Tom Graves / Tetradian

‘Tis the season for… something, probably?

For many people, it’s ‘the ‘Holiday Season’, or Christmas, or New Year, or something like that. A calendrical marker-point, anyway. Something to celebrate, perhaps.

The culture I come from is nominally Christian, hence ‘Christmas’ and suchlike, so that’s the label others around me tend to use. (Though it doesn’t quite have the same sense for me, I’ll admit: in religious terms, my family-background is in the Quaker tradition, which historically regards Christmas as ‘just another day’.)

[These days 'Christmas' in this country seems barely Christian anyway: it's much more about families - which sadly doesn't have much relevance for me - and, even more, about the real 'state-religion', the Church of Conspicuous Consumption, which I try to avoid as much as possible...]

As a perennial Outsider, my real colleagues are scattered around the globe: I have stronger connections with people in the Netherlands, Australia,Guatemala, Brazil or the US, for example, than with just about anyone in this town. Those friends and families and colleagues all follow different faiths, different traditions, different worldviews: even the Christians amongst them will celebrate their Christmas on different dates, from 1st December right through to 6th January (‘Twelfth Night’, also known in England as ‘Old Christmas’). And even a nominally-secular marker such as ‘New Year’ can be almost as problematic: there seem to be dozens of different definitions of ‘New Year’, few of which make much sense to anyone else.

So it’s kinda tricky knowing what to ‘celebrate’, or know which date-marker to use. For purely pragmatic reasons, I tend to focus on astronomical markers such as solstices and equinoxes, because they’re probably the ‘safest’ in social terms. Hence today, being the solstice closest to the most-acknowledged festival in these parts, and also closest to the New-Year point for this culture.

Even so, which solstice? It’s winter-solstice here, but summer-solstice for my friends down south; and solstices don’t mean much anyway to my friends in the tropical-regions, whose ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ and the like align with other real-world markers. Hmm… see what I mean by ‘kinda tricky’?

So what can a not-particularly-social not-particularly-anchored-anywhere soft-of-digital-native do or say these days, in terms of others’ societal celebrations?

I guess the best I can offer is that however, whatever and whenever you choose your celebrations to be, have fun, and Have A Happy Whatever!

Enjoy! – and thanks again for sharing this journey with me over the passing year.

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan?

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?

When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture.

Am I giving up? No, not at all.

Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll just have to put up with that. )

So what exactly am I doing, then?

All I’m doing here, metaphorically speaking, is that I’m moving along the road a bit: a few metaphoric houses up the road, if you like. Similar sort of work to what I’ve always done, in many ways, but a much bigger picture this time. A much bigger picture. I’m not going to be looking (much) at the ‘enterprise’-architecture of some small bits of detail-level IT any more: I’ll be looking at the ‘enterprise-architecture’ of the whole darn planet…

Arrogant sucker, ain’t I?

In a way, yeah, of course it is, to say something like that. But if you look around on this blog and elsewhere, in effect that’s what I’ve already been doing, for years. All that’s really different now is that I’m making it a bit more explicit.

And to be blunt, looking around a bit, it really does feel as if I’m one of the few people anywhere who has a freakin’ clue about what’s really going on out there (answer: an MQ-9 mythquake [kind of like a worldwide Richter-9 earthquake, only worse]), what chance we have to stop it (answer: none at all), what won’t work (answer: just about everything we might think of as ‘normal’ or ‘business-as-usual’), and what might work (very-tentative-suggested-answer: something on the lines of a responsibility-based service-oriented enterprise model for a global economics, with systematic eradication of any concept of possession – including all concept of ‘rights’ – and total restructure of every possible aspect of politics at every level. In other words, just a few minor changes here and there… ). Seems like there might be a real need, then, for someone with my kind of background in futures, social-dynamics, skills-development, creativity, complexity, innovation, sensemaking and strategy, across a whole swathe of different companies, climates, cultures and continents. Oh, and there’s also enterprise-architectures, of course: reckon that might possibly be useful, too.

Yes: a real big need for that.

Kind of a big anti-want for it, though.

A very big anti-want.

Oh well.

But no problem, really. Do I think I can make a living out of it? Nope, of course not: I’m not that crazy. But I’m not making any kind of viable living out of enterprise-architecture, either, so what’s the difference? As long as I can pay my way somehow in this increasingly-insane ‘economic system’, that’s all I’ll need. And given that I’ve survived somehow for all these years, without ever having suffered the indignity of being a so-called ‘permanent’ employee, I reckon I’ll manage to keep going for a while yet. Somehow. Doesn’t really matter that I don’t know how: the way things are going, pretty soon no concept of a ‘plan’ is going to make sense any more, so perhaps I’m just getting in early to beat the rush?

Yeah, sure it’s lonely at times: I don’t have any real support at all, no family, no partner since literally decades ago, and at my age pretty unlikely ever again. Good: it means that there’s no-one else to get hurt on my behalf if I screw things up.

Sure it’s scary, desperately insecure: I don’t even have a home of my own any more. Good: nothing particularly to lose, then; nothing of that kind that can be used as leverage against me. And I can just up-sticks and go anywhere that I’m needed. Easy. (In principle, anyway… )

I’m useless at organising anything, events, stuff like that. Good: instead of desperately pretending that I can do everything myself, let other people do that stuff instead – they’re much better at it than I’ve ever been or ever will be. Just do my part of the work, and let others get on with theirs. Simple. (Interesting challenges on trust, of course… )

Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. Live this stuff that I’ve been talking about: rather than ‘making a living’, much better to go for ‘making a life’.

Crazy? Sure. Of course it is: never said it wasn’t. But then I come out of a family-background with a long anarchist-style tradition (of the more constructive if occasionally-quixotic Quaker variety, rather than the brainless bomb-throwing kind), and it’s about time I put those principles into real-world practice. Time to give something back – especially as, at age 60, I probably don’t have that many years left in which to do so. That fact matters, a lot. It also brings its own rather interesting sense of urgency…

So what does all this mean, in plain, ordinary, everyday terms?

Various things I won’t be doing:

1. I won’t do any more work here on detail-layer analysis of IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture such as TOGAF or Archimate (unless anyone specifically asks me for an opinion or whatever).
2. I won’t be presenting myself for any more contract-work as an ‘enterprise-architect’. (I’ll still be available to do spot-work commercial consultancy or training for most types of EA, in just about any industry that isn’t finance, banking or insurance – but I will expect to get paid for that, every time.)
3. I won’t offer any more ‘free’ advice on enterprise-architecture or whatever to people who can darn well afford to pay for it. (I’ll still be more than happy to help anyone in any other way – especially any of the upcoming ‘new generation’ of enterprise-architects.)
4. I probably won’t be going to any more ‘enterprise’-architecture conferences, not least because I won’t be able to afford it (unless someone pays at least my expenses, of course).
5. I won’t pander any more to people who to me seem arrogant, bullying, unwilling to think, and otherwise acting in an asinine or irresponsible manner (and yes, there’s been a lot of them I’ve put up with way too often over the past few years…)

Various things I will be doing:

1. I will be doing a lot more research and exploration on ‘big-picture’ themes, developing new types of tools and techniques to tackle those issues in a much more constructive way than as at present; and working with others to develop new toolsets and training-materials for these needs. (It’d be nice if someone else paid for some of that work, but being realistic I wouldn’t expect it, unless anyone else that I’m working with is getting paid for it too.)
2. I will be doing various types of consultancy-work with non-profits, citizen-groups and other organisations that are reaching towards a more constructive world. (Again, it’d be nice if I got paid to do some of that, but I’d only expect it from commercial organisations or government bodies, who should be able to afford to subsidise some of that other work at least.)
3. I will show the EA community and others how to apply those ideas, tools and techniques, within the conventional business context, such as with Enterprise Canvas and the like. (It would likewise be nice if sometimes people would at least offer to pay some of my expenses for doing this, but I do acknowledge that there are too many of us already in this same boat that I am with regard to ‘real-EA’.)
4. I probably will be going to a wide variety of conferences and other gatherings on broader-scope societal-change topics. (As ever, the real limit here will be my probable near-nonexistent income: so if you really want me at your gathering, please do find some way to subsidise my travel-expenses at least.)
5. Much of my work and writing will be a lot more ‘political’ and challenging for a lot more folks: in which case, sorry, but that’s just too bad, because none of us can afford to tolerate outright irresponsibility and abuse any more. (I am very clear about what is and is not abuse in the social context, by the way: see the ‘manifesto‘ on that, from my book Power and Response-ability.)

So that’s it: getting down to work in a different garden – a garden that’s a rather better fit, than that of current mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, for this admittedly somewhat-strange kind of toad.

Comments / suggestions / requests, anyone?

Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes…

My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an overgrown tangle, and they didn’t have much of a clue about gardening, but it seemed a friendly sort of place. It even had its own toad, hiding in the humid dankness underneath a sprawl of strawberry-creepers that had crept in from under the fence from next-door.

It didn’t take long to see why the toad was there. Next-door’s garden was regimented, ordered, everything under control, just so. And all a bit sad, because nothing was thriving there. Beneath all that would-be perfection, the strawberry-patch was a mess of slugs and snails, stunting all the growth; what few fruit were left were all tiny. Yet over on my parents’ side of the fence, those same plants were producing a lush spread of abundant greenery, enough strawberries to keep a grocery going all on its own – and one very happy toad, who’d made very sure that there was not a single slug to be seen.

My mother realised what was happening in the next-door garden, and even offered to send ‘their’ toad over there. But the neighbour was adamant that she wasn’t having “that disgusting creature” in her perfect space: no way! And continued to fret over the fact that her once-imagined idyll was indeed dying…

Hence interesting that I’ve been writing about ‘the toad in the road‘, because I guess that’s what I am myself right now, in this garden we call ‘enterprise architecture’. A toad in the road: right idea, wrong place. Right idea for somewhere, I’d hope. But wrong place for here-and-now. Oh well.

Yeah, enterprise-architecture. You know, this could be a really nice garden? Especially if you got rid of most of this mess of concrete, and let those tired plants in their cracked concrete tubs get their roots down into the dirt at last. Plenty of potential and all that: to get the water flowing again, you might have to take a stick of dynamite to that ugly-looking paddling-pool that the last lot of kids built for themselves, over in the corner called ‘IT-centrism‘, but hey, it’s all here. Why not do it?

You’d wondered where all the wildlife went, but can’t you see there’s not much that can thrive in this kind of desert? A few bugs and wood-lice and a lizard or two, perhaps, but that’s about it. If you want it to work, perhaps plant a few things that can actually grow here: get a bit of shade going an’ all that. There’s a few plants of my own that might grow well here too, if given a halfway-decent chance: the Enterprise Canvas, perhaps, or that notation-agnostic metamodel; or maybe even a bunch of ideas about value-trees, about the service-oriented enterprise and the structure of management – kinda strange-looking at first, I know, but they really do work in this kind of climate. Only a suggestion, of course: it’s your garden, after all.

I’ll have to admit, though, that this isn’t really my kind of place that you’ve got here. Partly my fault, perhaps: I do know I’m kind of an Outsider – always have been, I guess – though I really have tried, I promise you. It’s just I really can’t cope with all the broken-down bits of machinery parked all over the place, and the possessiveness that still pervades everything: they do kinda get in the way all the time. And a bit too grey, too cold, too lifeless: too corporate, I suppose you could say? I’m gettin’ old, I s’pose: I need somewhere that’s a bit more comfortable with having real people around the place, a bit more aware of the anarchic nature of, well, nature itself? I guess I could do with a bit more of the bigger picture, too: and I don’t mind all those mythquakes that we can see coming down the road a ways, though I know they do worry some other folks a lot.

I’ll still be around, of course: if you need me, you know where to find me. And I’m always happy to drop by in your garden – especially if you find a way to bring it more back to life again.

But yeah, I gotta face the facts: this kind of ‘enterprise’-architecture garden ain’t no place for the likes o’ me – and out here at present I’m just another toad in the road.

So it’s “goodbye and thanks for all the slugs”, I guess? – because it seems like it’s time for this old toad to be a-movin’ on.

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

Sorry… my fault… many apologies…

Or should I be apologising for the apologies…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops…

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

Oops…

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

Oops…

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

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

Hmm…

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

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

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

Oops…

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

—

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

What do I do, and how do I do it? What’s the nature of my work, and the methods that I use? And for that matter, why?

That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘:

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

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

Read more…

…because the new day that starts in less than an hour’s time now is when I would stereotypically get that infamous bus-pass.

(Except that in this country I don’t actually get it for another 17 months: the governments here play an ever-popular game called ‘move the goal-posts so that we don’t have to provide what people have already paid for’. Bah.)

Yes. Tomorrow is the day I turn 60.

Sixty years of age.

Kind of scary, really. Officially ‘old’.

I’m glad to say that I don’t actually feel old. In some ways I’ve never felt better (although this week’s thoroughly nasty bout of something had me decidedly uncomfortable for a while… ), and I certainly do feel I’m doing some of my best work ever, helping to create new capabilities and options for an entire industry.

Doing it again, in fact – because, looking back over the decades, I’ve actually done so several times.

Back in my twenties I contributed a fair bit to the revival of the then somewhat moribund-discipline of dowsing. I’d long been interested in ideas that were on the outer fringes of any of the sciences or elsewhere, because even back then, coming from a design background, I knew that that’s where the most interesting possibilities were likely to reside. (Back then, too, I had little patience for ‘half-baked’ hype-merchants, on the one side; on the other side, the ‘over-cooked’, the self-styled ‘skeptics’ whose grasp of actual science was often worse than abysmal; and, worse, those who somehow merged all those incompetences together into one inedible mess – equivalent to the endemic IT-centrism or business-centrism of so much ‘enterprise’-architecture of today.) I was doing research on skills-education at the time, as part of my Masters degree: I chose dowsing as my test-case, because it’s an example of an almost ‘pure’ skill, in that almost its entirety resides in judgement and interpretation rather than in manual or conceptual dexterity. To prove the research, I wrote up part of the thesis test-case as a ‘teach-yourself” book on dowsing – which actually became a best-seller for a time, and in somewhat adapted form is still in print, 35 years later. I’ll admit I’m not actually that good as a dowser: I’ve always been much more interested in the methodology behind it – the internals, the ‘theory in support of practice’ – rather than deep-involvement in the practice itself.  A systems-view, if you like: a theme that comes up later in many other forms, of course.

Some years later, into my thirties, I was back to the other roots of that work, in graphic design. My then partner and I were running a pre-press bureau, using the then new technology of phototypesetting. The machines could run much faster than we could type: it was obvious that we could use more than one input terminal. But the manufacturers’ systems were fantastically expensive, and frankly crude – even cruder than the nascent microcomputer systems that were just beginning to appear on the market, at less than a tenth of the price the manunfacturers expected. Which – as things things do – led sideways into learning a lot about microcomputers, and the joys of software-development in assembly-language with inadequate software-tools, absurd constraints on hardware capabilities (yes, we did indeed manage to squeeze an entire microcomputer operating-system into 2Kb of memory, and a complete typesetting application into less than 40Kb), and, of course, clients who changed their requirements every few minutes… But we could typeset from just about any of the dozens of micro-based systems that were available at the time (remember WordStar, anyone?); and we had a perhaps rudimentary but proven and respected form of fully pagefitted desktop-publishing in daily use at least a year or two before the first Apple Mac made its appearance on the scene. Things changed a lot after that, and I sold the company on to one of our competitors; but I can justifiably claim to have been one of the pioneers – in Britain at least – of what is now the huge industry of desktop-publishing. (I also remember being told by the CEO of one of the largest manufacturers of typesetting equipment that “there is no market for printing from computers, and there never will be!”. Hmm…)

Over the years, I seem to have done this same kind of ‘business-anarchist‘ disruption in a few other disciplines. Perhaps the most notorious of these was around the fraught field of research on domestic-violence (‘DV’) resolution, where a simple five-minute thought-experiment of swapping gender-pronouns in the text showed that the so-called ‘standard’ model – mandated by law in more than half of the US states – was so deeply flawed in its fundamentals that it was completely unfit for purpose, in most real-world practice was causing more harm than good, and should never have been used at all. To prove the point, I prepared a simple rewrite of the ‘standard’ that used a more straightforward whole-of-system perspective, that resolved each of the fundamental flaws of the original in a methodologically-defensible way. The politics of the field being what they are, this was not exactly popular… but in fact that rewrite is starting to be used more often now. The core of that analysis also resurfaced in my later book ‘Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems‘ – nominally written for the business context, but in reality the underlying issues are exactly the same as in DV.

And, of course, the same disruption to the field of enterprise-architecture, with all the books and blog-posts and presentations and the like, trying to pry it free from the dead-weight of IT-centrism and remind everyone that ‘enterprise’ means ‘the enterprise’ – not just ‘the IT’ or even ‘the business’. We’re getting there at last, I think, but it’s been a long hard slog – again. And a lot of work still to do, on metamodels, toolsets and a whole lot more.

But am I getting too old for this game? I do have to wonder sometimes. And yet I’m reminded of an amazing woman called Mary Sheridan, who I worked for as an medical-illustrator in the early 1970s, and who started the public part of her career in child-development studies when she retired from the Schools Medical Service at the same age as I am now. (Her classic Children’s Developmental Progress is still in print, in fact regarded as the standard work on the subject, though sadly the current edition doesn’t use my illustrations any more.) When I look at what she managed to achieve in the time that she had, well, yes, I have to admit, there’s still a lot more I could do too.

But what could I do? Or should? (If ‘should’ is the right word here…?) That’s perhaps what I’m struggling with most right now.

So might be wise to use this, uh, somewhat-scary milestone as a moment to reflect on things a while… And maybe even use that not-quite bus-pass, perhaps?

In quite a few of my posts on enterprise-architecture, you may have seen two unfamiliar terms: anti-client, and kurtosis-risk. To see these two concepts in real-world action, and to get some understanding of how important they are in enterprise-architecture practice, you need look no further than the rioting that’s been taking place in London and elsewhere in Britain in the past few days.

First, though, an essential read to set the scene: Don Tapscott’s article “The World’s Unemployed Youth: Revolution In The Air?” (Note that that article was posted on the Huffington site on 4 June 2011 – more than two months before the riots began.)

An anti-client is someone who in some ways shares the same extended-enterprise as the organisation in scope for an enterprise-architecture – the same space as any of the organisation’s clients. But unlike a non-client, who is in the same conceptual ‘enterprise space’ as the organisation’s clients but has no interaction with the organisation, an anti-client will actively oppose, reject or object to the organisation’s presence in that extended-enterprise. Many businesses will have ‘inherent’ anti-clients: environmentalists in relation to oil-companies or miners, for example. And far too many organisations create their own anti-clients, converting previous good clients into active ‘enemies’ – anti-clients – through poor service, misleading contracts and all manner of other minor dishonesties and ‘game-plays’ that are all too common in the business context and elsewhere.

A key point here is that in ‘the good old days’ of broadcast one-to-many media, when companies all but controlled all access to the airwaves or the press, an organisation’s anti-clients had so little leverage that the organisations could usually afford to ignore them. Some careful PR would keep everything ‘on message’ without too much effort, or cost. But when the internet, SMS and other media allow many-to-many communication, or even many-to-one, organisations find themselves in a radically different game, where there’s no possibility of ‘controlling the message’ – and where even a single aggrieved anti-client can cause huge reputational and other damage with one well-placed viral video. Suddenly, an organisation’s anti-clients can have more power than the organisation itself – a very significant point…

A kurtosis-risk is a risk in which the losses that eventuate from the realisation of the risk exceed the total apparent gains made by ignoring the risk. (It’s sometimes called ‘long-tail risk’ because it’s a risk analogue of ‘long-tail‘ opportunities.) The important point about kurtosis is that it is usually a knowable or identifiable risk: it’s not an ‘unpredictable’, but one whose risk-pattern can be identified within the drivers for the statistical distribution of risk.

The risks from poor customer-service represent an all too common example of a kurtosis-risk: there’s no way to predict which incident will cause a massive blow-up, but we can predict that poor-quality customer-service will lead to a blow-up at some point. And we can also predict the statistical distribution of the scale of the risk in much the same way. And for organisations, one of the key drivers for the scale of risk – in other words, the positioning of the risk on the long-tail, and also the likely loss when the risk eventuates – is the separation between and effective power (or lack of it) of the agents of risk, such as disgruntled (ex)-customers. Separation between agents of risk is a risk-divisor: when separation is high, the effective risk is reduced, or pushed further down the long-tail (but never actually disappears). Separation is at its greatest – and hence risk is at its lowest – when the organisation controls one-to-many broadcast; or, to put it the other way round, the risk-multiplier increases, and the risk moves ‘up’ the long-tail, with increasing availability of many-to-many communication.

So, if we put the two together, anything that risks creating anti-clients, in a context where the media balance shifts from one-to-many (broadcast) to many-to-many (peer-to-peer), represents a context in which the risks are increasingly likely to be unacceptably high. They can no longer be ignored: they must be mitigated. And the only way in which the risk can mitigated is to seek out and pre-empt or resolve any context in which anti-clients could be created.

We can now apply this an enterprise at a very large scale: an entire socioeconomic system.

First, what are the anti-client risks? It doesn’t take much effort to identify that the socioeconomic model in place in Britain creates huge alienation, particularly amongst young males. Real youth unemployment is up above 50% in many inner-urban areas; those young men have have literally nothing to do, no apparent place in the society, no apparent means to gain social-status or even the resources that they need to live, and no apparent prospects or hope for change. It’s the same drivers that lead to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – in other words, that lead directly to active revolt against the state. Some people have expressed ‘amazement’ that the youth are ‘destroying their own community’ – but the key point here is that, to the youth themselves, they don’t feel that they belong in that community. It isn’t ‘their’ community: they feel rejected by it – and hence go off to create their own sub-community, in rejection of the ‘host’-community, and, in an all too literal sense, parasitic upon it.  (The crucial point to understand here is that they don’t feel that they have any other choice.) In effect, they have become anti-clients to the entire society in which – in theory only – they supposedly live.

In short, a perfcect recipe for a social explosion.

We then add in two other factors. One is the kurtosis-risk: the fragility of the economic system means that quite small acts of rebellion create disproportionately-large disruption. This is the basis of all asymmetric-warfare – including terrorism. The other factor is the availability of peer-to-peer communication, which enhances both the effective kurtosis-risk and the the cohesiveness of the ‘aliented’ group as a group.

Now add in yet another factor, namely rapidly increasing prices for essentials (the initial trigger for the Arab Spring).

And add in yet another factor, namely a government hell-bent on ‘cutting costs’ by shutting down any ‘unnecessary’ social programmes, especially in socially-stressed areas – at the same time as apparently providing massive subsidies to those already perceived as over-paid and undercontributing. (It doesn’t matter whether this is ‘true’ or not: the crucial factor is whether it is perceived as ‘true’.)

What we end up with is ‘an accident waiting to happen’: a context in which the ‘unexpected’ risks – already dangerously high – were being exacerbated in almost every possible way. And the actions that were known to be needed to reduce the risk were not carried out, on the grounds that they would ‘cost too much’. As Don Tapscott’s article makes all too clear, it may be a shock when it happens, but it should not have been a surprise. As Camila Batmaghelidjh put it in a much-praised opinion-piece in the London newspaper The Independent:

It costs money to care. But it also costs money to clear up riots, savagery and anti-social behaviour. I leave it to you to do the financial and moral sums.

The riots are a classic example of a kurtosis-risk: the cost-savings from cancelling those social-programmes were perhaps a few tens of millions at most, whereas the insurance-costs alone are already running into the billions. Ouch…

That’s what happens at a societal scale. Now bring it down a bit, to the scale of your own organisation. Look at the context architecturally, in much the same way as above: what do you have in the current architecture that risks creating anti-clients? What are the kurtosis-risks for your organisation, particularly around anti-client relationships. It can be an interestingly scary analysis… but one that’s well worth doing. Preferably right now, before the risks for your organisation get any greater?

People seem to struggle so much with the word ‘enterprise’ in ‘enterprise-architecture’. So often they seem to think it’s about technology. Or money.

But if you want to understand ‘enterprise’, look for the story.

And if you want to see where and how people really commit themselves to an enterprise, look for the tattoos.

That’s commitment…

And actually, no, I’m not joking. (Not much, anyway.) There’s an excellent article on this in a recent Financial Times: ‘The culinary art: Nothing shows chefs’ commitment to the trade like their food tattoos’. It’s an article I would strongly recommend to any enterprise-architect: it describes what is to me one of the best illustrations (literally!) of what a shared-enterprise means, and how people connect with that enterprise:

“Although tattoos are non-conformist,” says [Russell] Norman , “they are also very conformist. It’s a way to show other like-minded individuals that they will understand you and your ideals. When chefs get tattoos of knives, food or kitchen equipment, it shows a sort of tribal allegiance.”

So what does this look like in practice? Well, here’s one example from the FT article:

The caption for that photo is worth including in its entirety:

Dario Sutera, 28, chef de partie, Locanda Locatelli, Marble Arch. I cook a lot of fish, and so I love that I have a fish tattoo that symbolises strength and power but is also what I live off. It’s a sign of respect, in a way. If I have a bad day, I look down and there it is (it’s quite big so it’s hard to miss) and it reminds me that perseverance is a strength, a great quality and very necessary for a chef.

Notice that it’s not like a brand – a corporate identity owned by the collective – or a generic symbol such as the chef’s uniform. It’s an intensely personal badge of commitment to that shared-enterprise – the way in which each person interprets how they connect themselves to and with that enterprise.

As the article puts it, we could perhaps argue that chefs are something of a special case:

While tattoos are more fashionable than ever, it’s fairly unusual for a profession as a whole to get tattoos illustrating what they do – there aren’t many bankers with pound signs inked along their arms, nor many plumbers decorated with wrenches.

But what about enterprise-architecture itself? Like the chefs, we’re often “a driven, passionate, artful, moody and overworked lot”, and likewise “crazy” too – or at least seen that way by many of the people with whom we work! So should we get our own tattoos too, perhaps?

Any suggestions for suitable designs, folks?

[Thanks to Florian for the initial Tweet-link.]