Random ramblings over the metaphoric edge
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 …
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 …
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‘ …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
What is a strategy? How do we create a strategy? – rather than merely a delusion of ‘strategy’? Several of the folks in my Twitterstream – Gerold Kathan and Shawn Callahan, amongst others – pointed recently to a great HBR …
“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 …
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 »