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?

One of the practical problems of the innovator’s lifestyle is that, by definition, we tend to work a long way away (metaphorically speaking) from the mainstream. It’s true that there are some real advantages to playing the Outsider role – for example, it’s one of the few ways to bypass the ‘groupthink’ trap. Yet the catch is that there’s often real barriers between creating a new idea and its subsequent adoption in the mainstream – and that matters a lot, not least because mainstream adoption is also the point where we actually get paid for all that previous development-effort…

Classically, this follows the ‘diffusion of innovations‘ pattern described by Everett Rogers and others:

• Innovators – venturesome, educated, multiple info sources;
• Early adopters – social leaders, popular, educated;
• Early majority – deliberate, many informal social contacts;
• Late majority – skeptical, traditional, lower socio-economic status;
• Laggards – neighbours and friends are main info sources, fear of debt.

But the catch, as documented by Geoffrey Moore in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, is that there’s that chasm of (lack of) understanding that sits somewhere in the ‘early adopters’ range, blocking the path between innovation and the mainstream – the gap between the people who’ll try anything new, and the people who won’t. Something we need to explore…

Read more…

We boarded the plane, settled down in our seats, to await pushback from the gate – the usual ‘hurry up and wait’ of everyday air-travel. Seemed to take a bit longer than usual, though. Strange clonks and thumps from beneath my seat, down below in the cargo bay. We wait, and we wait.

[I won't name the airline here: they probably did a better job than most, under the circumstances, and it certainly wasn't bad enough to blame or shame. In any case, I want to focus on the overall theme here rather than a single incident.]

And we wait. After perhaps twenty minutes past our scheduled departure, a call from the cockpit: there’s a problem with the cargo-door, haven’t been able to fix it, engineers are on their way, apologies for the delay.

Twenty minutes later, with the clunking and clanking still going on below, I’m doing that calculation so common amongst experienced air-travellers: is my connection still possible? I can probably still make it across the terminal, but will my luggage make it too? Another polite apology from the flight-deck, but no actual news. And whatever they say, it’s not looking good.

An hour goes past. Still belted into our seats. Can perhaps just make that connection if we leave now. Another announcement: but it’s not the one I’d been hoping for… “first class and business class passengers can leave the plane and wait in our airline lounge; other passengers please wait here while we serve you a meal”. The meal, when it eventually arrives, consists of, uh, one plastic cup-a-soup. While another hour drifted away into nowhere. Like the flight, which is clearly going nowhere.

Another hour. “All passengers please disembark: please take all your belongings, we’ll call you when you can board again.” As we leave, it’s clear that the first-class and business-class passengers didn’t take their carry-on junk with them when they left earlier: it’s going to be chaos for them if we have to change planes. No information; no warnings about what to do with boarding-cards or the like. Three harassed staff at the gate, trying to field impossible queries in half a dozen different languages; no-one knows in any detail what’s going on, no suggestions on what to do about a myriad of by-now-lost connections other than the all-too-obvious platitudes of “we’ll sort it out later”.

Another hour, spent anxiously around the gate. At least the children are having fun, running up and down on the somewhat bouncy travelator. And then, suddenly, an announcement over the general system: plane’s fixed, please hurry up, we’re boarding now. The usual airline complaints about lost passengers – as if it’s the passengers’ fault that there’s a delay. No time to check boarding-cards, it seems – and a fair few passengers have left them on the plane anyway. But everyone’s in, seemingly on record time: and five hours after scheduled departure, and with somewhat of a struggle to find a slot in the lengthy queue for take-off, we’re finally on our way. Hooray.

A tedious seven hours later, we arrive at the airline’s hub. The only passengers who aren’t going to be affected by the delay are the relatively few who live here, and the fewer still who’d want to stay here: just about every onward connection will have been blown. Still, the airline’s ground-staff will have had almost twelve hours to plan for this: we’ll get it sorted out somehow. We decant from the plane into an almost empty airport, well after midnight, in fairly optimistic mood.

Which doesn’t last long. No plan, no information, no nothing. A chaos of queues at the transit desk. Nothing happens, very slowly. One lucky soul eventually rushes away to catch one momentary slot. The line beside collectively groan when it becomes clear that there’s no possible flight to their destination for at least another day, and so many of them that it might take two or three days at least to find enough slots.

My name is called, followed by those of several others. In some confusion, I make my way forward to the desk – and am angrily challenged by the woman already there, whose name hadn’t been called – how come I’d been picked instead of her? I try to explain that I’m just following instructions, like everyone else, that it’s the airline’s choice, not mine, it’s not something I’ve done to her at all: slowly, slowly, she subsides, still simmering. Turns out that we’d been picked out to catch a flight that we’d already missed anyway. Another woman next to me had been given one of her boarding passes for a connection that now no longer exists. No-one seems to know what’s going on; perhaps least of all the ground-staff who are trying to sort out the mess.

Another hour of tired confusion, frazzled ground-staff, yet tempers still holding fairly well all round. No more connections for anyone today, but they do manage to assign hotels for everyone, with pick-up times and boarding-passes and coaches to take us to bed. At last.

Except the hotel doesn’t know we’re coming: no-one had told the reception-desk, at any rate. It’s gone 4am before we all manage to get that one sorted out and into bed. For a 6am wake-up to call to warn the people waiting for me at the other end that I won’t be there for another full day.

Where, eventually, we do indeed arrive. And my luggage, too. Wow. Amazing. Feels like a real bonus after all that struggle.

Looking back with an enterprise-architect’s eye, what are the lessons-learned here?

The incident itself was ‘just one of those things’: someone had been a bit too rough with the cargo-door, bent something just that bit too much out of shape. All fixed: it just takes time. Except time was what we didn’t have. For which we can’t blame the airline, or the airport, or anyone, really. Just one of those things.

What wasn’t good was the availability or use of information. The ground-staff where we started didn’t know what was going on. Which was why the passengers didn’t know what was going on. Which was why no-one could make any alternate plans, beyond perhaps passing on a warning to others further down the line. The screw-up over the non-’meal’ was just a minor annoyance, really: a few people kicked up a minor fuss, but there wasn’t much point – because if everything’s run on a just-in-time model, there ain’t much redundancy anywhere in the system to cover anything like that.

Beyond the departure itself, the use of available information seemed even worse. The ground-staff at the hub should have known we were going to be late, and that connections would have been lost: they should, at the very least, had had the whole of our flight-time – seven hours or so – to prepare for alternatives. But amazingly, no-one seems to have had thought fit to warn them. Hence a lot of chaotic make-it-up-on-the-spot – not just for the passengers, but for all their separate checked-baggage too. Not the ground-staff’s fault, really, that so much of it was such a mess – they did remarkably well, under the circumstances. Likewise the hotel-staff, when we all arrived in the middle of the night, apparently without warning. But none of that chaos should have happened at all – if the airline and others had made proper use of their information. Which they didn’t. Which to me, frankly, seems bizarre – but there ’tis…

Yet all of this was just one flight, with one well-rated airline. What happens when the whole airport is out of action? Or the whole transport network? An entire city, or an entire region? That’s when we most need the information-exchange to work. But instead, we see all too well the gaps in information…

What are the most common complaints these days in any kind of disruption? “They didn’t tell us anything.” “We had no way to find out what was going on.” Endless variations on the same theme: no information, or information not where it’s needed, or not available in a form that can be used. Which, even for the IT-centric of ‘enterprise’-architecture, should tell us straight away that there’s a real information-issue there that can probably only be addressed with any success via a whole-of-enterprise approach. And in each case the enterprise-in-scope needs to be larger than the organisation-in-scope.

To resolve each of those various problems on our flight, the information-scope was larger than the flight itself:

• the initial attempt to repair the cargo-door was not via airline staff but the airport ground-crew
• the damaged door needed attention from aircraft-engineers assigned to the airport by the aircraft manufacturer
• the flight-delay required rescheduling for ground-control at the airport and for air-traffic control once in the air
• the airline ground-staff at the departure-airport needed to consider the impact of the delayed flight at the arrival-airport
• rescheduling before and on arrival needed real-time knowledge of other flights across the system, in some cases including other airlines’ flights, and links to the airport baggage-handling system to re-assign and/or hold checked baggage
• overnight stays (a legal responsibility of the airline) required links to hotel-availability information, and also coach and driver information to transfer stranded passengers to and from the hotels
• few if any of the stranded transit-passengers had visas for that country, so the off-airport overnight-stop needed passport-information links to immigration

Not much of which, it’s clear, worked particularly well – because if it had, we wouldn’t have experienced anything like the mess that we did.

(It definitely helped that immigration there were very laid-back about it all, though, compared to the the seemingly-insane rules and regulations of so many other ‘security’-obsessed countries these days: for example, why on earth does a transit-passenger from London to Mexico need a full [expensive] US visa and full immigration clearance just to pass through the sealed international-transit section of Dallas airport…??? No idea what would happen for those rare stranded-passengers whose countries or passports were incompatible: probably the only option would be to be locked up in a cell somewhere until their onward flight became available?)

All of those are large enough enterprise-architecture problems. But take the scale up a few notches, to the kind of issues that we’ve seen so often over the past few years:

• an airline goes broke, stranding its passengers in random places across the globe: what information is needed to find them all, identify their needs (not just food and shelter, but medical and much else besides), assign the appropriate priorities, get them all to their required or alternate destinations as soon as possible
• there’s a fire at a fuel depot, blocking the usual fuel supply-chain to the airport: what information do you need to get to airlines, to their passengers, to air-traffic control?
• there’s a failure in the baggage-handling system: what information do you need in order to reunite the right passengers with their own baggage – and only their own baggage – when all the electronic records have been lost?
• heavy snow closes the airport for several days: what information do you need to share with other modes of transport – rail, road, even by sea – in order to get the passengers moving onward? what information do they need in order to make the right choices? and how do you get that information to them in the most effective way?

On the surface, there are simple answers to all of those questions. But in practice, with present-day enterprise-architectures – few of which extend beyond the nominal scope of a single organisation – many of the essential links are fragile at best, or missing entirely. And the closer each system and sub-system moves to maximum ‘efficiency’, the less room there is for manoeuvre: Heathrow Airport, for example, at present often operates at or above 95% of its theoretical capacity, with each aircraft similarly close to its maximum load – hence even a single day of closure could take more than a month to clear if no other alternative transport-options exist. In essence, to make the system seem to work, we rely on people to take up the slack – abandoning their journeys, making alternate arrangements, whatever. Which kind of defeats the whole object of the extended-enterprise, namely to make it easy and convenient and reliable for people to travel as they need…

So in these days of obsessing over ‘efficiency’ and the like, how do we get back to enterprise-architecture – an architecture that provides proper support for the enterprise in context? What we’ve seen for information above applies to all other aspects of each enterprise: assets, people, process and everything else. So what do we need for the enterprise? How do we enable the requisite redundancy and resilience in the enterprise, to emphasise overall effectiveness rather than mere local ‘efficiency’? For that matter, what is ‘the enterprise’ in scope in each case – not just the organisation itself, but the broader context within which the organisation exists? How do we deliver on the real promise of enterprise-architecture, that “things work better when they work together”?

Happy Travels? Or unHappy Chaos? An interesting yet all too real challenge here for enterprise-architects and enterprise-architecture…

One of the comments on the previous post on the unacknowledged risks of  ’cooperative IT’ triggered off an essay-length response that really deserves its own post. So here it is.

The comment that started it off was from Ric Phillips. (I’ve trimmed it slightly, but you can see the original here.)

The innovations that led to mini-computers led to the increasing importance of information processing based on the technology’s ability to capture and model transactions (atomistic events). It really did change the nature of work and organisations and made a new kind of information available.

It wasn’t really the advent of PCs that changed things. If the information about the world that could be stored in them and used had not changed radically they would have simply replaced the niche occupied by terminals. But they allowed people to simulate sheets of paper and type writers. And spreadsheets – which were existed prior to software and were done on very large sheets of paper. Later came sound files, photographs, building designs, industrial machinery, complex electronics (like audio mixing decks) and a thousand other things that are now simulated in software.

In this wave computers became personal productivity tools. The changes to how personal productivity expressed itself in our lives when assisted by the new ‘virtual’ things PCs could provide is what changed our jobs, our professions and be extension our lives.

The internet started out as an extension of publication and communications models that already existed. But (in this case much more slowly that in previous transformations) our activity on the internet started to capture large amounts of information that previously wasn’t subject to computation – social information, information about opinions, subjective value, and what we might call (tentatively) knowledge.

There are intersecting trends (consumerisation for example). But mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on are all converging to create a new domain of information – information that allows us to model and manipulate in computers new and extremely complex things. Once again this will transform organisations. But this time maybe even whole societies.

I don’t see this as an impending disaster. Our world is changing again. As a strategic profession EAs need to get their heads around this. We are leaving the era of ‘information processing’ and ‘ICT’ and entering the era of social computing and Knowledge Technology.

Reading it again, I now realise that this critique has completely missed the point: all it’s doing is extolling the virtues of each of the transformations in technology, yet seemingly ignoring any possibility that there might also be vices associated with those virtues. Yes, each of those transformations are real and valuable to some context, and that is indeed a key driver for change. Yet the change itself is not the risk, and neither is the technology: it is the dependence on that technology that creates the risk.

So, as I put it in my response, I strongly agree that “mobile computing, ubiquitous data, web 2.0 and so on” are not in themselves an impending disaster. The same applies to their initial impact on organisations and “maybe even whole communities” – in general I see those impacts as desirable, even if certainly not something we can ‘control’.

What does worry me is what happens next. As an EA I’ve spent many months at clients tracking down all those small private-to-a-workgroup spreadsheets and databases and log-files and the like that were a) business-critical and b) unmaintained, undocumented, not backed up, inherently fragile [such as trying to use MS Access as a multi-user database, which it was never designed to do], unregistered, and in many other ways a real business risk. Whenever some key person changed jobs, or a single hard-drive failed, or a sysadmin triggered an automated application-upgrade, or any other of a myriad of seeming-trivial events, that business-unit would literally lose that part of its mind – and an entire business-process, affecting an entire cross-functional workstream, would grind to a halt until someone could work out what had gone missing and how to set up yet another kludged workaround.

When the business-application is non-critical, kludges usually don’t matter: it’s how people learn, it helps get things done, and it’s exactly what ’shadow-IT’ is for. The new mobile technologies and the like are brilliant for this – just as spreadsheets and single-user databases were (and still are). Everything’s fine as long as they’re essentially used in the same way as Lego bricks or a Meccano set or the like – a ’serious toy’ that can be used to knock out a quick prototype to test out an idea, or perhaps even to keep around as a vaguely-useful tool and talking-point. And as long as they’re used for that kind of purpose, it shouldn’t matter much when they do fail – especially if we can use that failure as a way to learn what to do differently next time. In other words, we accept failure as part of the deal – it’s ’safe-fail’.

But don’t try to use a ’serious toy’ for anything that’s business-critical. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s simply not ‘fit for purpose’: they’re not robust enough, resilient enough, agile enough, secure enough, and so on – which means that as a system we cannot set them up to ’safe-fail’ in such a context. Sure, you could use Lego to build a house (it’s been done), or Meccano to build a bridge (that’s been done, too), but the effectiveness of doing so is questionable at best, especially over the longer term.

It’s the ‘-ilities’ that usually matter most in architecture. The functional requirements for a system are usually much the same at any scope or scale, but the qualitative or so-called ‘non-functional’ requirements are what will usually make or break the system in practice. Building an IT system that can handle half a dozen strictly-sequential requests in half an hour or even half a minute is relatively trivial; building one that can handle thousands or even millions of parallel, interleaving, fragmented, potentially-incomplete requests every second is not trivial at all; and yet the functional requirements are essentially the same. That’s the difference between a ’serious-toy’ prototype, and serious engineering with serious architecture and serious service-management and support behind it.

What we have right now in mobile-computing, ubiquitous-information and cloud is a whole bunch of serious-toys desperately pretending to be more than they are, and – more worryingly – being sold and used as if they’re more than they are. Sure, the function is there – but that’s easy. It always is. Getting them beyond that ’serious toy’ stage is not easy – and because it’s hard work to get there, it hacks into the short-term profits, too, so it’s not exactly popular amongst the money-obsessed.

So we have here all the ingredients for a ‘perfect storm’: more and more of individual people’s lives and livelihoods being placed onto platforms that are inherently unstable and unsustainable, because little or none of the work to make them stable and sustainable is as yet in place or even in progress. If you’re not already seriously worried about what will happen when large chunks of our society literally lose their collective mind and memory through the failures of these kludged-together toys, you’re not thinking hard enough about the architecture of the enterprise… 

The lessons of history are plain to see, and it’s also plain to see that the level of unaddressed risk has been raised each time, with even the earliest-period risks still not fully addressed even now. You Have Been Warned?

Twitter-correspondent Craig Hepburn posted a Tweet this morning pointing to Dion Hinchcliffe‘s excellent ZDNet article, ‘CoIT: how an accidental future is becoming reality‘, about the current rise and rise of ‘consumer IT’ or ‘cooperative IT’:

It’s a story as old as the IT department: New technology arrives in the market, it makes some type of work easier to accomplish, the business asks for it, and IT reacts and delivers it. Not always however, and usually somewhat slowly. It was this way with PCs, it was this way with the Internet, and now IT is faced with what is turning out to be a veritable perfect storm of technology and social change. …

Today’s highly mobile, social cloud has set everyone’s expectations for how easy, powerful, and simple IT can be. The genie will never be put back into the bottle.

For once I’m going to stand firmly on the side of the IT-folks on this one – because no matter how wonderful this looks right now, this is not good news at all. Looking at this with a futurist’s eye, I’m wondering how long it will take before we wish we could put the genie back into the bottle… because what I’m seeing here is a full-on disaster-in-the-making. Or rather, a double disaster-in-the-making, given how much this will interact with the ongoing disaster that is ‘cloud-computing’…

One of the first lessons any futurist learns is to look back at history, to seek out any equivalent occurrences in the past. And the blunt fact is that we’ve been here before… not just once, but several times already. Each time that we came back to the same place – if perhaps from a slightly different direction – it’s clear that the fundamental lessons were not learned, in fact were wilfully ignored; and each time it took a lot of effort, a lot of skill, and a lot discipline, to tidy up the mess – just in time for the next batch of overly-excited idiots to trash the place all over again. This is the dirty end of Gartner’s ‘hype-cycle’: someone has to tidy up the mess. And yes, “it’s a story as old as the IT department”, because in every case so far, that ‘someone’ has been the much-derided IT department – and also enterprise-architecture, in its broader sense, beyond IT alone.

Go back sixty years or so, to the first beginnings of mainframes and ‘big computing’. Watch the hype-cycle at work: slow adoption, then a huge take-off in ‘data-processing’ (we didn’t get round to calling it IT until quite a bit later). It will solve every business problem! Control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (COBOL, the IBM-360 architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Twenty years later, it’s the mini-computer boom. It will solve every business problem! Now even medium-sized businesses can control the world! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except that it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (the C language, the Digital PDP-series architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Ten years later, we get the microcomputer revolution. It will solve every business problem! Now you too can control the world, right here on your desktop! Unlimited information on tap, right here, right now! Except it wasn’t quite as simple as that… turns out it was a lot of work to get standards happening (disk-formats, file-formats, data-architectures, the IBM-PC architecture, and so on), and then all the boring stuff about requirements, maintenance, data-cleansing, service-management…

Yup, you’ll be seeing the pattern here. The exact same sequence applied to the rise of the internet ten years later, the web five years after that (with a merry little hiatus called the Dot.Com.Bomb), the rise of cloud over the past few years, and now the rise of Hinchcliffe’s mobile IT or ‘CoIT’. In every case, there’s the same wild hype, the initial push from outside the IT-department (as ‘shadow IT’) which gets the basic idea going to point where it’s usable.

(And to be fair, if that push hadn’t happened, those new developments would probably never have been usable: as Hinchcliffe implies, it’s actually quite rare that innovations arises from within the IT department itself. Because that isn’t it’s job: IT’s real job, unfortunately, is to tidy up the mess that will inevitably follow…)

In every case we see the same exuberance… then the slowly-dawning awareness that it isn’t quite as simple as that. It turns out that there’s a lot of work that’s needed in order to get standards happening – otherwise the new ‘revolution’ turns out to be something that can’t be shared, which means that the whole thing fizzles out quite quickly because we need that sharing to happen. We need clear standards for hardware, software, data-architectures, information-architectures, interchange protocols and much more besides. We need distinct disciplines around requirements, governance, maintenance, data-cleansing, quality-management, service-management and a whole swathe of other areas. And all of those, it’s now clear, need to allow for customisation, agility, security, versatility, adaptability, resilience and the like – none of which are easy to balance with conventional ‘control’-style disciplines.

So here I am, looking at the rise of Hinchcliffe’s ‘CoIT’ – particularly cloud-computing and mobile-apps. And what I’m seeing is an architectural disaster waiting to happen, if not unfolding right before our eyes:

• security – where is it? does it exist at all? (I’ve seen lots of hype and promises, but not much reality as yet)
• file-formats – half the iPad apps I’ve seen seem to embed their data actually within the app itself – they don’t even have a file-format other than perhaps plain-text or unstructured PDF
• interchange-formats -if they have a file-format at all,  most of the apps seem to rely on unpublished proprietary file-structures with no means to enable exchange between different apps, whilst cloud-providers will often deliberately make it difficult to exchange, so as to enforce ‘lock-in’
• escrow – information-lifetimes range between seconds and decades – yet no-one seems to be thinking beyond a year or more at most, and no-one at all seems to be planning for what happens when a cloud-provider or app-provider goes bust – which they will, often (over the long-term at least), and often very expensively
• system-standards – where are they? do they exist at all? – we seem to back in the worst days of early microcomputing, where just about every man-and-his-dog-in-a-garage could and did create an entirely different architecture for everything, often intentionally incompatible with everything else

I could go on… and on… and on… there’s no shortage of other nightmare-level architectural risk-factors that aren’t being addressed at all. Other than by the much-maligned IT-department, that is (who unfortunately tend to be able to see only the IT-related risks, which represent only a relatively small proportion of the whole); or by the few enterprise-architects who actually do think about whole-of-enterprise scope (and who are mostly derided, by the hype-merchants and their ilk, as doomsayers who’ve lost the plot). Not funny… Oh well…

Yes, it’s true that the excitement (or the oft-forlorn hope that it will finally be better this time?) is what gets people going to create new ideas; so yes, the exuberance does matter. Hence, in turn, I suppose, the hype does matter too. And safe-fail experiments are also always a good idea, because they show us where things will break but without causing much damage in the process. ‘Safe-fail’ can get quite extreme, too: for example, think of the buildings in a fireworks-factory, with very solid walls, very lightweight roofs – because when you know there’s a high risk that things can go badly wrong, you can indeed design for that fact. Yet there are also many types of structures that we can’t allow to fail: anyone who’s lived through a major earthquake or major storm-event will know that fact firsthand… Architecturally we need to be able to tell the difference between those two extremes, and design accordingly.

Yet that’s exactly what’s not happening here with cloud or CoIT: architecture of any valid kind, it seems, has all but been abandoned in the usual wild rush towards The Next Best Thing… So might it not be wise to take a brief pause for thought at this point, before we rush headlong into yet another insanely-expensive IT-disaster? Or is that too much to ask of anyone whilst the hype is in full flow?

Okay, so that’s all of the Mythquake book-project. The chapters, in variously-complete condition, are as follows:

• Mythquake
• MQ-1: Everyday upsets
• MQ-2: The centre of the universe
• MQ-3: I am what I do
• MQ-4: Whoever you voted for…
• MQ-5: Money makes the world go round?
• MQ-6: The meaning of life
• MQ-7: Sugar and spice
• MQ-8: Let freedom reign
• MQ-9: Possession
• Aftershocks

I also have a fairly large collection of research-material in electronic form, and a matching domain-name, mythquake.com .

If someone wants to take over the project, all I’d would ask for is some kind of credit in the final product. That’s it.

Anyone interested? If so, please let me know via a comment here.

The final section of the Mythquake book-project – a book I know I’ll now never complete, so I’m making it available for anyone who wants it.

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-9: Possession‘, explored what will probably be the source of the most disruptive mythquake that’s hit human society for several thousand years: the notion of personal property and possession.  It’s the key-stone for our entire economics, much of our politics, much of our systems of social relations: yet in terms of physical fact, it has no more foundation than the equally delusory myth of ‘rights’. Dangerous indeed…

Yet if such mythquakes are inevitable, what can we do about them? How can we prepare for them, so as to minimise the damge they would cause? That’s the topic for this final chapter of the book.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Did the earth move for you?
• Mythquake preparedness
• Everyone’s a winner

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

Read more…

More on the Mythquake book-project – a book I’d been trying to write for some ten years, but now recognise it’s time for me to hand it over to someone else (if anyone else wants it! )

The previous chapter, ‘MQ-8: Let freedom reign‘, explored one of the deep-myths of ‘Western’ culture: the notion of rights. Despite the frequent claim that rights are inherently ‘true and inalienable’ and the like, we’re forced to conclude that they don’t actually exist as anything much more than an arbitrary and unsupportable declaration of wishful-thinking – leaving the culture lethally exposed to mythquakes that may be amazingly destructive at almost every imaginable scale. That in itself is worrying enough. Yet there’s one more deep-myth that has an even greater potential for devastating destruction: the concept of possession. That’s what we’ll explore in this final main chapter.

This chapter contains the following sections [all notes-only]:

• Down to the core
• A property of mind?
• The unwantedness of anti-property
• Possessing or possessed?
• Sustained by belief

Book-development notes are shown in italics inside square-brackets, [like this]. Further commentary on the development-notes is in ordinary type inside curly-braces, {like this}.

MQ-9: Possession

Richter 9: Rare great earthquake. Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across. Equivalent to around thirty thousand megatons of TNT (Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004). Around one per twenty years on average.

Mercalli XII Vision distorted; ground moves in waves or ripples; objects thrown into air; large amounts of rock move; river courses altered; almost everything is destroyed.

Read more…