Ron – many thanks, very pleased you found it useful.

Tom, have you actually considered writing a book-length exploration of these ideas? I think you’re really on to something deeply profound here.

Would you be willing to expand on this? – it would help me to have some other concrete examples of practice, especially in the .mil space. Many thanks on that.

Re. Kansas City – may be a while (I was last there more than 20 years ago!) but yeah, a long yarn over lunch would be good.

Myron – likewise many thanks, and very strongly agree with all of your points. Unfortunately there’s about a book’s-worth of reply needed there, but I’ll do what I can here with what time I have!

On “The organization is of an enterprise”, I think you’re probably right there: in essence, an organization coalesces around an enterprise-story, to place itself within that story. (Most of the time this process is barely a conscious one at all: a key part of enterprise-architecture and the like is to ‘surface’ the hidden assumptions and hidden stories that underpin an organization’s decisions.) But it’s important to recognise that there are layers and layers of story – or intersecting-sets of story, rather – so that each line-of-business and each department also has its own story. One of the aims of organisation is to line up all of these stories so that they point in the same overall direction, ‘the’ enterprise-story. There are plenty of military analogies here: each unit and division has its own distinct esprit-de-corps, but we work together to align them towards the _overall_ mission and vision of the military and its role within the human community. Another useful parallel much-used in the military context is systems-of-systems: each system is distinct, but we link them together to “cooperate towards a common mission or set of related missions”, to quote the FEAF definition of ‘enterprise’.

On ‘beginning and end of the story’, we’re actually dealing with two different forms of story. The classic ‘journey’ style of story has a beginning, a middle, and an end – much like a typical military mission. But the enterprise-story is more like a trade-mission – once we set it up, it continues indefinitely. (In TV terms, this is the difference between a serial – which has a distinct story-arc – versus a series – where at least some parts of the story will always remain the same.) Importantly, _the enterprise-story would continue even if the organisation ceases to exist_. The organisation _chooses_ to weave itself into the enterprise-story – not the other way round. And the reason why it does so is two-fold: one is that it helps the organisation ‘make sense’ of everything it does (in facts the enterprise-values define what quality _is_ for the organisation); and the other is that the connection to the shared-story enables conversations with potential partners in the story – in other words, potential customers and the like.

Hence, as you say, “the farther an organisation threads itself into the enterprise story, the greater the expectation of long term success”. The catch is that an organisation can thread itself so far into the story that it thinks that it _is_ the story, that it _possesses the story: the mistaken belief that the organisation _is_ ‘the enterprise’. It’s easy to see how that happens, but the trap is that if we do that, we shut everyone else out of the story – which means that the enterprise ceases to be _shared_, and hence ceases to exist (in that form, anyway – the story continues on regardless). Yet if we don’t weave ourselves into the story, there’s no reasons for others to connect with us. To make the organisation work well within its chosen enterprise, we need to find the right balance of ‘weaving’ somewhere between those two extremes.

On “intrusion into the vendor’s organisation”, many organisations _already_ do this – this is nothing new. It can be at a routine-level, such as ensuring that your outsourced cleaning-company complies with all the security rules and health-and-safety regulations that apply in your buildings. It can be at a partner-level, such as Nike checking for child-exploitation in its overseas manufactories. Or it can be at a whole-of-context level, such as US regulations on export of controlled technologies. We frequently _require_ the intersecting partners in our extended-organisation to align with at least some central parts of our view of the enterprise-story – otherwise they can’t be partners.

Hope this helps, anyway – and thanks again.

Can it be said, then, that an organisation is of an enterprise? Further, since a story demonstrates – perhaps illustrates – an enterprise, then as story (I really want to make story a mass noun, to say enterprise is story. I am pretty sure Webster would have me pilloried…), with the scope of the enterprise as you are presenting, we are actually talking about a line-of-business in the organisation? If this is true, then we are able to offer this encapsulating mechanism for an organisation’s chapter in a particular enterprise story as it operationally manifests. This would logically allow mutually disjoint enterprises in the organisation. I find this exceptionally satisfying, so hopefully it is true.

But, now this goes to something astounding to me: how do we effectively establish the beginning point and ending point of the story as it regards the organisation’s involvement? It would seem that a vision represents a certain depth of concern into the client. However, wouldn’t the organization’s consideration or measurement of the enterprise story go further than the vision implies? The organisation would thereby ‘listen’ to the story as it is played out in the vision’s environment? Under the same proposition, wouldn’t the quality measures for a vendor’s product, set by policy, then necessarily require intrusion into the vendor’s organization to approve (too harsh?) the vendor’s policies for the product’s creation? An organization’s chapter of an enterprise story, to cogently flow from the previous chapter on into the next chapter, must, as you say, weave itself into the tapestry of the enterprise book. Therefore, the farther an onganisation threads itself into the enterprise story, the greater the expectation of long term success(?). Is there a point of diminishing returns? Since the enterprise book has no one author overseeing its consistency throughout its longevity, to have an organisation pull this off successfully is no small challenge.