There are three kinds of chaos. They’re fundamentally different from each other. Don’t mix them up… (For a quick overview of the themes in this post, see the video ‘Three kinds of chaos‘.) I was going to start this off …

Three kinds of chaos Read more »

What exactly is ‘the chaotic’ in enterprise-architectures? How do we work with it, design for it rather than ‘against’ it? Yeah, I know this is a theme I’ve visited often here, but to me it’s a challenge that’s right at the core of …

Control, complex, chaotic Read more »

Just how restricting – 0r even dangerous – is our seeming ‘need’ for certainty? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring links between the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework and Cynthia Kurtz’s more socially-oriented Confluence sensemaking-framework. I still …

Control, complexity and chaos Read more »

Following on from ‘Boundary of identity, boundary of control‘ and ‘inside-out versus outside-in‘, perhaps the quickest way to understand the difference: the boundary-of-control delimits what the lawyers think the organisation is the boundary-of-identity delimits what everyone else thinks the organisation is …

More on boundary of identity versus control Read more »

What’s the boundary of the organisation? Boundary in what sense, and for whom? And how does this impact on enterprise-architecture and the like? These questions came up for me a short while ago when working on an article on enterprise-architecture …

Boundary of identity, boundary of control Read more »