Tom Graves / Tetradian

Another week’s worth of Tweets and links, for once almost on time. Usual categories, of course, with a few extra bits and pieces as usual. Over to you?

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What is simple, complex, complicated, or chaotic? And from whose perspective?

For a long time now I’ve been using those context-categories – often referred to as the ‘Cynefin-categorization’ – with a straightforward cross-map to levels of repeatability, somewhat analogous to the states or phases of matter:

Although we do need to be wary of misusing the proper Cynefin framework, it can be valuable to use the common Cynefin-style sort-of-cross-grid depiction of those categories as a base-map for context-space mapping. This example, from an earlier post here on business-rules, cross-maps those categories with repeatability, timescale and logic-modality (‘truth’ versus ‘value’):

That spectrum of ‘levels of abstraction’ here is about the way in which various assumptions about ‘how the world really works’ are a kind of overlay or ‘abstraction’ on top of actual reality. Rules (‘high abstraction’) overlay many assumptions onto reality – and often the most fixed assumptions, too – whereas principles (‘low abstraction’) are much more fluid, more a choice of how to interpret rather than an assertion of ‘truth’.

(In case anyone’s concerned, this is not Cynefin – it’s just a routine ‘mashup’-style diagram for context-space mapping, where we intentionally mix and cross-map different and perhaps nominally-incompatible schemas as a way to generate potentially-useful ideas and views about some context of interest. The Cynefin frame is a useful base-map for this, but there are many other base-maps we can use – see Everyday Enterprise Architecture for more detail.)

So anyway, as in that diagram, I’d long since ended up with a fairly fixed view about the relationship between different types of context, and the kind of guidance that we use to work with each context:

• Simple: rule-based
• Complicated: algorithms
• Complex: patterns and guidelines
• Chaotic: principles

Hence, for example, that’s the mapping that I used in reviewing Nigel Green’s cross-map of application-types, in my recent post ‘What can we simplify in enterprise-architecture‘.

All of it a safe set of assumptions that we can make about the nature of reality. Simple, straightforward, obvious. Or so I’d thought…

(Yes, you can see where this is heading… )

What finally woke me up from my metaphoric slumber was the following, from my futurist colleague Marcus Barber, in a comment to the ‘What can we simplify’ post:

Thanks for the article – some thought bubbles for me are

• Simple: ‘guidelines’
• Complicated: ‘Rules based’
• Complex: ‘Algorithms’
• Chaotic: ‘patterns and non patterns’

As the user, simple is what works without me needing to think too heavily about it – ‘rules’ rarely allow me to do things simply, though they may simplify by offering me a checklist to follow. That makes them structured but not simple. So a guideline would be something that works generally well enough for me not to have to think too hard as a user and fits in with your idea about simplification being addressed in different ways

Complicated therefore embraces the rules structure as in ‘if this, then that’ and ‘if not this, then that, or that or not that’

Complex – for the algorithms, is where as a user, my head hurts. In this space I sense that complex means that what ever is happening is knowable to me, and that I’d need much effort to gain a serious understanding

Chaotic is for a user where sometimes I see a pattern, sometimes I don’t. Only the very few would discern the potential what and how from amid the morass of outputs.

My first response was “He’s wrong!”, followed by a slightly-more-honest “Why is he wrong?”; and then the blaring realisation that it’s not wrong at all, in fact it’s very right – and that what had been ‘wrong’ was my too-simplistic and perhaps too-smug certainty on this… oops…

It gets worse. Here I am, frequently railing against IT-centrism and the like – yet that simple mapping of ‘simple = rules’ etc is actually just about as IT-centric as it can get. By contrast, Marcus’ mapping actually is a human-oriented view into the Cynefin-categorization: no doubt about it.

Hmm… oops…

(For what it’s worth, I suspect that the ‘official’ Cynefin view is somewhere between those two views, but that’s something for Snowden to describe, not me. I do know that many IT-folks use the term ‘Complex’ in a way that at first can look similar to Marcus’, but more as ‘very-Complicated’, ‘things we should be able to control but haven’t found the right algorithms for yet’ – which I still do believe is misleading, because it doesn’t allow any space for inherent-uncertainty, but that’s just me, I guess…)

Machines find repeatable rules easy to follow, and non-repeatability impossibly complex; whereas real people often find a rule-laden environment all but impossible to bear, yet may well thrive on the uncertainty and unrepeatability of ‘chaos’. That’s a very important distinction of which we do need to be aware.

If we don’t take enough notice of that distinction, we end up with something like Taylorism’s ‘scientific management’ or a feudal-style ‘command-and-control’ culture, which only ‘succeed’ through requiring people to act as literally robotic machines. Which, yes, those people can do – but as Deming and others demonstrated, it’s almost the least-effective way of using people’s abilities in a work-context. (So much so that ‘work-to-rule’ has long been used as a form of workers’-protest – because it really screws things up, yet in a way that can’t be challenged by ‘the bosses’…)

All of which has huge implications for enterprise-architecture and the like. For example, a mismatch between what IT-folks would think of as ‘simple’, versus what people doing the work would regard as ‘simple’, would lead directly to the kind of process-redesign disasters that we saw so often in business-process reengineering. People can navigate their way quite easily through the myriad of minor variations in a typical real-world business process; but for a rule-based IT-system those same variations can quickly become an impossibly-complicated mess of exceptions on exceptions on exceptions to the supposedly-simple ‘business-rules’. There’s a major task of translation needed here, one that’s all too often missed or ignored: hence Nigel Green’s book Lost In Translation, and the VPEC-T framework that it describes.

And we’ll need the same kind of translation, but in the opposite direction, for most planning and design for business-continuity and disaster-recovery, where people need to take over the tasks of out-of-action IT-systems. Expecting people to follow the exact same ‘business-rules’ as an IT-box might not only be nearly impossible in practice – way too much ‘picky-petty-detail’ for almost anyone to remember – but would also be incredibly inefficient and ineffective. It’d be much more effective instead to trim all of those business-rules down to a much simpler set of principles and priorities, matching more closely to the way that real people really work – and then use skills-development and governance to clean up any rough edges at run-time and beyond.

That’s what’s obvious – when I remember to use my own tools on my own thinking, that is… Oh well…

So there’ll be a lot of options and ideas to explore there: Simple may not be as simple as it looks, and Complex may not be so complex, either. A point well worth pondering a bit more, I think?

Another week’s collection of Tweets and links – somewhat oversized this time, don’t quite know why. Usual categories, anyway, after the usual break:

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It’s back again, by popular (lack of?) demand: another week’s collection of Tweets and links. All the usual categories, confusions and all-too-necessary break before we start:

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What’s this? Not again? Yet another post – already??

Sorry… my fault… many apologies…

Or should I be apologising for the apologies…?

Over-apologising for everything seems a peculiarly English affliction… (Talking with a Polish guy in the post-office the other day, he said that the first three words he learnt when he first came to England were “Please”, “Thank-you” and “Sorry”…) On average I’d guess I say ‘Sorry’ well over a hundred times a day, on the street, in shops, when driving, and perhaps especially at ‘home’ with my increasingly-deaf and increasingly-elderly mother. Yet most other cultures don’t seem to do it; in fact often it seems that most other people don’t do it, even when an apology is definitely required. But in my own case, growing up in this decidedly screwed-up Anglo culture, it was a habit that was hammered into me from earliest childhood: and it’s an often-dysfunctional habit that’s proven very hard to break – even when it doesn’t make sense to apologise. Sorry…

Sure, there are some things for which I definitely do need to apologise. For example, I take on far too much, and then wonder why I don’t get much done at all. I ask for help, and then don’t follow through when help is offered. I perhaps say ‘Thank you’ too much in person, but perhaps nowhere near enough on the net – especially on Twitter, where all the ‘thank-yous’ and #FFs and the like clutters up the space so much, yet probably does matter quite a lot… Oh well. Not good, I know.

And I’ve been ‘the Outsider’ for most of my life – sometimes enforced, sometimes just from an inability to connect, yet so much so that I often do have huge difficulties relating with people in the ‘normal’ way. I’ve never been an employee: I’m not sure I could even cope with it now. Right now I’m back in my all-too-frequent ‘recluse’-mode, so deep into it that my last sort-of ‘social’ event was a meetup with a colleague from Brazil, well over a month ago. I know it’s messed some people around, but I really don’t know how to get out of it now. Seems to be part of who I am. Sorry.

Yet there are also some things I definitely need to stop apologising for.

To use Snowden’s phrase, I’ve definitely become more ‘curmudgeonly’ of late. I’m well aware that the ‘trade’ I’m in – enterprise-architectures and the like – can often be challenging in many different ways: we all have much to learn – myself very much included – so mistakes and flat-footed errors are all fair enough. Yet I’ve become much less tolerant of ‘game-plays’ by people who really should know better: yes, all of us – again, myself included – have perhaps too much ego invested in ‘our’ careers and ideas, but none of us should have to put up with some people’s obsessive ‘need’ to believe that they’re ‘better’ than everyone else, simply by the fact of their existence. I won’t apologise for being ‘curmudgeonly’ about that that: I think we all should, to be honest…

(I haven’t ‘named names’ so far, about some of the more appalling offenders within the EA community and elsewhere, but I must admit I’m getting darned close to that point now. I won’t apologise for doing so, either: most of those people know darn well who they are, so take this as “last and final warning”, perhaps?)

And I certainly won’t tolerate abuse any more, from anyone to anyone. There’s way too much of it, almost everywhere, in every form – see the model and manifesto on this, if it it isn’t already obvious to you. (Yes, I do know that I too fall into it at times – I’m all too human too – but I challenge myself on this a lot harder than I do anyone else, whilst some people seemingly never challenge themselves on it at all. ::sigh:: ) Too many people still seem to believe that they have a ‘right’ to abuse others, which in itself is a societal form of structural abuse: I have no apology and, now, no compunction for calling them on it. None of us can afford to waste the time and energy any more in propping up others’ obsessive self-centredness, or ‘protecting’ those people from the consequences of their wilfully childish refusal to accept their real responsibilities in a complex social world: it’s got to stop. Abusing others is not a ‘right’: I won’t apologise for saying so.

(In fact it’s about darned time that collectively we acknowledged that there are no ‘rights’. The whole idea of ‘rights’ is an arbitrary fiction, built on top of real responsibilities that few people seem willing to acknowledge. To be blunt, most so-called ‘rights’ have become little more than a means to evade responsibilities, by offloading them onto everyone else – in other words, yet another form of structural abuse that could well do without. But that’s another story – though another much-needed story that I won’t apologise for either…)

Perhaps most, though, I really need to stop apologising for who I am.

Yes, I’m cantankerous and curmudgeonly, and write too long with too many confusing complications and complicated words. So what? At least I’m willing to explain things in reasonable depth and precision, and stand up for what I believe in, too. That’s who I am. My reflex is to say “Sorry…” – yet it’s not something I need to be sorry about at all.

Yes, I’m eccentric, with strange ideas that often may not seem to make much sense; and yes, I think a lot about far-future, about the ‘really-big-picture’ and the like. So what? Someone has to do that: and we need something that’s literally ‘offset from the centre’ if we’re to have enough leverage to create needed change. Why should I be sorry that I’m willing to do it when others won’t?

Yes, I skitter around from one field of work to another, sometimes almost minute-by-minute, and sometimes with a (lack of) attention-span to match. But so what? I’ve never claimed to be a specialist: so why should I apologise that I’m not? This work requires an enormous scope: the lack of detail can sometimes be a problem, it’s true, but I wouldn’t be much use as a cross-disciplinary generalist if I didn’t cover as much breadth as I can. Nothing to apologise for there – other than perhaps feel sad at times for our culture’s often excessive faith in the cult of the specialist…

Yes, in many ways I all but live for my work, and perhaps push others too hard at times too. But so what? Again, someone has to do it, and I am doing it: why apologise for that?

Yes, it’s probable I don’t fit well enough with most social ‘norms’: it’s true that I’ve never been an employee, no family of my own, don’t even have a home I could call my own any more. I’m perhaps too much of an Outsider, too: I don’t seem to ‘belong’ – or even able to belong – to anything or anywhere or with anyone, in fact I seem to move between countries and continents as often as other people change houses. And I’ve lived on my own for most of the past quarter-century and more, much of it striving to get away from other people as far as I can: by now I may well be almost constitutionally incapable of ‘normal’ relationships of any kind, and it can be hard not to inflict that kind of inner insecurity on others at times. Oh well.

But so what? That Outsider view is very valuable at times, especially in the type of work that I do; and whilst Thoreau’s bleak phrase “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation” applies to me as much as it does to anyone else, at least I do strive to ensure that “and go to the grave with the song still in them” does not apply. And sure, like anyone else, it’s perhaps hard not to feel sorry for myself at times; but I certainly don’t need to say ‘Sorry’ to anyone else about it – or ask others to feel sorry on my behalf, either. I am who I am: enough said, really.

I’ve been apologising way too much for everything, for everyone. Even apologising for the apologies, which is just plain daft…

Sorry…

Yep, a difficult habit to break. But perhaps what I most need to do now is stop apologising – and just get on with life instead.

An interesting follow-on this afternoon from the themes of the previous post, ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘.

I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer is expounding about this shop, telling them in his somewhat condescending upmarket voice that it’s where they ought to buy real English food (??) to take home, and so on. Then he says:

If you see schoolboys walking down the road here wearing purple blazers, they are from the Royal Grammar School. They are the elite, the cream. At age 11 they have to take a special examination in mathematics and English, and only two percent pass that exam.

It’s kinda interesting to apply a services perspective to that assertion. All that the exam tells us is that it selects for ability in mathematics and native-language. Which means that those pupils will, in later life, probably be well-suited to doing tasks that deliver the kinds of services that make good use of those abilities. But that’s all that it tells us. Since every service is ‘just another service’, there’s nothing in there – nothing at all – that indicates that every one of those young students should therefore be described as ‘the elite’.

In service-architecture terms, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’ of the enterprise, and every service is necessary to the viability of the enterprise, hence it makes no sense to describe any category of services – or the people who deliver those services – as ‘the elite’. (Individuals, yes, perhaps; a specific category, no.)

In short, the only reason why those students with that specific set of (proto)-skills in that location would be called ‘the elite’, is because people who are like them and have similar skills want to believe that they themselves are ‘the elite’.

In other words, it’s nothing more than a myth – the kind of circularly self-centric fantasy that’s guaranteed to cause serious dysfunction in a service-oriented enterprise-architecture.

Oops…

And yes, it gets worse! All the way through school, these young students will be told, time and time again, that they are ‘the elite’. That they are entitled to special privilege and special attention because they are ‘the elite’. Which they aren’t, because it’s just a self-aggrandizing fantasy.

Oops…

And wait – yes, it gets still worse! These young people go on to elite universities, elite business-schools, to become elite businessmen, businesswomen. Which they aren’t, because, again, it’s a fantasy.

Oops…

And now, yes, it gets worse again! – because they go on to become ‘the elite of the elite’, the ‘captains of industry’, the managers, who are ‘elite’ because they’re managers.

Yet management is ‘just another service’. There’s nothing inherently ‘elite’ about that set of services at all: every service is ‘just another service’, and every service is, by definition, essential to the enterprise. In a service-oriented architecture, there is no service that is inherently more important than any other: that’s the whole point.

Hmm…

So let’s ask a very simple question – a very difficult, dangerous, politically-explosive question: if every service is ‘just another service’, why is it that as a category, those who deliver the category of services that are called ‘management’ get to control more, and are given more, and paid more – often so vastly much more – than those who happen to deliver a different type of ‘just another service’?

Because as far as I can see it, from a service-architecture perspective, the only reason that they’re paid more is because they purport that they’re ‘the elite’. Which they’re not, because it’s just an arbitrary, self-important fantasy.

A whole load of smoke-and-mirrors to prop up the fantasy, of course – no surprises there. But beyond that there’s nothing of any substance at all: nothing more than a plaintive little chant of “the elite are the elite because they’re the elite”, and kinda hoping beyond hope that we won’t notice how empty that claim really is.

Oops…

Y’know, there might just be a problem there?

—

[And by the way, yes, I did indeed go to that kind of 'elite' school as a child. Which is why I do know, first-hand,  just exactly how vapid, shrill and empty those claims really are... Hey ho...]

There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it.

(This gets long again: sorry…)

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As usual, the previous post ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘ ended up way too long and involved and ‘wordy’. Sorry…

So let’s do a shorter version, in some ways going a bit deeper, but concentrating only on the issues and suggested actions.

Here’s the problem: there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

(Trust me on that one. I’ve been researching it for at least the past couple of decades: the best outcome we can get from a possession-based economy is ‘The Worst Possible System‘, in which most resources automatically end up where they’re least needed.)

Which is a problem, because what we think of as ‘the economy’ is actually a money-based economy built on top of a barter-based economy built on top of a possession-based economy, scaled up to a full global scope.

Which means, in other words, that there’s no way to make what we think of as ‘the economy’ sustainable.

Which means that in the longer-term – or even in the medium-term, at the rate we’re currently going – if we don’t find an alternative that actually works, we’re dead.

Oops…

So here’s the challenge: find a way to run an economy, in a radically different way, that actually is sustainable. Start at the household level first; then scale it up to a work-team or business-unit; then an entire organisation; and keep on scaling up towards a full global scope.

Big challenge? Yep. Big stakes too…

We can’t use money for this, or any form of so-called ‘alternative currency’. The problem isn’t money itself, but rather the fact that money is a standardised form of barter, which assumes that we have something to withhold from others in order to barter with, which in turn depends on the notion of ‘right to exclude’ that’s built into the notion of possession. And that’s the part that doesn’t work: which means that nothing else that’s built on top of possession will work, either.

The only thing I’ve found that does work is responsibility – literally, ‘response-ability’, the ability to choose appropriate responses in accordance with the needs of the context. Mutual responsibilities interlock within a social context: we can build upward and outward from that fact. Without any form of possession.

But this is where it gets interesting…

For a start, money vanishes from the economy. No banks, no insurances, no pensions, no social-security, no medical bills or grocery-bills or school-bills or college-bills or lawyers-fees or consultants-fees, no sales-commissions, no savings or loans, no credit-cards, no mortgages, no monetary taxes, no salaries, no pay-rates, no threat of lost income from lost job, no threat of monetary fines. Gone. All gone. Can’t use them, either as stick or carrot, or any part of the economy.

Because possession doesn’t work, the entire property-model that we know and, uh, well, know, disappears as well. There are property-responsibilities, in the same sense as we talk about ‘project-owner’ or ‘process-owner’; but all those much-vaunted ‘property-rights’ vanish. Gone. We own something because we declare responsibility for it, and for no other reason. (This isn’t a fiction, by the way: most ‘traditional’ property-models operate this way. What we think of as normal, they rightly regard as an aberration.) So we can’t use that as a stick or carrot, either: whether via the offer of property, or the threat of loss of property, it isn’t going to work.

(It’s not that we can’t make a ‘property’-type model seem to work: that’s actually quite easy to do, and that’s what the present possession-economy does right now, after all. It’s that we cannot build anything of that type that does not automatically fall back to an unsustainable ‘Worst Possible System’. That’s why this challenge is a lot harder than it looks.)

We don’t possess ideas, so ‘intellectual property’ vanishes completely. (It never made any sense anyway, so it’s no loss.) We can be responsible about ideas, but they’re not ours to possess. They never were.

We don’t possess people, either. We can’t really talk about ‘our’ people: that’s treating people as possessions, and the only time when people are assets is when they’re slaves. Not a good idea, especially when you have no possession-based way to bribe or bully them into staying in your chosen place. Which, by the way, means that the usual family-model – ‘to have and to hold’, of children in parental ‘custody’ and the like – also vanishes, in much the same way that no-one ever really possesses a cat. Tricky, that…

Almost all of the usual controls disappear from this scenario. No stick that we can wield, no carrot that we can control. Hmm…

How do we get an economy of any kind to work under these constraints? A global economy? An industry? A town or village? A company? A school? Even a family?

Definitely an interesting challenge… especially compared to what we think of as ‘normal’ at present…

(We know it can be done, because, again, this is how most ‘traditional’ societies operate. But in most cases they do so only in small family or tribal groups in agrarian or nomadic contexts – not huge sprawling megacities dependent on complex supply-chains, high technologies and very high energy-demands. Same idea, very different scale – and scale is where so many of the really hard architectural problems arise…)

As I see it, just about the only way to make this work is by reconnecting to enterprise, via shared-vision and the like. Which is why whole-of-scope enterprise-architecture turns out to be really important in this kind of economics.

Which is why this is a challenge for enterprise-architects almost more than for anyone else.

So: Interested? Over to you for your ideas?

Oh, and for an extra challenge: how do we get from here to there?

[Update: Forgot to mention: my sort-of-novel Yabbies is in part an exploration of these themes: Share & Enjoy, perhaps? (At present, download the whole book for free from here.)]

A couple of days ago I wrote an intentionally-controversial post on my Sidewise blog, saying that ‘The future of money is that it has no future‘.

Was I being serious? Yes. Very serious: I really do mean it when I say that the only feasible future for money and the money-based economy is that it has no future.

Which in many people’s eyes would no doubt immediately mark me as some kind of nutcase. Or worse.

To which all I can say is that if they don’t know how proper futures-work actually works, and how to apply it in practice, that’s their problem, not mine.

Perhaps they needn’t worry, though: the money-system that they know and, uh, love, isn’t going to vanish overnight. (Or rather, it almost certainly will, when the change actually takes place; but that change is probably a fair while off yet. Probably…) My point is that as enterprise-architects we need to be fully ready for that change when it comes: otherwise collectively and societally we really are going to be in a mess.

Which means it’s a topic that as enterprise-architects we perhaps really ought to be exploring right now?

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Another week’s worth of Tweets and links, for once available almost straight away. Usual categories an’ all: make of it what you will?

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