Blog Archives

Obliquity, serendipity and purpose

Posted on 6 November 2012 by Tom G — 6 Comments ↓

When everything is changing all around us, what is the role of purpose? And what is purpose, anyway? The starting-point for this one is a Tweet by someone I deeply respect, quoting someone I deeply don’t: RT @DavidGurteen: Obliquity and serendipity…

Tagged with: causal layered analysis, enterprise, Enterprise architecture, obliquity, purpose, SCAN, serendipity, strategy
Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Society

What I do and how I do it

Posted on 29 August 2011 by Tom G — 5 Comments ↓

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why? That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment…

Tagged with: anarchist, complexity, disruption, dowsing, effectiveness, Enterprise architecture, Futures, Knowledge, metamodel, methodology, mythquake, narrative, paradigm, purpose, quality, responsibility, story, strategy, tactics, taxonomy, values, vision, worldview
Posted in Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures, Knowledge, Power and responsibility, Society, The Outsider

Complexity, chaos and enterprise-architecture

Posted on 19 February 2010 by Tom G — 7 Comments ↓

Courtesy of a link by fellow enterprise-architect Sally Bean, I’ve just spent the past couple of hours viewing and then reviewing an online seminar on complexity by one of the thought-leaders on complexity-theory and practice, Dave Snowden: From Induction to…

Tagged with: Business, chaos, complexity, cynefin, dave snowden, enterprise, Enterprise architecture, Futures, Knowledge, metamodel, methodology, principles, purpose, values, vision
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Futures, Knowledge

Content, context, connections – and purpose

Posted on 30 January 2010 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

A few days back, one of my fellow Twitterers (I forget who – my apologies) pointed me to a brief video, ‘Context is King‘, by futurist David Houle. His theme in the video and elsewhere is that we are in…

Tagged with: data, effectiveness, Enterprise architecture, information, Knowledge, metadata, purpose, taxonomy, wisdom
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge

New posts on my SideWise blog

Posted on 26 November 2009 by Tom G — 2 Comments ↓

Been some time here since I mentioned my other more business-oriented weblog, SideWise.biz. I’ve added a fair few items over the past few months: The market as economy: how ‘the market’ consists of much more than just transactions, and how…

Tagged with: anarchist, Business, business architecture, complexity, economics, Enterprise architecture, purpose, responsibility, side-wise, Society, strategy
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Knowledge, Power and responsibility, Society

Reference-sheets on Slideshare

Posted on 30 June 2009 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

Realised that the free-download reference-sheets from the Tetradian Enterprise Architecture books would be useful to have up on Slideshare as well, so have uploaded them there for more general accessibility than solely from the Tetradian Books website. “A framework for…

Tagged with: ADM, Business, business architecture, Enterprise architecture, power, purpose, slideshare, Society, togaf, Zachman
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Power and responsibility

Slideshare #7: Purpose, power and productivity in the new economy (2001)

Posted on 23 June 2009 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

Another slide-deck from a fair while back (2001, in this case), but still seems relevant today. Many of its quotes reference a section in The Economist edited by Peter Drucker, about ‘the business of the future’. [It’s in PDF format,…

Tagged with: Business, business architecture, Enterprise architecture, power, purpose, slideshare, Society
Posted in Business, Enterprise architecture, Power and responsibility, Society

Anarchist again

Posted on 2 May 2009 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

Still recovering from the TOGAF conference – about which I need to do a blog-report later, ‘cos some major shifts there – and still ridiculously tired from the way-too-early-start, way-too-late-finish days of the conference itself. But a key point came…

Tagged with: anarchist, anarchy, Business, business architecture, Enterprise architecture, purpose, responsibility, Society
Posted in Business, Complexity / Structure, Enterprise architecture, Power and responsibility

And more business-anarchist

Posted on 12 March 2009 by Tom G — No Comments ↓

More ramblings on the ‘business anarchist’ theme. The conventional ‘scientific’ assumptions about business reality – as in Taylor’s classic ‘Scientific Management‘ – assume that everything is based on predictable Newtonian-style rules and laws. It’s sort-of true, up to a point,…

Business anarchist, again

Posted on 10 March 2009 by Tom G — 1 Comment ↓

I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about the ‘business anarchist‘ idea, following a couple of great conversations yesterday with Bas van Gils in the Netherlands and Stuart Curley in London. Hence a few more notes: Every business-consultant is, in…