Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, often don’t bother to say that they’re competent – perhaps because they don’t need to say it, their actions say it well enough instead. The outcome of competence is fairly certain, even in contexts of high uncertainty.

Non-competence is where someone doesn’t know what they’re doing, and will either not do it, or will do the best they can, yet with the explicit intent to use it as a learning to improve their competence. Importantly, they will usually say that they don’t know what they’re doing. The outcome of non-competence is uncertain, even in nominally-certain contexts, but at least we are aware of the risks.

Incompetence is where someone doesn’t know what they’re doing- i.e. is non-competent to do the task – but either purports and/or believes themselves to be competent. They will usually say that they are competent, even though demonstrably they are not; they claim to be responsible, yet have limited ‘response-ability’. The outcome of incompetence is fairly certain, and frequently dire, yet lack of awareness of the risks is often rampant, or in some cases the risks actively concealed.

Someone who is non-competent can become competent by learning the respective skills, or be competent by proxy, via finding someone else who is competent at doing the respective type of task. I treasure my non-competence, because it means there’s always more for me to learn. And as an enterprise-architect, I am, almost by definition, non-competent in much if not most of the detail-aspects of areas that I need to cover: hence one of my key competencies is the ability to learn enough of a new area fast enough to be able to guide meaningful exchanges between people who are fully competent in some detail-area but are not competent in others with which they need to connect.

Yet one of the key criteria for non-competence, and to separate it from incompetence, is a willingness to accept that we are non-competent, and say so. If we’re not aware that we’re non-competent, we automatically increase the risk of being incompetent. And if we know that we’re not competent, yet somehow ‘need’ to claim that we are competent, we would, again, automatically be incompetent – with a very high risk of inappropriate or ineffective outcomes of the work.

In part it’s a cultural problem: the risk of incompetence increases wherever a culture exhibits any of these characteristics:

• prioritises content over context, ‘truth’ over context-dependent usefulness
• has an insistent ideological base (leading to the same as above)
• is typified by rampant egotism, self-advertising and self-centrism
• is frequently swayed by tides of hype and ‘following after the latest fad’
• displays an almost desperate need to be ‘right’

Unfortunately, all of these attributes are extremely common in business, and in many cases are actively prized… By definition, they’re also more likely to be common in any ‘truth’-oriented domain, one which operates primarily on ‘true/false’ decision-making – hence, in practice, the tendencies towards IT-centrism and finance-oriented business-centrism, both of which rely on simple true/false logic for most of their operational decisions.

In SCAN terms, all of these are where the Simple certainties of Belief – either as ideology and/or as self-belief – are inappropriately applied to the far side of the Inverse-Einstein Test, where the uncertainties of the Ambiguous and the Not-Known cannot be avoided.

This gives us a dysfunctional ‘diagonal’ decision-path, where Assertion is imposed on the Not-known, or Ambiguity ‘solved’ by arbitrary Belief:

Yet the real problem here is somewhat more subtle:

• someone who is competent will typically not bother to say so, but will just get on with the work instead
• someone who is non-competent will typically say that are not competent, but will often actually be adequately-competent, or at least willing to learn to become so
• someone who is incompetent will typically claim that they are competent, and will usually not be willing to learn how to become so, because to do so would betray to themselves and others the fact that they are actually not competent

Which, in practice, leaves us with a huge dilemma:

• those who do not claim to be competent usually are competent
• those who do claim to be competent frequently are not competent

Hence, again, the kind of mess that we see so often in enterprise-architectures, wherever IT-centrism, business-centrism and the like predominate… Oh well.

Comments, anyone?

• transarchitect: The priority shift we make is from efficiency to effectiveness to co-creativity. #complexity

Of course. Yes. That’s obvious, the moment I look at it.

Except that I’d completely missed before now.

Oops…

I’ve long since drawn a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. Or rather, that efficiency – ‘doing more with less’, ‘doing things right’ – is only one dimension of effectiveness – ‘doing the right things right’.

[The set of five dimensions that I've used to summarise effectiveness, if you're interested, is efficient, reliable, elegant, appropriate, integrated - see  the slidedeck 'What is effectiveness?' or my book SEMPER & SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness.]

Yet that type of ‘effectiveness’ assumes that there’s some kind of pre-ordained plan – ‘effective in terms of the plan’. What if there isn’t a plan? What if we don’t know what the plan is? What if we’ll only know what the plan was – or sort-of ‘was’ – once we’ve completed it? (‘Retrospective causality’, as a certain person would put it.)

That’s where co-creativity comes into the picture. Co-creating a ‘plan that is no-plan‘, together.

And that’s what I’d missed.

[I can see why I'd missed it: to be blunt, I'm, uh, not good at anything that involves being social, and the whole point and focus of co-creativity is that it's social. But it still doesn't excuse the fact that I shouldn't have missed it. Sigh.]

Yet I’m not the only one who’s missed it: there’s a whole societal shift implied here – a completely different way of working. One that doesn’t assume that there’s ‘The Plan’. One that doesn’t assume that there’s The Person In Control, or The Person Who Knows What’s Going On. Or even that there’s anyone who knows what’s going on. Instead, there’s a trust that co-creation will take us where we want to go: an effectiveness that’s an emergent property of the collective, without any ‘plan’ or pre-certainty at all.

I don’t see this as an ‘either/or’ – either effectiveness-relative-to-a-plan, or co-creation-with-no-plan. It’s more a ‘both/and’ – it seems more an effectiveness that arises from a sort-of plan-that-is-no-plan, one that covers the entirety of the SCAN decision-making space:

The classic ‘efficiency’-based approach is mostly about the left-hand side: assertions about ‘the true metrics’ and so on leads to The Plan which leads to control of actions and decisions at real-time – the Belief ‘domain’. It’s very mechanical – often literally so.

Looking at it now, the approach I’d taken to effectiveness did incorporate a lot more of the right-hand side, with a strong acceptance of various aspects of uncertainty – particularly in the human space, the ‘elegant’-dimension of effectiveness. But it still presumes a plan, an Assertion – and hence that’s where it naturally tends to return.

Co-creativity would seem to focus more on the ‘Use’-domain – literally, “What’s the Use?”. I believe that to work well – to avoid a collapse into a dysfunctional-chaotic free-for-all, a ‘co-non-creation’ – it’d still need some kind of guiding-light or anchor or direction, a shared “What’s the purpose here?”. Yet even that would likely be co-created too – a nice recursion there.

Hmm… A lot to think about. Or, preferably, co-create? Thanks anyway, Bert!

Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and responsibilities to those ‘below’?

For that matter, why do we still prop up the misplaced myths of ‘above’ and ‘below’ anyway? After all, in a service-oriented view of the enterprise, there is no hierarchy - they’re all just mutual peer-level service-relationships, no different in nature from any other. And does anyone benefit from those myths any more? – other than people who need to prop up arbitrary and unwarranted delusions about their own importance?

This came up for me today from three different directions:

• reviewing several posts here on management-architectures, particularly ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘, ‘Management as ‘just another service’ ‘ and ‘Rebalancing top-down management-architectures‘
• a Tweet from SystemsWiki, pointing to a brilliant HBR paper by Gary Hamel, First, Let’s Fire All The Managers‘ [PDF]
• thinking about ‘bosses’ I’ve known – some good, some not-so-good, and some just plain incompetent

I’ll happily give names to the good ‘bosses’ – Helen Mills at Australia Post, for example, or Graeme Burnett at DSTO. For the others, well, I’d best be a bit more circumspect, hadn’t I? – which is an interesting point in itself…

But there’s one of the latter that comes particularly to mind. It was on a large engineering-project a couple of decades or so ago; almost all of the team were contractors, some of them world-class level, because it was a genuinely innovative system that had to do things that had never been done before. To make it all work, and to hold the team together, we needed a manager at the same kind of skill-level. What they gave us instead was – to be blunt – an incompetent idiot, a classic civil-service time-server, eking out his last years before retirement. Not a good choice…

He was way, way out of his depth and his comfort-zone – a fact that became painfully obvious even before the first day was out. He had no experience or understanding of the inherent anarchy of innovation: as an ex-military-type, all he knew was command-and control. Which really, really, really didn’t work.

We limped on under his endless incompetence for a few months, until one day it all came to a head. At a particularly fraught team-meeting, every one of the contractors blew up at him, saying that he alone was the reason why the project was so far behind schedule; furious, he rushed out, accusing everyone of insubordination, and yelling – and I quote – that “I’ll have all of you frog-marched out of the establishment!”

At that point, the executive realised they needed to intervene, kinda urgently… The team explained to them that whilst, yes, they would perform best with a good manager, they would actually be better off with no manager at all than with this guy. And for once – hooray! – we actually had senior-management who had some real grasp of what was going on – and they agreed. So for the rest of the project, we ran as a self-organised team, without any manager at all.

In short, our incompetent manager had been fired for insuperordination – failing to deliver the required management-services to the level needed within that context.

Looking around at most management-structures, it’s clear that that needs to happen a lot more often…

And this, of course, is where it can get v-e-r-y tricky for enterprise-architects and the like. We can see what’s not working. We can see why it’s not working. We know exactly what to do to get it working again. And yet we’re supposed to pretend that the myths of management-hierarchy are somehow sacrosanct, that insubordination is real and punishable, but insuperordination and plain management-stupidity is not. We’re allowed – in fact required – to ‘fix’ anything and everything except that which is the blatant cause of the problems, namely those myopic myths of management, which we’re not allowed to challenge at all. Hmm… About time we started being honest this, don’t you think?

Implications for enterprise-architecture

Insuperordination isn’t just lack of leadership: it’s a structural failure of the management-model to support essential symmetries of responsibility in mutual service-relationships.

And as a structural flaw – one that has serious impacts on overall enterprise risk – it’s very much a concern for enterprise-architecture.

The key requirement here is to stop thinking in terms of hierarchies. If we take a service-oriented view, it’s clear that management-services have a very real function, as information-aggregators and resource-distributors, dealing with the trade-offs across a functional-silo.

Yet those types of services are not well-suited to managing end-to-end cross-silo process-flows: there needs to be a separate category of coordination-services that handles that task – a fact which immediately implies matrix-relationships of some kind.

And those matrix-relationships need to be peer-to-peer – which doesn’t fit at all with any Taylorist-style concept of top-down management-hierarchies.

In short, top-down ‘command-and-control’ hierarchy is an overlay on top of a tree-structure that arises naturally from aggregator/resource-distributor relationships. The tree-structure provides a genuine service; the hierarchy, all too often, a genuine disservice. Don’t conflate the two structures: they’re not the same.

The way to separate them is that the tree-structure could be viewed in any orientation: top-down, bottom-up, sideways-in, centre-out – it’s all the same. But the hierarchy is always described as top-down: it can’t be made to (seem to) make sense in any other way.

The top-down management-model is essentially a leftover remnant of a supposedly long-dead feudal past, in which position in that hierarchy denotes ‘rights’ to demand subservience on pain of punishment for ‘insubordination’. As a structure based entirely on ‘power-over‘ – with all the dysfunctionality that that implies – it can only be made to seem to work as long as there is no need to engage the ‘subordinates’ actually in the work: “check your brain in at the door” is how one colleague described it. But when the work does require that kind of personal engagement – as is becoming more and more common throughout almost every business context – then the overall system will either operate only at low efficiency, or even fail to operate all, if that ‘conventional’ command-and-control hierarchy is allowed to remain in place.

It’s an architectural choice. Command-and-control hierarchy will only work with low-agility: if we need to preserve command-and-control hierarchies, we will not be able to achieve high-agility in that context. If the organisation – or some part of the organisation – needs high-agility, we must define a structure in which that section of management is peer-based, as ‘just another service’ – and in which the responsibility-failures of insuperordination must be recognised as exactly symmetric with insubordination.

In any given context, we can choose one model, or the other: they don’t mix well, and we can’t have both in the same context – as even current military doctrine [PDF] now makes clear.

If we want our organisations to work, we need to stop pretending that insuperordination doesn’t exist – and instead acknowledge that it’s one of the most serious sources of organisational risk.

That’s the message that we need to give to our enterprise-architecture clients.

Challenging, yes – but it’s the only way that this is going to work.

Comments/suggestions, anyone?

Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are very important in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and business-model design: not least because if we get it wrong – as too many people still seem to do, in business and elsewhere – then we’ll likely find ourselves on a guaranteed path to business failure.

Was reminded of this by two Tweets earlier today, both from Swedish social-business specialist Oscar Berg:

• oscarberg: RT @letterpress_se: In war, there can be only one winner. Not so in business – Stop Competing to Be the Best  http://s.hbr.org/soHqME
• oscarberg: Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia et al…please fight your wars in the marketplace, not in courts

The HBR article, by Joan Magretta, that’s referenced in that first Tweet, describes the key part of the point I want to make here. The second Tweet illustrates what happens when people don’t get that point: business-energy gets wasted on things that don’t actually matter, until all the players in that ‘game’ get so wasted, in various senses, that none of them can survive.

[There's one subtle yet crucial disagreement I'd have with that comment above from Joan Magretta's article, that "In war, there can only be one winner". I know it's a popular belief, but it's wrong - lethally wrong, often in an all too literal sense. No-one wins from being involved in a war: the only 'winners' are those who take care not to be involved, and the parasites who profit from picking up the pieces afterwards - and who often set up the war in the first place, for exactly that reason. No-one wins from a war: everyone loses. We'll see why that's so in a moment - and also why that fact matters a very great deal in business.]

So is competition good, or not good? For that matter, should we cooperate with others, or not? In all of those questions, the obvious answer is “It all depends…” – but what it most depends on in each case is what we understand as the nature and purpose of competition, and its apparent counterpart in cooperation. And that, in turn, depends on what we understand as the nature and purpose of power.

What’s the purpose of competition? Is it to win? If so, win what?

Is it to beat the other guy? If so, what happens next?

Or is it less about winning as such, but more about not having to face the feeling of failure, of being labelled ‘the loser’, and everything else that goes with that label in so many societies?

Yeah, that last one starts to hit a bit closer to home, doesn’t it? Oops…

Behind most of the myths of competition is a hugely tangled mess of mostly-unacknowledged feelings and fears. The details change from culture to culture, and I won’t go into much of that detail here, but the real core of it is a really simple set of mistakes about the nature of power in the workplace and elsewhere. Again, I won’t go into the detail – see my book Power and Response-ability, if you’re interested, or the associated brief ‘manifesto‘ – but in essence what it comes down to is this:

– the physics definition is that power is the ability to do work

– most social definitions are closer to the notion that power is the ability to avoid work

Therein lie the roots of some serious problems for business…

In the myths around ‘winning’ and ‘losing’, most of the work being avoided is relational and aspirational: in other words, work that can only be personal, not collective. On one side, it’s often a failure to grasp that, on a finite world, we are always in a closed, finite context where ultimately there is no convenient-scapegoat ‘Them’, but only ‘Us’ – hence there is no-one that we can ‘win’ against. On the other side, we actually can’t force others to face our own feelings for us – no matter how much we would want that to happen – because they’re actually our feelings. And in reality there’s no way to win, in any real sense, unless we find the courage to turn round and face that work – rather than wasting what little energy we have in futilely trying and, by definition, failing to ‘export’ it to everyone else.

Do we really think we can ‘win’ by making someone else ‘lose’? The reality is that the most we could achieve is a temporary respite from that ‘feeling-work’, at the cost of actually increasing the damage and the load across the overall system. At best, we gain a short-lived ‘high’ – exactly like any other form of addiction. Which is why most of the myths about ‘winning’, and most of the myths about ‘beating the competition’, are a literally deadly delusion.

[There are plenty of people who would promote such myths, of course - especially the parasites who profit from the ever-popular 'game' of 'let's you and him fight'. The point here is that those myths don't help you - even (or perhaps especially) in a business-context.]

Competition is good: we need competition if we’re to improve our skills, our competencies, our overall game.

But it’s only good – is only successful, in the longer term – if we compete with others. Not ‘against’ others.

Cooperation is good: we need cooperation if we’re to do anything that we cannot do solely on our own.

But although cooperation is always going to mean working with others in some sense or other, it’s only good – is only successful, in the longer term – if the overall aim of the cooperation is with all others. Not ‘against’ others.

There are only two choices here: either everyone wins, in some way; or everyone loses. There is no ‘win/lose’: it’s a delusory form of ‘lose/lose’, in which an apparent gain for one party masks a greater overall loss for everyone – including the nominal ‘winner’.

If we compete with others, and with ourselves, everyone wins. Sometimes one player is ‘the winner’, sometimes another: but overall, over time, everyone wins in one sense or another – and the overall ‘competing’ is a key part of what helps everyone win.

If we compete against others… – well, in short, everyone loses. No matter what it looks like in the shorter-term, everyone loses.

[Except for the scavengers and parasites, of course. And yes, we all know who they are in business. Except we're so often required to pretend that we don't, and that they're not. Oh well.]

And there’s no way round any of that: all of that comes from the real nature of power itself.

So if we’re going to compete – and in business, we’re going to want to compete, and also often have to compete - then we have to compete with others, not against them. Because if we don’t, we’re going lose – even, or perhaps most, when we seem most to ‘win’.

Which is no doubt somewhat different from what we’d hear in most everyday ideas about ‘business as usual’. But it’s also the only way that works. Which can be kinda tricky – especially in enterprise-architectures and the like, where we do need to deliver something that actually does work. Hmm…

Implications in business-architecture and enterprise-architecture

In architectural terms, what all of this comes down to is one very simple fact:

• every instance of ‘competition-against’, in any form whatsoever, represents an active source for loss of overall effectiveness, and a potential point for catastrophic-collapse of the overall architecture

That applies right up to an overall business-model, onward through design of performance-bonuses of sales, or managers’ resource-allocation, right down to real-time relationships between web-services and code-level conflicts. Competition-with is (usually) good: no doubt about that. Yet every time we allow some form of competition-against to slip through and become embedded in the system-structures, we increase the risk of total system-failure.

Which leads us to one very simple test:

• wherever the architecture includes some form of competition, is it competition-with, or competition-against?

In many cases, perhaps most, we’ll want our architecture to encourage competition-with.

Yet we must eliminate every form of competition-against – otherwise we’re designing an architecture that, by definition, is designed to fail.

And yes, this kind of design is all doable - despite all those conventional delusions about power and the like in ‘business as usual’. We just need to be rigorous about it, that’s all.

There are plenty of examples of how and why this works, at every level of the architecture. For business-architecture, see Joan Magretta’s HBR article referenced above, or Michael Porter’s work on strategy, or Tony Hsieh on customer-service. (For an interesting real-world example, see the small Welsh-border town of Hay-on-Wye, whose core business is built around a ‘competition-with’ web of specialist bookstores.) In the mid-range, see Dan Pink’s work on motivation, perhaps, or John Seddon on service-design. On the factory floor, see Deming’s classic ‘14 Points‘. I’ll admit I don’t know enough current code-level IT to give detailed examples there, but I know plenty of people who could.

It’s all doable. None of this is new, as such; and in itself, none of it is especially difficult, either.

[What is difficult is shifting the mindset - the usual myths of competition, the delusion that we can only 'win' by making others lose. That's hard, true: but it's also the only way that works.]

Architecturally, the only thing that makes it hard is artificial boundaries between segments of the overall system. This is one area where we need a whole-of-system perspective, and where the obsessive IT-centrism of conventional ‘enterprise’-architecture would be far more of a hindrance than a help. For much the same reasons, we need regular business-folk to understand that the overall enterprise runs on a great deal more than just money. But again, all of this is doable.

More to the point, it’s all been done – and proven in practice, too. And since overall it’s quite easy to prove that competition-with is more efficient and effective than competition-against – as can be seen in the bitter farce of the current fights between cellphone-manufacturers, as in Oscar Berg’s first Tweet above – there’s an interesting point that those who don’t ‘get’ the value of competition-with stand to lose ground against their nominal competitors…

There is, however, one serious structural problem of which we need to become very much aware. Competition-with is the only way that works, but sadly a lot of people still believe that they can be ‘the winner’ in any game of competition-against. (And there are plenty of parasites and predators who’ll prop them up in that belief, too. For a while, at least…) There are plenty of businesses that operate that way – as we all know all too well.

Yet unfortunately the game is naturally weighted in a way that props up those delusions. We know that win/win is the only way that works; we know that we can only win if others win too. But if they believe in win/lose, then they’ll be certain that they can only win by ‘making’ others seem to lose. In other words, whenever we come across someone like that, we want them to win, but they want us to lose – which is not a good place for us to be…

In those circumstances – to quote the old children’s-film War Games – “the only way to win is to not play”. So once we do get properly onto competition-with, we cannot engage with anyone who indulges in competition-against – because we will always lose, in one sense or another, whenever that occurs.

[In fact everyone will lose whenever that occurs - but it's our organisation for which we're designing the architecture, hence that's what needs to be our focus here.]

So that test – explicitly excluding any interaction with any form of competition-against – needs to be embedded right the way through every aspect of the architecture, without exception. And yes, that’s hard. But essential. Seriously.

And that’s what’s actually implied, in architectural terms, from those two Tweets above. Interesting, I trust?

Anyway, enough for now, I guess. Comments, anyone?

Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point?

(Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.)

Why? Simple reason, really: the purpose of a plan is to control something. And since ‘control’ is itself little more than a rather forlorn myth – especially in this kind of context – then it really doesn’t make sense to have a plan, because ‘control’ doesn’t make sense either.

I do have a sense of the direction I’m headed, though. Call that ‘a plan’, if you like. Sort-of.

It’s still enterprise-architecture. But a much bigger view of enterprise-architecture than you’d normally see associated with that term.

[As an aside, one of the joys of this shift is that I won't have to waste any more time arguing with the IT-obsessed and, now, the business-obsessed, about their misuse of the term 'enterprise-architecture'. I know it's wrong, they know it's wrong, everyone knows it's wrong, and just about everyone knows the damage that that term-hijack is causing, too. But hey, if they really need to keep on 'pissin' in the pool', best to just leave 'em to it, I guess. At least when you come here, you do know that when I talk about 'enterprise architecture', I do mean 'enterprise', and 'architecture', and the way they fit together - and not some piddling point about how two IT-boxes talk to each other. Unless we do need to talk about that. Which we do sometimes, of course. ]

What I’m really aiming at is the architecture of the biggest enterprise we have: the human enterprise. All of it. Which takes place within a broader ecosystem, usually referred to as ‘this planet’ or suchlike. Which is, yes, kinda big…

[In Twitter and elsewhere I'll use the hashtag #rbpea to indicate this type of 'Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture'.]

Why? It’s because I can see there are some big, big, BIG architecture-type questions that just about no-one else seems to have addressed so far, if at all. Or even noticed, in most cases. Kind of ‘oops…’, if you like. A very big ‘oops…’.

Which means that someone needs to be doing something about that ‘very big oops…’. And I look around, and I can’t see anyone else doing it, or putting their hand up to do it. Which, uh, kinda suggests that it’s my turn to do something about it. Yikes… Yeah, kinda challenging, coming face to face with that…

It doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily be much good at it: others would probably be a lot better for this than I am, no doubt about that. But it’s clear that someone needs to hold the fort for now: and right now that ‘someone’ seems to be me. Oh well…

I certainly don’t claim to have ‘the Answers’; at the moment I’d barely claim to have more than a few good questions. But at least it’s something. And I do have some relevant skills and experience, so in that sense I do have some ’response-ability’ here. Hence, in that sense, my responsibility.

So that’s the ‘plan’, really: be responsible. See what I see, hear what I hear, feel what I feel, and then literally ‘be response-able’ about that. Be like Wangari Maathai’s hummingbird – or perhaps, in my case, more like a weary, wary old toad – just doing the best I can.

Not a big plan. Not a complicated plan, with a nice big complicated roadmap from ‘as-is’ to ‘to-be’ and crop-circles an’ all that, like what all those real, proper certififificateded enterprise-architects do.

But a plan. Sort-of.

Hmm…

There’s one part of this plan, though, that a fair few people may not like – and I perhaps ought to apologise for that in advance. (Though might be better to just stop apologising for everything anyway?) It’s just that being responsible also means being honest: and being honest about what I see is going to annoy a few folks – because to be blunt there are a heck of a lot of ideas and actions out there that are just plain dumb. Stupid: the definitely-not-a-good-idea kind of stupid. Often the darn-lucky-if-we-survive-this-one kind of really stupid, too. Sorry, but it’s true.

One example of that kind of ‘really-stupid’ is the notion of ‘rights‘, which just does not and cannot work, no matter how much people try to kludge to make it it look as if it does. It’s bullshit: it’s a ‘kiddies-anarchy’ view of the world, built around evasion of any notion of responsibility. And we need to stop pretending that it’s anything more than that – so that we then do have a chance to rebuild something that actually can and does work.

Ditto the entirety of what’s laughably called ‘economics‘. Ditto the whole notion of ‘intellectual property’ – or most any current form of so-called ‘property’, for that matter. Ditto, behind it, the entire concept of ‘possession‘. All of us know it’s all bullshit, a made-up fantasy to prop up the pretences of people whose idea of ‘making a living’ consists almost entirely of untrammelled theft – an ‘economy’ based on theft-without-end. Gosh: that’s an ‘economy’??? – doesn’t look like one to me… not in any sane sense of ‘economy’ that I’ve ever heard of, anyway… So why not say so? – before we really do all end up in drowning in this bullshit?

Sigh.

In that old fable of ‘the Emperor has no clothes’, it’s a naive kid that unknowingly calls everyone’s bluff, by saying the truth about what he see. But I’ve come to realise that in reality it isn’t some innocent kid: it’s a grumpy old toad like me. Which means that sometimes – often, perhaps – some people ain’t gonna like what I say about what I see. Too bad. Sorry, ’bout that, but there ’tis: there are only two choices here – it’s either be honest, or don’t bother, and from now on I’m a lot clearer about which one of those two I need to pick.

One thing I won’t do is put anyone else down. I’ll challenge the bullshit whenever I see it, and challenge hard about it at times (and expect others to challenge me about that, too): but it’ll always be about the ideas, the thinking, the action – not the person. I promise you that. So if you find yourself ‘taking it personally’ about something I’ve said, please look closely at yourself first, and before you come out all-guns-blazing at me – because it’s in that ‘taking it personal’ that you’re most likely to learn the most, and most likely to find out who you truly are.

Anyway, down to it. That’s the plan, sort-of. And yes, there’s a lot to do – and a lot to talk about with you, too, if you wish?

I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it?  And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? – well, this is what that looks like.  )

So cool it, okay? Calm down. It’s almost certainly not what you might think I’m saying. And don’t panic: ultimately this is more about a practical design-issue in ‘big-picture’ enterprise-architectures than about anything else. Serious, sure: but not misogynistic. Honest.

It’s true that there are specific problems around all closed-category ‘rights’ such as purported ‘women’s rights’ and the like – and I promise I’ll come back to those later. But that isn’t the real point here anyway. The real point is this: the whole concept of ‘rights’ could well be one of the most disastrous mistakes that humans have ever made. And we need to find a way back out from that mistake if we’re ever to achieve some kind of sustainable society.

In terms of well-meant stupidity, the notion of ‘rights’ is right up there with the toffee spear [thank you Terry Pratchett!] and the lead balloon: it doesn’t work, it’s never worked, in fact can’t work, because its cause of failure is built right into its very roots. Scrambled misunderstandings and misuses of the notion of ‘rights’ represent a huge failure-risk, right at the roots of all of our current ‘really-big-picture enterprise-architectures’. And to be blunt, the concept of ‘rights’ is so riddled with calamitous unintended-consequences that we really need to remove it, totally and permanently, from every aspect of every law in every land.

An assertion to which, at present, you might well disagree.

Which is fair enough, of course.

But perhaps allow me to explain?

(And yes, as usual, this is going to be a bit long… but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.)

The right emotions?

First, though, ask yourself this: why is it that that defence of ‘rights’ is, well, so visceral? Existential, almost, for something that’s actually just an idea? What’s going on there?

[By the way, there's an additional source of confusion here that may be specific to the English language: 'right' as in 'it's my right', versus 'right' as 'factually-correct', versus 'right' as 'proper', the socially-proper thing to do. When all those meanings get conflated together, life gets even more, uh, interesting...]

So try this, as not so much a thought-experiment as a feeling-experiment. Let’s play around with that headline a bit, and feel what happens:

• Women’s rights? – just say No!

If that statement makes your blood boil, notice that it does so. In which case, why? And how? – how can a simple statement reduce some people to paroxysms of rage? Notice how you might well want to lash out at me, silence me, all the rest of it – when in reality I’m just the messenger. Ne tirez le pianiste, s’il vous plait? And when you’ve calmed down a bit, notice that you could have read it an entirely different way: for example, that the most important part of ‘women’s rights’ is a woman’s right to say No… in which case, what’s wrong with saying that? Hmm… just what does that tell us about ‘rights’, then?

Anyway, let’s try another version of the headline with a different ‘right’, and see what happens here:

• Human rights? – just say No!

A bit bland, yes? A bit abstract? ‘Human rights’? – have to think about it, rather than feel it? And why would anyone object to that, anyway? – whatever that ‘it’ might be? Hmm…

Okay, try this one:

• Right to silence? – just say No!

That one could well feel a bit abstract too – unless you’ve somewhen found yourself on the wrong side of a so-called ‘justice’-system, in which case it won’t be abstract at all… Right, okay, here’s another one:

• Right to education? – just say No!

This gets a bit complicated, yes? Kind of muddled mixture of trying to think it out, then work out what that negation means, and then the emotions, and so on. But let’s have another one that might have a bit more impact:

• Right to party? – just say No!

Whatever the Beastie Boys might say, the idea of a ‘right to party’ is not as simple as it looks – especially in any real social context. Likewise this one:

• Right of way? – just say No!

That ‘right’ can get seriously complicated in a social context, out on the highway – yet notice too the enormous amount of emotion that can get tangled up with that ‘right’ as well? Odd, that… So let’s ratchet it up even more:

• Right to life? – just say No!
• Right to choose? – just say No!

Whichever way you’d take it, that one’s really tangled… kind of like there’s a huge emotive polarity there, yet can’t actually get a grip on it? – at least, perhaps not enough grip to work out what to throw at me for saying it, for which of those two phrases, and why? Which should definitely bring us back into ‘Hmm…’ territory, perhaps? Anyway, one final example, just to bring us back down to ground again:

• Right to high-speed broadband-internet – just say No!

Before you go ‘Huh???’, note that in Finland, access to broadband is a ‘right’ that’s enshrined in law. And in this case I would hope that the “just say No!” part might get you to see what’s really going on here.

The key point is this: rights are a fiction.

They’re a description of a desirable outcome, in an idealised world that may never exist in the real one. A map of an imagined territory.

That’s it.

Gosh…

Which means that all that emotion is a bit odd… but that’s something we can come back to later. First, let’s deal with this fact about fiction.

Rights are a fiction

‘Rights‘ are a fiction; responsibilities are real. The desired-outcome of each so-called ‘right’ can only arise when someone takes responsibility for enacting the conditions to create that outcome (a point that should be obvious when we think about ‘the right to high-speed broadband’). In a societal context, each ‘right’ is actually created by a complex interweaving of mutual responsibilities – so it’s actually the responsibilities that we need to pay attention to here, together with a solid understanding of those mutualities and interlocks, and the social checks and balances and other conditions that support them.

A ‘right’ is just a very simple shorthand way to describe a desirable outcome that arises only when someone – perhaps individually, more usually collectively – enacts a specific interplay of some very complex mutual interlocking responsibilities, under appropriate forms of governance. To ensure that those outcomes actually do occur, we need keep the focus always on the responsibilities, and the mutuality of those responsibilities – and not on the so-called ‘rights’. Given this, though, it’s easy to see that some serious problems are going to arise if anyone thinks that the ‘rights’ are somehow ‘real’ in their own right, and forgets about the existence or mutuality of those real responsibilities that make it all happen.

Part of the difficulty here, of course, is a straightforward map-versus-territory mistake. The ‘right’ is the over-simplified map; the responsibilities are the real-world territory. It’s easy to see that if anyone thinks that the map ‘is‘ the territory, yeah, it’s gonna get messy for a while… Oh well: common-enough kind of mistake for folks to make, anyway.

Yet where the heck does all that emotion come from? – because no-one would doubt that there’s often a lot of emotion there…

Rights and the ‘terrible twos’

Want to know where the emotion really comes from? Next time you hear yourself (or anyone else) talking about ‘my rights’, do you notice the inner two-year-old that’s actually saying those words? A very angry two-year-old, lost in a possessive temper-tantrum, demanding that the world be other than it is – declaiming that it’s everyone else’s fault that it’s not that way? And in its rage, claiming that it has the ‘right’ to punish those others for failing to deliver what it wants?

Oops…

A two-year-old wants the world to happen in the way that it wants: it has a very clear sense of a personal right to that desired condition of the world. There’s no concept of mutuality here: it sort-of understands the notion of Self, and of separation of Self relative to the world, yet still views everything ‘Other’ as a semi-autonomous extension of its will – everything not-Self as subject of Self. (Yep, we’ll see that word ‘subject’ coming back again later.) So when it wants an outcome that it cannot immediately grab for itself (i.e. Other-as-object), it asserts that it’s only others – the possessed not-Self, its ‘subjects’ – that are responsible for delivering that outcome. It has a ‘right’ to an absence of responsibility, an ‘anti-responsibility’; responsibility is always Somebody Else’s Problem.

So we’ll see an awful lot of declamation of ‘should‘ coming out of that two-year-old, often accompanied by an awful lot of tears and tantrums; and since there’s such an explicit denial of mutuality, such angry assertion of absence of responsibility, we’ll often see an awful lot of ‘should‘ coming back the other way, trying to reestablish the mutuality, reassert the responsibilities that any human of any age will have in any social context. That often-fraught, often-furious clash of shoulds is what every parent will know all too well as the dreaded ‘terrible twos’…

And that‘s what’s actually going on, underneath, in the background, in almost every aspect of the ‘rights-discourse. It’s not about responsibility: it’s about the evasion of responsibility, a desperate attempt to find some way to convert every difficult choice, every difficult action, into Somebody Else’s Problem.

Oops…

And evasion-of-responsibility – “any attempt to offload responsibility onto the Other without their engagement and consent” – is the formal definition for another all-too-well-known term: abuse. Evasion-of-responsibility is abuse. And when evasion-of-responsibility ends up somehow being enshrined in law – which it very often is, as we can see very quickly once we start looking with a mutual-responsibilities lens at most forms of law – what we have is not ‘rights’ at all, but full-on state-sponsored abuse, backed by all the societal force of law.

Oops…

Which just might be why things so often get into such a mess whenever someone introduces the idea of ‘rights’ into the picture…?

What’s actually going on here?

Whenever we come across the notion of rights, what we have in that context are the following:

1. A description and declaration of a desired social outcome (the purported ‘right’)
2. A complex set of mutual interlocking responsibilities (the means to deliver the purported ‘right’)
3. A set of societal checks and balances (to provide governance for the purported ‘right’ and the mutualities that underpin its continued delivery)
   but, all too often:
4. An evasion of responsibility and/or denial of mutuality, often expressed in practice as systematic Other-abuse.

The first three items are what make the ‘right’ happen; the last item is why it so often doesn’t happen.

And whenever we see a strong focus on the first item – ‘my rights!’ – that somehow fails to acknowledge the matching mutualities – ‘my responsibilities’ – then what we actually have there is not ‘rights’ at all, but active Other-abuse. Which pretty much guarantees that whatever-it-might-be is not going to work.

Ouch…

Yet extremely common. And, because it at first looks like it works, but actually doesn’t, is addictive. Very addictive.

Recognise this yet? In just about everything in our current culture, everywhere around you, at work, at home, everywhere else? And in your own behaviour too?

Ouch…

Yup. This is serious. If you want to understand why so many things are so disastrously wrong in so many aspects of our culture, all you need to do is look at all those so-called ‘rights’.

Sigh…

The subject of rights

Just one more step before we start to sort out the mess. This is around the notion of ‘Other-as-subject’ (which, as you’ll see, will also take us right back to the beginning here, and explain why, even for women, ‘Women’s rights’ is not such a good idea…).

For this we’ll use a Spiral Dynamics lens. (We’ll ignore that model’s theory of social development, which to be frank is just millennialist garbage. Oh well.) This gives us a set of colour-coded values-perspectives, within which we can see who supposedly has ‘the rights’, who doesn’t, and who is deemed to be the ‘subject’ of whom:

• Beige: ‘Survival’: Self only, no social context, hence neither ‘rights’ nor responsibilities, and no subject
• Purple: ‘Family/Tribe’: “Mother/Father is right” – all others are subjects of patriarch/matriarch
• Red: ‘Feudal’: “might is right” – monarch is peak of fealty-tree of overlord-rights (‘down’) versus subject-responsibilities (‘up’)
• Blue: ‘The Law’: “God/The Law is right” – the purported ‘agents of the Law’ have rights, all others are subjects of ‘the Law’
• Orange: ‘Democracy’: “individual rights” – all are sort-of-subjects of everyone else
• Green: ‘Collectivism’: “group rights” – all groups are sort-of-subjects of all other groups
• Gold/Turquoise/Coral: ‘Systems’: “only responsibilities are real” – no ‘rights’, no ‘subjects’

Although the only values-perspectives that are stable in this sense are the ‘Systems’ group, all of the other values-perspectives can work. In functional form, all of them represent an appropriate context-specific balance of mutual responsibilities: for example, parents will usually take on responsibilities on behalf of the children, and so on. There is, however, some tendency to drop into a ‘racket‘ or codependency in which each party can evade responsibility by blaming the other: those types of social-dysfunctions are all-too-common in all of the non-’Systems’ values-perspective types.

Yet as soon as the idea of ‘rights versus responsibilities’ comes into the picture – especially when accompanied by any notion that others are the ‘subjects’ of those with ‘rights’ – each structure rapidly becomes dysfunctional in its own way. ‘Rights’ are equated with ‘privilege’ – literally, ‘priority in the law’. Hence in a police-state or a rigid theocracy, for example (dysfunctional-Blue, in Spiral terms), the ‘agents of the Law’ are deemed to be ‘above the Law’: they have the purported ‘right’ to act as they wish, without any mutuality of responsibility to the ‘subject’-population – which gets to be seriously abusive, seriously-quickly, in almost every single case.

Most organisations are still run on what is essentially a feudal model – hence the dreaded org-chart and its ‘report-to’ relationships – with an often-thin overlay of ‘the Law’. Again, it can work: but because of the ‘rights versus responsibilities’ problem and the inherent tendency of a feudal structure to form codependent relationship-pairs (the ‘boss’ blames the ‘workers’, the ‘workers’ blame the ‘boss’, no-one takes actual responsibility for anything), most organisations seem to range between somewhat-dysfunctional to seriously-dysfunctional – a fact reflected in the painful prevalence of Dilbert cartoons…

A typical would-be ‘democratic’ or ‘collectivist’ model starts out with a commitment to full mutuality of responsibilities, which is what actually underpins any notions of ‘universal human rights’ and the like. Yet as described so well in Orwell’s Animal Farm, once the ‘rights’ dysfunction takes hold, this quickly deteriorates into a morass of “some animals are more equal than others”. In the ‘democratic’ model, the assertion is that “I have rights”, whilst in the ‘collectivist’ model it’s more often “we have rights”; and both models assert that only others have responsibility, and in general do not have rights (or at best, rights that are inherently subject to and of lower priority than those of ‘I’ or ‘we’).

Which brings us back to the notion of ‘Women’s rights’.

The wrongs of rights

The notion of ‘women’s rights’ is a very good example (one of many possible examples, I hasten to add) of a ‘collectivist’-model concept of ‘rights’. By definition, it’s exclusive: only women have these rights, they acquire these rights by fact of birth, the rights are not transferable, and, in principle at least, there is no way that anyone from the Other-class can acquire those rights.

[Note that there's nothing inherently 'wrong' with that kind of exclusive-category, of course - it's just a category. It's what happens next that gets, uh, interesting...]

In itself, the existence of the category does make sense: clearly there are a few concerns or experiences that are specific to women. Which means that we need to consider specific outcomes around those concerns. Most of the time, then, when people talk about ‘women’s rights’, what they actually means is the desirability of certain outcomes that are, by their nature, specific to women.

(And in case anyone’s still angry at me about the headline for this post, I perhaps ought to emphasise here that to me those outcomes are indeed desirable, for everyone’s benefit, and that achieving those outcomes is extremely important.)

[By the way, that list of items that are 'specific to women' does not include sexual assault or domestic assault. In many sub-types of those two categories, women are actually the majority of perpetrators - not victims. (And yes, I have done the meta-analysis on that, several times, as part of my professional work, so I do know what I'm talking about there.) Which means that any claim that women should have 'special rights' in those areas solely because they are women is, frankly, a flagrant attempt at yet another form of state-sponsored Other-abuse. Not a wise move, as we'll see shortly...]

To achieve those outcomes, we need to focus on the mutual responsibilities that make it all happen. But the ‘rights-discourse’ just gets in the way: especially that addictive return to arbitrary assertions of “I have rights, you have responsibilities”. Hence all too easily, all too often, instead of helping something happen, it all just dissolves into a chaotic mutual blame-game, with everyone eventually sidestepping their responsibilities, partly because the mutualities are not acknowledged or enacted, and partly because anyone who does take responsibility for anything will immediately get blamed for everything – which kinda acts as a fairly serious disincentive against doing anything at all.

[Note that this is not specific to 'women's rights' - I'm just using this as a worked-example because its inherent-exclusivity makes it easier to see what goes on in this type of 'wicked-problem' or 'mess'.]

As someone’s who’s worked professionally in that field from time to time, I can confirm that the whole gender-issues space is riddled with people – most of them women, as it happens, but by no means all – who are utterly addicted to Other-blame. They’ve literally built their careers on it. And it guarantees that things can’t and won’t work – which is then used to justify even more Other-blame, in an all-too-literally vicious cycle. Oops…

[I sometimes describe these people as 'cuckoos': "a parasite that lays its eggs in other birds' nests, that hatch out into monsters that destroy the hosts' own children". It's a bit unkind, perhaps, but it is a painfully-accurate metaphor...]

The tragedy, of course, is that the ‘subjects’ of that relentless Other-blame and Other-abuse will eventually crack – which is how a structurally-abusive version of ‘women’s rights’ in one era will create the conditions for an ever-more-abusive misogyny in the next. That’s why it’s called a ‘revolution’: it goes round in circles… And when everyone in the game is stuck in ‘toddler-mode’, endlessly demanding their ‘rights’ and trying to do so by trying to make everyone else lose, no-one is going win anything. And hence we don’t get the outcomes that we need. Which means that, in this example, ‘women’s rights’ all too easily becomes women’s tragedy – created by self-styled ‘women’s advocates’ themselves.

Ouch…

And because all of this is driven by addiction, there’s no rational way to resolve it. The only viable option is to bypass the whole miserable mess, and reject the entire concept of ‘rights’. Everywhere. Every possible form. Every possible so-called ‘right’. It’s a mistake: so don’t fall for the mistake. Simple as that.

Hence the second half of that headline here: whatever ‘right’ it may claim to be, Just Say No!

Which, of course, leaves the rather important question of what we do next…

Rights without rights

How do we tackle this problem of supporting the desired outcomes of ‘rights’, without resorting to ‘rights’ themselves? For enterprise-architects and others who are charged with designing what is, in effect, a social-architecture, within an organisation or a broader social context, this is a very real and very urgent problem.

So let’s turn the last part of this rather-too-long post into a straightforward how-to on exactly this point.

Jump back for a moment to the ‘What’s actually going on here? subhead. What we saw there was the following:

• definition – the description of the desired outcome (the ‘right’)
• means – the delivery-mechanisms, described in terms of interlocking mutual responsibilities
• governance – checks and balances to ensure it all works, especially over the longer term

And we have the known problem-areas, the symptoms that indicate that delivery of the outcome is at risk:

• risk-symptoms – evasion of responsibility, denial of mutuality, and/or arbitrary assertion of ‘priority’ or ‘privilege’

And if we phrase it like that – definition, means, governance, risk – it should be clear that it’s actually a straightforward design for service-delivery: little different from any other type of service-design. So let’s tackle it that way.

First, what are the desired outcomes?

We’ll notice straight away that there will be a lot of those in any context, quite a few of which will conflict with each other. Which means we’re going to need some means to help us evaluate priorities between outcomes.

Which is where whole-enterprise architecture comes into the picture, showing us how to identify and define the core Vision or ‘guiding-star’ and its concomitant values.

Once we have those, we then turn to specification, design and evaluation of service-delivery and service-governance.

Which again should be well-known territory for enterprise-architects and the like: it’s about specification, design, protocols, inter-dependencies, coordination, validation, management, and all the other things we need to do to evaluate and ensure service-viability over the longer term. And I won’t write anything more on that here, because it’s all in the books such as Doing Enterprise Architecture and The Service-Oriented Enterprise and Mapping the Enterprise, and in articles on this blog such as ‘Enterprise Canvas as service-viability checklist‘. No big deal, really: just the routine slog of “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”, that’s all.

Which leaves us with the risk-symptom – the tendency to misuse any notion of ‘rights’.

And there’s a really simple answer to that: Just Say No! Don’t allow it to exist, at all, anywhere in the architecture. As soon as anyone makes any mention of ‘rights’, move the discussion straight away to what actually needs to happen:

• What is the desired outcome? (The ‘right’ is a map of a territory: what’s the territory?)
• What are the responsibilities that are needed to achieve that outcome? (For enterprise-architects, we would probably phrase that as the services and business-processes that would make it happen.)
• What are the interlocks and mutualities of those responsibilities? (We would probably talk here about protocols and service-choreography and the like, plus a whole lot about checks-and-balances across the system.)
• What governance is needed to ensure that everything ‘stays fair’ for all stakeholders – because without it being seen as ‘fair’, it isn’t going work? (That’s what in Enterprise Canvas is the role of the ‘guidance-services‘ – particularly the validation-services – and also the Investor and Beneficiary relationships.)
• How does all of this link up with and remain aligned to the overall shared-enterprise Vision?

We’ll probably have to recurse or iterate many times through that loop, or parts of that loop – but it’s all straightforward enough, if we don’t allow ourselves to get distracted by the fiction of ‘rights’. Rights are a fiction, it’s only the responsibilities that are real: the only way to achieve what we think of as ‘rights’ is to not have ‘rights’.

So again, whenever anyone makes any mention of ‘rights’ – any so-called ‘right’ at all – Just Say No!

Because it really is the only way that works.

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.)

Amused that Anthony says he’s 27, because that’s about the age that I really got going on this. (A little earlier, actually: the first dowsing book came out when I was still 24. I used to have to apologise for not being the age people expected me to be, namely at least 75! )

I wouldn’t say that any of what I do is a ‘rare skill’, although it’s true that it’s not often acknowledged or respected – perhaps because, by its nature, it necessarily tends to be disruptive to any comfortable status-quo. I’ve been doing it since a very early age – for as long as I can remember, anyway, certainly way back in primary school – but it’s actually the standard approach used in most forms of design-thinking and the like, as taught in art-college or architecture-school or good engineering courses or even in the US military. It’s also what really happens in scientific research – see, for example, WIB Beveridge’s classic The Art of Scientific Investigation.

My own particular twist on it arose because I’m not much good at doing things, or making things (I tend to describe myself as ‘ambi-sinistral’ – the opposite of ‘ambidextrous’… ). Hence I tend to focus instead on the thinking behind the doing or making or whatever, always searching for the simplest way to do things, the most effective way, and so on. Kind of recursive, if you like, but it works well. Except for that little problem that it tends to be so darn disruptive…

Methods, mechanics, approaches

One place to start would be around skill itself, and the key themes of my Masters thesis, way back in 1976. Back there, I described a skill – any skill – as being made up of three components:

• the methods used in the skill
• the mechanics and other real-world constraints of the ‘objective’ context of the skill – that which is common to everyone
• the approaches, assumptions, mindset, paradigms, physical dexterity and other ‘subjective’ context for the individual (the ‘operator’) – that which is specific to the individual

What I found, very quickly, was that most people seem to focus on the methods used in any skill. But that actually misses the point: the methods used by any skilled operator arise from their own personal resolution of the mechanics and the approaches – the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ components of the skill. This is why using someone else’s methods doesn’t always work, and why ‘best practice’ can be dangerously misleading: the mechanics of the issue remain the same, by definition, but the context is different, and hence may well need different methods.

Focussing on method also makes it much more difficult to tease apart the separate threads of mechanics and approaches. It should be obvious that blurring the objective and the subjective is not likely to be a good idea, and yet that’s exactly what happens whenever we focus only on method.

In all skills-work – in fact in just about every human context – we also come face to face with Gooch‘s Paradox: “things have not only to be seen to be believed, but also have to be believed to be seen”. In an all too literal sense, in skills-work, reality is what we say it is: we actually create it, from nothing, or rather from a combination of imagination and hard work. (In this kind of context, it doesn’t really make sense to ask the question “Is it real or imaginary?”, because the only possible answer is ‘Yes’ – both, therefore neither.) To resolve Gooch’s Paradox, we treat the approaches – our assumptions and beliefs – as if they are part of the mechanics of the context. The danger is that we may forget that point about ‘as if’, and – if we think about those assumptions at all – think that they are part of the fundamental mechanics of the context, rather than an arbitrary choice to achieve some particular purpose.

Once assumptions creep in – in other words, whenever the subjective is blurred into the objective without conscious intent to do so – what we have is a context to which arbitrary constraints have been applied. Which places arbitrary limits on possibility. Which is kinda pointless, really. But the only way that we’ll be able to see that the constraints are arbitrary is to step back a bit, and re-separate the subjective from the objective. Hence a kind of recursive methods-to-look-at-methods, analysis-to-unpack-analysis, and so on. Which is what I do.

As I mentioned in my reply-comment, much of the ‘how I do what I do’ is already documented in various ways throughout the books, such as in Everyday Enterprise Architecture (which focusses on method in a business context) and The Disciplines of Dowsing (which looks more at ‘thinking about thinking’). The core of the latter book is the ‘four disciplines’ section (see the summary on the separate two-page reference-sheet) and the ‘seven sins of dubious discipline’ (currently listed only in the book): it wouldn’t take much work to translate those into almost any other context.

What I’ll use here is the Five Element / effectiveness framework that I use in a lot of my client-work these days (though often in somewhat covert form). It’s nothing special, in fact it’s little more than a recursive use of a pair of matched checklists. The first of these, as summarised in the ‘Five Elements’ chapter in SEMPER & SCORE, is a set of perspectives on the overall context:

• Purpose – what are we aiming to do here? and why? (see also the slidedeck ‘Vision, Role, Mission, Goal‘)
• People – who would be needed for this purpose? what skills and relations do they need? what are their mutual responsibilities?
• Preparation – what planning and logistics would be needed for this purpose? what assumptions and mindsets apply here? what are the key events that trigger action?
• Process – what needs to be done to achieve the purpose? when, how and with what would this be done? when is each process complete?
• Performance – what constitutes ‘success’, and for whom? what information and metrics are needed to keep everything on track? what would be needed to support continuous improvement?

The other checklist is a set of keywords on effectiveness, which are sort-of orthogonal yet also sort-of linked to the Five Element set. Listing these in the same order as above:

• Appropriate – is this on track towards the purpose?
• Elegant – does this support the human-factors in the context? (e.g. simplicity, ergonomics etc)
• Efficient – does this make the best (e.g. least-wasteful) use of the available resources?
• Reliable – can this be relied upon to deliver the required results?
• Integrated – does this help to link everything to everything else in a consistent way?

To assess a context, we can start from anywhere at all. The point is that we use these checklists not as linear lists, but as a reminder to keep looking round, bouncing back and forth between each of the interconnected themes in the two lists, looking at the context from every possible angle, and at every level from really-big-picture to finest-detail, building up a kind of hologram of the overall context, using one form of sensemaking to bounce off others, and so on. The book Real Enterprise Architecture provides a complete worked-example of this kind of recursive process as applied to whole-enterprise architectures.

Questioning everything

Looking back at the various areas I’ve worked in or with, there’s a fairly consistent pattern about what I’ve done and the sequence in which I’ve done it.

The first stage is just getting involved at all: taking the ideas and practices at face-value, and putting them into practice as if they are entirely ‘true’. That usually works for a while (not least because that’s what everyone else is doing).

I then allow myself to start to notice the niggles, the things that don’t quite seem to work, where ‘what it says on the tin’ doesn’t actually deliver what it says on the tin. The problem, of course, is that we can’t assess the validity of a logic from within the logic itself. Yet we also can’t actually work on the context without being inside the logic (or some form of the logic). This is where we hit Gooch’s Paradox head-on: we have to see it to believe it, yet also have to believe it to see it. The only way out of that dilemma is to start to use beliefs as tools – which can be kinda challenging…

In my experience, there are two parts to this:

• identify the big-picture theme for the overall context (the ‘vision’ or, as architects would put it, the unifying ‘parti‘)
• apply design-thinking tactics to question everything, switching beliefs in order to experience the context in different ways, and test the apparent results

The tactics to identify the key-theme(s) are usually straightforward. A classic example is the ‘Five Whys’: just keep asking “why?” until eventually we hit a ‘Because.’ – or rather, a real ‘Because.’ that makes some degree of sense, rather than one that’s just used to get people to stop asking awkward questions! These days I tend to look for a brief overview-statement – usually only about three to five words – that has a distinct three-part structure: it identifies the ‘things’ or concerns that matter to everyone in the context, what’s being done with or to those items, and why it’s deemed to be important. This gives us a stable anchor to which we know we can return, and against which we can test anything in the context.

Then, following standard ‘design-thinking’ tactics, we use a suite of ‘disruptive’ questions about the context – for example:

• what’s another version of this?
• what does this look like at a smaller scale, or a larger scale?
• what happens if we substitute something else for this?
• what happens if we invert some or all of the rules?
• is there a ‘term-hijack’ here? – does a small subset purport to be the whole, blocking the view to any other aspect of the context?

This is where things often get to be, uh, fun… – because it’s very common to find aspects of the context that a) don’t and can’t make any sense, b) clearly don’t work ‘as advertised’, in fact usually work against the nominal aims of the overall enterprise, yet c) there are key players with a lot of vested interest in ensuring that the status quo remains unquestioned and unchallenged. Don’t be surprised at this: it happens every time.

This is where a certain amount of dogged determination becomes essential… Also essential is a very clear, insistent emphasis on the big-picture, on holding to the overall vision for the shared-enterprise, because that’s often the only thing that will persuade people that there’s no ‘personal attack’ here, that instead the only purpose of the challenge and the enquiry is to make things work better, for everyone. (We have to be real about that, too: we need belief in ourselves in order to keep going, it’s true, but we need to keep questioning ourselves as well. It’s one reason why serious self-doubt is a chronic yet necessary occupational-hazard here.)

We need to keep hammering at this until we do start to get a clear separation between the mechanics of the context – which usually turn out to be surprisingly simple – and the approaches to the context – which are, by definition, individual and subjective. Then we can start to work towards new methods that work with the context under the current conditions.

The same seems to apply to just about any type of context: an individual’s personal challenges in developing their own skill, a business, a social context, a single conceptual tool, or an entire discipline.

Scattered throughout this weblog and the sister-weblog Sidewise, you’ll find examples of those techniques in use. Sometimes it’s reasonably straightforward, sometimes rather more controversial, but you’ll see in each case that’s it’s essentially the same principles, the same tactics.

I’ll also summarise here those same techniques in use in four different large-scale domains that I’ve been involved with over the decades: dowsing, desktop-publishing, domestic-violence resolution, and enterprise-architecture.

Example: Dowsing (1970s)

Big-picture theme: finding things, particularly where conventional (mechanical/physical) techniques either won’t work or are unavailable.

History: as a discipline, has been around ‘forever’, and often highly controversial – first from priests who regarded it as ‘the work of the devil’ etc, then later from would-be scientists who wanted to ‘explain’ it and couldn’t. When I first got involved, in the late 1960s, the field was pretty much moribund, with a random mixture of wild claims, erratic discipline, no formal methodology or theory-base as such, a long history of inconclusive scientific experiments, and the first flush of hype-laden New Age ‘thinking’ (if that’s the right term…). Most of the people involved were well into their sixties, seventies or more (which I, uh, wasn’t…). The key players consisted of a kind of closed ‘military club’ (water-finding being very important to an army on the move), a few variously-erratic practitioners (often with wild-eyed ideas about health and the like), a swathe of armchair-theorist camp-followers who talked a lot but did nothing, and a few people who really did know what they were doing and wisely kept themselves well away from the mess.

Conceptual mismatch: The most common assertion was that it was a special ‘innate’ skill that only certain ‘special people’ could do. Methods that often clashed or even flatly contradicted each other could lead to the same result; the same method used by different people would lead to wildly different results. Most of the theory in use – such as notions of ‘waves’ or vibrations’ or ‘radiations’ – was either meaningless or just plain wrong in terms of conventional physics. (Much of it did sort-of make sense as metaphor, but there seemed to be little understanding of the difference between active-metaphor and concrete fact.) Muddle-headed ‘New Age’ ideas merely added to the overall mess.

Vested interests: On the one side was the moribund ‘military club’, who liked the idea of being ‘special and different’, and/or the ‘right’ to tell the ‘lower ranks’ what to do, whether it made any sense or not. On the other side were the upcoming ‘New-Agers’, who were not going to let anything block their path to potential fame and fortune. (I’m being cynical, I know, but that’s exactly what happened.)

Assessment and action: Assess the purported theory, and scrap most of it: it’s meaningless. The only parts of the theory that do make sense and do have solid experimental backing revolve around perceptual psychology and physiology – particularly around weighted-sum merging of multiple channels (which is why there’s no single ‘the method’) and around edge-triggered reflex-response (which is why some experienced water-finders can’t find static water even when they’re standing on top of it). If some kind of tool is used, almost all of the tools act as some form of mechanical amplifier – if I move my hand a little, the tool moves a lot. (I’ve only ever found one case where that principle didn’t apply at all.) Materials, structures, theories and so on seemed to matter only because people believed that they did: in most cases, a simpler alternative would work just as well, if not better. Keep stripping it back to the bare essentials.

It is a true skill – but it’s not one that’s restricted to only ‘special people’. Instead, it’s a learnable skill: anyone can do it – though whether they may or will do so are entirely separate questions! (There was quite a lot of pushback from the ‘military club’ against the idea that ‘anyone can dowse’.) It’s also a skill that requires a lot of practice and a lot of discipline to get right. (Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of pushback from the ‘New-Agers’ on that point, and there still is – see the book Disciplines of Dowsing.) It’s also a skill which often requires a wide range of psychological ‘tricks’ to help people slide past Batcheldor’s ‘witness-inhibition’ and ‘ownership-resistance’ – in other words, “this isn’t happening, and if it is, it isn’t me”.

End-result: After a few months’ experimentation and subsequent practice over several years with a wide range of students, I’d stripped it down to the point where I could get most people started on the basics within less than two minutes, using two bits of fencing-wire from the garden as simple instruments. The notion that ‘anyone can dowse’ is now firmly established in the canon, and the teaching-methods that I developed (based on, self-responsibility, self-critique and continual-improvement) are still some of the most common currently in use.

Example: Desktop-publishing (1970s-80s)

Big-picture theme: getting ideas and information out into the public space.

History: I trained as a graphic-designer/typographer, and became professionally involved in typesetting in the late 1970s, with the early developments in smaller phototypesetting machines. (‘Smaller’ being a relative term here: the first system we bought required a room of its own and a separate darkroom, and cost more than my house.) The big bottleneck was keyboard input: the typesetting unit was capable of running much faster than a single operator. Although the internal technology was extremely complex, the input was not: some machines still relied on a very simple 6- or 7-channel punch-tape reader, using control-codes to extend the effective size of the character-set.

At the same time, simple but usable microcomputers were just starting to come onto the market. (My first microcomputer had only an 8-character LED display, hexadecimal keypad and 256 bytes of memory; the more usable Ohio Scientific systems that we first used for real had a proper keyboard but still only 8kbytes of memory, and the only storage was on audio-cassettes.) Almost all of these machines used a 7- or 8-channel character-set (ASCII or extended-ASCII); most also provided some form of direct data input/output for interfacing to other systems.

It seemed to me that there should at least be some way to use a basic micro as a much cheaper input-terminal, using simple code-translation and a standard hardware-interface. It also seemed probable that other people would want to do the same – taking control of their own publishing, driving a typesetter direct, or both. In the longer term, that could well be quite a large market.

Conceptual mismatch: This is best summarised by the phrase (exact quote, in fact) that “there is no interest in typesetting from microcomputers, and there never will be”. There were all manner of arbitrary demarcation-lines across the whole context, both on the pre-press side – such as between authors, publishers, unions and printers – and on the technical side – particularly between typesetter-manufacturers, computer-manufacturers and various hobbyists and hackers – most of which arose more from historical ‘turf-wars’, ‘positioning’, and mutual misunderstanding than from any concrete distinctions. On the union side especially, there were many arbitrary assumptions, based on the belief that technology could not and would not change, or if it did, it could not and would not be allowed to make any difference to existing processes or roles.

Vested interests: The entire context was riddled with vested interests, almost all of which were in conflict. A stream of intermediaries – agent, publisher, pre-press, press, retail – stood between author and audience. Typesetting-systems were expensive pieces of equipment, yet with not all that much to justify their cost: there was lot of money to made there, both from machinery-sales and from fonts and other consumables, and hence a lot of ‘need’ to protect those sources of income. Until IBM eventually stepped in, most of the microcomputer manufacturers were trying to establish themselves as ‘the manufacturer’, resulting in a plethora of mostly-proprietary, mostly-incompatible hardware and software non-’standards’ – at one point we had to buy two machines whose sole function was to read the two hundred or more different disk-formats used on the four distinct disk form-factors then in common use: 8″, 5.25″, 3.5″ and 3″. Weaving a path between all the different vested-interests and proprietary structures was, frankly, a time-wasting nightmare.

Assessment and action: On our first machine, we’d been told emphatically that it was physically impossible to connect a microcomputer; a weekend spent poring over technical specs and waving a soldering-iron around a bit on a prototype-board soon proved that ‘fact’ wrong, whilst the only software we needed at first was a straightforward lookup-table to translate between character-sets. It really was that simple. (We avoided warranty risks by using opto-isolators, so there was no electrical connection between the two machines.) For our later, larger systems – which were capable of typesetting a reasonable-sized book in less than an hour – the hardware-interfaces were already built in. This gave us ‘direct typesetting’ capability, but it still required operators to know – and use – the distinct formatting-codes for each type of machine.

The next step was to hide the complexity, using the format-code in common word-processors such as WordStar to trigger font-changes and the like. (I believe we were the first people to use style-codes, such that a single hideable code – *F1, for example – would change the entire style, including paragraphs, indents, font-family and so on.) At that point, people could use ordinary word-processors to typeset text: the first true precursor to desktop-publishing.

It worked, but there were still limitations. (Our main competitor, meanwhile, was using a mangled form of SGML which still required people to embed hard-codes in the text; in our system, all of the formatting could be invisible.) The main problem was that people couldn’t see beforehand exactly how much space any text would take up – a very important concern to two of our customers, who were producing page-spread books and partworks, Dorling-Kindersley style. Hence some serious code-hacking (all assembly-language, with multiple overlays to squeeze into no more than 40kb of memory) to create a post-processor that would copyfit line-by-line for the correct fonts and sizes, and output a symbolic result to a dot-matrix printer. This was probably the first viable attempt at a true desktop-publishing system – several years before Macintosh and, later, PageMaker.

End-result: I’m good at creating ideas and markets, and all the preliminary work that gets things going, but I’m not good at running businesses – that’s a different mindset entirely. Eventually we sold out to another pre-press company and (in an all too literal sense) I ran away, first to the US, and then onward to Australia. I believe it’s still running, and certainly made millions for the new owners. (I didn’t, of course.)

Example: Domestic-violence resolution (1980s-90s)

Big-picture theme: reducing and repairing the damage from social harm, particularly between individuals.

History: Fights and power-games between individuals in a domestic context have been part of the human story since forever, but had usually been largely covert and ignored as ‘a private matter’ for most of that time. It was brought into public notice in 1970s by women’s activists, most notably Erin Pizzey, founder of Chiswick Women’s Aid. Unlike Pizzey herself (who has always insisted that domestic-violence (DV) is a human problem, not a gendered one), most activists purport that DV is something that happens almost exclusively to women, and caused almost exclusively by men – so much so that some have called for the term ‘domestic-violence’ to be replaced always by the term ‘violence against women’. Most current law (e.g. US ‘Violence Against Women Act’), support-structures (domestic-violence help-lines) and formal theory (e.g. Duluth) reflect this assertion. I became involved in the field during the 1980s as a member of a pro-feminist men’s group who were taking up the feminist challenge that all violence was caused by men alone, and therefore men’s responsibility alone to resolve the (purportedly) ever-rising tide of men’s violence against women. The issues became more personal later when two of my lesbian friends asked me for advice after they had ended their relationship with a knife fight (without injuring each other, fortunately) but had been explicitly shut out from any help because no man could be blamed for the violence.

Conceptual mismatch: The theory was straightforward: men are the problem, women are the solution, and the only useful thing that men can do is blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in the world. Everything in my background supported that assertion, hence it seemed to make sense: self-blame had been a very deeply ingrained habit for me, going right back to earliest childhood. Yet the whole field seemed riddled with gendered special-cases: behaviours that were definitely violence if done by a man were, if done by a woman, either deemed ‘not violence’ or ‘indirectly caused by men, therefore men’s fault’. In the Duluth model, blame itself was classed as a form of violence only if done by a man, and only if the person being blamed was an adult woman: blaming of men (or in essence almost any other form of abuse of men), was explicitly not classed as violence. And the real catch was that, in terms of outcomes, it clearly wasn’t working: no matter how much we blamed ourselves, and blamed other men, the overall level of violence in the culture around us still seemed to continue to rise.

Vested interests: Looking around, it was very clear that there were a large number of players – mostly but not all women – whose identity and self-worth depended on putting men down, regardless of whether or not this actually helped women in general, or anyone in general. There were also very large sums of money, and large numbers of jobs, that depended on maintaining the assertions around women’s purported exclusive victimhood in this context.

Assessment and action: The first warning-signs appeared in one of our standard text-books, Paul Kivel’s Men’s Work: How To Stop The Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart, which is designed around a series of workshops for senior-school students. The book includes many oddly-unrealistic role-play scenarios in which an adolescent boy or young man is suddenly violent or abusive to a woman; yet the only real example of violence described in the whole book is an actual incident in which two girls had a full claws-out fight when one insulted the other in the classroom – and in which no boys were involved at all, other than to separate the warring parties.

After my lesbian friends had their knife-fight, we discovered that no violence-resolution material was available that acknowledged even the possibility that a woman could be a perpetrator of violence. The standard Duluth model defines violence as inherently ‘male’; on the Duluth Wheel, female pronouns are used exclusively throughout to indicate victim, and male pronouns exclusively for perpetrator, and mutuality (where both parties are both ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ of each other and of themselves) – which clearly applied in my friends’ case – is explicitly denied. I decided to try a very simple thought-experiment: swap the gender-pronouns throughout, and see if it still makes sense in terms of real-world evidence and experience. It did: in fact for most of the Duluth categories of abuse it made more sense than the ‘official’ way round. Also – importantly – two key categories of abuse were absent from the original model: sexual abuse, and third-party-abuse. It became immediately clear that the Duluth model itself was structured as third-party abuse, primarily leveraged through other-blame – in other words, far from reducing violence and abuse, it was actually designed to increase it. (Whether that mis-design was intentional, or merely arose from incompetence and excess zeal, is a separate issue that I will not discuss here… – but the fact of its unfitness for purpose cannot be in any doubt.) A simple ‘de-gendered’ redesign resolved almost all of the structural problems, sufficient at least to satisfy my friends’ immediate needs.

That exposure of the extreme inadequacies of the original Duluth model forced our group to reassess all of our previous assumptions about gender and violence, and thence to look again at the research on whose purported facts we’d based those beliefs. I did two analyses of a much-published study on which Australian public policy was based – the first analysis on the public version of the paper and political assertions from it, and the second analysis on the original academic study, which took quite a bit of work to obtain, since it was not publicly available. Another colleague, as his MA thesis, undertook a meta-analysis of domestic-violence studies in Australia. The results were shocking. None of the original studies were based on defensible methodologies – in fact many were so riddled with basic methodological errors such as circular-reasoning that they were essentially meaningless. And in all cases, all of the methodological errors either inflated the female injury-rate or risk, diminished or denied the male injury-rate or risk, or both: there were no exceptions. In short, almost none of what we’d previously taken as ‘fact’ was fact at all. The only genuine facts we could establish was that domestic-violence was a systemic issue with some gendered overtones, and that although it that affected both sexes in different ways, overall it seemed to do so almost equally – though there were strong indications from hospital data and the like that the majority of victims were male, not female.

We then looked at public policy, and the provision of domestic-violence support-services. These too were based on the same fundamentally-flawed assumptions and the same unquestioned circular reasoning: women are the only victims, hence support-services are only available to women; and since only women use these services, this proves that women are the only victims. In some of our interviews we discovered that men who’d been abused – knifed, in one case – were referred to police for charges, simply because the models in use automatically deemed men to be the sole perpetrators, regardless of the actual context or evidence. In short, the entire domestic-violence resolution ‘industry’ it was, and still is, an unworkable and fundamentally dysfunctional mess whose structures and methods are all but guaranteed to cause far more harm than good: an archetypal example of the Shirky Principle that any institution will attempt to preserve the problem to which it purports to be the ‘solution’.

End-result: The domestic-violence ‘industry’ is the outcome of a classic example of a ‘term-hijack‘, in which a small subset of systemic issue is misframed as the whole, and strenuous efforts are made to deny or conceal any other aspect of that issue. In effect, the term-hijack converts a resolvable systemic context into a non-resolvable ‘wicked-problem‘, in which every attempt to resolve a problem is constrained by the structural myopia, inevitably making things worse with each iteration. Unfortunately, there are huge vested-interests in maintaining the term-hijack. Anyone who challenges it – as I and many others have learnt to our cost – is likely to come face to face with extreme violence from women who somehow purport that no woman is ever violent. It seems clear that resolving these structural problems would require a high level of honesty and humility from those players – an honesty that in most cases at present seems conspicuous only by its absence…

Some of the material I wrote is out there and in daily front-line use by others – with real success, according to the occasional emails I still receive on the subject. But to be blunt, after a decade of relentless ongoing abuse from almost all sides, I just gave up and literally threw away most of the work that I’d done… the structural dishonesties in this mess are so entrenched and so ‘political’ that I found it just too painful to be involved at all, and it still seems that resolving the mess would require fundamental shifts in societal attitudes and beliefs that would be unlikely to occur within my own lifetime. Oh well.

The issues are generic, though, and can be resolved at a more generic level. You’ll see how some of these exact same issues are addressed in the business-context in my book Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems and its accompanying ‘manifesto‘.

Example: Enterprise-architecture (2000s-to-present)

Big-picture theme: helping organisations and overall shared-enterprises become more efficient and effective (‘doing the right things right, on purpose’).

History: The main focus of enterprise-architecture is around the relationships between structure, purpose and business-execution.As a discipline, it’s been around for at least a century in various forms, such as Taylorism (‘scientific management’), operations-research and organisational cybernetics. I often describe it as based on a single, very simple idea: that things work better when they work together. Although my work often touched on it over the decades, I first became actively involved perhaps fifteen years ago, when trying to tackle issues around long-term knowledge-management in aircraft research. Over the past decade, most of my work has revolved around various aspects of enterprise-architectures.

Conceptual mismatch: The term ‘enterprise-architecture’ implies a very broad whole-enterprise scope. In recent decades, though, the term ‘enterprise-architecture’ has often been (mis)used to denote a very small subset of the real scope, relating to IT-infrastructure or IT-systems in general. This (mis)usage probably arose from a simple conflation of the term ‘enterprise- or organisation-wide IT-architecture’. The result, however, is a very serious term-hijack: the tiny subset of the overall enterprise represented by IT purports to be the whole, with all other aspects of the enterprise – including people, purpose, physical facilities and non-IT machines of any kind – either concealed or denied. In effect, it becomes all but impossible to discuss any aspect of enterprise-architecture without being forced to describe everything in terms of IT – even in contexts where IT-systems are either not relevant or not available.

Vested interests: There are huge vested interests in maintaining the story that ‘enterprise-architecture’ relates only to IT. Many, many billions of dollars are invested each year on IT-systems that purport to resolve inherently-complex enterprise-scale concerns such as customer-relationships, market-relationships, regulatory-compliance and the like. However, by definition, many if not most of these systems are incapable of resolving all aspects of the respective concerns, in effect converting them into non-resolvable wicked-problems; maintaining the ‘enterprise-architecture’ term-hijack makes it possible to conceal or deny the inherent dysfunctionality of the systems, instead maintaining the faith or fiction that the problems created can only be solved by yet another IT-centric system at yet further cost. There are also large vested-interests in training, certification and the like for IT-centric ‘enterprise’-architectures.

Assessment and action: The starting-point for assessment was a simple review of the term itself, deriving the natural-meaning via term-inversion. The ‘natural-meaning’ of a term is the meaning implied by the individual words of the term. The term-inversion here is ‘the architecture of the enterprise’: hence the natural-meaning is ‘anything to do with the structure and purpose [architecture] that underpin the emotional drivers and actions (the animal spirits of the entrepreneur”) in the shared context [enterprise]‘. The purported exclusive-association of enterprise-architecture with IT does not occur in the natural-meaning: in fact the role of IT in the enterprise-architecture is implied only peripherally, as a minor aspect of support for ‘the animal spirits of the entrepreneur’. In other words, what we’re dealing with here is definitely a term-hijack – and an extremely unhelpful one at that, because the constraint on the scope (i.e. ‘enterprise’-architecture constrained solely to IT aspects of the enterprise) has such a limited connection with the actual scope (which would naturally focus more around people than machines).

Most of my work in the past decade, and particularly the past five years, has been focussed on finding ways to highlight the term-hijack, to resolve the resultant problems and dysfunctionalities, and to create models, methods and frameworks to guide a true enterprise-scope architecture, in some cases all the way out to a global scale. The public outcomes of this work so far include several books, a couple of dozen conference-presentations and other slidedecks, and many, many weblog posts.

End-result: We are getting somewhere with this one. Most ‘enterprise’-architecture conferences these days do explicitly include some discussion of the enterprise-scope beyond IT, usually under a banner of ‘business-architecture’, and there’s much stronger linkage to true business-architecture models and techniques such as Business Model Canvas. The real danger now is there’s a tendency towards ‘business-centrism’ rather than ‘IT-centrism’ – in other words, where the architecture sub-domain of ‘the business of the business’ rather than the sub-domain of ‘the IT-systems’ becomes used as the base for yet another term-hijack. The crucial understanding that we’re still somewhat struggling to get across to most of the players in the field is that in a true enterprise-architecture, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’.

But yes, we are getting somewhere with this one. Slowly…

Summary

So that’s what I do, and how I do it:

• explore a context that is of interest to me
• identify the conceptual mismatches that occur within that context, and that make it difficult to achieve effective results within that context
• identify the vested-interests that drive and maintain the current dysfunctionalities in the context, and, where possible, devise strategies and tactics to disarm and disengage those vested-interests
• assess the details of the dysfunctionalities in the context, and identify or design workarounds for those problems, and methods to work on the context when the dysfunctionalities are disengaged
• document the end-results in various forms, as appropriate

It’s a lot of work, and sometimes very painful work, but someone has do it?

A gentle warning on occupational-hazards

To anyone who might want to do this kind of work, I really ought to add some important caveats.

The work itself is actually not that hard. All it requires is a willingness to let go of assumptions, and tackle each of the issues with a rigorous attention to discipline, following the ever-changing rules of the different disciplines that apply at each moment whilst working in that context. Using beliefs as tools can be kind of challenging at times, but again it’s just another skill, and one that’s not that hard to build up over time.

It’s the social aspects of the work that are hard: sometimes very hard…

For starters, it’s often lonely. Very lonely. Part of that is because there aren’t many people who do this kind of work: at a guess, from what I’ve seen around the net and elsewhere, there may be as few as five or ten thousand people in the entire world who work in this space. Social-media does help to ease the loneliness a bit – the people I work most closely with are scattered literally across the entire globe – but it’s not the same as working in close proximity with close colleagues every working day.

Another part of the loneliness is that the feeling of loneliness – and likewise insistent sense of self-doubt – is actually inherent in the work. It’s almost an indicator of success: as Whitney Johnson put it in her HBR article ‘Disrupt Yourself‘, “If it feels scary and lonely, you’re probably on the right track”. To put it the other way round, the times when we feel most certain are probably the times when we’ve most likely missed the point. It’s hard, and it usually hurts, every single day: so if you can’t cope with a relentless, all-pervading feeling of failure, and yet somehow still create the required results, you really shouldn’t to do this work. There are plenty of other much easier ways to make a living, after all. (This isn’t a macho thing, “I’m tough” and that kind of garbage: in my own case, to be honest, I’m probably not suited to do most other kinds of work anyway. For me, though, there’s a real sense of ‘a calling’, an inner drive to do this work, whether I want to or not: and often that’s the only thing that keeps me going… )

Another crucial point is that whilst there’s a great need for this kind of work, there’s also a huge ‘anti-want’ for it. Every aspect of this work implies some kind of mythquake; and anyone who has a vested interest in the status-quo – which in effect that includes most of our would-be employers, amongst many, many others – will not want that mythquake to occur. It’s disruptive: it is, in a very literal sense, often anarchic. So for much if not most of the time, we’ll need to do the work ‘by stealth’, embedding it in other more conventional analysis-work or the like. Doing it ‘by stealth’ is often the only option if you’re an employee, and even then it can be risky: as one of my ProFuturist colleagues put it, “if you’re employed as a professional futurist, and you’re not being fired at least once every year or so, you’re probably not doing your job properly!”

In my own case, I’ve never been an employee: only ever a self-employed contractor, an independent consultant or running my own business. I’ve survived somehow, though often I don’t know quite know how – it’s certainly not an easy way to run one’s professional-life. But I’m well aware that’s not a viable option for many people, especially those with young families. If you are an employee, and you want or need to do this kind of work, you definitely need a Plan B – and work hard on building and maintaining your professional reputation, such that you can recover from being fired after that ‘one disruption too many’.

Another subtle problem that affects many of us arises from the fact that this work requires us to be very good generalists. The good part of being a generalist is that we’re able to learn fast and be interested in anything, at any level of the enterprise. The disadvantage is that, when people compare us to specialists, we almost always come off second-best – and the fact that we specialise in being generalists doesn’t seem to count, especially where the over-simplistic assessments of recruiters and the like so often come into play. In almost all of my contract- or consultancy-work in the past couple of decades, I’ve ended up doing a different (and much broader-scope) role than the one I was nominally employed for: the problem was that I somehow needed to employed for something in the first place, and that can be a real hurdle. So the catch for us is that we need to be at least as skilled as the typical specialist, whilst also being very skilled as a generalist. It’s not easy, and is one reason why the really good enterprise-architects tend to be older, often into their fifties or more – simply because it takes that long to build up the generalist portfolio and experience whilst embedded in what is (to be honest) often a complete waste of time and effort in a ‘required’ but irrelevant specialist role.

Overall, though, it’s probably the loneliness that hurts the most. But if you can cope with that, and with all of the other challenges of ‘the trade’, then yes, we definitely need you… come and join the club, perhaps?

These are not trivial questions, as indicated well by these tweets from Chris Potts and Robert Phipps:

• chrisdpotts: @tetradian What comes first in an enterprise, and with that its architecture, is determined by the people whose enterprise it is. // You can choose whether you want be an architect of my enterprise, fair enough, but not what my enterprise is. #entarch
• Robert_Phipps: @chrisdpotts @tetradian this is almost a political resolution to the #entarch question.

The essence of a great sparring-partner is that they come up with great challenges, and these are some of the best. Chris is right: the notion that an enterprise-architect designs the enterprise itself seems at first to be a statement of incredible and unforgivable arrogance. And Robert is right, too: by its very nature, all enterprise-architecture work is intensely political – about as political as it gets, really…

And yet enterprise-architects do also do design – in the enterprise. Of the enterprise. About the enterprise.

But only design sort-of. Kinda. Ish. Y’know? That kinda thing? All a bit blurry, subtle… all about implications, edges, options, opportunities…

The real clue is in that comment of Robert’s above: it’s all political. Very. It’s all about people – so it’s not quite the kind of design-thinking that we would use in designing a machine to make toothpaste-tubes. We don’t design enterprises as such: as Chris indicates, they develop from people, as an expression of people and their choices and desires – and the notion that we should, would or even could ‘design’ people or people’s choices is an insult in the extreme. (Not that that’s an unusual insult, unfortunately…)

The enterprise is itself: “the animal spirits” of the entrepreneur and everyday people, as Chris puts it sometimes. That’s the whole point. Yet there is a specific sense in which we do sort-of design about the enterprise. The key resides in what we mean by ‘enterprise’ and ‘organisation’, and the crucial differences between them:

• an enterprise is bounded by vision, values and commitments: it is primarily about ‘Why‘
• an organisation is bounded by rules, roles and responsibilities: it is primarily about ‘How’ and ‘What’ and and ‘Who’ and ‘Where’ and ‘When’- in fact almost everything except ‘Why’

They are not the same: and if we ever make the mistake of thinking that they are the same, we’re in deep trouble. (It’s true that, by definition, the boundaries of an organisation do also coincide with the boundaries of an enterprise – but it’s a special-case, and one of which we should be very wary in enterprise-architectures.) Crucially, the nature of an organisation means that it has no ‘Why’ of its own: to make sense of its existence – to give it a reason to exist – it needs to attach itself to the ‘Why’ of an enterprise that is greater than itself. If it loses that connection, it tends to revert automatically to the dreaded metaphor of ‘organisation-as-machine’ – literally, a machine without a purpose, or at best with a non-purpose such as ‘making money’ that confuses means with ends – that has disastrous consequences for almost everyone involved. One of the key tasks of enterprise-architecture is to identify the enterprise to which the organisation is or needs to be attached, and to help guide the organisation’s responses to and relations with that enterprise. Enterprise-architects do not design the enterprise: they provide decision-support to guide the organisation in its relations with the enterprise. That’s a subtle yet very important distinction.

Enterprise-architects develop an architecture about an enterprise, for an organisation. Yet what do we mean by ‘an enterprise’, in this context? The simplest summary is that what we look for is an extended-enterprise or shared-enterprise – defined by some kind of shared and very human drive or intent – that denotes a conceptual and/or emotive space about three steps larger in scope than the organisation itself. The organisation sort-of ‘is’ an enterprise (that special-case, as above) that has a shared-enterprise with its partners – ‘customers’ and ‘suppliers’ – that exists within a broader shared-enterprise – the ‘market’ or its equivalents – that exists within a yet broader shared-enterprise of people who are emotionally or otherwise engaged in that overall aim or intent yet are not actively or directly engaged within that market.

An enterprise simply is: it cannot be ‘designed’ as such. (Nor is it anything that anyone could ‘possess’, or ‘control’ – a mistake still made by too many marketers, managers and MBAs…) Yet each enterprise is also bounded by vision, values and commitments – to which the organisation itself commits by choosing to align itself with that enterprise. The vision, the values, the commitments and even the alignment of the organisation to each of those often starts out as implicit: a key part of the role of the EA is to identify each of those implicit items, bring them into a more explicit space, and hence enable more-explicit and more-considered choices. That’s where the ‘design’ comes in: it’s not design of the enterprise, but about the enterprise, for the organisation in relation to (and relations with) that chosen enterprise.

Enterprises intersect: I’ve shown above a simple case of the organisation in relation to one enterprise, but in reality it’s more like a complex Venn-diagram, overlapping, overlaying, often arguing with each other, too. The organisation’s choice(s) of enterprise to which it chooses to align or belong – with the ‘choice’ often being either implicit and unknown, or mandated by fact of geography or social context – each bring consequences and other choices. For example, the extended-enterprise will hold the organisation accountable to the implied values and commitments of the enterprise, and will react strongly if the organisation fails to deliver on those commitments – which is where many organisations discover to their cost that there is indeed such a thing as ‘corporate social responsibility’, and that it’s not quite as simple as Milton Friedman‘s assertion that the sole social responsibility of business is to increase its profits…

I won’t go into detail on how we deal with those myriad of consequences: as usual, this post is too long already! But essentially that’s it: enterprise-architecture sort-of does and sort-of doesn’t ‘design’ the enterprise. It’s in that ‘sort-of’ where the real interest of the EA role lies.

Comments, anyone, as usual?

What follows is perhaps my favourite story-fragment, “Mishie’. (A gentle reminder that it’s fiction? ) A bit of context first, though. The fragment takes place perhaps thirty or forty years from now, some decades after one country has shifted from a ‘conventional’ possession-based economy to a responsibility-based (‘no-money’) economy. The latter is that ‘world’ that Mishie inhabits, has grown up in – and wants, very much, to see more of the world. A few terms: ‘vizzie’ is a ‘visitor’, someone from a different country; ‘GA’ and ‘garda’ are police, ‘tucker’ is a standard current Australianism for ‘food’; the language is basic English with a fair few adaptations over time, and a lot of local slang. The reference at the end to ‘that book we did in Year Nine’ is Ursula le Guin’s sci-fi masterpiece The Dispossessed. What happens in the story-fragment is a simple contrast of before, and after…

Over to you after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway: have fun, I hope?

Mishie

Baz,

U know i said this course was just a trick that Overseas uses to make it difficult to get a passport? Gods is that true or what! This bloody stuff cant be real, u would not believe the crap they make up about what the vizzies are supposed go through for resources – even the most basic everyday stuff!

They made us all sit through the most boringly stupid bloody lecture this morning, about what they called ‘the economics of money’. It made no sense at all: how u have to have credit or this actual money stuff – paper and coins and so on – before ure allowed to take anything, or use anything, or do anything, really. And if u live there u can only get the money by working for someone else, and they have to get it by working for someone else, and so on. If thats real, gods only knows how parents would survive, or kids, or the old, or the sick. Perhaps Overseas think they dont? though apparently theres something called ‘welfare’ which we wont get anyway. They said something about how all that works, with something called ‘taxes’ that everyone hates, and that we would have to give them even though we dont get any benefits, but it was all so bloody complicated i just gave up. I mean, who gives a shit? the headcases get into that stuff, but i just want to get on the road, dont i?

I guess they must be making it look worse than it is just to keep us on our toes and all that. They keep on saying stuff that the money has to do a two-way balance, to the dot, in everything – but everyone knows u cant get that in real-world systems, I mean, thats basic system-symmetry stuff from primary school, isnt it? And then they say that the more u have – the ‘richer’ u are – not only does that get u to more stuff and better stuff, but they give u more money as well, just because uve got the money in the first place. So theres no way it can balance anyway. I really dont get it. I mean, no-one could design something that stupid.

We had a go at it this afternoon, but gods its crazy! Theyve got this place laid out like a store street, like in a country town they said, but all the store windows are these bloody great sheets of glass and everythings on display and all really pretty and stuff. Everythings got prices on, money-labels, except for a couple of real fancy stores where there werent any prices, they said the idea was that if u have to ask the price it means u cant afford it, which apparently makes it better or something, but i cant see the point. And the prices are all different for the same thing in different stores and u have to go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards to work out which ones less, they called it the ‘cheapest’, in each place and get each thing in turn from each one and it takes ages to do it and noone would do it for real anyway so obviously its just another Overseas fake.

Theyve got actors and stuff to pretend to be storekeeps and so on. So they gave us this stupid moneyfold thing, which the girls are supposed call a ‘purse’ and the boys a ‘wallet’ even though its exactly the same thing, and got us to sit down in a cafe place and pretend to be prissy ladies and gentlemen from some poncy old pommy flick, drinking afternoon tea and all that kind of crap. And were supposed to look at the menu thing and check all the prices and look at the folds we each have and each count all the coins and paper in the fold and make sure we have enough to match the price of everything we ask for, then the biz takes the order and brings it all back and we have the dainty tea and she brings back a single bill and we all have to work out who ordered what and put it all in the middle and it never adds up because noone has the right coins and stuff, and the biz adds it all up again and makes sure weve given her enough and then e takes it away and brings back the extra – the ‘change’ – and we have to check es given us back the right amount and then were supposed to divvy that up and it doesnt balance either so were supposed to argue about that till its fair somehow, and then we have to work out an extra bit called a tip that goes to the biz and we have to argue about who pays what of that too and we put that on the table and then we can finally walk out the door. Overseas must be making all this stuff up to be stupid, of course, i mean, its like the prices thing, would anyone do all of that kind of petty crap for real?

So they took us next to a store and told one of the boys that the travel-pack e uses is bust and e has to get a new one. So e goes looking for a return bin to put the existing pack in for repair but e cant find one so e leaves it by the door to the back storeroom, then e goes to the rack and e picks out one thats the right sort of size and fitout, even waves at the storekeep to let en know es checking it out, and e goes to an unused scanner and e scans it and heads out. U know, just like anyone else would do? But no, Overseas want to make it all complicated just for the hell of it. Alarms go off as soon as e gets near the door, some lump of a guy in a black and white uniform thing comes out of nowhere and grabs en and yanks the arm of en up the back and other people come running up and call en a thief and the rest, and all other sorts of crap.

Its all play-acting of course but the Overseas instructors look smug and say they did it to show us what happens if we get it wrong like that. What es supposed to do is really stupid, even worse than that fart-arsing around we did in the cafe. First thing is – get this – there isnt a return-bin, in fact if e leaves the pack by the back door for repair itd be called littering, es supposed to just throw it away someplace else so it doesnt get repaired or reused. This is ‘good for the economy’ apparently though id say its totally bloody mental. Then e goes to the rack and theyre all different prices with long-use ones more price than short-life ones, which again is stupid because everyone knows the short-lifes are more wasteful. Then e has to look in the fold e uses and see if e has enough money for the pack e chooses and if e hasnt then to use the credit instead and if e hasnt enough in credit e has to forget it or pick out a crappy short-life or something, and i asked the instructors how es supposed to know if e has enough credit or not and they said e has to know the ‘balance’ for him at all times even without a telelink, which again must be just them being petty for the sake of it. Then when e thinks es got the right pack and the right money e has to go find a queue for a scanner that one of the storekeeps is using and wait in line for that and then the storekeep scans the pack and asks for the money and e has to give the coins and paper or the credit and the storekeep then checks all of that and gives back the change if es used coins but this time there isnt any tip, and the storekeep clears something in the scan because when thats all done the alarm doesnt go off and es allowed to go out of the door without being attacked by the thug in the white shirt. It all takes about twice as long as the ordinary way and ties up about twice as many people and its really really stupid. So i think Overseas are just making it all up to try to put us off. Well it hasnt worked for me – Im still going.

There was more of that crap for the rest of the afternoon but i couldnt be bothered, i just went to the cafe instead with some of the others. And we didnt play their stupid money games, we had drinks and tucker in the normal way just like we should.

This evening there was another stupid lecture about how its sposed to be easier if we stick together as a crew and use someone whos been before as a kind of guide. Well im stuffed if ill do that, im nineteen years old for gods sakes and i know how to look after the self and i don’t need a bloody nursemaid, thank you Overseas!

Just two more days of this crap to put up with and then ill have the passport so i can at last get the hell out of this stupid back­water of a country for a while at least, until they drag me back or something. Ive managed to scrib a flight slot on Monday week, so see u again in a few months time!

Mishie

———

Baz

Im in the pound at the consulate. Theyve booked me on the next flight home, so Ill probably see you tomorrow.

I lasted one day, Baz. Just one fucking day. Thats it.

One fucking awful day.

I got in from the port, dumped the packs at the hostel, went out for a drink, like anyone would. Its real pretty out there, lots happening, lots of girls, the rest. Went through a couple of glasses, pints they said, and had a few laughs with the girls in the bar and the mates with them and all, and they said that i was paying for it all, which was fine, its just a drink, right? that’s what u do, isnt it? Well, not there, apparently, the barkeep said that was most of the money for the week for me gone in one hit. I was just about trying to make sense of that when i went out for a piss, left the fold on the counter, came back and the fold wasnt there any more and the barkeep said e didnt know anything about it and it was the fault of me anyway for not looking after it and told me to piss off because i didnt have any money left.

So fair enough, id had enough to drink so I left and went to a cafe down the road for a feed. All smiles and such, and nice tucker, too. So id finished and i got up to go to the door, like u do, and this biz whod brought me the meal comes running up and says i havent paid. So i says, yeah, i dont have any money with me any more, someones walked off with the fold, so whats the problem, all this money stuff its all some stupid bloody game isnt it? And e gets real pissed off at this, and this big hefty security guy comes up and starts being snarky at me so now im getting pissed off at the lot of them, so i just walk out the door of course. Then the stupid bugger comes after me and tries to grab me, and ive had a couple of drinks and im half out my skull from the jetlag so i think were back in Defence so i flip en onto the floor and leave en there and keep walking.

Next thing i know theres a couple of GA cars come screaming up and they all jump out and they push guns at me – the fucking garda have guns here, Baz! – and they mustve thrown a vomit-comet because thats it, its like someones hit me with a sledge­hammer and im on the ground puking the guts out. They pick me up and slam me against the wagon and turn me round and tie the hands behind the back, but as soon as i open the mouth to ask what the fuck theyre playing at, someone says something like, shit, its a jaffa, means just another fucking aussie apparently, and they stop playing quite so bloody rough and just turn sarky instead, which i guess was kind of them but it didnt bloody feel it. And then they do an iris-and-retina and they cant find a match of course and they ask questions and more questions and more bloody questions and they bundle me into the back of the wagon and take me back to the hostel.

So we get to the hostel and at least the doorkeep says es seen me check in before so they ease off a bit at that. But they want to see the ID for me because i havent registered at the GA yet and they keep saying there will be charges but i dont whether they mean money or court or both, and we get to the dorm and the packs arent there which means the passport isnt there and noone knows where theyve gone. So im up shit creek apparently.

They bundle me back in the wagon again and we turn up at the consulate and the sergeant says to the counterkeep im making out im ‘one of your fucking lot’ and that if e can show a match for me e can keep me and theyll hit the consulate with the bill, otherwise theyll take me to the cleaners and the rest of it. So thank the gods for the consulate and for bloody auto-DNA or i really would have been fucked i reckon.

The guys here have been pretty good about it really, specially after i said it was the first day and all. They said i was bloody stupid to try to go it alone as a first-timer, but that was about it: u arent the first and u wont be the last, someone said. So now i got a bunk for the night and a change of clothes and some proper tucker this time, and ill be off in the morning.

They even said i can have another passport and another go if i do the course again and come over with a crew next time, but i dont think ill bother. They are mad here, Baz – fucking insane. And they can keep it. Ive had my adventure – “true journey is to return”, wasnt it, in that book we did in Year Nine? So i reckon im staying home from now on. Isnt so bad after all.

See u soon

Mishie

“Yabbies. Funny little things, all in their own world at the bottom of the dam. A bit like us, ain’t they? Can’t see a thing for all the mud in the water; bits and pieces drift down, in any old order, all out of sequence, an’ we have to make sense of them as best we can.”

The real yabby is a small Australian crayfish, a kind of miniature freshwater lobster. They’re common all over Australia, particularly in the south-east, and can frequently be found burrowing into the sides of a farm dam – hence their Latin name cherax destructor. They seem to come in all kinds of colours, from muddy brown to red to white to a really startling blue, such as this fairly large one at something close to actual size:

Yet what’s the connection to the book? Uh.. not much, to be honest. What’s now come out as the book first started out more than a dozen years ago as an idea about sustainability: namely, that we won’t be able to achieve any kind of sustainable economy unless we have a system of law that supports it – which we certainly don’t have at present. The working-title for the project was ‘Yet Another Book Idea’ – hence the acronym YABI. Which had a nice ring to it, and hence kind of stayed in the mind as ‘Yabbies’. Which is what the project has been called ever since. A bit unfair on real yabbies, and yabby-farmers and the like, perhaps, but there ’tis.

The idea of story-fragments that could assembled in any order came on quite early in project – in fact the first form in which it surfaced was as an interactive website in which people could make up their own story and add their own story-fragments to build a richer picture of the YABI ‘world’. (This was in the days before social-media, so it never really went anywhere: perhaps it might be worth-while having another go at recreating that website somewhen soon?) Later on, I tried doing it as a screenplay: it worked quite well as a story, but with so many characters in so many cameos it would almost certainly be too complicated an expensive to produce as a conventional film-type story. (But it might work well with current transmedia – another avenue to explore, perhaps.) All sorts of other frames I’ve tried out over the years: one version had technical notes attached to each story-fragment, another split it into separate story-streams for distinct audiences, and so on. But this version will do for now? – enough to get the story-ideas out there, anyway.

Its real aim, I guess, is to get some pretty challenging ideas out there in a more palatable form – hence packaging it as fiction. The ideas behind it, though, are not fiction at all: they’re real issues that somehow, collectively, we must all face, and definitely sooner rather than later. Make of it what you will, perhaps?

And the yabbies themselves? Yes, they’re strange little creatures, “all in their own world at the bottom of the dam”. Feeding on whatever falls down from the surface, making sense as best they can. Linking that across to my more usual ‘world’ of enterprise-architectures and the like, that’s kind of what we do every day, isn’t it? So I kind of like yabbies as a metaphor for ourselves…