Tom Graves / Tetradian

Oh well. The past couple of posts on a ‘thought-experiment‘ in using enterprise-architecture methods to guide a fundamental rethink of economics both seem to have gone down like the proverbial lead-balloon. Fair enough. But I guess I’ll do one more try before going back to more conventional enterprise-architecture themes. (If anyone is interested in this, we can always come back to it later if need be.)

So: here’s the background.

No-one would doubt that, globally speaking, we all have a few problems at present. Global financial crash, some serious environmental overshoots, an evident reshuffle going on in the global power-positioning between various nation-states, and increasing social unrest even (or perhaps especially) in so-called ‘developed’ countries.

Yet those are almost trivial compared to what any competent futurist could see coming up on the horizon. Seriously.

So much of “Seriously.”, in fact, that there’s no possible way that we’d still be able to survive long-term – or even medium-term – with what we currently think of as ‘business-as-usual’. And I don’t just mean business-survival or suchlike – I mean survival. Period.

Hence we’re talking about an urgent need here for some truly fundamental changes. Not just minor tweaks of the deckchairs on the Titanic.

We still see lots of attempts at such ‘tweaking’, of course. The most popular seems to be about trying to tweak individual parts of the existing money-system – which by now everyone knows isn’t going to work. Perhaps the next most popular type of tweak is the search for ‘alternative currencies‘. Yet all of those ideas fail at the first hurdle, because the real source of the problem goes much deeper than that. Trying to build yet another structure on top of something that already doesn’t work is kinda futile, really…

The real problem is about possession. But it isn’t about who has the money, or who possesses the property: those kinds of problems are ‘fixable’ by ordinary political means. No: the real problem is the entire concept of possession itself. And that’s a lot deeper than just politics: that one really is fundamental.

And the problem is that possession doesn’t work. It never has. That’s the whole point. The notion that “possession makes the world go round” is a total delusion: most times, possession is what makes it go stop. Which, ultimately, is why it guarantees a world that doesn’t work. (Like now. Only worse.)

‘Possession’ is a screaming toddler’s refusal to share – a refusal to accept that the complexities and responsibilities that make a social world viable are always mutual, and must necessarily apply to everyone.

To be blunt, the myth of ‘possession’ arose when some foolish parent failed to pacify and placate a selfish, self-centred, screaming child. Kind of embarrassing to realise that so much of our vaunted ‘world-economy’ has its roots in the nursery, in the possessive temper-tantrum of a child lost in the ‘terrible twos’. Most children do grow out of it, eventually; but some don’t grow out of it at all – and that’s where the problems start…

Unfortunately, too many two-year-olds learnt that screaming and stealing and hitting people and holding onto things that they don’t need will seem to give them ‘control’ over others. The screamers do indeed ‘get results’, for themselves, for a while – but only by making it harder and harder for everyone else to sort out the resultant mess.

More unfortunately, it’s very addictive: it gives apparently-good results in the short-term, but at the cost of screwing things up in the longer-term.

Even more unfortunately, it’s also very infective: when stealing ‘wins’, who wants to be the ‘loser’? Which is why, some 5000 years or so after this mistake first became established - apparently starting within a small sub-clan somewhere in what later became called Mesopotamia – we now have an entire global structure that actively rewards even the most obsessive self-centredness, and actively punishes almost any form of responsibility. Which is why we now have a global economy and a global environment right on the brink of total collapse. Oops…

So, what do we about it?

Let’s start right from the beginning:

The core foundation of all economics and social structures is a ‘value-network’ of interlocking mutual responsibilities.

That part of ‘the economy’ does still work. And we know it works, because we can see it do so in many different contexts and at many different scales, from high-functioning households to the internals of high-functioning businesses, and in most of the now-few ‘traditional’ societies that have so far managed to withstand the ravages of ‘development’.

A possession-based economy is, in effect, a dysfunctional overlay on top of a responsibility-based economy. To be blunt, a selfish-child’s version of an economy, in which everything is deemed to be centred solely around themselves. (Technically, it’s a ‘subject-based’ model: all others are deemed to be subjects of self.)

The fundamental basis of a possession-economy is that it ignores or rejects outright many of the mutual-responsibilities that make an economy viable and sustainable over the longer-term. In effect, it ‘sweeps the mess under the carpet’, and attempts to conceal the mess via a myth of ‘infinite growth’. Yet those responsibilities don’t simply disappear because we ignore them: they’re still there, still gathering metaphoric interest (to use the monetary term). So when the myth of ‘infinite growth’ hits up against the real-world’s finite limits – which is what’s happening now – the whole thing is going to come apart at the seams. At that point, the only viable option is to reinstate what does actually work: a responsibility-based economics.

Which means that we’ll have to dismantle the entire superstructure of possession, and everything built on top of that as well; and then rebuild a new set of structures pretty much from scratch, starting from right down at the root-level, and then building upward again from there. Which is definitely a non-trivial challenge: but we really do not have any choice about that. (If we want to survive, that is…)

The catch is that the change-over has to be total: no exceptions at all. Possession is highly-addictive, and fatally-infective: if we allow any of it to remain, it will destroy the economy all over again – and we won’t be able to survive another mess like this one. There’s no getting round that fact: it really is all, or nothing. Literally.

Which where it gets kinda scary…

Possession has to go. Perhaps doesn’t sound so bad at first, because it might seem too abstract to matter. But we mean that this applies to all notions of possession, in every one of its real-world forms. No exceptions. No exceptions.

Which means barter has to go too, because barter assumes that we must already possess something, in an exclusive sense, in order to be able to exchange it for something else.

Which means that money, or currency in any form, also has to go, because in effect that’s just an overlay on top of barter.

Which means, among other things, that the entire monetary-system has to go; the entire banking-system and finance-system has to go; the entirety of microeconomics, the entire system of pricing and valuation, yes, that all has to go too. And the entire tax-system has to be re-thought from scratch, along with the entire social-benefits system, the fundamentals of the insurance-system, the fundamentals of most medical-care systems, the fundamentals of most forms of trade, and much, much, much more.

The entirety of the property-system needs to be restructured from scratch, refocussed around responsibilities: in a responsibility-based economy, we own something not because we claim to ‘possess’ it, but because we declare and demonstrate responsibility for it.

Yep: this isn’t something that we can fix up with a few minor tweaks here and there – which is all that most people seem to be aiming for at present. It’s big. Really big. Huge. And yet it’s probably the only chance that we have to get out of this mess.

And just to make it even more fun, we also have to remove all forms of possession in the social sphere. Of which the most important, most pervasive, and most pernicious, is the concept of ‘rights’. (Ouch… not going to be popular for saying that, am I? )

Yet the blunt fact is that ‘rights’ aren’t real: they only exist because of the mutual responsibilities that create the conditions that we want when we talk of ‘rights’. And the other blunt fact is that most so-called ‘rights’ are actually little more than a sneaky method to evade key aspects of the mutuality of those responsibilities, and attempt to offload the responsibilities onto everyone else. Which is, technically, a form of abuse – and hence, in many cases, a fully state-sponsored form of structural abuse against those who are deemed not to have the respective ‘rights’. Which is why things often don’t work very well – especially whenever someone insists on bringing their purported ‘rights’ into the picture… Most so-called ‘human rights’ exist solely to compensate for someone else’s so-called ‘rights’: and the only viable way to sort out the resultant shambles is to get rid of the whole mess of ‘rights’, and focus on the responsibilities instead.

In short, the entire notion of ‘rights’ is a form of possession – or more often the ‘anti-possession’ of a claimed absence of responsibility. Which is why ‘rights’ have to go, too.

Yes, I’m serious: no rights. For anyone. Anywhere. Ever. Instead, we have to replace every single purported ‘right’ with social-structures that are based on the actual underlying mutual-responsibilities, to deliver the same overall results, and more. (That’s not hard to do, by the way: most businesses do it internally all of the time, in one way or another. Yet for many people, though, the ending of the delusion of ‘rights’ is definitely going to be the hardest part of this to face…)

So: no possession, no barter, no money, and no rights. Think that might mean a few changes to most our existing institutions, then…?

Which, in turn, is why most of those institutions aren’t likely to be much help here either:

• Would you trust a banker to supervise the end of the entire banking-system?
• Would you trust a lawyer to supervise the end of most current law?
• Would you trust an economist to rethink the entire economy?
• Would you trust a government to rethink the entire nature of government?

Hmm… probably not?

So who could do this work that so obviously and urgently needs to be done?

It’s going to need someone with a solid background in futures. Most futurists, though would, only deal with the abstract, the future – they don’t deal much with the nitty-gritty of ‘the now’.

It’s going to need someone with some solid experience in negotiation, in governance, and design for governance. A lot of people in the social-work space could do that – but they usually don’t have much experience of futures, or of dealing with anything that isn’t primarily about people.

It’s going to need to need a total re-think of business-processes, business-models and business in general, in just about every possible field of work. Most business analysts could do that, if it was all about money – which it isn’t. Which kind of rules them out for this work as well.

It’s going to need to cross an enormous scope – in a way, it’d be literally everything. Not a good role for single-domain specialists, then.

Which kinda bring us back to the skillsets of the enterprise-architect: futures-oriented, but practical; people-oriented, but with a solid grasp of the technical too; a lot of experience with re-thinking every aspect of business, outside of a purely money-oriented scope; and above all, consummate generalists.

So yeah, does kinda look like the ball’s in our court, doesn’t it?

Hmm…

Comments, anyone?

The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded it.

Step 1: The aim of the ‘thought-experiment’ is to devise a form of governance for a responsibility-based economics for an enterprise of any scale. What we’ll be working on during this thought-experiment is identifying the core constraints for a ‘to-be’ architecture for that requirement.

(Ultimately, we’d need to be talking about governance for economics at a global scale, but it might be best to start with something a bit smaller: your own organisation, for example, in relation to its industry and business-context.)

Step 2: For the purposes of the thought-experiment, take it as a given that any claim of ‘possession’, in any form whatsoever, will cause failure of the respective economic system in the medium- to longer-term. We must therefore class all forms and variants of possession as ‘disallowed’ from the to-be architecture.

(See the previous posts for the background to this assertion. It does happen to be true, but for now let’s bypass any argument by saying that we’re just using it as a nominally-arbitrary assumption for a thought-experiment.)

Step 3: For the purpose here, take it also as a given that possession, and hence all of its overlays, is itself an overlay on top of a responsibility-based economy – a structure of interlocking mutual responsibilities. Because of this, everything that would perhaps more usually be described in terms of possession or its derivatives – the ‘disallowed’ items from the previous step – may instead be described in terms of mutual responsibilities.

(Again, see the previous posts for the detail on that, but for now just take it as an assumption “solely for the purposes of the thought-experiment” etc.)

Step 4: Outline a ‘to-be’ architecture whose core content consists of the responsibility-based replacements for all ‘disallowed’ items. No exceptions can be permitted, because any instance of a possession-based model will inevitably ‘infect’ and eventually destroy the sustainability of the responsibility-based model.

– Step 4a: All concepts of exclusive-possession are ‘disallowed’; societal management of those resources must be described in terms of personal responsibilities for and to those resources, and interlocks between mutual responsibilities for the use (‘exploitation’) of those resources, including all responsibilities to others either elsewhere or elsewhen.

– Step 4b: All concepts of ‘anti-possession’ – a purported ‘right’ to not be responsible for some aspect of a managed resource – are also ‘disallowed’; governance-mechanisms should be defined so as to ensure that the respective personal and/or mutual responsibilities are not evaded.

– Step 4c: All concepts of possession of inherent priority, privilege or ‘entitlement’ are ‘disallowed’. (Note that this means that, by definition, all concepts of supposed ‘rights’ must be ‘disallowed’ – including all purported property rights, right to free speech, right to silence, women’s rights, etc. Which, yes, is going to be seriously challenging for a lot of folks… but for now, play safe, and keep reminding people that this is ‘only a thought-experiment’.) Instead, identify the mutual responsibilities that underpin and/or are evaded in order to create the context for each purported ‘right’ at present, and – as for ‘anti-possession’ – devise governance that would resolve and prevent evasion of mutual-responsibilities in that context.

– Step 4d: From 4a and 4c, all concepts of exclusive ‘property rights’ are ‘disallowed’: this includes physical-property, real-estate, land-title, so-called ‘intellectual property’, brands, cultural-stories and the like. Note that in effect this also includes beliefs about ‘possession of the truth’, such as are common in many forms of law, and in scientism and in similar models of religious or quasi-religious belief. Identify the mutual-responsibilities and evasions of responsibilities that underpin all of these ‘possessions’, and sketch out forms of governance that do also acknowledge and respect people’s emotional and spiritual attachment to things, to places and to ideas.

– Step 4e: All concepts of ‘possession’ of others are ‘disallowed’. Note that such concepts are commonly either explicit or implied in many social relationships, such as employment-contracts, marriage, notions of ‘custody’ of children, etc. As above, identify the actual responsibilities that would be required in each case – taking into account the fundamental differences that would apply in a non-possession-based economic and societal model – and sketch out governance that would support those responsibilities and their mutualities.

– Step 4f: Scan language in use within the context, for possessives such as ‘my’ , ‘your’, ‘his’, ‘hers’, ‘their’, ‘its’, ‘the company’s’ etc, to identify any implied forms or assertions of ‘possession’. All such forms would be classed as ‘disallowed’, as above; identify, document and model the underlying mutual-responsibilities, also as above.

– Step 4g: All concepts of barter presume the existence of a possession-based model of ‘right to exchange’, and hence are automatically ‘disallowed’. Identify the mutual responsibilities implied by any barter-exchange, and devise alternative mechanisms – and governance for those mechanisms – that are based on the actual underlying responsibilities.

– Step 4h: All concepts of ‘currency’ (including money, tokens, time-based currencies, money-based taxes or fines etc) represent purported possession-based ‘rights to resources’, and hence are automatically ‘disallowed’. As for barter above, identify the mutual-responsibilities – and, often, evasions of responsibilities – that underly such concepts, and devise alternative exchange-mechanisms and governance that are based on the actual underlying responsibilities.

(Note that all of the above is the minimum that would need to be in place in order to create and maintain a viable and sustainable economy. A lot of this might no doubt seem seem seriously scary, but it’s essential to realise that there can be no exceptions here. We can’t cling on to some favoured part of the possession-economy, because any remnant part of the existing possession-based structures will inevitably destroy everything – there is no way round that bald fact. Hence the work here.

Don’t forget that, by definition, every form of ‘possession’ and every so-called ‘right’ is actually based on mutual-responsibilities: the responsibilities themselves are rarely acknowledged, and the mutualities of those responsibilities even less so, yet without them, the ‘right’ or whatever would not and could not exist. To illustrate this, try a very simple exercise: take that classic US description of ‘the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and identify the responsibilities that underpin each of those ‘rights’. In reality, every ‘right’ is an arbitrary fiction; but the responsibilities that underly them are real. Hence why we really are best off by discarding the entire concept of ‘rights’, and keep a firm focus on the real responsibilities instead.)

Step 5: Sketch out mechanisms of exchange, and forms of governance for such exchange and relationship, that fully enact and support all of the mutual-responsibilities identify within all the work of the previous step. Document and model all of this as a ‘to-be’ enterprise-architecture for the respective scope.

(Most of this is a straightforward ‘to-be’ architecture-modelling exercise: it’s focussed on governance rather than, say, IT-applications or physical infrastructure, but the principles and process are exactly the same as usual.)

Step 6 (optional):  Map out an ‘as-is’ architecture for the same scope, based on the various current possession-based structures.

(This again should be straightforward: in essence, it’s just describing what we already know and, uh, love…)

Step 7 (optional – requires Step 6): Develop a gap-analysis between ‘to-be’ and ‘as-is’, to identify requirements for change from the present context to a viable and sustainable responsibility-based socioeconomic model.

(This is the part that gets seriously scary for a lot of people… Notice how many existing institutions simply don’t exist any more in the ‘to-be’ model: banks, insurances, pensions, monetary taxes, most concepts of ‘valuation’, the entire money-system, large chunks of the legal system, large chunks of current education, religion, science, and much else besides. What’s interesting is what doesn’t change: for example, most market transactions still have to happen somehow, but via a responsibility-based model rather than via ‘rights of exclusion’.)

Once all of this is done, documented, discussed with stakeholders and the rest… – only then can we sensibly start talking about possible ‘solutions’, ‘roadmaps for change’, and the like.

(Again, this is standard architecture-practice: other than for Agile-style exploratory experiments, we don’t talk about ‘solutions’ until the requirements are properly understood. There are way too many people wanting to rush off into some form or other of instant-’solution’ – particularly around would ‘alternative-currencies’ and the like – but it’s a complete waste of time and effort unless and until this work is done…)

Oh, and in case you wondered whether any of this is feasible? – if so, perhaps take a look at some the various state-wide or nation-wide emergency-management legislation scattered around the globe…? In Australia, for example, the person in charge of a declared emergency already has the legal right to take possession of anything at all “as he sees fit”, offering only “such compensation as he sees fit”: and there’s nothing whatsoever to stop a government declaring a national-scale emergency and literally taking possession of the whole country – with no payment required at all. The same will almost certainly also be true for your own country… interesting, huh?

Anyway, try this out for yourself, if you would? – and let me know what insights arise for you in doing so, perhaps?

I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise architectures.

(Don’t panic: this is only about getting started in doing so – not the whole thing! But collectively, as enterprise-architects, we do need to get started on this, as a matter of real urgency, because the longer we all leave it, the faster we run out of options when the crunch really does come – and all the indications are that that’s not far ahead at all. (Remember that I’ve worked as a professional futurist? From what I see right now, I’d say that we do have perhaps ten years from now to get everything set up, though no more than fifty years beyond that to get the entire world economy changed over to a sustainable model. If we don’t get properly started within the current decade, I’d estimate that we’d have perhaps at most ten more years beyond that of ‘business as usual’ before the whole thing collapses worldwide in an all-too-literally bloody mess. Look at any of the planetary-scale indicators right now: you’ll see that no, I’m not being alarmist at all, and yes, it really is that serious…)

And no doubt you might ask “Shouldn’t it be the lawyers who do should do this – not us?” If so, all I can say is “listen to what you’ve just said…” – because right now, to be blunt, would you trust any lawyer, or certainly any group of lawyers, to lead any kind of constructive change, especially at this kind of scale? I wouldn’t: with very few exceptions, they’re way too embedded in the current models, in every possible way – which makes them almost the least appropriate group to guide a fundamental rethink of governance and the law. By contrast, whole-enterprise architects have a lot of practice at linking things across a very broad scope, at every layer from very abstract to very concrete; and most will have had a lot of experience at all manner of governance-issues of every category, from rules to algorithms to guidelines to principles, dealing with and negotiating on a vast array of interpersonal issues and wicked-problems between just about every feasible group of stakeholders – all of which makes EAs one of the few groups of people who do have the background and experience for this task. Hence this post.)

To make sense of what follows, you’ll probably need to have read at least the following posts:

• (on the Sidewise blog) ‘The future of money is that it has no future‘
• ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘
• ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘
• ‘Responses to ‘EA economics challenge’‘

All of those posts explored one specific aspect of what’s needed for a viable societal model, namely the architecture of its economics. What I want to do here is start going one step deeper, exploring the core architectural-principles for a system of law and governance that would underpin that economics.

(What should be clear to everyone by now is that the current system of economics, and the system of property-law that underpins it, is not sustainable. Or, to put it the other way round, a sustainable economy depends on a system of sustainable law – which doesn’t exist at present. The best that current economic-law can achieve is what I’ve described as ‘That Worst Possible System‘, where resources will inevitably end up where they’re least needed. The worst it can achieve is, well, a lot worse… and from a futurist perspective, it’s patently obvious that that’s where we’re headed right now.

Which, to put it mildly, means that we’re all in trouble. Deep trouble.

The catch, of course, is that most people won’t believe that fact. Or won’t want to believe it, more to the point. Which in itself is a problem – especially for anyone who happens to find themselves in the unhappy role of ‘the messenger’ in the age-old game of “the best way to respond to bad news is to shoot the messenger”…

Hence, for public-consumption, probably best to describe all of what follows as ‘merely a thought-experiment’. Except that it isn’t. At all.

Anyway… to continue…)

I perhaps need to make it clear that I won’t be presenting or promoting anything here that purports to be ‘The Answer’. Any competent enterprise-architect should recognise that we’re nowhere near that stage as yet: we’ve barely even started on ‘The Question’…

We do have a fairly good idea of ‘The Vision’, though – namely something like ‘a world that works in a sustainable way, with an economics that works in a sustainable way’. (I don’t think anyone would disagree with that? – or anyone vaguely-sane, anyway?) So that’ll do as a starting-point: we can leave detailed discussion of values and the like until somewhat later.

Given that starting-point, the next thing we need to establish are the fundamental constraints that any would-be ‘solution’ must address. And it’s those constraints that are the main focus for this first-stage thought-experiment here.

What came up from the research behind the previous posts was as follows:

– The money-system has now become almost completely detached from any concrete reality or from any feasible form of control: so we now have a potentially-infinite system that has no inherent constraints or controls, but that somehow supposedly obtains ‘rights’ to an inherently-constrained pool of concrete resources. That’s a very serious problem in itself: yet money in itself is not the core source of the problems we face.

– The primary purpose of all money-type mechanisms is to resolve a structural problem with barter: barter-exchanges can only take place on a point-to-point basis at or close to real-time, so a ‘currency’ of some kind provides a token of mutual trust that supports multi-way indirect non-real-time exchanges across the agreed jurisdiction of that currency. This in turn depends on a mechanism of ‘valuation’, which in essence is now all but completely broken: yet valuation in itself is not the core source of the problems.

– The same problems apply to all forms of ‘currency’: hence the currency-type is not the core source of the problems. (Hence there is no point is wasting time or effort on any form of ‘alternative-currency’, because by definition no type of ‘currency’ can resolve the real underlying economic problems.)

– Barter assumes some form of exchange of services or resources; in turn, a barter-based economy assumes that everyone has access to ‘exchangeable resources’, or ‘tradable services’ – which is simply not the case at all. Small children, the ill, the elderly, and anyone undertaking care-work or the like for such people, will either have nothing to exchange, or no time to engage in so-called ‘economic activity’. The fact that a barter-based economy – and hence any money-based economy – will therefore be unable to cover the economic relationships of more than perhaps half the people of the world, is in itself a serious problem: yet barter in itself is not the core source of the problems.

– Barter-exchanges assume that each participant has the ‘right’ to exchange the resource or service – which in turn assumes the ‘right’ to withhold that resource or service, otherwise there would be no need for the type of ‘quid pro quo’ exchanges managed through barter and the like. Such purported ‘rights’ of exclusion are typically termed ‘property-rights’, and ultimately almost all trails of provenance for purported ‘property-rights’ end up in some arbitrary act of expropriation – or, bluntly, theft – which is in itself a serious problem: yet ‘property-rights’ in themselves are not the core source of the problem.

– Right at the root – underpinning all of the above – is a concept of possession. It is, in essence, the two-year-old’s view of the world: “Mine!” It arises from an inability to perceive that the economic world depends on complex interlocking of mutual responsibilities, and hence an inability to trust that resources and services will be there as needed. It can also be seen as ‘possession’ of a purported right to not be responsible to others for some aspect of a resource or service – a peculiar form of possession that we might describe as ‘anti-possession’. The result is that all attempts at possession or any of its variants will cause resources and services to not be available where, when and to whom they are needed – and hence possession itself becomes its own dysfunctional self-confirming prophecy.

There’s a lot more detail that could be gone into here, but in essence it all comes down to this: the core problem that underpins all economic dysfunctionality is a concept of possession.

To put it at its bluntest and simplest: no system of sustainable law can incorporate any concept of possession, in any form whatsoever, applying to any type of resource or service. That includes physical-property, intellectual-property, relationships, ideas, theories, beliefs, religion, anything: none of them can be ‘possessed’ in any way.

(Interestingly, any attempts at ‘possession’ usually result in the respective person being ‘possessed’ by that which is considered to be possessed: a point which is expressed well in the Buddhist concept of ‘attachment’. Yet there’s a further twist, in that an attempt at rejection of possession is itself a form of possession, the possession of the absence of something. In a more complete Buddhist view, ‘non-attachment’ – ahimsa - is a synonym not of ‘detachment’, but of non-detachment.)

What does work is mutual responsibility: a model of ownership based on responsibility or stewardship. We ‘own’ something because we accept responsibility for that ‘something’ – and for no other reason. We do not have a ‘right’ to withhold it from anyone, other than as an expression of that personal responsibility.

All economic systems are ultimately based on interlocking mutual responsibilities: ’possession’ is merely a dysfunctional and literally ‘self-ish’ overlay on top of a responsibility-based economic model.

Most ‘traditional’ economies are responsibility-based. The internal operation of most households – the literal meaning of ‘economics’ – is responsibility-based. Most aspects of the internal operations of most organisations are responsibility-based. All possession-based, barter-based, currency-based or money-based economic-models are aberrations that are inherently guaranteed to cause economic failure. This is, of course, almost the exact opposite of what we’re usually taught about economics…

It is true that a possession-based model will seem to deliver better economic results in the short-term: yet it does so solely by offloading some form of economic-responsibility to elsewhere and/or elsewhen. To be blunt, it ‘succeeds’ solely via stealing either from others in the present, the future or, in some specific examples, the past. Its primary method for concealing the theft is via a concept of ‘growth’: once such ‘growth’ ceases – as it always must in any closed system – its only remaining option is to cannibalise itself into oblivion. There is no possible way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

So, that’s the context of this architectural ‘thought-experiment’:

– The vision is a sustainable world.

– The constraints are that since all forms of possession lead to economic relationships that are inherently unsustainable, that world cannot include any form of possession, and hence also cannot include any form of possession-based ‘property’, any withholding-based exchange, barter, currency, money, or finance.

– Corollaries from those constraints include an assertion that any form of ‘growth’-based economics is likely to be delusory; likewise that any concept of ‘control’ is likely to be delusory.

– By definition, possession-based societal-control mechanisms cannot be used for societal control in this model: this includes fines, confiscation of property, and many other types of inclusion or exclusion. Likewise monetary taxes, pensions, benefits and similar mechanisms for ‘wealth-distribution’ and suchlike will not be available. (It’s quite a long list of other things that would vanish, too: banks, insurances, mortgages, loans, credit-cards, wages, salaries, ‘gifts’, bribes and much, much more. Interesting, yes? )

As enterprise-architects we do know how to do governance for this kind of world: it’s exactly what we deal with when we talk about a ‘project owner’ or ‘process owner’ or ‘business-rule owner’. It’s also the type of context that we deal with when getting different stakeholders and project-groups together to resolve architectural conflicts. And we also know how to do roadmaps for change, and how to deal with some of those really difficult change-adoption issues. In that sense, the only real difficulty for this ‘thought-experiment’ should be in scaling all of that experience up to a much broader scope – and again, we know how to handle scaling-issues of this type.

So there’s the governance-challenge:

• How do we make this work?
• What governance do we need?
• In what ways does the governance change in different contexts – simple rule-based ‘law’, legal-algorithm, pattern-based guidelines, or overarching principles?
• What checks and balances are needed for each form of governance?
• Who are the stakeholders in each case?
• What are the responsibilities for each stakeholder?
• How do we identify and monitor the mutualities and interlocks between those responsibilities?
• Within the governance-mechanisms, how do we balance all the conflicting needs?
• How do we support viable, sustainable forms of conflict-resolution that do not simply collapse into ‘wicked-problems’ time and time again?

That’s it. It’s huge, sure; yet it’s also urgent…

So: over to you: any comments? Any questions? Or any answers, perhaps?

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…)

Read more…

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?

Read more…

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 to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘:

On a selfish note… It’s apparent that the common thread to dowsing, printing and enterprise architecture is your ability to look at a field holistically and apply logical thought to extract inconsistencies and errors, as well as looking at new ways of doing something more efficiently to meet the original aims. That’s a rare skill. Have you given thought to documenting how you go about doing this? While I imagine it’s the application of a number of taught skills, the way you put these together must be far from ubiquitous. Have you considered teaching this? Personally, as a 27 year old, I want to soak up as much of your approach and thought process as you’re willing to offer.

(Warning, this is going to be another (very) long one, mainly because there’ll be several case-studies.)

Read more…

Often we talk about narrative and narrative-knowledge as if there’s only a single story in play at any one time, a single thread of meaning that’s carried by the words that that one person says.

Yet in reality there are many different threads of meaning in every narrative, and sometimes it’s the subtler threads – the ‘stories without words’ – that carry the most meaning. There’s an especially poignant example of this quoted by Disqus member ‘DDNAU‘ on one of Al Jazeera’s weblogs on the Libya crisis, in the immediate aftermath of the Tripoli uprising on 21 August:

A few hours ago, a news reporter said the TV station had an eyewitness to interview and said he understood the man wanted to remain anonymous. The man then spoke, saying he would give his name because he was no longer afraid. And he began spelling out his name, enunciating each letter deliberately. The news man became a bit impatient and cut him off before he finished, asking him what he was seeing at the moment. The man then told what was going on in his vicinity. The news man, intent on the action in the streets, seemed to miss the most important detail:  A Libyan man spoke his name freely in public, to the world, before describing the reality in front of him. That, to me, was as important a moment as all the others on this great day. That the Libyan people are now free to identify themselves and speak their views without fear for themselves or their loved ones.

Whenever we work with narrative, we need to remember to watch the context, listen for the deeper narrative – especially when a major mythquake is in progress. The story isn’t always in the words alone.

When we talk about enterprise-architecture, what is ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, what is ‘enterprise’? Seems they’d be fairly foundational questions, yet most of the answers we see seem, well, kinda thin…

If we hunt around on the net, we’ll find plenty of definitions for ‘enterprise’: “a business venture”, “a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort”, “initiative and resourcefulness”, “a business organisation”. That last definition is a popular one with business-folk – the organisation as ‘the enterprise’ – which leads to the quite common view that enterprise-architecture would, at most, limit its scope of interest to the boundaries of the organisation itself.

But to me this misses the whole point of enterprise, the one that comes up in so many of those other definitions: that it’s about emotion. About commitment, to some kind of action or cause. As Chris Potts would say, it’s about “the animal spirits of the entrepreneur”. Almost the antithesis, in fact, of the obsessive need for ‘control’ that pervades so many organisations…

And when we look at enterprise-architecture from that lens of ‘animal spirits of the entrepreneur’, suddenly it’s clear that there isn’t just one ‘the enterprise’ at play in our organisation or whatever: there’s dozens of them. Hundreds. Thousands. An infinity of enterprises, perhaps. Enterprises everywhere. (Sometimes showing themselves mostly by a lack of enterprise within the organisation, but that’s perhaps another story… ) And all of those different enterprises competing like crazy for every small scrap of available attention… No wonder it’s hard to keep focus!

Those ‘animal spirits’ are each person’s hopes, fears, aims, intentions. Whatever they’re each committed to in the moment, that’s their enterprise. So every customer brings their own unique enterprise to the organisation each time they connect – and it may well be a different enterprise on every occasion. Every employee brings their own enterprise – or enterprises, rather, because they bring with them the current enterprise of themselves, their family, each member of the family, the community, every concern at every timescale. Everything that holds their interest in every fleeting moment – whatever it may be, it’s all enterprise.

If it’s an interest, it’s also an enterprise. Hence pervading through every organisation are vast numbers of collective enterprises: some are somewhat imposed from outside, by the communities and governments and pressure-groups that apply in the organisation’s context; some come from a more sideways direction, as professional communities-of-interest and communities-of-practice, each with their own worldview and language and mythos and everything else. All of them colliding and clashing and competing with each other, all within this one organisation that we might now almost laughably describe as ‘the enterprise’.

And from somewhere within that chaotic cacophony, the enterprise-architects must somehow find something that will help people make sense of this ‘the enterprise’. (If not the enterprise-architects, then someone still has do this task.) Because if that still-point isn’t found – the calm within the centre of the storm – then all we’ll have is the storm. Which ain’t pretty…

We’ve all seen what happens when that kind of storm wreaks its havoc across an entire organisation. If there’s no focus, then soon the only thing that will matter is what matters for me, right here, right now: not interested in anyone else, anything else. The clashes and confusions go out of control, pulling every which way at once, yet often also covert, concealed, the impossible un-joys of knife-in-the-back office-politics and worse. The organisation first splits into silos, then fragments further and further into factions and tribes. And by that point there is no organisation left that’s worthy of the name. Or enterprise, for that matter. In short, a mess. A big mess. A mess that’s no fun for anyone.

Which is why the idea of ‘the enterprise’ is important. As one of my clients put it, what they needed most was “a totem-pole to unify the tribes” – a shared focus around which everything could coalesce, as ‘the enterprise’.

Here, of course, we hit the obvious problem: whose enterprise? Who defines ‘the enterprise’? For that matter, who owns it?

Corporate law has very definite views on that last point: the interests of ‘the owners’ are paramount above everything else. (Except taxes, perhaps.) But it’s not simple as that, because it actually doesn’t work. Sure, we could legitimately say that ‘the owners’ possess the organisation – or the assets of the organisation, rather. But the organisation operates within a much larger business context, which is also an ‘enterprise’ – whereas the most that ‘the owners’ can possess extends only up to the boundaries of the organisation. In that sense, the scope of ‘the enterprise’ that matters most to the organisation is always larger than the organisation itself. And no matter how much they might wish to do so, ‘the owners’ can never really possess ‘the animal spirits’ of the employees, the customers, the suppliers and everyone else – which is an important point in itself.

Hence we come back to the notion that ‘the enterprise’ is a shared point of focus for everyone who might do some kind of business with the organisation. An enterprise is a commitment: so this ‘the enterprise’ – whatever it might be – is a kind of declaration of commitment, the chosen answer to the question “what does this organisation stand for?”. It gives the core reason for anyone or everyone to connect with this organisation – yet also identifies or implies the criteria, the values and principles, against which the organisation expects to be judged by all.

So as enterprise-architects, how do we choose this ‘the enterprise’? The usual way is through some sort of ‘vision-descriptor‘ that summarises the context, what’s being done within that context, and why it should be important to (almost) everyone to be engaged in that vision. But it’s crucial to understand that it’s not about the organisation – but about the organisation in relation to its broader context. It’s a statement of commitment to that enterprise: about how the organisation will behave in relation to that enterprise; about why it will behave that way; about how it will add value to that broader enterprise. This is why we might say that as enterprise-architects we create an architecture for an organisation, but about a much broader extended-enterprise.

But do we define the enterprise, as such? Not really: again, it’s a bit more subtle than that. The enterprise is: it’s not something that someone could define, or, even less, control. And yet even by the act of naming it, we sort-of bring it into existence, if only as a focus for shared attention, shared commitment, shared enterprise. We choose the phrasing that defines it – and that is a real choice that is well the organisation’s own purview. And yet it’s just a choice of words: it’s not the enterprise itself. We can choose to be responsible about that enterprise, and to that enterprise – yet no-one ever possesses it. In fact the moment anyone tries to possess the enterprise, tries to make their own private possession, that’s when it will ‘softly and suddenly vanish away‘ – into nothingness, as if it never existed. That’s the paradox of enterprise – and a real trap for any overly-controlling organisation.

This chosen ‘the enterprise is very real, and – when it works well – identifiably interwoven with yet also identifiably distinct from and greater than the organisation itself. And yet perhaps the strangest part of all is that it’s only ‘the enterprise’ because the organisation says it is – as its chosen “totem-pole to unify the tribes”.

An interesting twist, yes?

What is ‘Why?’ And why, anyway?

“Oh no, not again“, do I hear you cry? Actually, it’s not as bad as that: it’s not going to be yet another of those long tedious technical posts – honest!

(It is a sort-of technical question, I’ll admit. And, in the event, quite long. But interesting to just about everyone, I hope.)

What do we mean by ‘Why’? It’s a question that’s been puzzling me for quite a while – not least because enterprise-architecture is in some ways all about the shared ‘why‘ of an enterprise, and how we express that ‘Why’ in practice.

That kind of ‘Why’ is energising, and engaging. “Start with Why“, says Simon Sinek – and in terms of how things really happen in enterprise, he’s right. If we start with why, things do indeed happen, and usually happen well.

But then I look at the ‘Why’ column in Zachman: ‘Why’ is business-rules, it says. Gosh. Wow. Exciting… (To be honest, my heart just sinks. Doesn’t yours?) Business-rules? – seriously, where’s the fun in that? Kind of the exact opposite of engaging, really. Something’s gone missing there, clearly…

That’s not quite fair, of course. Up at the top, Zachman describes ‘Why’ as a list of Goals. Not quite as unexciting as business-rules. (But close…) Yet there’s something kinda odd here… kinda like a sudden sideways jump… different things all mixed up together in the same space…?

And I hit up against the same problem when working on the Enterprise Canvas concept, a year or so ago. The same Start with Why: the ‘vision’ for the extended-enterprise is the core ‘Why’ from which everything else flows. That ‘Why’ is emotive, it means something: for the right kind of ‘Why’, people are willing, even eager, to get out of bed way too early on a cold dark dreary workday morning. It matters. It sits above everything else. And yet, to make sense of the content and activities of the service that we’d represent on an Enterprise Canvas module, there’s that same dull boring ‘Why’ again: decisions, principles, rules and regulations, all that kind of stuff. Where’s the fun gone? How come we’ve lost the why from the Why?

I’ve been bouncing up against an answer on this in several previous posts over the past while, such as one about principles in enterprise-architecture, and another on the relationship between architecture, design and implementation. But perhaps a better answer came up over the past couple of days, when trying to unravel the anatomy of Archimate and, in particular, struggling to make sense of the split between what in Archimate they call Intentional Concepts versus Extensional Concepts.

Intentional Concepts are, as the name suggests, about intent. Extensional Concepts are about what we do with that intent – about how we extend that intent out into real-world practice. In Archimate, Intentional Concepts are entities such as Value, Meaning and Reason. And the important point is that these are viewed as separate from ‘the action’. Yet down in the details of that ‘the action’, we again come across another kind of ‘reasons’ – all those business-rules and so on. (Archimate doesn’t model any of that as yet, but that’s another story.) So again we’ve got this kind of sideways jump: ‘Why’ is above everything, as Intent; yet it’s also just another part of that ‘everything’, as Extension, the ways things work together.

The obvious answer: we’re dealing with two different kinds of ‘Why’. Or two different sides of the same ‘Why’, perhaps.

One side of Why creates a question: literally, it starts a ’quest’. For most of us, that’s the exciting bit.

The other side of Why is the answer to the question, the end of the quest. That was the question, here’s the answer: The Decision. End of story. For most of us, that’s when the fun ends: a sense of relief, perhaps, that there’s no more need to quest, but also, well, no more need to quest… Final. That’s it. Full Stop. (or Period, if you speak the US version of English). An ending, that somehow ends up in a bunch of rules, with No Questions Allowed any more. A Why To End All Whys.

Kind of like the braces round a mathematical function: a=func(x,y) and all that. The opening-brace ( begins the question: what’s x? what’s y? what do we do with them? – exciting, new, gosh, wow! And then we hit the closing-brace ) that ends the question: its kind of ‘nothing more to say’, really. We have the answer, the decision. Nothing more to do. Oh. Oh well. (Except that in much of maths, and in computing too, we have parentheses within parentheses within parentheses: q=some(func(x,y), also(y,z, andalso(b,c))) – quests within quests! Fun within more fun – hooray! )

So we do have two different kinds of ‘Why’ – and they go into different places in our architecture.

One kind of ‘Why’ – the question, the ‘(‘ – goes above the Zachman space, goes above the Enterprise Canvas, goes into Archimate as intention. Think of it as a row above everything, or a backplane, or something like that: whichever way we view it, it pervades everything.

The other kind of ‘Why’ – the ‘)’, the decision – goes into the Zachman space as just another column, goes into Archimate as extension. Each decision is specific, explicit: it literally cuts off other choices in that context. We can connect it to things, show how it affects other things, but it doesn’t pervade everything in the way that the question does.

In that sense, it does make sense to put them in different places. (And also – very important – not to forget the intention. Zachman ignores it, or loses it somehow in its strange sideways jump; Archimate all but abandons it, when it squeezes all of its Intentional Concepts into the literal meaninglessness of Passive Structure; and Business Model Canvas doesn’t even bother, but seemingly assumes that the only ‘Why’ that matters is ‘How do we make money?’ The ‘questing Why’ is literally emotive, the source of all motivation: if we don’t explicitly include it in our enterprise models, we’ve just shut out any reason for anyone to be engaged in our whatever-it-is. Perhaps not a wise mistake…?)

In another sense, though, it’s still the same ‘Why’. Just different faces – or phases – of the same quest. That’s where so much of the confusion comes, because often where we place it is more about how we choose to look at it than anything else. Looking ‘downward’, we see a stream of decisions: “because so-and-so… therefore… therefore… therefore…”. Looking upward, we see a stream of reasons: “because… because… because…” – ultimately ending up in the the unquestionable ‘Because!’ of the enterprise-vision or whatever. (I tend to place only that ultimate ‘Because!’ and its immediate implied-values as that uppermost layer of the enterprise-model; everything else ends up at various levels of that Extensional side-column of ‘Why’.) The Knowledge Genes structure also describes this Janus-faced relationship well, though in a different way: move leftward towards the question of Why, rightwards towards the decisions of How. The same ‘Why’, and yet different; a different ‘Why’, and yet the same.

Two kinds of ‘Why’.

That are also the same ‘Why’.

Now why is that, I wonder…?