How do we make sense of a context? How can we make sense in a disciplined way, without the discipline itself getting in the way? This is a follow-up to the previous post ‘Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor‘, to provide a bit …
One of the core tasks in enterprise-architecture is sensemaking – making sense of what’s going on within some context. And one of the key methods we can use for this is to make some kind of mental-map of what seems to …
A quick follow-on from the previous post on ‘Complex, complicated and Einstein’s dice‘, in relation to effectiveness in enterprise-architecture. There’s a common phrasing in business and elsewhere that places efficiency and effectiveness as kind-of opposites: efficiency, we’re told, is doing things …
What’s the real source of that infamous ‘business/IT divide’? And is there a way to bridge it? The answers would seem to be both complicated and complex – and might involve Einstein’s dice… At which point I probably ought to …
Re-reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, to write a book-review for the current edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, it struck me that the SCAN frame provides a useful means to understand and describe the relationship between checklists and …
Following on from the previous post ‘Rules, principles and the Inverse-Einstein Test‘, there’s an important corollary about real-time sensemaking and and decision-making – it was in my notes for the post, but I forgot to include it, so I’ll do …
Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, …
At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it …
One of the key reasons why I’m so vehemently against any-centrism and suchlike revolves around the question of competence – or, more usually, the lack of it. Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, …
This was such a good question from Paul Beckford, in one of his comments on the previous post, that I thought it was worthwhile bringing it out into more accessible form here: “I don’t understand the recursion you speak of …