I must admit I’m pleased with this brief interview, filmed by the AV crew at AE Rio 2011 (many thanks, guys!). It covers a lot of ground in barely four minutes: the importance of stories and culture in enterprise-architecture, key …

Interview on enterprise-architecture at AE-Rio 2011 Read more »

Something that’s been concerning me quite a bit over the past year or so in enterprise-architecture has been the over-obsession with agility: agility for its own sake, perhaps, without much thought behind it, much thought about why or how we …

Agility needs a backbone Read more »

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 …

Responsibility versus anti-possession as response to disaster Read more »

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 …

An architecture of responsibility Read more »

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 …

Possessed by possession? Read more »

A great conversation yesterday with Australian facilitator Helena Read, around the word ‘belonging’, and how it links with vision and enterprise-vision. In the enterprise, vision is the anchor for everything: the quality-system, the business-purpose, the enterprise itself. It’s a very …

Belonging Read more »

Why vision? Whose vision? What do we mean by ‘enterprise vision’, anyway? And who’s responsible for it? – who should create it? This enquiry arose from a great multi-way Twitter-conversation following my previous post ‘Yes and No‘: tetradian: [post] Yes …

Why vision? Read more »

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 …

Yes and no: a question of commitment Read more »

[A slightly risky post, this, given the unfortunate history between myself and Dave Snowden: but I want to emphasise that it is in good faith, as a genuine enquiry that I believe would be of real value to those of …

Cynefin as place: a respectful enquiry Read more »

Companionship. A calm kind of word. Quiet. Friendly. Supportive, enfolding – those kinds of feelings. A companion is literally “someone with whom we share bread”. Hence companionship is that state, condition, process, experience, whatever, of ‘sharing bread’ with companions. So …

Companionship Read more »