Tom Graves / Tetradian

What is ‘Why?’ And why, anyway?

“Oh no, not again“, do I hear you cry? Actually, it’s not as bad as that: it’s not going to be yet another of those long tedious technical posts – honest!

(It is a sort-of technical question, I’ll admit. And, in the event, quite long. But interesting to just about everyone, I hope.)

What do we mean by ‘Why’? It’s a question that’s been puzzling me for quite a while – not least because enterprise-architecture is in some ways all about the shared ‘why‘ of an enterprise, and how we express that ‘Why’ in practice.

That kind of ‘Why’ is energising, and engaging. “Start with Why“, says Simon Sinek – and in terms of how things really happen in enterprise, he’s right. If we start with why, things do indeed happen, and usually happen well.

But then I look at the ‘Why’ column in Zachman: ‘Why’ is business-rules, it says. Gosh. Wow. Exciting… (To be honest, my heart just sinks. Doesn’t yours?) Business-rules? – seriously, where’s the fun in that? Kind of the exact opposite of engaging, really. Something’s gone missing there, clearly…

That’s not quite fair, of course. Up at the top, Zachman describes ‘Why’ as a list of Goals. Not quite as unexciting as business-rules. (But close…) Yet there’s something kinda odd here… kinda like a sudden sideways jump… different things all mixed up together in the same space…?

And I hit up against the same problem when working on the Enterprise Canvas concept, a year or so ago. The same Start with Why: the ‘vision’ for the extended-enterprise is the core ‘Why’ from which everything else flows. That ‘Why’ is emotive, it means something: for the right kind of ‘Why’, people are willing, even eager, to get out of bed way too early on a cold dark dreary workday morning. It matters. It sits above everything else. And yet, to make sense of the content and activities of the service that we’d represent on an Enterprise Canvas module, there’s that same dull boring ‘Why’ again: decisions, principles, rules and regulations, all that kind of stuff. Where’s the fun gone? How come we’ve lost the why from the Why?

I’ve been bouncing up against an answer on this in several previous posts over the past while, such as one about principles in enterprise-architecture, and another on the relationship between architecture, design and implementation. But perhaps a better answer came up over the past couple of days, when trying to unravel the anatomy of Archimate and, in particular, struggling to make sense of the split between what in Archimate they call Intentional Concepts versus Extensional Concepts.

Intentional Concepts are, as the name suggests, about intent. Extensional Concepts are about what we do with that intent – about how we extend that intent out into real-world practice. In Archimate, Intentional Concepts are entities such as Value, Meaning and Reason. And the important point is that these are viewed as separate from ‘the action’. Yet down in the details of that ‘the action’, we again come across another kind of ‘reasons’ – all those business-rules and so on. (Archimate doesn’t model any of that as yet, but that’s another story.) So again we’ve got this kind of sideways jump: ‘Why’ is above everything, as Intent; yet it’s also just another part of that ‘everything’, as Extension, the ways things work together.

The obvious answer: we’re dealing with two different kinds of ‘Why’. Or two different sides of the same ‘Why’, perhaps.

One side of Why creates a question: literally, it starts a ’quest’. For most of us, that’s the exciting bit.

The other side of Why is the answer to the question, the end of the quest. That was the question, here’s the answer: The Decision. End of story. For most of us, that’s when the fun ends: a sense of relief, perhaps, that there’s no more need to quest, but also, well, no more need to quest… Final. That’s it. Full Stop. (or Period, if you speak the US version of English). An ending, that somehow ends up in a bunch of rules, with No Questions Allowed any more. A Why To End All Whys.

Kind of like the braces round a mathematical function: a=func(x,y) and all that. The opening-brace ( begins the question: what’s x? what’s y? what do we do with them? – exciting, new, gosh, wow! And then we hit the closing-brace ) that ends the question: its kind of ‘nothing more to say’, really. We have the answer, the decision. Nothing more to do. Oh. Oh well. (Except that in much of maths, and in computing too, we have parentheses within parentheses within parentheses: q=some(func(x,y), also(y,z, andalso(b,c))) – quests within quests! Fun within more fun – hooray! )

So we do have two different kinds of ‘Why’ – and they go into different places in our architecture.

One kind of ‘Why’ – the question, the ‘(‘ – goes above the Zachman space, goes above the Enterprise Canvas, goes into Archimate as intention. Think of it as a row above everything, or a backplane, or something like that: whichever way we view it, it pervades everything.

The other kind of ‘Why’ – the ‘)’, the decision – goes into the Zachman space as just another column, goes into Archimate as extension. Each decision is specific, explicit: it literally cuts off other choices in that context. We can connect it to things, show how it affects other things, but it doesn’t pervade everything in the way that the question does.

In that sense, it does make sense to put them in different places. (And also – very important – not to forget the intention. Zachman ignores it, or loses it somehow in its strange sideways jump; Archimate all but abandons it, when it squeezes all of its Intentional Concepts into the literal meaninglessness of Passive Structure; and Business Model Canvas doesn’t even bother, but seemingly assumes that the only ‘Why’ that matters is ‘How do we make money?’ The ‘questing Why’ is literally emotive, the source of all motivation: if we don’t explicitly include it in our enterprise models, we’ve just shut out any reason for anyone to be engaged in our whatever-it-is. Perhaps not a wise mistake…?)

In another sense, though, it’s still the same ‘Why’. Just different faces – or phases – of the same quest. That’s where so much of the confusion comes, because often where we place it is more about how we choose to look at it than anything else. Looking ‘downward’, we see a stream of decisions: “because so-and-so… therefore… therefore… therefore…”. Looking upward, we see a stream of reasons: “because… because… because…” – ultimately ending up in the the unquestionable ‘Because!’ of the enterprise-vision or whatever. (I tend to place only that ultimate ‘Because!’ and its immediate implied-values as that uppermost layer of the enterprise-model; everything else ends up at various levels of that Extensional side-column of ‘Why’.) The Knowledge Genes structure also describes this Janus-faced relationship well, though in a different way: move leftward towards the question of Why, rightwards towards the decisions of How. The same ‘Why’, and yet different; a different ‘Why’, and yet the same.

Two kinds of ‘Why’.

That are also the same ‘Why’.

Now why is that, I wonder…?

Trust is the core of the enterprise in action. So why do so many businesses and other organisations seem to go out of their way to destroy that trust? And what can we as enterprise-architects do to make it work better?

This came up in a tweet yesterday from the Open Group Brazil’s Isabela Abreu, pointing a recent HBR article, ‘The Deepest Deficit: Trust‘:

It’s not surprising that business leaders are held in such low esteem when each and every day, it seems, brings a new corporate scandal. However, these transgressions and their impact on public perception illustrate not merely a crisis of business leadership, but something much more profound. For if Joe Public loses faith in the leadership and legitimacy more generally of our political and economic institutions, we are in deep trouble — our whole system and way of life at risk. Democratic capitalism relies upon trust in order to function, unlike authoritarian systems which substitute fear for trust. The positive challenge, then, is to re-establish the social conditions for trust and to redefine leadership in this new world.

To me that makes a lot of sense, so I sent out a re-tweet of Isabela’s post, with an addendum about the EA perspective:

• Bebela239: RT @HarvardBiz: The Deepest Deficit: Trust http://s.hbr.org/pkfWEe >trust is key in #entarch #economics – if trust is lost, so is the enterprise

To which Australian enterprise-architect Mike Aikins replied:

• AussiMike: @tetradian hmm…not clear to me why entarch is any different from the human condition..we rely on trust to interconnect..

Which, of course, is entirely true:

• tetradian: @AussiMike “not clear to me why entarch is any different from the human condition” – it isn’t. that’s the whole point. // (…or, we need to ask why biz so often thinks it is different from ‘the human condition’… )

From an enterprise-architecture perspective – with proper distinctions between ‘organisation’ and ‘enterprise’ – the functioning of the organisation’s overall business-model should run in a virtuous-cycle something like this:

Everything starts from trust – or from reputation, which in effect is secondhand trust. Each transit through the business-model should reaffirm-trust, building and maintaining that virtuous-cycle.

Yet this assumes an ‘outside-in’ perspective, where the organisation understands its subordinate relationship to the broader-scope enterprise. The danger is that in a conventional self-centric or ‘inside-out’ perspective – “What do we have that we can sell? Who can we sell it to? How can we sell it? How do we make money?” – only a subset of this cycle may be visible: and that subset doesn’t include awareness of the centrality of trust. Instead, like the schoolroom bully, it ignores the need for trust, and thinks that a crude demand for attention is an adequate substitute for real respect. Oops…

One of the problems here is that there are three distinct choice-points with the ‘Completions’ phase of the cycle: completion of the task, completion for self, and completion for the overall enterprise. A loop-back is possible at each of those choice-points – but they return to different places in the market-cycle:

In a production environment, we’re likely to want to go back straightaway to the next task as soon as the current task is complete. And much of the time, that’s fine – but not every time, otherwise we end up producing and producing for no actual purpose other than production itself.

In a business environment, there’s huge pressure to go straightaway back to the start of the next sale as soon as we’ve been paid for this one (‘completion for self’). Churning our way as fast as possible through the sales-cycle – grab the attention, do the sale, get paid – is what brings in the best short-term profit: there’s no doubt about that at all. And much of the time, that’s fine too – but not every time. The keyword there is short-term, because it doesn’t work in the long-term – in fact, on its own, this kind of tactic is often what’s known as a kurtosis-risk, in which the losses incurred when the risk eventuates in the longer-term will exceed the total of all the previous shorter-term gains. As a model for ‘the business of the business’, this could best be described as ‘pass the parcel’, where the parcel consists of a Russian-roulette time-bomb that will explode without apparent warning – a profitable game for the protected players on the stock-exchange, perhaps, but not for anyone else… Spinning through the quick-profit short-cut on the market cycle is a lot more risky than most business-folks seem to acknowledge…

(It’s true that it’s a risk that can often be mitigated to manageable levels as long as we do remember to take time-out every now and then – and often enough – to reset the timer on that time-bomb. That’s the point of what we’re exploring here. If no-one can be bothered… well, there’d be not be much reason to complain when the whole thing goes ‘boom’, would there? )

To make the business-model work as a whole, it must be constructed ‘outside-in’ – starting from the shared-enterprise, not from the perspective of the organisation alone. And it must connect with the whole of the market-cycle. To do that, the complete business-model must ensure that it establishes and verifies ‘completion for the enterprise’: not just ‘customer-satisfaction’ and the like for the organisation’s immediate business-partners, but satisfaction for the non-clients further out in the shared-enterprise, and, wherever possible, satisfaction for the organisation’s ‘anti-clients‘ too.

Trust is the key to the enterprise. Without trust, the enterprise dies – or, at the very least, the organisation’s place within that enterprise will die. Hence trust is kind of an important concern in an enterprise-architecture…

So as enterprise-architects, what can we do about this? One practical suggestion is to apply the market-cycle to the modelling of every type of transaction and process – including IT-only transactions:

• Before we start in this business-process, how do we establish trust, and reputation?
• How do we establish and maintain relationships based on real mutual respect?
• How do we establish conversations that enable genuine attention? (Note that shouting louder than anyone else – as in classic advertising and ‘marketing’ – can sort-of garner others’ attention, but in a way that usually prevents true conversation…)
• How do we establish and enact the transaction and exchange? (That part is usually well-understood in current enterprise-architectures, process-models and the like, but it often needs review in relation to everything else in the market-cycle.)
• How do we identify and verify completion and closure for the transaction itself? (Ditto, and ditto re need for architectural review.)
• How do we identify and verify completion and closure from the organisation’s perspective? For example, how do we ensure that we get paid, that compliance with all legal and regulatory responsibilities is assured, and so on? (This part is usually addressed in current architectures, but often in a very disjointed way – domain by domain – and also not integrated across the organisation or even with the related transactions.)
• How do we identify and verify completion and closure from the perspective of the overall shared-enterprise? (Seemingly rarely addressed at all – especially in relation to automated transactions.)
• How do we ensure that everything within this transit through the market-cycle will maintain and enhance the organisation’s reputation and trust within the shared-enterprise, and of the shared-enterprise as a whole?

And yes, this kind of enquiry is likely to be, uh, political… but as enterprise-architects, that’s an inescapable part of our professional responsibilities towards the organisation and the broader shared-enterprise. Sorry, but there ain’t no way to sidestep that and still do the job properly…

One of the most serious sources of ‘political’ problems here is that at present, far too often, systems and structures are built upon an assumption that ‘win/lose’ is the only game in town – or, worse, the assumption that the only way I can ‘win’ is by making you lose. In reality, there are only two choices: either everyone wins from each transaction, throughout the overall shared-enterprise; or, in the longer term, everyone loses. ‘Win/lose’ is actually an illusory form of lose/lose, in which the short-term gains for one player mask an overall longer-term loss for all – in other words, another form of kurtosis risk. ‘Win/lose’ may seem to be the norm at present, but it’s bad news for everyone…

So in every architectural assessment, watch for any point where trust is uncertain, or is at risk of being lost. In each architectural design, look for options that can maintain, protect and enhance trust, and keep the market-cycle building, in a virtuous-circle.

Simple, really. Though rarely easy, of course…

Comments, anyone?

Just how much are organisations themselves ‘their own worst enemy’ for the enterprise?

Have been thinking about this one for quite a while, following up on some great conversations with Kevin Smith (of PEAF fame) and Nigel Green (of VPEC-T fame) about Kevin’s concept of Enterprise Debt – an expansion into the whole-enterprise scope of Ward Cunningham’s concept of Technical Debt:

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation.

In classic IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture, Enterprise Debt occurs with any ‘quick-fix’ IT solution, or any solution that breaches the architecture guidelines. A lot of ‘shadow-IT’ fits into this category, of course. But exactly as with a credit-card, for example, the ‘debt’ doesn’t matter much if it’s cleared quickly: short-term debt is rarely much of a problem or risk, and if managed well does help us to achieve short-term goals. Likewise for longer-term debt, such as a mortgage or a car-loan: as long as we know that the debt is there, and that we’ve allowed for it and managing it, it’s not a problem. Yes, it’s a risk, but it’s a managed risk, and one that allows us to reach towards our longer-term goals. So, to take the metaphor back to IT-architectures, a large-scale solution that breaches the architecture-principles may indeed be a risk – but it’s probably not too much of a risk if we’re aware of it, are managing it and do have specific plans in place to ‘write down the debt’.

For enterprise-architectures and any of the other non-IT-oriented architectures, we take the same principles, and adapt them to the respective scope to identify and address the overall Enterprise Debt and concomitant risks. It’s really no different to Technical Debt, other than in its scope: the tasks to identify and address it are certainly much the same.

So far, so good. But it’s the hidden debt – the debt that we don’t notice or don’t know about – that can be the real killer here. Because we don’t know or notice that it exists, it keeps on building up and building up in the background, until suddenly the metaphoric bill is presented, and we have little or no way to pay it off. A classic example was Y2K – otherwise known as the ‘short-term thinking bug’ which comes back to haunt us again and again. In that context, the use of two-digit dates was a design decision that was sensible enough given the technical constraints of the time, but whose short-term expediency was never redressed, and came back to bite us big-time… a good example of a kurtosis risk.

In enterprise-architectures and the like, there are many sources for hidden risk of this kind, often quietly building up quite terrifying amounts of Enterprise Debt. Some examples to watch for:

• small ‘knock it up over a weekend’ applications and databases becoming used in business-critical processes [no documentation, lack of links to enterprise standards]
• a database for a single team, developed using office software tools such as MS Access or cloud apps, becoming used across a wider spread [security concerns, database stability in a true multi-user context]
• business-processes continuing indefinitely without review [loss of 'fitness for purpose', high efficiency but low effectiveness]
• anything that depends on or assumes specific silo boundaries or organisational structures [because those boundaries or structures may change at any time]
• anything that depends on a single individual or small team [serious maintainability-risks, risk of inability to review design-decisions]

We can tackle some of this with proper governance that provides an appropriate balance between the competing needs for agility and stability, such as in a ‘backbone’ governance-model. We also need a long-term view – often reaching out into decades, for many types of business-critical information and processes – and strategies and tactics for systematic ‘entropy-reduction‘ in the overall architecture.

To me, this is one of the most important tasks of an enterprise-architecture unit: addressing the issues of the past so as to support the needs of the future.

Yet there’s a really nasty booby-trap here, a huge source of hidden Enterprise Debt, of which we definitely need to be aware at every level, especially at an enterprise-wide scope. It’s a variant of Parkinson’s Law, often nicknamed the Shirky Principle after Clay Shirky’s aphorism: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution“. This is a classic wicked-problem whose symptoms include:

• people whose incomes and identities depend on ‘the problem’ not being resolved [very common in social-work contexts]
• ‘hero’-managers and other ‘fire-fighters’ whose prestige depends on having metaphoric fires to fight [hence have vested-interest against preventive strategies or tactics]

To say this is ‘political’ is an understatement… And unfortunately, by its business-anarchist nature, enterprise-architecture tends to highlight the inherent absurdities of these kinds of situations – which means that, when accidentally exposing this, architects themselves often tend to be attacked, often with extreme ‘irrational’ anger, in a classic shoot-the-messenger ‘defence’.

This does mean, though, that many organisations – especially in the government or non-profit sectors – are actually ‘their own worst enemy’. The people, the processes and even the structures will often in effect act to perpetuate the problem they purport to resolve. Tricky… especially for the enterprise-architects who work in those organisations…

There are some practical options, though, for enterprise-architects unfortunate enough to be faced with that kind of ‘mess’. These include:

• be careful never to describe any of this as anyone’s ‘fault’ – it’s a natural tendency at the systemic level
• use narrative or story-based methods such as SEMPER or Causal Layered Analysis to ‘surface’ the structural issues
• always reframe motivations and requirements in terms of being ‘for‘ something – never ‘against’ something

As enterprise-architects, we have to deal with the painful realities of Enterprise Debt as best we can. But first we have to learn to become aware of it: and warnings such as the Shirky Principle can be a lot of help in this.

Hope this helps, anyway – comments/suggestions, as usual?

Happy to announce that I’ve at last gotten round to publishing my sort-of-novel Yabbies. Hooray!

(I perhaps ought to say ‘completed and published’, but as you’ll see, ‘completing’ isn’t quite the right word, since much of the content is made up of story-fragments that could be assembled in just about any order.)

At present you can download the full content in PDF format for free from the Tetradian Books website.

More details and background to follow, but for now, here’s the book-blurb:

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

This unusual novel explores ideas about sustainability from a different angle: that we can’t achieve a sustainable world without a system of law that fully supports it. To make that happen, we would need truly revolutionary change in the way we see our world: a refocus of passion from possession to purpose. In some ways, as one of the characters here explains, we may not have much choice:

“The whole system is so fragile that there’s a real risk it could collapse at any time, in a really big way. Those problems are inherent in the system, so to speak, so that the whole thing is held together by little more than wishful thinking.”

But what would happen if only some countries made that change – and others didn’t? What would happen to trade, to international relations, to everyday living? How would they deal with each other’s business-visitors, or tourists? Yabbies explores these themes through story-fragments, each piece as if drifting down to us through the waters of time, different characters describing their own worlds and experiences each in their own unique voice. And perhaps a little magic, too.

Yabbies first appeared more than a decade ago as YABI – Yet Another Book Idea. Although it has taken many forms over the years, as an interactive website, screenplay, annotated text and more, this is its first time available as a conventional novel. This new edition includes a background section on the ideas and principles behind the story, and also a suggested timeline to link the fragments together.

Author Tom Graves is best known as a writer on a broad range of non-fiction topics – from the structure of organisations to the structure of magic, and much more besides. He applies the same perceptive eye and acerbic humour to this story, using fiction to explore some of the deep-questions and ‘undiscussable’ themes of the present day.

Share and enjoy, perhaps?

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?

We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power.

In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to do work. Wherever there’s work to be done – in whatever form that that ‘work’ might take – there’s a need for the power to do that work. Should be simple enough to identify and model that within an enterprise-architecture, surely?

Unfortunately, no, it’s not that simple – because most social definitions of ‘power’ tend to be closer to ‘the ability to avoid work‘. Therein lie lots of, uh, interesting problems for enterprise-architecture…

Hence power is something that we really do need to address in enterprise-architecture – even in an IT-centric architecture, let alone one which covers a true whole-of-enterprise scope. Read on?

Read more…

Over on the long-running LinkedIn thread about enterprise-architecture as a bridge between strategy and execution, there was a bit of discussion about trusted advisors and a potential role for Pat Ferdinandi‘s parrot (Scarlet – the star of Pat’s enterprise-architecture how-to book Parrotology). In other words, we’re back on the always-fraught theme of where – if anywhere – is the proper place in the organisation for enterprise-architects.

Most of the conventional EA frameworks (TOGAF, FEAF, Gartner, CapGemini and the like) are all quite strongly IT-centric, and hence tend to place the EA role as either a direct or indirect report of the CIO (Chief Information Officer). But as EA becomes more business-oriented, as a discipline, and begins to break out of the IT box, it’s clear that that reporting-relationship wouldn’t really work any more: the role needs to have a wider scope. So, where does it fit?

Given the hierarchical nature of so many organisations, it strikes me that there’s a rather nice analogy here with a mediaeval court.

There’s the King, or perhaps the Queen (the CEO): the one at the top of the tree, the one who makes all the final decisions. (‘Execution’ can have a rather different meaning here than the one we’re used to these days in business… )

The monarch is surrounded by an array of courtiers, all jostling for position.

Some of them are just sycophants, and most of us would get sick of them quite quickly: but they’ll find some way to hang around, whether they’re wanted or not. (Yes, we find plenty of those in present-day organisations too, unfortunately… )

Some of them are various officials (aka managers) of varying rank, pushing and shoving to get heard, to get their specific issues addressed, their achievements noticed, their bonus, their reward, their promotion. They’ll drag us down right into the dust and the detail if we’re not very careful indeed.

There are the priests and the generals and the judges (aka governance and audit), and the ambassadors from other realms (aka government, senior lobbyists, potential partners). They probably need more attention than we might like, but they do indeed matter.

Then there are the monarch’s advisors: wise men and women all (the specialists and subject-matter experts). Very senior, of course, all wearing fine robes and raiments. Sometimes nodding sagely, more often arguing intensely with each other – sometimes so much so that they fail to notice the monarch’s original question.

And then, to put it bluntly, there’s the mob. Hoi polloi, ‘below the salt’, kept well apart from ‘the persons of quality’, their opinion and experience is usually deemed not to matter not at all – even though they’re often the only ones who know what’s really going on. Which is an interesting problem, and one that’s often reflected in present-day corporations, too…

Yet there’s one other person that we’ve probably missed, so visible that he’s almost invisible: the court-jester. Unlike all those advisors, he’s not a specialist of anything, really: he’s a generalist, such that some might dismiss him as ‘a jack of all trades and master of none’. And again unlike those advisors, there’s often only the one jester – yet he’s also the one that the monarch may listen to most of all.

The jester has no real pride: he’ll talk with anyone – which means that he can find information from everywhere, including those firmly-forbidden, carefully-forgotten places. He can make a joke out of anything, see the mythquake in the making; anarchic, unexpected, sideways from the predictable paradigm, or the suspect certainties of the usual worldview – and yet every jest has its bite, its deeper contrast, its deeper meaning. It may not be comfortable for the monarch, and even less so for the advisors – but often the jester is the only one who will truly speak the truth.

Seems to me sometimes that that’s the real role of the enterprise-architect: the confusing court-jester, one of those strange ones who links everything to everything else, talks with everyone, coordinates, connects across the whole enterprise.

So bring on the enterprise-architects, as the quiet clowns of the corporation – because they’re often the only ones who make sense.

[Update] One of the items I wrote this post for, and then promptly forgot, was this quote from the Wikipedia page on Morris dance, about the role of the jester or ‘fool’:

Many sides [troupes] have one or more fools. A fool will usually be extravagantly dressed, and communicate directly with the audience in speech or mime. The fool will often dance around and even through a dance without appearing really to be a part of it, but it takes a talented dancer to pull off such fooling while actually adding to and not distracting from the main dance set.

The Morris fool will usually be the best dancer by far in the side – yet to many people watching, he won’t appear to to be much of a dancer at all. It’s also a teaching role: I’ve seen a Morris fool gently highlight yet brilliantly parody every one of the mistakes of each of the other dancers, whilst weaving in and out and through the rest of the dance in seemingly-drunken abandon. (Given that these are often stick-dances, each dancer wildly wielding a thick cudgel perhaps two or three feet long, that’s not a task for the faint-hearted. ) The parallel with much of enterprise-architecture should be clear: we weave in and out of the dance of change, connecting everyone, keeping everything moving, keeping everything pointing towards the overall vision. Which in the Morris-dancers’ case would usually be the vision of a very large jug of ale, together with a dance in which no-one’s actually been bashed over the head with a club… most enterprise-architecture won’t offer quite the same level of excitement, but close at times, perhaps?

History seems to be all in vogue in Cynefin circles at present. On one side, for example, there’s Cynthia Kurtz – the too-often-unacknowledged co-creator of Cynefin, and originator of some of its key concepts such as the crucial distinctions between ‘order’ and ‘unorder’ – who’s recently written some truly excellent posts on her past involvement with Cynefin and her subsequent development of those ideas into her current Confluence model. Very strongly recommended.

On another side, Dave Snowden has been busily documenting his own ‘history of Cynefin’, in a series of blog-posts with that title. In Part 4, for example, I’m very glad to see that he does indeed describe Cynthia’s crucial role in the development of Cynefin. And in Part 5, bizarrely, he uses my own work on context-space mapping – uncredited, unacknowledged, and, of course, completely out of context – as his sole example of an ‘illegitimate approach’ to usage of Cynefin concepts. I suppose I ought to be flattered at this singular censure, though to use Dave’s own words, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” at this, because all it really demonstrates is his continuing inability to get the point. Oh well…

(Unlike Dave, I’ve never laid claim to the mantle of ‘scientist’. I’m a toolmaker, a creator of conceptual tools: my real field is metamethodology, the methodologies for creating methodologies to create context-specific methods like those in Cynefin – and although there’s always a large theoretical component to that work, the core focus is always on practice, not theory. In a classic Two Cultures sense, might the real problem here be that we’re operating in different metaphoric ‘worlds’? No matter: it is what it is (or isn’t), and that’s that.)

The point that Dave seems to be missing is that he’s still using entirely the wrong criteria to assess what context-space mapping is all about. None of it is about ‘truth’ in the formal scientific sense: it’s much more about ‘mashups’, about the quest for something useful, that has value in a given context – which is a fundamentally different concern. To use one example he so pointedly dismisses in his ‘History’, if we were to merge the Cynefin categorisation with the classic ‘data, information, knowledge, wisdom’ stack, and claim that it was somehow ‘true’, that would make indeed no sense at all: if I’d actually done that, Dave’s critique about ‘illegitimacy’ would indeed be valid. But the whole point here is that in context-space mapping and many other related techniques – such as the venerable SWOT – we intentionally create crossmaps with  nominal-’mismatches’ of that type, and use the resultant cognitive-dissonance to trigger new ways of looking at a context. Mistaken notions of ‘truth’ or ‘legitimacy’ simply get in the way of this process: the legitimacy is determined from the discipline and precision of process, not from an ultimately-arbitrary ‘scientific lineage’.

It’s possible to argue that I continued to associate what’s now context-space mapping with Cynefin for a little while too long – a month or two, perhaps – beyond the point where it had become probable that their paths had diverged too much to make sense. It’s a common enough mistake, though, and perhaps a less reprehensible one than simply renaming someone else’s work as one’s own, without any actual difference in model. (Is acknowledging influence a greater ‘scientific crime’ than denying it? – I honestly don’t know.)

There’s also the blunt reality that every ‘new’ model is sort-of ‘illegitimate’ – Cynefin included, as Dave makes clear in his history – in the sense that it’s a kind of ‘bastard child’ of many different ideas coming together in unexpected ways. For context-space mapping, I’ll freely admit that the overall method and model each have many different ‘parents’, some of which I’ve long since forgotten and some I may never even have known. Yet that’s true for the work of most of us, I’m sure.

So in the current spirit of exploring the history of our respective models, I’ll point to a key influence behind context-space mapping, which came up in several different forms, most of them predating my involvement in Cynefin by several decades.

Read more…

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.