to sleep again until we do have enough together to show that there is a real way out of this mess, and that we do have some tangible suggestions of a path from ‘here’ to ‘there’.

The core of it is this:

• we somehow have to replace every non-sustainable form of ‘possession’ with a sustainable responsibility-based equivalent that, at the surface at least, is experienced as creating the same emotional, practical and other functions as possession
• we somehow have to replace every possession-based institution – including the entire money-economy, which would be redundant in a responsibility-based economy – with institutions that provide equivalent responsibility-based functions
• we somehow have to replace every notion of ‘rights’ with responsibility-based equivalents that create the same effect as ‘rights’

On the surface, the last is probably the most challenging politically – not least because historically the US has based its entire politics on a concept of ‘rights’. From an architectural perspective, though, it’s actually the simplest of those sets of tasks, because in reality the entire concept of ‘rights’ is a delusion – there are no rights in the real world. To be blunt, they’re a fantasy – and in all too many cases that fantasy is propped up by offloading responsibilities onto others, in a state-sponsored form of structural abuse. Instead, what we think of as ‘rights’ need to be understood as desirable-outcomes that are created by interlocking sets of mutual responsibilities. So for every purported ‘right’, we need to model the mutual-responsibilities from which those supposed ‘rights’ arise – and identify how the mutualities need to work in order for them to be genuinely fair, genuinely mutual, and genuinely sustainable.

(For a real existing example, take a look at British traffic-law: just about everyone uses the concept of ‘right of way’, but to my knowledge it does not exist anywhere in law. [To be pedantic, the road itself is described as a 'right of way', but that's actually a responsibility on the landholder to permit passage through the respective piece of land.] Instead, everything is described in terms of responsibility to give way, with each apparent non-mutuality described in such a way as to demonstrate effective fairness over time – for example, we give way at a green light to an emergency-vehicle that needs to come across, because next time it could be us that needs the services of that emergency-vehicle. In the same way, every ‘right’ can and, I would argue, should be described instead in terms of the real mutual-responsibilities that realise that desired-outcome.)

Much the same goes for the other two sets of tasks. For every instance of ‘possession’ – whatever form it takes – we need to model the underlying responsibilities that underpin that purported ‘right’ of possession. This applies not just to physical property, but intellectual-property, and every other form of purported ‘property’: rights do not ‘exist’ other than as a social fantasy, and hence, to make them work in real-world practice, we need to identify the real mutual-responsibilities – which need, again, to be genuinely fair, genuinely mutual, and genuinely sustainable.

And every institution: what is that institution trying to do? Is it actually necessary in a responsibility-based economy? (For a perhaps-surprising number of existing institutions, the answer is ‘No’ – they’re only necessary at present to try to compensate for the fundamental flaws and failings of a possession-based economy. Banks, insurance, finance, pensions, anything to do with money, vast swathes of existing ‘property’-law – a few moments’ thought would illustrate that all of them are redundant in a responsibility-based economy.) If the institution does still need to exist in some form (and sorry, but to some extent that does include some equivalent of taxes ), what responsibilities does that institution enact? What are the mutualities that would make those responsibilities interlock?

From an architectural perspective, there’s a lot of work to do there, just to get started. We don’t need to worry anyone about where this is going as yet – but it should be clear that it does need to be done, and fast, if we’re to have any chance of getting out of this collective mess.

As I hope you can see, I’m doing what I can in this, towards creating a true architecture of responsibility. Yet I certainly don’t claim to have ‘all the answers’; in fact I’d barely claim to have more than a small proportion of the questions. But there ’tis: over to you, perhaps? Comments/suggestions, anyone?

In case you hadn’t noticed, there are some big changes happening right now in the wider world… Lots and lots of them, at every scale and in just about every major context, from political to social, environmental to technological, and much else besides.

Myself, I look at all of these things with an enterprise-architect’s eye – looking at entire economies, societies, cultures, as literal expressions of ‘enterprise‘. And beneath all of that turmoil, there’s one underlying theme that I’ve been tracking for many years now – one really obvious theme, yet oddly one which very few people seem to have noticed, or fully acknowledged its implications. It’s the way in which almost everything in our society – its economy, its cultures, its relationships, its idioms, its concepts of property, and perhaps most of its deep-myths – is ultimately founded on a notion of ‘rights’ of possession. And yet in all of my studies, over all of those years, I keep finding myself returning to one seemingly inescapable fact: there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

It’s true that a possession-based model gives better short-term results than most alternative (responsibility-based) models; but it does so only at the expense of longer-term sustainability. In effect, possession ‘succeeds’ by borrowing – or stealing – from the future, often in ways that are very inefficient and ineffective – hence what I sometimes call ‘the worst possible system‘, and so on. So the only way that a possession-based model can be made to seem sustainable is by running it as a pyramid-game, powered by an illusion of ‘growth’. When there’s nothing more to pull in at the bottom of the pyramid, the illusory ‘growth’ comes to a grinding halt – at which point the model has no choice but to cannibalise itself, all the way back until there’s nothing left. From all of the signs around us, we’re perilously close to that point now – if not already over the edge.

There are of course many people trying to tackle aspects of this, yet to me it seems that most of them are doing little more than wittering and whittling away at the edges of this problem. For example, there are many, many groups on working ideas for ‘alternative currencies’ and the like: yet none that I’ve seen so far resolve many or even any of the drivers for That Worst Possible System. Currencies are a crude mechanism to attempt to resolve the fact that point-to-point barter – what I call ‘double-entry life-keeping’ – simply cannot handle the complexities of real-world resource-exchange. So currencies don’t work because barter doesn’t work, and barter itself is an overlay on possession-based assumptions that also do not and cannot work. And it’s very frustrating to see so much care and effort lavished on so many variations of a core idea that, by definition, simply cannot work.

There are also many, many groups working towards environmental sustainability: but without tackling the problem of possession, we’re always going to slide back to something that’s inherently unsustainable. To put it in its simplest form, we cannot have sustainability without a system of law that supports it – which it certainly doesn’t at present.

And as we can see on the news every day, there are also many groups struggling to rein in various of the many ‘robber barons’ of the physical and financial and political and other spheres – and yet a possession-economy will always create new ‘robber-barons’ to replace them, because it’s inherent in the ‘winner-steals-all’ structure of the model. So to be blunt, important though those actions are, they’re all doomed to futile failure unless we go right down to the roots of the problem.

Surface-level politics is equally irrelevant here. At this kind of level, those endless arguments about capitalism versus communism versus socialism or whatever are almost entirely irrelevant: they’re merely variations on a theme of possession’, in effect down to little more than arguing about the positions of individual deckchairs on the Titanic. As history shows all too well, redistributing ‘possessions’ will make barely any difference in the longer term: our only chance for real change is to change even the idea of possession.

Which, to say the least, is going to be difficult. It’s not just that so many people are seemingly possessed by their possessions, but that our entire culture is possessed by possession itself. Look around at all those instances of the simple possessive-adjective ‘my’, or ‘mine’: every one of those is ultimately an illusion, because in the end we all die – and we ‘can’t take it with us’. (Hasn’t stopped many half-crazed kings from trying to do so, of course… ) The only viable alternative is a responsibility-based economy, but for most of us, possession is the only model we’ve ever known: “possession is nine-tenths of the law” and all that. Getting people to understand that possession does not and cannot work is not going to be simple. And we’re not just talking about a few people here: it’s a change in worldview that needs to be taken up, taken almost literally to heart, embedded in every action and interaction, by everyone in the entire globe.

In short, a mythquake of almost unimaginable proportions. But if that change doesn’t happen, the entire human species is dead – not just some of us, all of us. It really is as fundamental as that…

But it’s not an impossible task. In human terms, possession-based economies seem to be a relatively recent innovation – or aberration – stretching back no more than a few thousand years.  (Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B suggests that we can pin the start-point geographically and temporally as somewhere near Babylon at around 3000BCE, but it’s more probably an artefact and side-effect of agricultural settlement just about anywhere and anywhen.) Obsessive possessiveness is also a natural stage in child-development – the ‘terrible twos’ and the like – though usually tempered in later development – typically 5-8 years old – as awareness of social context comes in. (Some children never reach that stage of awareness, of course – which is one of the major drivers for the collective problems we face right now. Even worse, many cultures actively reward childish possessiveness and will often even punish a more adult sharing – a huge disincentive against creating an efficient and effective economy!) The point is that change is possible, and it’s a change to a worldview that arguably is more ‘natural’ in human terms than the literally childish myths of ‘possession’.

The catch is that it’s a change that has to happen fast – far faster than any other cultural change in human history. At a fairly conservative estimate, we have perhaps as few as ten years to get everything in place and starting to have a real, tangible impact on many people’s lives – because even an optimistic estimate places the fundamental failure of current ‘business as usual’ at no more than fifty to a hundred years. (The current upheavals in the Arab world, and relatively recent collapse of the old Soviet states, are and were all messy enough, but will seem almost trivial by comparison with what is likely to happen if or when the real resource-wars start happening later this century…) So in real terms we really don’t have much time at all: we need to get started now.

The alternative to a possession-based economy is a responsibility-based model: one in which we ‘own’ something because we declare responsibility for it and manage it accordingly – much like the notion of ‘process-owner’ or ‘project-owner’ in a business-context, but on the scale of an entire global economy rather than solely within one organisation. There’s a lot more that could be said on this – what it is, how it works, the challenges that need to be resolved, and so on – but for now it’s worth noting some of the real practical constraints that we face:

• the only cultures that have long experience of responsibility-economies are those that are often currently derided as ‘primitive’ – and they don’t have much if any experience of an economy on the kind of scale and complexity that we need
• worldwide we still run much the same kind of ‘slave-economy’ that was typical in Roman times: the main difference is that our ‘slaves’ are machines and systems that use prodigious quantities of energy – mainly some 10-100,000 years per year of trapped solar energy, in the form of oil, gas or coal – which in itself creates perhaps even more problems than it solves
• the change will require a much greater awareness of systems-level impacts of actions and inactions: and whilst we do know how to teach this to pre-school children – such as in the well-known HighScope project – we have little or no experience of doing this on a large scale with adults already embedded in the possession-economies
• despite the desires of so many dictators and would-be reformers (not that there’s much difference between them at times… ), cultural changes cannot be imposed from outside: to succeed, they have to be chosen as an act of personal free will – which means that we have to find a way to show that this worldview is preferable by and for everyone

But we’re architects: we’re used to constraints, in fact for most of us it’s the kind of challenge that we relish. Yet this is definitely ‘The Big One’: the greatest architectural challenge any of us will ever face. So what will this challenge mean to you – professionally, personally, in every other way? And what part will you play in this?

Any comments, anyone?

A great conversation yesterday with Australian facilitator Helena Read, around the word ‘belonging’, and how it links with vision and enterprise-vision.

In the enterprise, vision is the anchor for everything: the quality-system, the business-purpose, the enterprise itself. It’s a very human focus, literally emotive: “that which gets me out of bed in the morning”, and so on.

Behind it, though – and the driver that creates that literal emotion – is the human need to belong. To be part of something that is ‘greater than self’.

Belonging, says Helena, is about longing, about deep desire, ‘to long for’. To belong to something – to be part of something greater than self – is a way to express that longing. And, in the longing, to be. Literally, to be, in the longing; to know oneself as oneself in and through the expression of that longing.

A longing is also about or for something that does not exist, that we wish did exist. We accept that ‘that which is longed for’ may in reality never exist: yet it’s that very tension that makes us reach out for it, strive for it, do whatever we can towards it so that it might somehow exist in some unknown future.

Belonging. Longing to be.

To what do you belong? What do you long for? And how do you express that longing in your life, your work, your enterprise?

So that’s what an enterprise-vision is really about: it provides an anchor for that longing, that need to ‘belong’.

Which is why that enterprise-vision is not a trivial matter.

And if you don’t take it seriously, don’t be surprised that people show little interest in belonging to your enterprise?

This one’s a return to the themes from that previous post on Power, people and responsibility in enterprise-architecture, and the dichotomy between power as ‘the ability to do work’ versus a supposed ‘power’ as ‘the ability to avoid work’.

We can also see this as the difference between yes and no; between for and against. In each of these it’s about the difference between a commitment to do something – which will involve real work of some kind – versus avoiding commitment, hence avoiding the work, and hence leading to the illusion of ‘power’ from avoiding that work.

From Yes comes commitment; something happens. The success when something happens is largely self-sustaining. A Yes usually leads to more Yes, is energising, empowering – and often literally so.

From No comes… well, nothing, really. Nothing happens. And another nothing happens. Until, eventually, nothing happens at all. No is negation, nullifying, disempowering: a slow spiral into stultifying stupor.

Yes creates a story, a narrative. No creates a non-story, a nothingness, an absence of story.

But Yes is scary. It means commitment, to change, to work, to effort. Yes introduces uncertainty; only No is certain – or seemingly certain, anyway. Far easier, then – far safer – to Just Say No. Avoid commitment. Avoid work. Avoid change. Avoid anything.

Saying Yes means that we open ourselves to being judged on the results of that effort, and perhaps failing to measure up in others’ eyes. Scary indeed. Far easier to say No, and feel powerful because we have the ‘right’ to tell others that they are ‘wrong’.

Making others wrong is easy. It is also, literally, a form of abuse. And everyone knows it – though they’ll often pretend not to know it. Fear breeds fear, breeds further abuse, further indulgence in “offloading responsibility onto the Other without their engagement or consent” – the definition of abuse from that previous post. Which, in turn, will spiral deeper into more serious dysfunction, “propping Self up by putting Other down” – the generic definition of violence. It can be very hard to for an organisation to recover when its culture has gone deep down into that spiral of self-destructive decay. And yet it all begins with one word: No.

For an enterprise-architect, the nightmare-client is the organisation that’s oriented itself around a culture of No. Government-organisations are notorious for this: seemingly everyone has a ‘right of veto’ – literally, “I forbid”. Anyone can say No, at any time – often with a double-serving of blame and recrimination on the side – bringing any activity to a grinding halt, often at the most dangerous moment of change. No-one dares say Yes, to anything. Hence nothing happens, very slowly, painfully, expensively in every sense. Everyone feels powerful for having said No; yet everyone also feels powerless; and still no-one seems to make the connection back to the dispiriting culture of No.

By contrast, working with an organisation that understands Yes can be a sheer delight. Things happen: yes, they’re questioned, challenged, assessed, re-assessed, but as part of the Yes, not a negation of it. Anyone can say Yes. And yet there’s no irresponsibility: people do still know when and how and why to say No when it’s needed. Because sometimes No is indeed necessary: yet it’s a No that is still for the purpose of saying Yes.

It’s a bit like the distinction between competition-with versus competition-against, cooperation-with versus cooperation-against. In a sense, competition is always a kind of No; cooperation is always a kind of Yes. Yet when we look deeper, what really matters is not competition itself, or cooperation itself: what matters is the aim or focus of the activity.

When we compete with each other, or with ourselves, such that the real aim is that everyone’s skill and competence would improve, it’s a Yes to the work of learning, a Yes to a new narrative. A runner competes against herself to improve her times, her expertise; she asks the help of others to compete with her, to push her to ever-greater achievement. On the surface, that kind of competition seems a kind of No: but it’s a No for the purpose of Yes. And yes, it’s hard work. Yet worth it.

Competition-against and cooperation-against are the inverse of this. Competing against others to put them down is, in practice, about avoiding future work: particularly relational work, or the spiritual work of creating one’s own sense of self. Command and control may seem so desirable in every organisation, every context, but in reality they are almost always about avoidance of needed future work. Basing one’s sense of self on being ‘above’ others is inherently fragile: we then need those others to be there to prop up our sense of self, and to do the work we avoid – yet if they’re not there, we have no identity, and no means to for the work to be done. Tricky… And there’s always the risk – the fear – that someone else will come along and put us down into the despised place of ‘the Others’, force us to do the work that we’ve avoided so long: hence the tyrant’s terror of growing old, and their ‘need’ to export that terror to everyone else… Then there’s cooperation-against: collaborating with others for the purpose of putting another group down. On the surface, it looks like a Yes; but it’s a Yes for the purpose of No, power-over or power-under, an attempt at avoidance of some kind of future work. And it’s not worth it: no matter what it looks like, even to the nominal ‘winners’, in the long term no-one wins from a war…

We see much the same with ‘for’ versus ‘against’. To be ‘against’ something is just another way of saying No: it’s about ensuring that something doesn’t happen, but the actual result is that nothing much happens to prevent that unwanted ‘something’ from happening. To be ‘for’ something is to say Yes, to be committed to that something: and it’s only through commitment, and action and work, that that ‘something’ will happen.

If we really are committed to to be ‘against’ something, the only way that works is to turn it round: to be ‘for’ the opposite of whatever it is that we’re ‘against’. For example, there’s not much point in saying we’re ‘against world hunger’ if we’re not willing to enact some kind of commitment about that supposed ‘against’: so instead of being ‘against’ world-hunger, we need to say Yes to something that will create conditions in which everyone is appropriately and adequately fed – and hence in which hunger no longer exists. Without that ‘for’, we’re just deluding ourselves: avoiding commitment, saying No through an empty pretence of saying Yes.

In short, if there’s no work involved, no commitment, it’s just another way of saying No. Which is pretty pointless, really.

Which brings us back to enterprise-architecture (of course? ) – and, in this case, the role of the enterprise-vision. ‘Enterprise’ and ‘organisation’ are not the same. An organisation – a business, a corporation, a government-department or the like – is bounded by rules, roles and responsibilities: it’s defined by its definitions. But an enterprise is different: in effect, the organisation exists within a broader extended-enterprise, and expresses and incorporates ‘enterprise’ in the sense of drive and purpose, but is not itself ‘the enterprise’. Instead, an enterprise is a much looser structure, amorphous, tenuous, with porous boundaries delimited by by vision, by values, by commitments. In other words, it’s bounded by Yes.

And the ultimate Yes for the enterprise is its vision: an emotive descriptor of what the enterprise is for – a commitment shared in some way by all participants in that enterprise. Without that vision, there’s no clarity of commitment; not much to say Yes to. Which leads, inevitably, to an awful lot of No, an awful lot of nothing-much happening, slowly, pointlessly, expensively…

So that’s really the choice: Yes, or No.

And No doesn’t work. Literally doesn’t work.

So to what do you say Yes?

Companionship.

A calm kind of word. Quiet. Friendly. Supportive, enfolding – those kinds of feelings.

A companion is literally “someone with whom we share bread”. Hence companionship is that state, condition, process, experience, whatever, of ‘sharing bread’ with companions.

So it’s an interesting word – and an especially interesting metaphor for enterprise-architecture.

In your enterprise, in your work-context, or elsewhere, with whom do you share your (metaphoric, or maybe even literal) bread? Why? How? In what ways do you share it? What is it that connects you as ‘companions’ in a shared-enterprise?

With whom do you not share your bread? Why not? How not? How and why are these Others not your companions in this enterprise?

What happens when you offer to share your bread, and your offer is refused? How do you feel about the refusal?

What happens when someone simply takes the bread, perhaps without even asking? How do you feel when your offer is not even noticed, but the bread taken anyway as if as of ‘right’?

What happens when someone agrees to share, offers to share, takes your bread, and then betrays their own offer? What are your feelings about that ‘not-companion’, and about future offers of companionship from that quarter?

It’s a metaphor that can be most enlightening in every aspect of enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, even in IT service-architectures… explore?

Comments, perhaps?

We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power.

In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to do work. Wherever there’s work to be done – in whatever form that that ‘work’ might take – there’s a need for the power to do that work. Should be simple enough to identify and model that within an enterprise-architecture, surely?

Unfortunately, no, it’s not that simple – because most social definitions of ‘power’ tend to be closer to ‘the ability to avoid work‘. Therein lie lots of, uh, interesting problems for enterprise-architecture…

Hence power is something that we really do need to address in enterprise-architecture – even in an IT-centric architecture, let alone one which covers a true whole-of-enterprise scope. Read on?

Read more…