Tom Graves / Tetradian

If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with huge problems arising from a massive earthquake and tsunami all down its north-east coast, and collateral impacts such as damage to and failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

It should be obvious – more like blindingly-obvious, I hope – that there is a massive need for resources there, of all kinds. The human impact is huge: the immediate fact that so many have died is almost trivial compared to the inner-work that each of the survivors will need to do, over years and decades to come. Many villages and towns and even cities have been all but erased from the map: the physical costs of rebuilding the homes and shops and workspaces and infrastructure need to be matched by all the other types of costs involved in rebuilding human community. It’s clear that whatever happens onward, the power-plant is already seriously damaged, possibly beyond repair: which means that Japan has lost a significant proportion of its power-generating capacity, partially crippling its entire industrial and social base, not just for a few days or weeks, but probably for several years to come, until a replacement can be brought on-line. (The costs of decommissioning the damaged plant are another story again…) And right now, all of those people directly affected by the disaster – at least half a million people, and probably many more – need food, clothing, shelter and much more; and in the long term, rebuilding not just the physical spaces and work and everything else that goes with it, but rebuilding hope as well.

A responsibility-based economy matches the resources to the need. It prepares for that need, too – as can be seen in Japan’s rapid, well-rehearsed response, including mobilising 100,000 troops in the disaster-recovery effort (a distinct non-warfighting role for its armed-forces). Around the world, nations and NGOs alike have sent not just words but practical aid: and even if the sheer scale of the problems tends in practice to render many of these well-meant efforts down to little more than token gestures, the fact that mutual-responsibility is acknowledged there is important, with more than just token effect.

Contrast that with the response from the possession-economy – in other words, that which currently presents itself as ‘the economy’. In a sense that response could best be summarised by an, uh, unfortunate ‘Freudian slip’ by US economics-commentator Larry Kudlow, as reported by the largely apolitical lifestyle-magazine Vanity Fair:

In these tough economic times, isn’t it nice to know that calamitous natural disasters needn’t have an adverse affect on your investment portfolio? After the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan failed to induce a market nosedive, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow expressed his relief in terms that seemed to appall even his fellow cheerleaders for capitalism: “The human toll here,” he declared, “looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”

Yet whilst the disaster “failed to induce a market nosedive” in the US, the immediate ‘economic’ response to Japan has been very different. The national bank, for example, ‘released’ trillions of yen (hundreds of billions of dollars) to protect the national economy – yet in effect diluted and devalued the price-worth of every other yen currency-unit by doing so, because the price/resource balance has to come from somewhere. And in almost every other market elsewhere in the world, share-values in just about anything Japanese – car-companies, electronics, whatever – have taken a steep nosedive, already by 10% or more, and going down further with each new item of bad news. Insurance-companies worldwide have also been badly hit. In other words, the possession-economy’s response to a disaster of any kind is to reduce the available resources to recover from that disaster – just at the point where they are most needed.

In short, the possession-economy is driven not merely by the myths of ‘possession’ – the purported ‘right’ to claim exclusive access to shared resources, and to withhold those resources from others on personal whim or for personal gain at others’ expense – but also by anti-possession – the purported ‘right’ to avoid any inherent responsibilities that arise from that claim of possession. This is the dysfunctional side of entrepreneurship – where an entrepreneur acts not as a symbiotic catalyst in the economic ecosystem, but as a literal ‘between-taker’ ['entre', between; 'prendre', to take], a parasite whose sole ‘service’ is to take, and take, and take, whilst giving little or nothing in return.

Like a ‘fair-weather friend’, the possession-economy demands its (often excessive) ‘cut’ whenever times are good, but is nowhere to be seen whenever times are bad. In fact that’s when we discover that our so-called ‘friend’ has instead taken away whatever we need for recovery, and may even actively hinder us as we struggle to recover, creating an enforced dependence in order to maximise any future ‘take’. Responsibility accepts the costs of caring; whilst possession ‘succeeds’ because it does not care – placing itself above all others, demanding responsibility from those others, but evading the duty and mutual-responsibility of care for others in return.

There will always be some parasites in every ecosystem, of course. But to put it in its bluntest form, the paradigmatic parasitism of the possession-economy is a ‘luxury’ we can no longer afford. If we are to have any chance to survive in the longer term, we have no choice in this: somehow – and even if as yet we have no idea as to how – we must bring the possession-economy to an end.

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?

This one’s a return to the themes from that previous post on Power, people and responsibility in enterprise-architecture, and the dichotomy between power as ‘the ability to do work’ versus a supposed ‘power’ as ‘the ability to avoid work’.

We can also see this as the difference between yes and no; between for and against. In each of these it’s about the difference between a commitment to do something – which will involve real work of some kind – versus avoiding commitment, hence avoiding the work, and hence leading to the illusion of ‘power’ from avoiding that work.

From Yes comes commitment; something happens. The success when something happens is largely self-sustaining. A Yes usually leads to more Yes, is energising, empowering – and often literally so.

From No comes… well, nothing, really. Nothing happens. And another nothing happens. Until, eventually, nothing happens at all. No is negation, nullifying, disempowering: a slow spiral into stultifying stupor.

Yes creates a story, a narrative. No creates a non-story, a nothingness, an absence of story.

But Yes is scary. It means commitment, to change, to work, to effort. Yes introduces uncertainty; only No is certain – or seemingly certain, anyway. Far easier, then – far safer – to Just Say No. Avoid commitment. Avoid work. Avoid change. Avoid anything.

Saying Yes means that we open ourselves to being judged on the results of that effort, and perhaps failing to measure up in others’ eyes. Scary indeed. Far easier to say No, and feel powerful because we have the ‘right’ to tell others that they are ‘wrong’.

Making others wrong is easy. It is also, literally, a form of abuse. And everyone knows it – though they’ll often pretend not to know it. Fear breeds fear, breeds further abuse, further indulgence in “offloading responsibility onto the Other without their engagement or consent” – the definition of abuse from that previous post. Which, in turn, will spiral deeper into more serious dysfunction, “propping Self up by putting Other down” – the generic definition of violence. It can be very hard to for an organisation to recover when its culture has gone deep down into that spiral of self-destructive decay. And yet it all begins with one word: No.

For an enterprise-architect, the nightmare-client is the organisation that’s oriented itself around a culture of No. Government-organisations are notorious for this: seemingly everyone has a ‘right of veto’ – literally, “I forbid”. Anyone can say No, at any time – often with a double-serving of blame and recrimination on the side – bringing any activity to a grinding halt, often at the most dangerous moment of change. No-one dares say Yes, to anything. Hence nothing happens, very slowly, painfully, expensively in every sense. Everyone feels powerful for having said No; yet everyone also feels powerless; and still no-one seems to make the connection back to the dispiriting culture of No.

By contrast, working with an organisation that understands Yes can be a sheer delight. Things happen: yes, they’re questioned, challenged, assessed, re-assessed, but as part of the Yes, not a negation of it. Anyone can say Yes. And yet there’s no irresponsibility: people do still know when and how and why to say No when it’s needed. Because sometimes No is indeed necessary: yet it’s a No that is still for the purpose of saying Yes.

It’s a bit like the distinction between competition-with versus competition-against, cooperation-with versus cooperation-against. In a sense, competition is always a kind of No; cooperation is always a kind of Yes. Yet when we look deeper, what really matters is not competition itself, or cooperation itself: what matters is the aim or focus of the activity.

When we compete with each other, or with ourselves, such that the real aim is that everyone’s skill and competence would improve, it’s a Yes to the work of learning, a Yes to a new narrative. A runner competes against herself to improve her times, her expertise; she asks the help of others to compete with her, to push her to ever-greater achievement. On the surface, that kind of competition seems a kind of No: but it’s a No for the purpose of Yes. And yes, it’s hard work. Yet worth it.

Competition-against and cooperation-against are the inverse of this. Competing against others to put them down is, in practice, about avoiding future work: particularly relational work, or the spiritual work of creating one’s own sense of self. Command and control may seem so desirable in every organisation, every context, but in reality they are almost always about avoidance of needed future work. Basing one’s sense of self on being ‘above’ others is inherently fragile: we then need those others to be there to prop up our sense of self, and to do the work we avoid – yet if they’re not there, we have no identity, and no means to for the work to be done. Tricky… And there’s always the risk – the fear – that someone else will come along and put us down into the despised place of ‘the Others’, force us to do the work that we’ve avoided so long: hence the tyrant’s terror of growing old, and their ‘need’ to export that terror to everyone else… Then there’s cooperation-against: collaborating with others for the purpose of putting another group down. On the surface, it looks like a Yes; but it’s a Yes for the purpose of No, power-over or power-under, an attempt at avoidance of some kind of future work. And it’s not worth it: no matter what it looks like, even to the nominal ‘winners’, in the long term no-one wins from a war…

We see much the same with ‘for’ versus ‘against’. To be ‘against’ something is just another way of saying No: it’s about ensuring that something doesn’t happen, but the actual result is that nothing much happens to prevent that unwanted ‘something’ from happening. To be ‘for’ something is to say Yes, to be committed to that something: and it’s only through commitment, and action and work, that that ‘something’ will happen.

If we really are committed to to be ‘against’ something, the only way that works is to turn it round: to be ‘for’ the opposite of whatever it is that we’re ‘against’. For example, there’s not much point in saying we’re ‘against world hunger’ if we’re not willing to enact some kind of commitment about that supposed ‘against’: so instead of being ‘against’ world-hunger, we need to say Yes to something that will create conditions in which everyone is appropriately and adequately fed – and hence in which hunger no longer exists. Without that ‘for’, we’re just deluding ourselves: avoiding commitment, saying No through an empty pretence of saying Yes.

In short, if there’s no work involved, no commitment, it’s just another way of saying No. Which is pretty pointless, really.

Which brings us back to enterprise-architecture (of course? ) – and, in this case, the role of the enterprise-vision. ‘Enterprise’ and ‘organisation’ are not the same. An organisation – a business, a corporation, a government-department or the like – is bounded by rules, roles and responsibilities: it’s defined by its definitions. But an enterprise is different: in effect, the organisation exists within a broader extended-enterprise, and expresses and incorporates ‘enterprise’ in the sense of drive and purpose, but is not itself ‘the enterprise’. Instead, an enterprise is a much looser structure, amorphous, tenuous, with porous boundaries delimited by by vision, by values, by commitments. In other words, it’s bounded by Yes.

And the ultimate Yes for the enterprise is its vision: an emotive descriptor of what the enterprise is for – a commitment shared in some way by all participants in that enterprise. Without that vision, there’s no clarity of commitment; not much to say Yes to. Which leads, inevitably, to an awful lot of No, an awful lot of nothing-much happening, slowly, pointlessly, expensively…

So that’s really the choice: Yes, or No.

And No doesn’t work. Literally doesn’t work.

So to what do you say Yes?

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…

A great meetup yesterday with Shawn Callahan (@unorder) and Kevin Bishop (@kevinbishop) of Australian consultancy Anecdote, and their upcoming launch of Zahmoo – a new web-based tool to manage stories and narrative-knowledge, for organisations, communities and families.

Over lunch the conversation wandered onto my work on enterprise-architecture and the Enterprise Canvas, and my latest book Mapping the Enterprise. We talked about how to describe assets in modelling an enterprise-architecture – during which we touched on one of my hobbyhorses, that the often well-meant phrase “our people are our greatest asset” is actually a very dangerous thing to say. Shawn tweeted that part of the conversation as follows:

unorder: “The only time people are an asset is when they are slaves.” @tetradian great lunch with Tom Graves and @kevinbishop

Which is a bit unfortunate, as it half-implies that I think that people are slaves (or worse, should be slaves) within a business context – which isn’t what I mean at all… The point I need to make here is that, in architecture especially, the person should never be viewed as an ‘asset’: instead, it is the relationship with that person that is the asset – and it is a real asset to the enterprise that needs to be managed as an asset, much as with any other type of asset. It’s clear, though, that there’s a lot of confusion around this point, and a lot of understandable anger, too, as can be seen in the Twitter-exchange that followed:

tetradian @unorder *people* are not assets – it is the *relationship* with those people that is the asset (and a real asset, too)

emovere: @tetradian @unorder …and “the relationship” is always two! relationships: A>B and B>A. So… there are two “assets” to deal with!

unorder: @emovere @tetradian @kevinsbishop said that in one of the corporates he worked in the UK they often said “we need to sweat the assets.” Yuk!

ImaginaryTime: @tetradian Even that has a nasty ring to it. Relationships should be motivated by what you can contribute, not by what you can gain.

tetradian: @emovere re relationship as asset, disagree slightly: not two assets ‘A>B’ ‘B>A’, but *one* asset ‘A:o:B’ maintained by *both* parties A B

tetradian: @ImaginaryTime agreed re ‘nasty ring’ of term ‘asset’ i/r/t real people, but for #entarch relationships are real assets

ImaginaryTime: @tetradian I’d just not use words like ‘asset’ at all when talking about human beings. ‘Human Resources’ is gauche enough, don’t you find?

tetradian: @ImaginaryTime using relationship as asset helps us *not* treat people as possessed-’assets’ – will write blog-post on this later today

I’ve written about this a fair bit now, such as in the post ‘The relationship is the asset’ on my Sidewise blog, from back in mid-2009, but it’s worthwhile doing it again, to explain a bit more about my current thinking on this crucial architecture-issue.

I usually take a service-oriented approach to architectures – see The Service-Oriented Enterprise or Mapping the Enterprise – in which everything in the enterprise is a service that is (or should) deliver value in terms of the vision and values of that extended-enterprise. Even the organisation as a whole can be viewed as a service in that sense. This then draws on and/or leads to the following assertions or definitions:

• a service implements the interface of a function (business-function, infrastructure-function, whatever) in accordance with an appropriate ‘contract’ or service-level-agreement, by linking that function to an appropriate capability [the service is also triggered via specific events at specific locations, but we don't need to go into that detail here]
• a function delivers identifiable changes to assets – for example, the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) actions often associated with information-assets – in accordance with appropriate business-rules, algorithms, metrics etc
• a capability acts on specific categories of assets with a specific degree of competence or skill-level [associated with categories of decision-types - rule-based, algorithmic, guideline-based or principle-based, though again we don't need to go into that detail here], delivered via an agent
• an agent is an active entity with the requisite capability, embedded in and/or accessed via an asset
• an asset is a resource of any type for which the service is responsible

There are four distinct categories of assets:

• physical – objects, material ‘things’
• virtual – data, information, ideas, so-called ‘intellectual property’
• relational – linkage between two tangible entities, usually but not necessarily real-people
• aspirational – linkage between a tangible entity (usually a real-person) and a virtual entity (such as a belief, an idea, a brand etc)

A ‘primitive’ is an asset of only one category; many (most?) real-world assets are actually composites of more than one type – a book, for example is a bundling of ideas (virtual) in a physical object (the book). There are fundamental differences between the categories: for example, physical-assets are ‘alienable’ (if I give it to you, I no longer have it) whereas virtual-assets are ‘non-alienable’ (if I give it to you, I still have it – in fact it’s quite difficult to not still have it). Relational and aspirational assets are different from physical and virtual in that they exist between two entities – not as characteristics of the entities themselves.

Many of the reasons why enterprise-related architectures – particularly organisation-architectures, security-architectures, business-architectures and business-models – so often get into such a mess come down to two core mistakes:

• trying to manage non-physical assets as if they’re physical (or otherwise attempting to manage assets in ways to do not align with their ‘natural’ constraints)
• using a possession-based approach to assets, rather than a responsibility-based approach

Many intellectual-property models and related business-models fail because they try to treat information as if it’s physical. This is why the business-models currently preferred by much of the media industry are inherently doomed to fail. Their old models depended on physical bundling (a physical book, a physical record, a physical seat in a physical cinema), but the moment their ‘product’ becomes all-virtual (i.e. data) it has to operate by the rules for virtual-assets, not physical-assets. Trying to force the virtual-world to fit physical-world constraints – such as via DRM and the like, or even via laws and regulations – is just not going to work: by their nature virtual-assets are transferred by making copies, so ‘copy-protection’ and the like will not only always fail somewhere, but will also inherently act against the object of the exercise of ‘use by copy’. The result is that companies often end up making ‘pirated’ copies the preferable solution for end-users, not just in terms of end-user cost, but also in terms of greater usability: not a wise move…

(A related example of confusion about asset-types is the whole concept of pricing or valuation. What we think of as ‘money’ is actually a composite of virtual-asset [numbers] and aspirational-asset [a belief about 'worth']. As a virtual-asset, it is, almost by definition, infinite. Pricing, however, frequently relates to physical resources – which are not infinite. This mismatch leads directly to problems such as inflation, bubble-valuations [tulip-mania, anyone?] and the very serious dangers of the current ‘financial-derivatives’ markets, which have no anchor in any physical reality at all…)

The same frequently applies to relational-assets, typically ignoring the real asset (the relationship) and instead treating the real-person as ‘possessed property’. Employees are treated as (disposable) ‘human resources’ – hence that obnoxious expression above, about ‘sweating the assets’ – whilst clients and customers are described and even derided as ‘consumers’, with companies fighting over the ‘market share’ of those purported ‘possessions’. Nowhere in this model is much if any understanding of people as people: instead, people are regarded either as objects to be controlled, and/or as subjects that ‘should’ place themselves as subject to the corporate will.

A possession-based model of economic relations is essentially the mindset of a two-year-old: ‘Mine!!!” (It’s kind of embarrassing to realise that most of ‘capitalist economics’ is little more than a pseudo-adult version of the possessive temper-tantrums of the ‘terrible twos’…) But whilst mainstream economics depends on delusions of possession, we already know that those delusions don’t work and should not apply within much of the business context. A process-owner or project-owner, for example, is not the person who ‘possesses’ that business-entity, but is the one who is responsible for its appropriate operation – in fact it’s when someone tries to to claim exclusive ‘possession’ of it that everything goes wrong.

In essence, a possession-based model tries to split an entity into ‘property’ (that which is desired, and therefore held onto, sometimes literally to death), and ‘anti-property’ (that which is undesirable, and therefore dumped onto others as quickly as possible – hence a two-year-old’s attitude to an ice-cream wrapper, for example). By contrast, a responsibility-based model accepts responsibility for the entity as a whole – because at a whole-of-system level, that’s the only way that works. Responsibility may and often will be transferred, but in each case it should ideally be explicit, a transfer of responsibility rather than partial ‘possession’ – because again anything less than that will not work over the longer term.

Resources are entities that are available and that could be used and/or useful in some way. Resources become assets by taking responsibility for those assets. Resources often rapidly become ‘anti-assets’ – causing more harm than good to the overall enterprise – wherever someone tries to take a partial ‘possession’ of a resource without acknowledging full personal responsibility for every aspect of that resource. Architecturally, every resource needs an identified ‘owner’ who is responsible for the use of that entity as an asset – other words, a complete architecture would include a dynamic RACI matrix for everything that is described in that architecture.

Relational-assets are usually links between real-people; aspirational-assets are typically links between a real-person and an ‘idea’ such as a brand, or ‘belongingness’ in relation to a community, a work-team or an overall enterprise. The keyword here is ‘between‘: in effect, the asset is the responsibility of both parties, and will cease to exist if either party drops it. CRM (‘customer relationship management’) systems are meaningful only if the views of both parties are maintained within the system: in most cases only the view from the organisation’s side is maintained, and, worse, the other end is often viewed as a ‘possessed’ object or subject – which bluntly makes the whole thing meaningless, and in many cases succeeds only in damaging the relational asset. (How much spam-mail churned out by some so-called ‘CRM system’ has actually been relevant to you? What happened to your side of the relationship with that organisation as a result?) The asset is the relationship; and the relationship only exists if both parties maintain it. That’s an absolutely crucial understanding that needs to be embedded in every aspect of the enterprise-architecture.

It’s slightly different with aspirational assets, because the linkage is more directional: ‘to‘ than ‘between‘. Yet if the ‘to’ end does not exist, or is dropped, the relationship is lost: and since relational-assets are often strongly bundled with aspirational-assets (e.g. a sense of connection with a company – company-as-idea, as aspirational-asset – rather than solely a single person in that company, as relational-asset), the organisation needs to be careful to maintain those entities to which people will attach aspirational links. Hence the importance of brands and the like, in marketing to ‘outsiders’; but also, very much, the importance of vision and identity in providing aspirational anchors for employees and other ‘insiders’. Each of those aspirational-anchors represents a responsibility on the part of the organisation: because without that responsibility, those links will be lost. But again, those aspirational-anchors are not ‘possessions’ that can be bought and sold (as in the largely delusory concept of ‘goodwill’ and the like); instead, they exist because of and as an expression of the responsibility itself. If the responsibility is dropped, or not treated with appropriate respect, the links will dissipate rapidly – sometimes overnight, as can be seen with many ‘brand-disasters’.

The other point here is the role of relational-assets in context of the agent in a service-architecture. The agent carries and enacts the capability. We often refer to agents as ‘assets’, but in reality all agents are connected to the service via relational-links of some kind. Where the agent is a physical machine or an IT-box, the relational-link is embedded in configuration – the physical and/or virtual placement of the agent and its capability within within a system. A ‘configuration management database’ (CMDB) is actually a record of relational links of assignment: the active-resource (machine or IT-box) is viewed as an ‘asset’, although that term should really apply only to the static physical and/or virtual entities in which the capability is embedded, not the active capability. It’s the routine and largely unconscious bundling here that causes so many architectural problems.

Importantly, though, a machine or IT-box is not capable of taking responsibility, or expressing choice in its assignment (‘configuration’): that’s one of the reasons why it’s so easy to ignore the relational-asset in this context. However, real-people do have the ability to take responsibility, and do have choice – and hence the relational-asset needs to be explicit in the architecture. (The human equivalent of the CMDB is the work-roster, for example.) Hence, in turn, the crucial point that although the requisite capability is embedded in that real-person, in terms of how that capability is linked into a service it is the relationship that is the asset, not the person. Architecturally, the skills and responsibilities of real-people should never be embedded directly in the architecture: they must always be linked only via an explicit relational-asset. Where human skills and competencies are involved, the available capability is determined by the strength of that relationship, the integrity of the relational-asset. And that relational-asset is the responsibility of both parties: if either side drops it, or damages it – such as via the company describing those people themselves as ‘assets’ to be ‘sweated’ – the available capability will be reduced, perhaps even to nothing, even though the nominal capability of that ‘asset’ remains unchanged.

Hence whilst we may describe agents as ‘assets’, architecturally it’s actually quite dangerous to do so, even with physical-machines and IT-boxes, let alone real-people. The key asset in each case is the relationship via which the agent is linked to the service, and hence enacts and enables the delivery of that service. And although each of these ‘between’-assets involves two parties, there is only one asset in each case (not two), with matching responsibilities on both sides of the relationship.

Apologies if this has been a bit long and a bit pedantic – but this is one of those cases where that kind of pedantry really matters, because although it may seem abstract at first, it has real and often severe consequences in real-world practice.

Hope it’s of use to someone, anyways.

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?

In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides.

And don’t worry, I’ll aim to keep this one short(ish) [later: turns out it's another long one - sorry...] – though I’ll probably return to the theme quite a bit in subsequent posts.

The key point in the previous post was that no ‘alternative-currency’ would solve the socioeconomic problems that we currently face: the all-too-evident failures and failings of the money-economy are merely at the symptom level, and attempting to replace conventional state-issued currency with some other kind of home-grown alternative would be merely one more variant on the theme of ‘shifting deckchairs on the Titanic‘.

Yet clearly we do need something that will enable us to operate the kind of global-scale exchanges that our current economic models allow – because without that, it’s obvious that the city-based cultures especially could quickly collapse into anarchy of the worst possible kind.

It might perhaps be a surprise that what I’m suggesting here as an alternative actually is anarchy – but anarchy only in a strict technical sense, and of a radically different form.

Let me explain.

In the previous post I hope I made it clear that there is no way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable. Therein lies the real economic problem: possession is a classic example of the antipattern that “for every complex problem there’s a least one clear, easily-understood wrong answer”.

Underpinning that ‘wrong answer’ is another even deeper ‘wrong answer’: the notion of rights. Possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. (In British law it’s more subtle again, in that it’s actually defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need: as the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone put it, “that “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.) But there’s a catch – a very important catch. To paraphrase Margaret Mead:

Rights are a social fiction; responsibilities are a social fact.

More to the point, it’s probable that responsibilities are the ‘social fact’ – that the structure of a society is actually an emergent property that arises from the intermeshing of mutual responsibilities. A society – and hence that society’s economics – arise from those mutual responsibilities. A society’s economics represent its recognised means and controls via which its available resources are shared, exchanged and used – and those ‘means and controls’ are, in effect, defined and circumscribed by mutual responsibilities.

You might ask “So where do rights come into this?” But that’s the whole point: they don’t. Rights don’t even exist in any real sense: they’re just a convenient social fiction, useful for some circumstances – as we’ll see in a moment – but dangerously misleading in others. And economics and purported ‘rights of possession’ are a good example of where the rights-discourse is indeed dangerously misleading – as all of us are discovering right now…

Read more…

Several people asked me to cross-post to other ‘economics’ sites the previous post on ‘Whuffie’ and currencies‘. I wasn’t comfortable doing so without editing-out the comments about the ‘Ready? Fire! Aim…’ syndrome, which were specific to the conversations to which that post referred: hence the re-work in this post here. I’ve also taken the opportunity to extend some parts, to link it more strongly to my ‘day-job’ of enterprise-architecture.

So: what can we learn if we tackle economics as enterprise-architecture? In other words, as if it was just another exercise in whole-of-enterprise architecture, the same as we would do for any large organisation (such as described in my book ‘Doing Enterprise-Architecture‘)? After all, ‘the economy’ is just another enterprise – it happens to be at a very large scale, but the exact same principles should apply.

(This’ll be another long one, hence I’ll place a ‘Read more…’ link here.)

Read more…

Several people have asked me for more information about the book I’m writing at present, ‘The Business Anarchist‘, so here’s a quick summary of the themes and structure.

Who or what is a ‘business-anarchist‘? Anyone who works with inherent uncertainty in business in an intentional, disciplined way – working with the uncertainty rather than trying to ‘control’ it. Often it’s not so much a person as part of a business-role – a necessary part of that business-role. (Most of the examples in the book will come from my own field of whole-of- enterprise architecture, but the same principles apply in just about every other type of business-role.)

Why ‘anarchist’? Anarchy is about working without rules, working ‘outside the box’. When ‘business as usual’ breaks down, a disciplined form of anarchy is probably the only way through to something new that works well in the new business context.

‘Kiddies-anarchy’ and real anarchy: Anarchy has had a very bad press in the past, mainly because of what I describe as ‘kiddies-anarchy’ – an overdose of presumed ‘rights’ without responsibilities, especially in terms of causing disruption and destruction without any awareness or respect of the consequences for anyone else. Real anarchy is very different – arguably the most difficult of all political forms, because there are no easy rules to fall back on or to blame. Some entire organisations have been run on anarchic lines – the Quakers have done so for centuries – and even some businesses – such as Ricardo Semler’s Semco Group – but here we’re mainly focussing on an often-unnoticed yet everyday set of roles and responsibilities within an ordinary, everyday type of business.

What kind of business? Any business, and any type of business – for-profit, not-for-profit, government or social – from a huge global conglomerate right down to the local bridge-club or the school parent/teacher association.

Business-analyst and business-anarchist: Business-analysts deal with certainty and predictability: they refine the figures, crunch the numbers, track the trends. When your business world is reasonably stable, you need your analysts to help you optimise efficiency and maximise returns. But when your business world is not certain, not predictable, that’s when you’ll need your anarchists. And you’ll need your anarchists then, too. Your analysts can only tell you how to do more of the same, better – which is good, of course, in its own context, but it doesn’t help when what you really need to do is something different.

What’s different about how business-anarchists work? The quickest one-line answer is that analysts rely on rules and algorithms; anarchists rely on guidelines and principles.

What principles should business-anarchists rely on? Obviously this varies from one context to another, but from my work in whole-of-enterprise architecture the three most important design-principles seem to be these:

• There are no rules;
• There are no rights; and
• Money doesn’t matter.

These three principles, and a fourth follow-on principle, Always enhance adaptability, provide the overall structure for the book.

There are no rules: Rules provide a spurious sense of certainty that can let us down badly when our business-world changes around us. The real world is much messier and more complex than any system of rules that we could devise. Hence at times it’s necessary to start off from the assumption and expectation that there are no rules: instead, we have to rewrite the rule-book, by working back to the core-principles from which the rules originally arose. A simple everyday business-example of this is embedded in the ISO-9000 standard on quality-systems:  work-instructions provide ‘the rules’ that we need for real-time practice and process, but when the world changes, we need to rewrite the work-instructions by working upward to procedure, policy and, if necessary, overall vision.

There are no rights: ‘Rights’ are an important social fiction, but as with rules, they don’t actually exist in the real world, and in themselves they tell us almost nothing about how to create the conditions that such ‘rights’ would require. In practice, apparent ‘rights’ arise from mutual, interlocking responsibilities – so it’s those responsibilities, and not the purported ‘rights’, that are where we need to start. This has important implications for business-architecture and enterprise-architecture that will be explored in some depth in the book – for example, we need to ask serious questions about “What do shareholders own?” if they possess all the ‘rights’ for the business but without any real responsibilities.

Money doesn’t matter: Money is important for every business, of course, especially in a commercial context – but as with rules or ‘rights’, it’s not the place where we need to start. Money is also only one small part of the overall economy in which the business operates: reputation, trust, attention and respect all need to exist before any money will be placed on the table. And if we state – or show – that we’re only interested in ‘making money’ from our customers and community, why would anyone want to engage with us? As with other ‘rights’, money is solely a social fiction, and profit is an outcome of being ‘on purpose’ to values: to achieve the profits that we may desire, we first need to start from values, with a values-architecture that describes how we engage with everyone within the extended-enterprise of the business.

Always enhance adaptability: Change is the only certainty: we therefore need to design for that fact. Mistaken notions about rules, rights and money often serve only to slow us down, placing the business at risk as the world changes around us. This sections of the book explores how to embed the ‘business-anarchist’ principles into everyday business-practice, especially in business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

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More details to follow over the next few days, including book-cover, cover-blurb, ISBN numbers and so on. Publication-date is fixed as late-April, so I need to keep moving!