Five Elements model – Tom Graves / Tetradian

Tag: Five Elements model

Fractality in Five Elements method

Posted on 20 May 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — No Comments ↓

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…

Documenting the Not-known

Posted on 6 May 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge — No Comments ↓

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…

Sensemaking: Down in the dungeons

Posted on 28 March 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures — 2 Comments ↓

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: Into the void

Posted on 14 March 2018 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures — No Comments ↓

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…

Managers and leaders

Posted on 10 June 2016 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Power and responsibility — No Comments ↓

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,…

New – EA training-course

Posted on 18 March 2014 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge — 15 Comments ↓

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…

Managers, leaders and hierarchies

Posted on 15 January 2014 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Enterprise architecture, Society — 2 Comments ↓

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…

Avoiding delusions of strategy

Posted on 29 December 2013 by

Tom G Posted in Business, Futures — 13 Comments ↓

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…

Anthropomorphise your applications?

Posted on 5 December 2013 by

Tom G Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture — No Comments ↓

“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…

Metaframeworks in practice, Part 3: Five Elements

Posted on 12 November 2012 by

Tom G Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge — No Comments ↓

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…