This is another of the sort-of status-reports about the ‘hammer it out in practice’ work that designer Joseph Chittenden and I have been doing on Five Elements, to make it more accessible and usable for a more general audience. In …

Fractality in Five Elements method Read more »

In our work on simplifying the ‘inventory’ of tools and techniques I’d developed for whole-enterprise architecture and the like, one of the challenges we keep hitting up against is how to capture ideas, information and insights, as they appear during …

Documenting the Not-known Read more »

Following on from the previous post ‘Sensemaking: Into the void‘, what’s a good everyday analogy or example on how to develop our skills in sensemaking and strategy? In particular, how to understand, apply and use the ‘sense, make-sense, decide, act‘ …

Sensemaking: Down in the dungeons Read more »

How do we make sense when we don’t know what’s going on? What happens when we find ourselves diving into ‘the void’ of the unknown and uncertain? And what can we do there, to make enough sense of ‘the unknown’ to make useful …

Sensemaking: Into the void Read more »

Many organisations talk about ‘developing new leaders’. What they mostly mean in practice is ‘developing new managers’. Which is unfortunate, because they’re not the same… The blunt reality is that most organisations I see have an absurd surplus of managers, …

Managers and leaders Read more »

Yep, I’ve finally Got Round To It: I’ve created a full set of materials for an EA training-course, building on the whole-of-enterprise approach that I’ve championed all of these years. (Whole-of-enterprise, that is, in contrast to the arbitrarily-constrained IT-is-the-centre-of-everything approach …

New – EA training-course Read more »

Is ‘manager’ the same as ‘leader’? Are leaders always managers? And are hierarchies – and, in particular, classic management-hierarchies – always a natural, necessary and unavoidable fact of (larger) enterprises? These questions came up for me whilst reading three articles …

Managers, leaders and hierarchies Read more »

“Don’t anthropomorphise computers – they hate that!” – that was the text of a great graphic I found on Flickr, and that I’ve used in various slidedecks since. Yet might it actually be a good idea sometimes to do just …

Anthropomorphise your applications? Read more »

What frameworks do we need to make sense of relationships, interdependencies and dynamics across the the whole of an enterprise? This is the third of five worked-examples of metaframeworks in practice – on how to hack and ‘smoosh-together’ existing frameworks to create …

Metaframeworks in practice, Part 3: Five Elements Read more »