Tom Graves / Tetradian

An interesting follow-on this afternoon from the themes of the previous post, ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘.

I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer is expounding about this shop, telling them in his somewhat condescending upmarket voice that it’s where they ought to buy real English food (??) to take home, and so on. Then he says:

If you see schoolboys walking down the road here wearing purple blazers, they are from the Royal Grammar School. They are the elite, the cream. At age 11 they have to take a special examination in mathematics and English, and only two percent pass that exam.

It’s kinda interesting to apply a services perspective to that assertion. All that the exam tells us is that it selects for ability in mathematics and native-language. Which means that those pupils will, in later life, probably be well-suited to doing tasks that deliver the kinds of services that make good use of those abilities. But that’s all that it tells us. Since every service is ‘just another service’, there’s nothing in there – nothing at all – that indicates that every one of those young students should therefore be described as ‘the elite’.

In service-architecture terms, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’ of the enterprise, and every service is necessary to the viability of the enterprise, hence it makes no sense to describe any category of services – or the people who deliver those services – as ‘the elite’. (Individuals, yes, perhaps; a specific category, no.)

In short, the only reason why those students with that specific set of (proto)-skills in that location would be called ‘the elite’, is because people who are like them and have similar skills want to believe that they themselves are ‘the elite’.

In other words, it’s nothing more than a myth – the kind of circularly self-centric fantasy that’s guaranteed to cause serious dysfunction in a service-oriented enterprise-architecture.

Oops…

And yes, it gets worse! All the way through school, these young students will be told, time and time again, that they are ‘the elite’. That they are entitled to special privilege and special attention because they are ‘the elite’. Which they aren’t, because it’s just a self-aggrandizing fantasy.

Oops…

And wait – yes, it gets still worse! These young people go on to elite universities, elite business-schools, to become elite businessmen, businesswomen. Which they aren’t, because, again, it’s a fantasy.

Oops…

And now, yes, it gets worse again! – because they go on to become ‘the elite of the elite’, the ‘captains of industry’, the managers, who are ‘elite’ because they’re managers.

Yet management is ‘just another service’. There’s nothing inherently ‘elite’ about that set of services at all: every service is ‘just another service’, and every service is, by definition, essential to the enterprise. In a service-oriented architecture, there is no service that is inherently more important than any other: that’s the whole point.

Hmm…

So let’s ask a very simple question – a very difficult, dangerous, politically-explosive question: if every service is ‘just another service’, why is it that as a category, those who deliver the category of services that are called ‘management’ get to control more, and are given more, and paid more – often so vastly much more – than those who happen to deliver a different type of ‘just another service’?

Because as far as I can see it, from a service-architecture perspective, the only reason that they’re paid more is because they purport that they’re ‘the elite’. Which they’re not, because it’s just an arbitrary, self-important fantasy.

A whole load of smoke-and-mirrors to prop up the fantasy, of course – no surprises there. But beyond that there’s nothing of any substance at all: nothing more than a plaintive little chant of “the elite are the elite because they’re the elite”, and kinda hoping beyond hope that we won’t notice how empty that claim really is.

Oops…

Y’know, there might just be a problem there?

—

[And by the way, yes, I did indeed go to that kind of 'elite' school as a child. Which is why I do know, first-hand,  just exactly how vapid, shrill and empty those claims really are... Hey ho...]

There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it.

(This gets long again: sorry…)

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As usual, the previous post ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘ ended up way too long and involved and ‘wordy’. Sorry…

So let’s do a shorter version, in some ways going a bit deeper, but concentrating only on the issues and suggested actions.

Here’s the problem: there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

(Trust me on that one. I’ve been researching it for at least the past couple of decades: the best outcome we can get from a possession-based economy is ‘The Worst Possible System‘, in which most resources automatically end up where they’re least needed.)

Which is a problem, because what we think of as ‘the economy’ is actually a money-based economy built on top of a barter-based economy built on top of a possession-based economy, scaled up to a full global scope.

Which means, in other words, that there’s no way to make what we think of as ‘the economy’ sustainable.

Which means that in the longer-term – or even in the medium-term, at the rate we’re currently going – if we don’t find an alternative that actually works, we’re dead.

Oops…

So here’s the challenge: find a way to run an economy, in a radically different way, that actually is sustainable. Start at the household level first; then scale it up to a work-team or business-unit; then an entire organisation; and keep on scaling up towards a full global scope.

Big challenge? Yep. Big stakes too…

We can’t use money for this, or any form of so-called ‘alternative currency’. The problem isn’t money itself, but rather the fact that money is a standardised form of barter, which assumes that we have something to withhold from others in order to barter with, which in turn depends on the notion of ‘right to exclude’ that’s built into the notion of possession. And that’s the part that doesn’t work: which means that nothing else that’s built on top of possession will work, either.

The only thing I’ve found that does work is responsibility – literally, ‘response-ability’, the ability to choose appropriate responses in accordance with the needs of the context. Mutual responsibilities interlock within a social context: we can build upward and outward from that fact. Without any form of possession.

But this is where it gets interesting…

For a start, money vanishes from the economy. No banks, no insurances, no pensions, no social-security, no medical bills or grocery-bills or school-bills or college-bills or lawyers-fees or consultants-fees, no sales-commissions, no savings or loans, no credit-cards, no mortgages, no monetary taxes, no salaries, no pay-rates, no threat of lost income from lost job, no threat of monetary fines. Gone. All gone. Can’t use them, either as stick or carrot, or any part of the economy.

Because possession doesn’t work, the entire property-model that we know and, uh, well, know, disappears as well. There are property-responsibilities, in the same sense as we talk about ‘project-owner’ or ‘process-owner’; but all those much-vaunted ‘property-rights’ vanish. Gone. We own something because we declare responsibility for it, and for no other reason. (This isn’t a fiction, by the way: most ‘traditional’ property-models operate this way. What we think of as normal, they rightly regard as an aberration.) So we can’t use that as a stick or carrot, either: whether via the offer of property, or the threat of loss of property, it isn’t going to work.

(It’s not that we can’t make a ‘property’-type model seem to work: that’s actually quite easy to do, and that’s what the present possession-economy does right now, after all. It’s that we cannot build anything of that type that does not automatically fall back to an unsustainable ‘Worst Possible System’. That’s why this challenge is a lot harder than it looks.)

We don’t possess ideas, so ‘intellectual property’ vanishes completely. (It never made any sense anyway, so it’s no loss.) We can be responsible about ideas, but they’re not ours to possess. They never were.

We don’t possess people, either. We can’t really talk about ‘our’ people: that’s treating people as possessions, and the only time when people are assets is when they’re slaves. Not a good idea, especially when you have no possession-based way to bribe or bully them into staying in your chosen place. Which, by the way, means that the usual family-model – ‘to have and to hold’, of children in parental ‘custody’ and the like – also vanishes, in much the same way that no-one ever really possesses a cat. Tricky, that…

Almost all of the usual controls disappear from this scenario. No stick that we can wield, no carrot that we can control. Hmm…

How do we get an economy of any kind to work under these constraints? A global economy? An industry? A town or village? A company? A school? Even a family?

Definitely an interesting challenge… especially compared to what we think of as ‘normal’ at present…

(We know it can be done, because, again, this is how most ‘traditional’ societies operate. But in most cases they do so only in small family or tribal groups in agrarian or nomadic contexts – not huge sprawling megacities dependent on complex supply-chains, high technologies and very high energy-demands. Same idea, very different scale – and scale is where so many of the really hard architectural problems arise…)

As I see it, just about the only way to make this work is by reconnecting to enterprise, via shared-vision and the like. Which is why whole-of-scope enterprise-architecture turns out to be really important in this kind of economics.

Which is why this is a challenge for enterprise-architects almost more than for anyone else.

So: Interested? Over to you for your ideas?

Oh, and for an extra challenge: how do we get from here to there?

[Update: Forgot to mention: my sort-of-novel Yabbies is in part an exploration of these themes: Share & Enjoy, perhaps? (At present, download the whole book for free from here.)]

A couple of days ago I wrote an intentionally-controversial post on my Sidewise blog, saying that ‘The future of money is that it has no future‘.

Was I being serious? Yes. Very serious: I really do mean it when I say that the only feasible future for money and the money-based economy is that it has no future.

Which in many people’s eyes would no doubt immediately mark me as some kind of nutcase. Or worse.

To which all I can say is that if they don’t know how proper futures-work actually works, and how to apply it in practice, that’s their problem, not mine.

Perhaps they needn’t worry, though: the money-system that they know and, uh, love, isn’t going to vanish overnight. (Or rather, it almost certainly will, when the change actually takes place; but that change is probably a fair while off yet. Probably…) My point is that as enterprise-architects we need to be fully ready for that change when it comes: otherwise collectively and societally we really are going to be in a mess.

Which means it’s a topic that as enterprise-architects we perhaps really ought to be exploring right now?

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Another week’s worth of Tweets and links, for once available almost straight away. Usual categories an’ all: make of it what you will?

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And, for once, not overly late… Another week’s collection of Tweets and links, always the same(ish) structure, always different content.

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Almost catching up for once: only one week late. Another collection of Tweets and links, anyway, all in the usual format and so on.

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Another not-quite-so-delayed collection of Tweets and links – Share and Enjoy? Usual and usual, of course: over to you…

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And another delayed week’s-worth of Tweets and links. Usual and usual, preceded by usual.

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Oops… badly behind on this, definitely need to do some catch-up. Oh well. A somewhat-delayed collection of Tweets and links, anyway. Usual this-that-and-the-other, with first the usual ‘Read more…’ link:

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