And given all of that, how do we, as enterprise-architects, bring all of these different views together to build something that works well for everyone’s needs?

Not easy…

For a long time now, one of the key tools I’ve used for this part of my work has been VPEC-T (Values, Policies, Events, Content, Trust). It was developed by Nigel Green and his colleague Carl Bate, and documented in their 2007 book Lost In Translation. As the Wikipedia entry puts it:

VPEC-T (“vee-pec-tee”) is used where interaction between agents and communication between parties can easily result in ambiguity. This form of analysis is particularly applicable where it is likely that the interaction and communication context is unordered, complex or chaotic, and liable to result in misunderstanding.

Nigel and Carl Bate summarise the roles of the VPEC-T ‘lenses’ as follows:

• Values describe that which defines the context
• Policies describe that which directs the context
• Events describe that which triggers change within the context
• Content describes that which informs the context
• Trust describes that which dominates the context

Or, in visual form, each of these lenses focus in turn on a given context:

Importantly, there’s no sequence to this: the lenses are used in any order, as appropriate, often iteratively or recursively.

The catch there is that sometimes – particularly in service-design – we do need to know and understand how themes play out in sequence as well.

Somewhat in parallel to Nigel and Carl, for many years I’d been using a variation of the classic Chinese wu xing or Five Element model as a way to describe relationships different areas or roles of an enterprise – see my post ‘Metaframeworks in practice, Part 3: Five Elements‘ for more detail on this.

In Five Elements, the order in which we do things is very important. We can do the various aspects of the work in just about any order, if we really want to, but in practice there are very clear patterns between sequences that work well, versus sequences that don’t.

In visual form, the ‘five elements’ – here shown as Purpose, People, Preparation, Process, and Performance – form a distinct sequence of activities across the overall enterprise, or even within any aspect of that enterprise:

These are domains of activity; but there’s nothing that specifically indicates what would trigger or guide the shift from one emphasis to the next.

And what I saw with VPEC-T was that it seemed to provide exactly those necessary triggers. Or something very similar to VPEC-T, anyway – a point we’ll need to come back to in a moment:

• vision and values provide a bridge between Purpose and People
• policies and procedures provide a bridge between People and Preparation
• identifiable start-events provide the transition from Preparation to Process
• identifiable completion-events mark the end of Process and the start of the closure and review of Performance
• reaffirmed trust is the desired-outcome of Performance that links back to Purpose

From there, it then seemed that we can usefully combine the two frameworks – Five Elements, and VPEC-T – into one single dynamic framework:

It all seemed to fit pretty well, although there were few rather noticeable kludges: strictly speaking, each of these transitions was an Event, and Content was distributed throughout the whole sequence, much as indicated in the Service-Cycle:

Or, for Enterprise Canvas, we would describe Content in a different way entirely, based more on a modified form of Zachman than on VPEC-T:

As described in my post Metaframeworks in practice, Part 5: Enterprise Canvas, we can then link all of these together – Service-Cycle, Five Elements, VPEC-T, the Enterprise Canvas service-model – into a kind of single zig-zag frame that summarises all of the interactions and the respective stakeholders in each stage of service-delivery:

In practice, in unravelling the complexities of service-design, that works really well as a visual summary.

Yet there’s a catch, a really, really important one that’s all too easy to miss: this isn’t VPEC-T as specified in the ‘Lost In Translation‘ book. It’s the same acronym, with some of the same meanings for each element of the expanded acronym, but they’re all used in a different way.

And if we don’t keep a clear separation between this and the original VPEC-T, we’re likely to create all manner of unwonted and unnecessary confusions further down the track.

That point created quite a bit of worry for me and, even more, for Nigel Green. We met up to discuss this, a couple of years back, and as described in my posts ‘Not quite VPEC-T‘ and ‘More on ‘Not-quite VPEC-T’‘, we came up with a summary that provides just about enough of a separation between the two usages:

• the original VPEC-T (with hyphen) describes a set of ‘lenses’ – it does not imply any kind of sequence
• the service-oriented usage of VPECT (no hyphen) – as in Enterprise Canvas and the Service-Cycle - does describe an explicit sequence of transitions

In other words, the service-cycle VPECT is definitely related to the original VPEC-T, but the usages and roles of the two frames are somewhat orthogonal to each other.

That’s an adequate compromise, but perhaps still not quite clear enough to reduce the risks for potential confusion between the two. There it sat for some fair few months, anyway.

Yet just recently, whilst doing some rethinking and rework around the Service-Cycle, it struck me that there’s another way we could do this, which actually fits better with how the service-cycle actually works. It still has the same transitions between the Five Elements, but there are two subtle shifts:

• Trust and Commitment are actually the core of everything – hence needs to be the central reference-point for all activities, rather than solely in one specific transition
• the transition that links past Performance to indefinite-future Purpose is verification of Satisfaction and Success, in terms of the success-metrics derived from the enterprise vision and values

The explicit Event the marks the transition from Preparation for service-delivery and into into active Process of service-delivery could perhaps be more accurately described as the Initiating-event, to match the set of Completion-events at the end of service-delivery. But it’s probably easiest to leave it as ‘Event’, because that’s usually the one type of event that people most notice and describe as as ‘an event’.

Overall, then, that gives us a revised-acronym of VPECS. (Or VPICS, to acknowledge the Initiating-event – or VPECS-T or VPICS-T, if we’re going to include Trust as well – but it’s probably easiest to leave it just as VPECS.) Or, in visual form:

So, to summarise, on the differences between VPECS and VPEC-T:

• use the VPEC-T acronym to describe the form of ‘lenscraft’ specified in Lost In Translation
• use the VPECS or VPICS acronym if you mean this sequence-oriented frame above

But most important, though, don’t mix them up: they’re related, but they’re not the same.

I’ll update my diagrams over the next few weeks to reflect this shift.

Hope this makes sense, anyway – over to you for comment?

If you’re like most of us, your answers to all three of those questions would be “almost never”. And yet we all supposedly agree – because however one-sided it may be, if we click ‘No’, the whole business stops right there.

Which, since just about no-one actually agrees with those ‘T&Cs’, yet vaguely pretends that they do, just in order to get anything done, might this not kinda strongly imply that we need a better way to do this?

What I’d suggest is that we need an alternative interpretation of ‘T&C’: not ‘Terms and Conditions’, but ‘Trust and Commitments‘.

Look at it this way, in terms of the Service-Cycle:

The whole cycle depends on mutual trust, mutual commitment, centred around the shared-values and the service-provider’s value-proposition, defined in terms of the vision, values and success-criteria of the shared-enterprise.

In other words, to make it work, and to make it continue to work, the whole relationship depends on each party doing everything they can to create and maintain mutual trust and mutual commitment.

But to be blunt, the usual terms-and-conditions – especially the wildly one-sided yet unchallengeable form that we so often see in those dialogs – is more like a declaration of absence of trust, of absence of commitment: a demand for a one-sided ‘right-to-evade-all-responsibility’. Many of them purport to be a kind of ‘peace-offering’, but bizarrely framed in the form of a declaration of war… Which is not exactly likely to help in either creating or maintaining the trust or commitment that’s needed to make the relationship work.

So in your organisation, whenever you see any reference to ‘terms and conditions’, reframe them as ‘trust and commitments’:

• What mutual responsibilities are needed to make the service viable, and thrive for all parties?
• What are the mutual commitments needed to support those mutual responsibilities?
• What else is needed to support mutual trust between all parties and stakeholders in the service?
• How do these responsibilities, commitments and trust support the overall aims of the shared-enterprise?

Given that, how would you rewrite your organisation’s ‘terms and conditions’ texts to more strongly support that trust and commitment? What governance would you need to support a better and more honest alignment, from all sides, to those aims?

Something worth thinking about, perhaps? – and perhaps even more, worth putting into urgent action?

Over to you for comment, anyway.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been watching one of the most inspiring television-documentaries I’ve ever seen: ‘Abby and Brittany: Joined for life‘. (The video is UK only, and only until 16 May 2013, unfortunately, but there’s also a good BBC Magazine article ‘Living a conjoined life‘, which gives a fair bit of detail.)

In principle, it’s just a documentary-cum-travelogue about a pair of twenty-something twins from Minnesota – Abby and Brittany Hensel – finishing up and graduating from college, going on a few trips with family and with friends, to Houston, Chicago, London, Venice and Rome, and then back to face the challenges of finding and then starting at their first job as qualified primary-school teachers. All very normal, in many ways – which in part is the point they most want to make. Because what’s not so normal – in fact almost unique – is that they’re conjoined-twins:

Abby and Brittany Hensel with college friends, on the run-up to graduation ((c) BBC)

Joined together from the shoulders downward, each of the girls has their own upper torso – head, heart, lungs, stomach, spine – but have only one arm each, and share the same lower body: Abby controls the right side – right arm, right leg – and Brittany the left. Which means that everything they do - everything - is an ongoing exercise in extreme cooperation.

To give some idea of how extreme that cooperation must be, cast your memory back to that old staple of primary-school sports-days, the three-legged race. You’d hold each other round the waist or shoulders, perhaps, and have your side-by-side legs tied together, and you’d then both try to run like that, one-and-two, one-and-two. Except that in their case this is just two legs, alternately, as in a normal gait – which is a hugely harder challenge, especially as each can only sense directly her own side of the body.

At first glance, just about everything we see in the documentary seems normal enough: they walk, run, dance, swim, study, ride a bike, type emails, go water-skiing, play a piano, drive a car (fast!), text two-handed on a cell-phone, do their makeup, play tourist, ride a Segway, brush their hair, enjoy cooking, learn how to row in a four-seat scull, play netball (well enough to beat the boys on the opposing team!), and much more. Watching them do all of this, it’s very easy to forget that this isn’t just one girl – and very definitely not ‘one girl with two heads’ – but two distinctly different girls who can only do any of this at all by working very closely together in everything that they do.

What’s also notable is that although they’re identical-twins, they have distinctly different personalities and tastes: Abby is more interested in maths, Brittany more in the arts; Abby likes bright clothes, Brittany quieter ones; Brittany likes to go out, whilst Abby is more of a ‘homebody’; Brittany likes to try new and different foods, Abby doesn’t. Which means that the same extreme cooperation applies not just to every action, but to every choice as well: everything has to be a workable compromise that’s fair to both, otherwise nothing would or could get done.

They’ve started work now as primary-school teachers, working mostly with fourth-grade (8-10yr-olds), apparently doing very well indeed. And I can only wish them luck: I certainly have deep respect and admiration for their emotional and spiritual strength, fortitude, courage.

Yet in a sense, their (to most of us) strange life is perhaps the most powerful metaphor and image of how all of us actually live – whether we know it or not. In most cultures – particularly in so-called ‘developed’ nations – we tend to view ourselves as separate, each with our own choices, independent from all others, and free to do as we wish. But in reality we too – all of us – are conjoined with each other, no less at all than are Abby and Brittany: we each share the same planet with everyone else. Ultimately, to make it work, we each need to learn that same level of extreme-cooperation, each managing our own specific part of this shared body, whilst also respecting each others’ temperaments, desires and needs.

Yes, it’d be hard to learn to do that, across a whole planetary scope and scale. But so what? – we really do not have any choice about that. Not if we want to have a worthwhile life, at any rate. (Plenty of choices that won’t lead to a worthwhile life, of course – a point that is becoming more and more evident with each passing day…)

Watching that documentary, and seeing how the girls constantly seek out new challenges, another even greater challenge comes to mind. Because if ever they tire of primary teaching, perhaps they could take up a much broader teaching-role: helping all of us learn how to emulate their skills in extreme cooperation?

Inspiring indeed…

Well, actually, there is something that we can do. In the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter – or perhaps even more of Jonathan Swift – here’s a modest proposal: scrap it.

Yes: get rid of the lot – get rid of the entire edifice and artifice of the money-system.

The banks, the financial-industry, the hedge-funds, the stockbrokers, Wall Street and the rest; monetary taxation; monetary fines; monetary everything. Get rid of the lot: it doesn’t add any real value to anything. Money doesn’t make the world go round at all: mostly it makes things stop, waiting and waiting for the money. So why not stop money instead, and get things moving again?

Let’s be honest about this: that whole money-system is a mess. It’s inefficient, it’s unreliable, it’s stunningly wasteful: a few brief back-of-the-napkin calculations suggests that just trying to maintain that whole mess at present accounts for something like a third of all ‘economic activity’, and still steeply rising.

As a method for resolving social needs, and as a method for managing global resources, it’s a complete failure. All it can do is guarantee that resources most often end up wherever and whenever they least need to be.

It doesn’t work. it’s never worked. Once we start properly facing the facts about this, it shouldn’t take anyone more than a few moments’-worth of thought to understand that it can’t be made to work: there are fatal flaws that go right down to the fundamental roots of the entire idea.

So no matter how much we might want the money-system to work, it can’t be done – and the notion that it somehow can be made to work is a delusion, a fraud, a joke.

There’s no point in trying to substitute some other form of ‘alternative currency’, either: that’ll only make things worse than they already are. It’s not just one type of currency that’s failed: it’s the entire concept of currency itself that doesn’t work.

And once we realise that we could replace every single monetary transaction with just one simple phrase - “what do you need?” – it should be clear that the whole money-mess is entirely unnecessary anyway.

So why not just scrap it?

Or, perhaps more to the point, can anyone come up with any genuine, solid, properly-thought-through reasons why we shouldn’t scrap it?

A modest proposal, indeed: but one that might actually work?

In part this one was triggered by reading through my relatively-new copy of Business Model You, and reflecting on the narrow money-only model of revenue and cost that pervades the original Business Model Canvas and its concept of ‘business-model’:

We defined ‘business model’ as ‘the logic by which an enterprise sustains itself financially’. Put simply, it’s the logic by which an enterprise earns its livelihood.

In reality, money is a form of cost, and a form of revenue – but in either case it’s by no means the only one. And the attempt to conflate all of those other types of cost or return solely into monetary form is a direct cause of all manner of otherwise-avoidable business-disasters.

None more so, perhaps, in sales and marketing. Every salesperson or marketer would recognise that there is a cost to acquiring a new customer, and likewise a usually much-lower cost to retaining an existing customer. However, few seem to recognise that de-acquisition – losing an existing customer – can carry far higher costs than merely the financial opportunity-cost of foregone future trade: and those costs can sometimes be high enough to bring down the entire business. In other words, not something that’s wise to ignore…

To make sense of this one, we need three things:

• a broader sense of ‘the enterprise’
• a broader understanding of ‘value’ – beyond a solely monetary sense – and how it intersects with business-services
• a broader understanding of where ‘cost’ and ‘profit’ arise in a business-service – and for whom

On the nature of enterprise, I use a much broader definition than that implied in Business Model Canvas: ‘the enterprise’ is not the organisation alone, but the overall business-domain or business-purpose within which the organisation operates. In essence, ‘the enterprise’ is a desire, a promise, an ‘ends‘ that is shared with others; the organisation is merely a means via which, in working together, people can reach towards those desired-ends.

If we say that the organisation ‘is’ the enterprise, there’s nothing to share with anyone else, and hence no reason for anyone to do business with the organisation. Or, to put it the other way round, the idea that the organisation is not ‘the enterprise’ is what, for others, makes doing business with organisation both possible and, perhaps, desirable. I usually illustrate this by showing ‘the enterprise’ separated from the organisation first as its transactions with its supply-chain or value-web, then its overall market relationships, and then outward to a much broader shared-space bounded by interactions rather than transactions – which also includes its investors and beneficiaries:

The shared-enterprise is defined by that desire or idea or promise, which in turn identifies the values of the enterprise – and which in turn also imply success-metrics in relation to the promise and its values.

To do business with others, an organisation presents a value-proposition – which in practice must be linked to the promise and values and success-metrics of the shared-enterprise.

Once we fully understand this, the distinctions between ‘values’ (enterprise) versus ‘value’ (that which is exchanged between services) versus money (merely one type of ‘cost of doing business’ within a money-based possession-economy) also become more clear, and hence the different service-relationships each service needs in order to keep these all in appropriate balance. Which we could summarise visually as:

In practice, though, what often happens is that an organisation – or even an entire culture – fails to comprehend value in anything other than monetary terms, and hence uses money as a proxy for ‘value’ in all of its relationships with the shared enterprise. There are often huge pressures to do this if financial-investors are given too much weight, as ‘the owners’ – which gives rise to an often seriously-dysfunctional upside-down and back-to-front model of organisation-as-service, where monetary ‘shareholder-value’ and suchlike take priority over the values and value-flows that make the monetary-return possible in the first place:

To understand why this is so dysfunctional, we need to look at how service-relationships actually work. If we take a money-only concept of business, it’s easy to cut off the view at a very simplistic transaction-only notion of ‘the market’: we grab someone’s attention via marketing, do the transactions of the sales, take the profit, and loop back for the next punter:

Even here there’s an attention-cost as well as a material (‘moneyable’) cost: every skilled salesperson knows that the wrong kind of attention-grabbing can cost sales, and hence hit the profit. It’s often easy enough to ignore that as a form of cost, though, and just hold the focus on ‘value-as-money-as-value’.

But the reality is that markets are much more than just transactions. As the Cluetrain Manifesto famously put it, “markets are conversations”; they also express and enact relationships, and shared-purpose too. And all of have their own roles and interactions across the shared-enterprise – which necessarily dictates a much broader view of the overall service-cycle. In somewhat simplified form:

Reputation and trust provide the ground for respect and relations, which in turn provide the ground for attention and conversation about value, and hence a proposition about value, which in turn can form the basis for transaction. And at the end of the transaction, we need to ensure that all of these concerns are satisfied – not just the monetary aspects of transaction.

Everything revolves around value as defined by the ‘promise’ of shared-enterprise; and everything begins and ends with trust – not money.

(As an aside, an over-focus on money alone will almost always lead to the ‘quick-profit failure-cycle’:

In practice this short-cut version of the service-cycle slowly loses its connection not just to trust, but to any sense of purpose or values, any links to people either outside or within the organisation, and even any clear sense of policy or, eventually, any sense of legality. In short, it invariably devolves into a slow-suicide for the respective business: so don’t do it!)

When we look at this in terms of costs and revenues, we can reframe this service-cycle in terms of sets of related dimensions. (What follows is definitely over-simplified – in reality the dimensions always interweave with each other much more than is implied here – but this is probably the best way to describe the overall scope of the context.) Moving outward from the transaction-oriented core:

• transaction-economy: primarily physical assets or ‘things’ (asset-characteristics: alienable, exchangeable) – implies resource-costs, ‘compensation’ for transfer of ‘right of possession’
• information-economy: primarily virtual assets or information and attention (asset-characteristics: non-alienable, exchange-via-copy) – implies potential costs of information-dilution or information-distortion, ‘compensation’ for ‘right of access’ to information
• attention-economy: mix of virtual assets and relational assets (characteristics: constrained by information, relationship and available time) – implies costs in terms of non-exchangeable and non-reimbursable attention and time
• relation-economy: primarily relational assets (asset-characteristics: non-alienable, non-exchangeable, exists between two real [physical] sentient parties) – implies costs in terms of time and of creation and maintenance of relationship, or opportunity-costs etc on loss of relationship
• purpose-economy: primarily aspirational assets (asset-characteristics: non-alienable, non-exchangeable, exists from real [physical] sentient party to [virtual] idea, belief, memory or sense of identity or belonging) – implies costs in terms of trust, purpose, ‘commitment-fatigue’, ‘change-fatigue’ or burnout
• the attention-economy provides the crucial bridge between the parts of the service-cycle that deal primarily with exchange-based transactions (things, information) and those that deal primarily with interactions around non-exchangeable assets (relational, aspirational)

Yeah, I know – that lot all sounds a bit abstract. But to bring it back more towards the practical for the service-cycle – even if still somewhat abstract – reinterpret these in terms of the set of interactions that set up the core service-transaction, and the set of completions that close everything off after that core-transaction:

– set up reputation/trust: The service-provider (‘the organisation’) and service-consumer (‘the customer’) carry various costs in search and discovery to identify mutual interest and mutual values, typically as indicated by mutual alignment to the enterprise-vision. The linkage here is primarily in terms of aspirational-assets (‘purpose-economy’), via interactions through the ‘before‘-channels.

– set up respect/relations: The organisation and the customer identify shared understandings of value and success-metrics for any mutual service-transactions. Both parties carry various costs in value-identification. The linkage here is primarily in terms of relational-assets (‘relationship-economy’), via interactions through the ‘before‘-channels.

– set up attention/conversation: The parties engage in conversations to identify potential requirements for service that the customer needs and the organisation can deliver, described in terms of the previously-identified vision and values (‘value-proposition’). Both parties carry costs in terms of service-identification and conditions and expectations of service. The linkage here is primarily in terms of relational/virtual-assets (attention: ‘attention-economy’) and virtual-assets (conversation/information: ‘information-economy’), via interactions through the ‘before‘-channels.

– set up transaction/exchange: The parties engage in transactions that enact change-as-experienced (‘service’) and/or transfer of exchangeable-assets (‘product’). The linkage here is primarily in terms of physical-assets and/or virtual-assets (‘transaction-economy’), via interactions through the ‘during‘-channels (which may also create and/or change relational- and/or aspirational-assets – for example, to enable a business-relationship, or to create and confirm an individual’s membership of a group or community).

– completion of transaction-tasks: Everything is complete in terms of raw service-delivery – in other words, everything that goes through the ‘during‘ channels of the Enterprise Canvas.

– completion for self (organisation’s profit): The balancing-return does come back from the customer via the ‘after‘-channels. The forms of value exchanged may not be – in fact often aren’t – the same as those in the ‘during‘ channel (for example, monetary payment for ‘services rendered’). They may also be different forms the forms of value forwarded on as ‘dividend’ to service-beneficiaries. This means that there may be significant ‘value-translation’ required to move the returned-value into the respective forms. The difference between the overall operating- and transactional-costs and the returned-revenue represents the service’s effective ‘profit’ or ‘loss’.

– completion for customer: Together, provider and customer establish that the customer’s expectations for service-provision have been satisfied.

– completion for all: Together with other stakeholders – albeit often only implicitly – provider and customer establish that the whole service-cycle was appropriately aligned with and supported the success-criteria of the overall vision and values of the shared-enterprise.

Each of the ‘set up’ stages sets up expectations of quality-of-service, of the proposed value of the service (hence ‘value-proposition’) to the customer.

Each of the ‘completion’ stages represents assessment of the actual quality and value of service-as-delivered and service-as-received. (Note that for Enterprise Canvas and the service-cycle, we usually remove the common distinctions between ‘product’ versus ‘service’ by saying that a product represents a kind of ‘proto-service’, a promise of future delivery of some actual service or self-service.)

If any of those assessments fails – if any party considers themselves ‘short-changed’ in terms of those expectations – then there is a non-monetary cost, in terms of damage to the aspirational- and/or relational-assets created or maintained during the set-up phases. To put it in simple business-terms, there is damage to the willingness to come back for repeat-business, and/or damage to reputation, such as in non-recommendations or anti-recommendations to other potential service-consumers and/or service-providers.

– incompletion of transaction: dissatisfied provider. Up till this point, the costs of the service – in time, resources, attention, effort, money, whatever – will usually have been borne by the service-provider (though this varies somewhat in prepayment-scenarios, where the ‘after‘-channel interactions sort-of come before some or most of those on the ‘during‘-channel). If the balancing-return (‘revenue’) doesn’t come back from the customer, those costs will be classed as ‘non-recoverable’ – nominally the organisation’s problem and organisation’s risk. If the return-transaction doesn’t happen, the relationship between provider and customer will probably be broken from the provider’s side, describing the customer as a ‘bad risk’ or suchlike – in other words, a refusal to engage in future attention, relations or shared-purpose.

– incompletion of attention: dissatisfied customer. This usually happens when the provider drops attention as return (payment etc) has been received through the back-channel (customer-to-provider ‘after‘-channels). In effect, the conversation is cut off before any check has been made as to whether the customer is satisfied with service-delivery. This kind of failure will often create betrayal-anticlients - former customers who feel ‘betrayed’ by the service-provider, and who will actively dissuade others from engaging in interaction or transaction with that organisation.

– incompletion of relations: dissatisfied customer and/or provider. This typically happens when either party simply ‘walks away’ after the interaction, without completing closures that would maintain the person-to-person or person-to-organisation relationships that would enable fast re-establishment of relations on a subsequent iteration of the service-cycle. The best outcome of this kind of failure is that, in effect, the client becomes a non-client, hence imposing on either or both parties the new-client acquisition-costs rather than the (usually much lower) existing-client retention-costs for the next service-cycle. At worst, customer and/or provider may become active betrayal-anticlients for each other.

– incompletion of purpose: dissatisfaction across the shared-enterprise. This typically happens in organisations with a ‘push-marketing’ model and a ‘sales at any cost’ culture: they try to acquire all and any possible customers, regardless of whether there’s an appropriate fit to the actual (i.e. values-based, not ‘feature’-based) value-proposition or to the values and success-criteria of the overall shared-enterprise. Failures of this kind not only create bad-client problems for the organisation, but also risk creating inherent-anticlient challenges against the provider and/or customer across the market-space and the whole shared-enterprise. Such inherent-anticlient challenges may be expressed in forms such as blacklisting, retroactive legislation, active constraints and even ‘pariah’ or ‘public-enemy’ status – as can be seen at present in common public attitudes towards ‘the 1%’ (at either end of the socioeconomic scales) and towards the banks and other financial institutions.

Practical implications for enterprise-architecture

As usual (sorry…), all of that was perhaps a bit too abstract – mainly because I’m trying to cover the whole context in all of its possible forms. At a more concrete level, we can bring at least some of these down to some simple tests for service-design and service-completion:

• Are the vision and values of the shared-enterprise identified and explicit? (Remember that this is the shared-enterprise to which the organisation aligns itself - not the organisation itself.) Failure to do so means that there’s means to establish criteria against which any value-proposition may be tested. [This is the first part of the 'set up reputation / trust' stage in the summary above.]
• Are the success-criteria for the shared-enterprise identified and explicit? Failure to do so means that the only apparent criteria for ‘success’ will be blurry notions of ‘customer-satisfaction’ and suchlike (which can sort-of be used to guide service-review and service-improvement), crude non-qualitative metrics such as short-term financial-’profit’ (which can’t be used to guide service-design), or even more blurry externally-driven notions such as ‘shareholder-value’ (which definitely can’t be used as guides for service-design). [This is also part of the 'set up reputation / trust' stage.]
• Are the provider’s value-propositions aligned with the vision, values and success-criteria of the shared-enterprise? Failure to verify this means that the effective success-criteria will default to lowest-common-denominator types such as ‘cheaper’ – often entrapping the provider (and customers too) into a dysfunctional-competition ‘race to the bottom’. [This is another key part of the 'set up reputation / trust' stage.]
• Are both provider and customer clear that they share the same (or similar-enough) definitions of ‘success’ in relation to any provision of service? Failure to get clear on this means a near-certainty that one or other of the parties – or both – are going to be dissatisfied with the end-results of service-provision. [This is the end-point of the 'set up reputation/trust' stage and the start of the transition to the 'set up 'relations / respect' stage.]
• Are both parties aware of the costs of setting up and maintaining a service-relationship, and willing and able to bear their part of those costs? (Remember that ‘cost’ here is defined in terms of the enterprise-vision, values and success-metrics: money is at best a poor-quality proxy for most such costs, and is not valid or usable at all for many types of cost – skills and competence, for example, or non-replaceable resources or lives.) Failure to clarify this at the start leads almost invariably to someone feeling that they’ve been ‘short-changed’ – and especially so if someone’s been foolish enough to try to use money as an inappropriate proxy for non-monetary costs. [This is a key part of the 'set up relations/respect' stage, also starting to transition to the 'set up attention / conversation' stage.]
• Are both parties aware of the need for and costs of ‘paying attention’, to clarify actual service-capabilities and service-needs? Failure to get clear on this before and during service-delivery usually leads to excess costs – of many different kinds – for one or both parties, and usually dissatisfaction-costs as well. (The requirement to pay attention during service-delivery arises because needs often change, or are discovered, only within and as a result of the interactions of service-delivery itself. Note also that there are strong reasons why the term ‘pay attention’ exists: it represents real non-monetary costs that cannot be avoided if service-delivery is to be successful.) [This represents the core of the 'set up attention / conversation' stage; coupled with cross-checks to agreement about the values in relation to the provider's value-proposition, this also establishes the ground for the transition to the 'set up transaction / exchange' stage.]
• Are both parties able and willing to keep track of variances during service-delivery, and to compensate and adjust for them accordingly? There are real responsibilities here – literally ‘response-abilities’ – without which variance-costs are likely to become hidden until too late to rectify, again leading to dissatisfaction on one or both sides of the relationship. [This is a key part of the 'set up transaction / exchange' stage.]
• Are both parties able to identify and agree upon the start-point and end-point of expected and actual service-delivery, and act upon it accordingly? Failure on either side to identify these will lead to excess costs on one or both sides – and, again, dissatisfaction. [The start-point represents the end of the 'set up transaction/exchange' stage; the end-point represents 'end of transaction-tasks' in the summary above].
• Are both parties able to identify what needs to be done and/or delivered to bring the transactions and interactions to a full completion that will align with the enterprise-vision and reinforce mutual trust? Failure to get clear on that will all but guarantee that someone will be dissatisfied… [This clarifies what needs to get through the 'after'-channels, and sets up the rest of the 'completions' stages.]
• Once the provider has achieved satisfaction, do they then confirm that the customer has achieved satisfaction? Failure to do so is one of the most certain ways to create droves of active anticlients. (Note that this may need to be repeated at various intervals in order to verify longer-term satisfaction: a product that works well at first but fails earlier than expected is likely to lead to the customer feeling ‘short-changed’ – and becoming a ‘betrayal-anticlient’ as a result.) [This represents the 'completion for self' stage above, and the need to continue through to the 'completion for customer' stage.]
• Once both parties have achieved satisfaction relative to each other, do they then confirm that the overall end-results also fully align with the vision and values of the overall shared-enterprise? Failure to test for this risks creating a business – such as in much of the current ‘wealth-management industry’ – where providers and clients are (usually) happy with their respective services and service-relationships, but other stakeholders in the overall shared-enterprise feel increasingly betrayed: deep dissatisfaction here can eventually destroy an organisation’s (or even entire industry’s) ‘social licence to operate’. [This represents the 'completion for all' stage above.]

Yeah, I know: all of this has been way too long (as usual…). But the core takeaways would be these:

• Revenues and costs may occur in many different forms of value, not all of which should – or even can – be converted to monetary form. (To put it the other way round, money is often a very poor or even fundamentally-invalid proxy for many if not most forms of value: under no circumstance should money be allowed to be used as a proxy for all forms of value in an enterprise context.)
• The definition of ‘value’ ultimately arises from the vision and values of the shared-enterprise. The shared-enterprise is not the same as the organisation itself, and is not under the organisation’s control.
• Creating and maintaining reputation, trust, relations, respect, attention and conversation all incur real costs. These costs are typically referred to in business as ‘cost of acquisition‘ and ‘cost of retention‘. Note again that these costs often cannot be measured meaningfully in monetary terms.
• Costs of acquisition are typically (much) higher than costs of retention. In any context where repeated service-delivery is likely and desirable, it is therefore in a organisation’s (and customer’s) interest to expend the costs of retention in order to avoid the higher costs of re-acquisition.
• Failure to maintain reputation, trust, relations, respect, attention and conversation can lead either to significant ‘costs of de-acquisition‘. If a customer simply becomes a non-client, the de-acquisition costs represent a combination of opportunity-cost (loss of future business) and re-acquisition cost (same or higher costs as for initial acquisition. If either party – or any party – becomes an active anticlient of another party, the risks of the costs becoming real steadily increase over time, often in the form of supposedly-’unpredictable’ kurtosis-risks.

Anyway, I’ll stop there for now: hope it’s useful for someone?

To many people, the term ‘sexism’ applies only to gender-imbalance that directly affects women: yet a few moments thought should make it clear that that assertion is in itself a form of sexism – the kind of ‘term-hijack‘ that can make it very difficult to work our way through the resultant mess of wicked-problems in the respective context. The reality is that sexism occurs whenever any gender-imbalance is embedded in everyday thinking, sensemaking and decision-making – and it’s a tendency that we need to challenge in all of its forms if we’re to have any chance of creating a sane and sustainable society.

Unfortunately, even supposed ‘progressive thinkers’ often fail to think that far. One apparent example of this came up in a Tweet yesterday from Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect):

• transarchitect: Feminine values are the operating system of the 21st century.

Okay, fair enough, it’s the kind of bland universalism that comes up all too often on Bert’s Twitterstream. But as one who’s had way too much experience not only of dysfunctional ‘masculine values’, but dysfunctional ‘feminine values’ too, I kinda winced – and said so when I reTweeted Bert’s note:

• tetradian: RT @transarchitect: Feminine values are the operating system of the 21st century. >oh dear, more politically-correct sexism…

To which Bert came back with a Tweet that I can only describe as bizarre:

• transarchitect: @tetradian far from, my dear…eternal laws in action…

Okay, I’ll admit the hackles raised at the “my dear…” – ‘insultingly patronising’ would be a mild way to describe how it felt – but I wrote it off at first as just one of those all-too-common errors of cultural-translation. But “eternal laws in action”? – no way… Even allowing for the limitations of Twitter, that’s ‘newage’ of the worst order – the kind of self-congratulatory spiritual-imperialism that runs rampant throughout so much of the self-styled ‘New Age’. Hence, again, I said so, loudly:

• tetradian: @transarchitect “eternal laws in action” – _what_ ‘eternal laws’? – or just an overdose of wishful-thinking? #NotAmused…

To which Bert came back with an even more bizarre response:

• transarchitect: @tetradian seriously; goes far beyond entarch. E.g. http://t.co/KPnfiZcgi8 #notamusedeither

The link points to a book by Marja de Vries, ‘The Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights into the existence and operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio‘, whose blurb suggests it’s the kind of, uh, nice pretty ‘spiritual’ guff that, as a gawky, confused late-teenager, I used to devour in good old Watkins Bookshop, just off the Charing Cross Road in central London, nigh on half a century ago. Ever so sweet, wildly optimistic, the usual careless blurring of disciplines that’s so characteristic of the would-be ‘New Age’: in other words, pretty, enlivening, maybe even enlightening at times, but almost useless – sometimes worse than useless – in real-world practice.

What worries me more, though, is that Bert knows that I work in a space far wider than mainstream EA: he’s commented on such posts in this blog before now. In which case, the notion that I should be rebuked that this “goes far beyond entarch” to me makes no sense whatsoever – because he must surely know by now that everything I do is as much about relations across the whole human enterprise as it is about between low-level IT-services and everything in between. Hence I kinda lost my rag at that point:

• tetradian: @transarchitect “goes way beyond entarch” – do you think I don’t know that??? – this is getting beyond bizarre, best I blog on this for you

And, hence, this blog-post.

[Before I go any further, I ought to emphasise that Bert is by no means the only one of my regular Twitter-correspondents who seems to have fallen for this trap. Amongst just the men, I can think of at least two others who've done so: one of them now does acknowledge the risks, but unfortunately the conversation with one of them became so acrimonious when I challenged him on it that I had to break off all contact. Oh well. I'd prefer to prevent the latter from happening here too, yet the societal dangers of this type of sexism are so high that I'll have to take that risk.]

Sexism, in whatever form it may take, is a huge problem for every society: such prejudice harms not just its more obvious targets and victims, but ultimately everyone throughout that respective culture. In short, it’s something that we need to challenge wherever we see it – perhaps most in ourselves…

I’ve been actively in gender-issues for almost half a century now. Right from the start, I knew I didn’t fit in with any of the standard gender-stereotypes for ‘maleness’, or for much of anything else, for that matter. Wherever I’ve lived, however I’ve lived, my social experience is pretty much that I’ve only ever really known myself to be a largely-unwanted Outsider: ‘unwanted’ because I seem inadvertently – often just by my very existence - to challenge almost everyone’s otherwise-comfortable preconceptions. Which is not a comfortable place to be.

Hence when I talk about gender-issues and the like, it’s not a trivial matter to me: everything I say about it comes from a lot of deep study, a lot of deep observation, and often a lot of deeply-painful personal experience. Which is also why I don’t take it lightly when someone actively promotes some form of sexism or suchlike as ‘a good idea’…

For the first couple of decades of that exploration, I’d followed pretty much the standard ‘feminist’ line: “men are the problem, women are the solution”. Which meant I first had to accept defining myself as ‘the problem’ – which kinda reinforced my existing rather-too-strong tendencies towards self-blame and self-doubt, and which kinda made any kind of social-relations even harder than they already were.

It wasn’t until I got well into my forties, along with a quieter somewhat-acceptance that I was quintessentially unsuited for any kind of social-relationship other than that of the Outsider, that I finally realised that the real problem wasn’t ‘men’ at all: it was the dishonesty and self-dishonesty of Other-blame, in whatever form it might take. And hence that the so-called ‘pro-feminist’ or ‘anti-sexist’ line that I too had supported all of those years was in fact just another form of sexism – but a more pernicious form of sexism because it had seemed to be supportive of others’ needs.

At that point I belatedly started to do some rather more careful self-examination, and realised that, for most of my life, I too had been a target for almost all of the forms of abuse that were purported to be applied solely to women – and the same was true for many if not most of the men I knew. I also belatedly realised that much if not most of that abuse had come from women, not men. In other words, both men and women were ‘the problem’, and both women and men would therefore need to be ‘the solution’. The notion that “men are the problem, women are the solution” was itself by definition not merely inherently sexist, but inherently violent – and often intensely violent at that, in both its action and intent. Ouch…

Somewhen around that time I was asked to review the Duluth model on domestic-violence. (In part this was on behalf of two of my lesbian friends, who’d ended their relationship in a knife-fight – fortunately without doing significant damage to each other – but had had no help at all from the official Domestic Violence Helpline, solely because there was no man that they could blame…)

That study of Duluth turned out to be a real eye-opener. The model starts off by defining all violence as inherently and exclusively ‘male’: it gives no reason for doing so, it just asserts that this is some kind of ‘universal truth’, and continues on from there. The Duluth Wheel then lists various forms of violence, exclusively using male-pronouns for the nominal perpetrator, and female-pronouns for the nominal-victim: ‘gender-equality’ is defined as existing when the woman – and, we might note, only the woman – “feels safe and comfortable expressing herself and doing things”.

Yet this exclusive use of gender-pronouns suggested a very simple thought-experiment: swap the gender-pronouns over and see if it makes sense this other way round. It did: in fact so much so that in many cases it made more sense – and with much more social-context evidence – than the ‘official’ way round. In which case, domestic-violence could not be portrayed as something that was inherently gendered: and the attempt to do so in Duluth, was, by its own terms, “minimising, denying and blaming” of men for what was actually women’s violence. Which meant that, in practice, other than for a very small subset of cases, Duluth was not only doomed to fail, but actually designed to fail – but fail in such a way that could then be used to blame men alone for the failure. Hence, far from reducing the social problem of domestic-violence, Duluth’s design is capable only of making things worse, for everyone. Not exactly a good idea…

The more I’ve studied current gender-issues in current ‘Western’-style cultures, the more that the inherently-dysfunctional design of Duluth has turned out to be typical rather than the exception. Which, again, is not exactly a good idea.

And that’s why I kinda lost my rag at Bert’s garbage about ‘feminine values’ – because almost invariably such over-simplistic garbage indicates a serious lack of thought or awareness about the real complexities behind a lot of seriously nasty societal wicked-problems. That kind of shallow (and, all too often, inanely sexist) non-thinking will keep on applying the same muddled-headed assumptions to contexts where they just don’t fit, repeatedly failing to understand or acknowledge that its ‘solutions’ not only don’t work but can’t work, in fact can only keep on making things worse, and worse, and worse – and guarantees overall outcomes that are going to be seriously non-fun for just about everyone involved. Which, yet again, is not exactly a good idea.

[Note, though, that we see exactly the same kind of obsessive misapplication of ill-thought-through non-'solutions' in many other areas, such as IT-centric EA, or in the ongoing disaster-area of 'managerialisation' that keeps on trying to force-fit arbitrary 'sameness'-based assumptions into high-uniqueness contexts such as the NHS. In that sense, there's nothing really different here: but there's a lot we can learn from properly tackling sexism that we can apply in other contexts too.]

So let’s strip this right back to its core essence: keep it strictly to observed fact and systematic symmetry, and build outward from there.

Item #1: yes, men and women are different – no surprises there. But actually everyone is similar to and different from everyone else – sex and gender are just specific strands within that overall ‘same and different’. If we over-focus on any one strand, or make arbitrary assumptions based on just one strand, we’re likely to miss out a lot of other strands that may actually be more relevant in the context.

Item #2: yes, much of this is problem of power. More specifically, it’s a problem about perceptions of power:

• physics definition: “power is the ability to do work” (aka ‘functional power’)
• common social definition: “power is the ability to avoid work” (aka ‘dysfunctional delusion of power’)

The reason why the latter definition is a delusion is that no work is actually done. Sometimes – such as in a slave-culture, or in our culture’s increasing dependence on a somewhat slave-like usage of machines – the work seems to be done by others, as a result of this kind of abuse, but often with hidden costs, or opportunity-costs, such as loss of skills-development in doing the work. But where the work can only be done by the self – particularly relational-work or spiritual-work, creating “a sense of meaning a purpose, a sense of self and of relationship with that which is greater than self” – then that definition of power as “the ability to avoid work” leads inevitably to a spiralling addiction to Other-blame and Other-abuse, because the needed work still repeatedly demands to be done, yet cannot be done by some Other, no matter how much they might try to do so.

(Over the years I’ve done a lot of work on how these themes play out in various real-world contexts, and what we can do to mitigate and resolve them in real-world practice. For example, take a look at my non-gendered rewrite of Duluth, or – for a somewhat less ‘political’ context, but using essentially the same principles – see the ‘manifesto‘ on tackling implicit abuse and violence in the workplace, from my book ‘Power and response-ability: the human side of systems‘.)

Item #3: there are various traits that are often described as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. Yet Item #1 applies: between individuals, there are differences amongst the supposed samenesses, and samenesses amongst the supposed differences. And Item #2 applies: we need to be careful to ensure that none of these traits are misused to ‘justify’ power-problems and power-abuses, especially in a broader social-context. In so much as those traits are physiologically-determined – i.e. sex-differences, such as the ability to bear a child – there’s not much that we can do about them, other than to acknowledge them and respect them. (Note, though, that even the notion that there are just two sexes is often questionable: as I remember, some of the Plains Indian cultures traditionally recognise at least a dozen distinct sexes, whereas current genetics and current medical evidence would take it a lot further than that.) Yet where those purported traits are derived more from gender, or from an arbitrary blurring of sex and gender – in other words, culturally-determined as much or more than biologically-determined – then we need to be much more careful about how we work with them, because there are distinct and important choices in there.

Let’s take two very similar supposed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits: the willingness to sacrifice Self for Other. The ‘feminine’ version – seen so often in mothers, but in fathers too – focusses its sacrifice on behalf of related Others, such as children or siblings or spouse. By contrast, the ‘masculine’ version – which we see embodied in groups such as emergency-workers, or individual rescuers, which these days may well include women as well as men – focusses its sacrifice on behalf of unrelated Others. One is familial, the other is social: and from the broader perspective of species-survival, both of these are very important and even necessary traits. Yet according to Bert’s bland assertion that “Feminine values are the operating system of the 21st century”, only the ‘feminine’ trait should be considered valid; the ‘masculine’ trait – willingness to risk life on behalf of a stranger, a previously-unknown Other – is to be consigned to the scrapheap of history. Is that actually a good idea? Hmm…

Let’s take two very different and often supposedly-gendered traits: competition, and cooperation. According to feminist writers such as Starhawk (Miriam Simos), competition is exclusively ‘masculine’, and always dysfunctional, whereas cooperation is exclusively ‘feminine’, and always functional and desirable. In The Spiral Dance, and even more in Dreaming the Dark, it’s notable the extent to which Simos relies on circular-reasoning to ‘prove’ the validity of these assertions… In practice, as only a few moments of real-world observation and reflection should indicate, it’s all too evident that men can and do collaborate, often in highly functional ways – such as in that same kind ‘masculine sacrifice’ in emergency-rescue scenarios; whereas women most definitely do compete with each other, often in extremely-destructive ways. (See, for example, the film Mean Girls, a kind of fictionalisation of behaviours researched and described in the book Queen Bees and Wannabes.) Hence it should be obvious that we should not conflate those themes together.

A more useful ‘bundling’ would cross-link these traits to Item #2: the key concern is not whether it’s competition or cooperation, but whether it’s based on working ‘with’ or ‘against’ others: ‘competition-with’ and ‘cooperation-with’, versus ‘competition-against’ and ‘cooperation-against’. The more whatever-the-activity-is is ‘with’ someone or something, the more likely is to be functional; the more it’s ‘against’ someone or something, the more likely it is to be addictively dysfunctional. For example, ‘competition-with’ is a often a key and necessary component in skills-development, even if the ‘competition-with’ is only with the Self-as-Other; whereas perhaps the two most classic examples of ‘cooperation-against’ are war, and the obsessive Other-blame of almost all current feminist theory and practice. Oops…

To put it into a personal context, in my work as a contractor and consultant, I’ve worked for and with some very competent people, and some seriously dysfunctional ones. The key point here is that there was a fairly even mix of men and women in both of those categories. Graeme Burnett and Helen Mills, for example, each managed a brilliant combination of competition and collaboration in their respective business contexts. Of the other kind, I won’t name any of the disaster-areas I had the misfortune to have to work with: we’ve all suffered them in our own ways – some of those ways documented with painful accuracy by Bob Sutton in his book The No Asshole Rule. In all of that mess, the nearest I’ve seen to anything resembling a gender-tendency was that the dysfunctional ‘male-dominated’ environments tended to be in commercial businesses, whereas the dysfunctional ‘female-dominated’ environments tended to be in government-departments: but that’s only my experience, and others would note it differently – such as the first-hand experience reframed into fictional form by Lauren Weisberger in her novel The Devil Wears Prada.

Anyway, despite all of the real-world evidence, ‘competition’ is still often described as a ‘masculine’ trait, and ‘cooperation’ a ‘feminine’. Hence, according to Bert’s assertion, all forms of competition should be expunged from “the operating system of the 21st century”. Which, in effect, argues for an ‘operating system’ that has no means for skills-development, and no means whatsoever to deal with dysfunctional ‘cooperation-against’. Perhaps not such a good idea? Hmm…

That is the real effect of the shallow thinking embedded in such bland assertions as “Feminine values are the operating system of the 21st century”: they are a lot more dangerous than they might at first seem. Especially so if people are foolish enough to believe them – which, regrettably, they often are. Oh well.

There’s one more lens that might be useful here, though itself often much-misused: Spiral Dynamics. The set of colour-coded ‘value-memes’ in the Spiral model alternate between ‘individual’ – usually characterised as ‘masculine’ – and ‘collective’ – usually characterised as ‘feminine’. The common (mis)perception of Spiral is that it’s a linear-progression, with unfortunate overtones of classic US concepts of ‘manifest destiny’, or Marxist-style notions of ‘historical determinacy’. We’ll come back to the problems around that in a moment, but for now, that linear-progression would imply a cultural clash between the Orange value-meme – masculine, competitive – and the Green value-meme – feminine, cooperative. In other words, the same garbled-conflation we’ve already tackled above. The popular notion amongst the newage-folks is that we’re moving out of an Orange age into a Green one – hence the sexist guff such as in Bert’s ‘Feminine values’ Tweet.

What such people don’t seem to notice, or know, is that whilst Orange can be seriously-dysfunctional, one of the core characteristics of Green is that it needs some Other to blame, in order to cover up and avoid facing up to the consequences of its own inherent dysfunctionalities. In that sense, yes, very much dysfunctional-feminine… Yet at the global scale, and given the kind of planetary-scale challenges we have to face up to Real Soon Now, the one thing we cannot afford – to be blunt – is yet another fundamentally-dysfunctional model of reality, this time based not on Orange-mode delusions of individual ‘rights’, but on Green-mode ‘rights’ of Other-blame. True, the current Orange-dominant culture does need to be superseded: but replacing it with a Green-dominant would be no real improvement at all – in fact, probably a lot worse, in many ways, because we no longer have the luxury of time or energy to waste in pandering to its delusions.

What we need – what we urgently need – is a transition to a true systemic view of reality: one that, for example, fully acknowledges that blame is itself a form of violence, and that there is never an excuse for any form of violence or abuse, from anyone to any Other, including to Self-as-Other. (Understanding of such behaviours, yes, and respect about where they come from and why, yes; but excuse, no, not at all, not ever. That distinction may seem a bit cryptic and confusing at times, but is utterly crucial – and increasingly, crucial to our very survival…)

In Spiral terms, that shift to a systemic view is represented by a transition to a Yellow value-meme, or ‘above’ (Turquoise, or Coral). In the usual interpretations of the Spiral model, that kind of two-step transition is impossible: it’s a linear progression, so our only possible options from Orange are to ‘go Green’, or collapse back to a theocratic or other rigid rule-based Blue that certainly won’t be able to  cope with the kind of complexities and chaos that we now know are coming our way. Yet that assumes that the linear-progression model is correct – which I don’t think it is. As I understand it, we can re-interpret Clare Graves’ core research not as a spiral but as a set of dimensions: societies do not evolve in the simple linear-progression of some ‘spiritual-imperialist’s wet-dream, but as moving around and exploring and acting within different regions in a value-oriented phase-space.

One of those dimensions is, as per mainstream Spiral, the ‘individual/collective’ axis – so often (mis)interpreted as a ‘masculine/feminine’ axis. But a more crucial dimension, for this present purpose, is a non-systemic/systemic axis: everything Green and ‘below’ is non-systemic, and, crucially, does not or cannot grasp the idea and experience that there is no separation between Self and Other. Everything is connected: there is no ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’, there is only ‘all of Us’. And to again be blunt, it’s only if we learn to understand that fundamental, crucial point – and learn it fast, and apply it in every single action – that we are likely to have any chance at all of coming with what’s coming up. Green may be desirable – especially its so-convenient, so-comforting ‘right’ to blame – but it just won’t cut it. Not for the messes we’re facing now – let alone the ones we’ll face soon. Sorry.

And that’s why I get angry at that kind of guff that Bert put out in that Tweet and, frankly, far too many other Tweets before it – just like so many other people put out there, too. Yes, it’s annoyingly sexist: that’s a problem in itself, as I hope should be clear by now from the above. But the reality is that that kind of shallow-thinking is not merely sexist, it actually puts everyone’s survival at risk: and that’s not clever – not clever at all.

That why I take it seriously: very seriously – and I hope you would too. Which is why I’d hope you’d join me in challenging it – every suchlike form of shallow-thinking, whatever form it may take.

But that’s up to you, of course: your choice?

Anyway, over to you, if you wish.

Most organisations still seem to prefer to ignore the complainers. But it’s perhaps not a good idea, because anticlients are the immune-system of the enterprise.

They’re the metaphoric antibodies or white blood-cells of the enterprise-as-organism, protecting the integrity of the enterprise as a whole. And they can and will reject – and eject – the organisation from its place in the shared-enterprise if enough of them interpret it as a threat to the enterprise. Hence, for an organisation, monitoring the anticlient activity around itself is not merely a wise idea: it can quite literally be a matter of survival.

So how to do this?

To make sense of this, we need to understand two key points.

First, in the sense that I’m using the terms here, the enterprise is far larger than the organisation. The organisation – bounded by rules, roles and responsibilities – does its business within the scope of a shared-enterprise – an emotive idea, or story, bounded by vision, values and commitments.

Contrary to many current concepts of business, the organisation is not itself ‘the enterprise’, nor does it possess the enterprise. Instead, the organisation operates within the enterprise: and, at any time, the enterprise may and can – to use Charles Handy’s term – revoke the organisation’s ‘social licence to operate’. Despite its own image of itself, the organisation is unlikely to be ‘the centre’ of the shared-enterprise: in reality, its existence is very much dependent on its relationships with and within the enterprise – and if that ‘licence to operate’ is revoked, the organisation will probably die.

And the way in which that ‘licence to operate’ is challenged, and possibly revoked, is very similar to an organism’s immune-response: some entity within that organism (or, here, the shared-enterprise) is somehow identified as a threat, will become surrounded by the organism’s ‘guard-cells’ to shield the rest of the organism from its influence, and then either absorbed or pushed out. For an shared-enterprise, anticlients are its antibodies – its immune-system to protect itself from ‘rogue’ organisations.

For an organisation, anticlient-activity is the first warning-bell of an immune-response by the enterprise against it. Just as in a living body, there’ll always be some immune-system activity anyway: but alarm-bells should definitely go off as soon as that activity rises much beyond a background level. For its own survival, the organisation needs to monitor anticlient-activity in the enterprise.

The scope we need to monitor here is quite a lot larger than most people seem to expect. For a start, we need to monitor within the organisation: one of the things that can definitely kill the organisation is when its own employees become anticlients… Beyond that, we typically need to think of the ‘the enterprise’ stretching out at least three steps beyond the organisation: its immediate supply-chain or value-web, its market-context, and the broader community beyond the market. Or, in visual form:

Anticlients are people who are in the same enterprise, but disagree with how your organisation acts within that enterprise. There are two distinct types of anticlients for whom we need to watch: inherent-anticlients and betrayal-anticlients.

– Inherent-anticlients are the anticlients you’ll get automatically if your organisation addresses only one side of a story that includes inherent wicked-problems. For example, if you’re providing family-planning advice, you’ll automatically have opposition from ‘right to live’ activists and/or ’right to choose’ activists, as anticlients to your organisation. Much the same applies if you’re doing oil-exploration in the Amazon, or doing PR for a political party: by the very nature of that kind of wicked-problem, there’s no way that you’re not going to have someone who vehemently disagrees with you.

[At first glance, our competitors might also seem to be like anticlients for us, but the relationship is significantly different: the opposition is peer-to-peer, not between organisation and its 'containing' broader-enterprise.]

Inherent-anticlients tend to reside out in the outer reaches of the shared-enterprise, beyond the market-space in which your organisation operates. (This should be no surprise, because in many cases they’ll reject the validity even of that market in itself, let alone any one organisation that operates within it.) They’re also relatively easy to identify and to monitor, because in effect ‘they come with the territory’ – their opposition is a direct outcome of a wicked-problem embedded in the core of the enterprise itself.

This does, however, also mean that there’s no way to eliminate their opposition as such, because it’s an outcome of the way the broader-enterprise defines itself – which is far beyond our own control.

The best way to mitigate inherent-anticlient risks is:

• acknowledge that the clash exists, and is inherent in the shared-enterprise itself
• respect the opposition, and the validity of that opposition
• openly reach out to work with the anticlients, rather than fight against them or attempt to silence or ignore them

A good example of how this can be made to work for all parties is Walmart‘s now-active engagement in sustainability throughout its value-web.

– Betrayal-anticlients are the anticlients that your organisation creates through its actions and inactions. The ‘betrayal’ in this context is a perceived betrayal by the organisation of the values or promise of the shared-enterprise, leading to a steep loss of trust in the organisation itself – and thence to active opposition against the organisation.

Sometimes these are non-clients who don’t actually engage in transactions with the organisation, but react against what they as ‘uninvolved third-parties’ perceive as unfairness against others. More often, though, they are – or were – customers of the organisation who feel personally let down or betrayed by the organisation. In that sense, betrayal-anticlients tend to reside more in the market-space of the enterprise, rather than in the outer reaches of the shared-enterprise.

Unlike the inherent-anticlients, opposition from betrayal-anticlients often seems ‘unpredictable’ – especially if the organisation is largely unaware of its impacts on others, or enacts behaviours that can seem cavalier or disrespectful about others. The opposition can also vary wildly in scope and scale, again seemingly ‘without warning’. Yet in practice these ‘immune-system response’ interactions are largely predictable: they arise directly from poor service-design and/or service-execution. The apparent unpredictability can also be reduced by monitoring social-media and suchlike for complaints about the organisation, such as tweets that mention the organisation together with a ‘#fail‘ hashtag – and a fast and respectful response is often crucial for reducing the risk that such social-media complaints could ‘go viral’.

The best way to mitigate betrayal-anticlient risks is to do a thorough review of all services and service-relationships, looking for and then designing-out any built-in power-dysfunctions in those services. Specifically, what we look for are two fundamental misunderstandings about power:

• power-over: any attempt to prop Self up by putting Other down (or the less-common ‘lose/win’ form: any attempt to prop Other up by putting Self down)
• power-under: any attempt to offload responsibility onto the Other without their engagement and consent (or the less-common ‘lose/win’ form: attempt to take on responsibility from the Other without engagement or consent)

Unfortunately, both power-over and, even more, power-under are very common in organisations’ internal and external service-relationships, in all forms and at all levels, from corporate policy right the way down to code-level interactions between IT-systems. Judging from the streams of ‘#fail‘ tweets and suchlike, both power-under and power-over are rampant in virtually all forms of so-called ‘customer-service’; some business-models in effect depend on power-under or even power-over. This is definitely not wise, since in the days of widely-shared social-media and other forms of many-to-many or many-to-one communication, just one seriously-disgruntled betrayal-anticlient really can have the power to bring down an entire corporation…

In terms of actions for enterprise-architects, service-designers and others, perhaps the most crucial of all is a shift in mindset, from ignoring or rejecting anticlient-complaints, to actively seeking them out and engaging with them. Remember that each of them is a kind of immune-response by the enterprise, against our organisation: and it is the remit of the shared-enterprise, not a unilateral assertion by the organisation, that determines the continuing of our organisation’s ‘social-licence to operate’. Remember too that in this kind of context, feelings are facts: simple notions of ‘reason’ and suchlike will rarely apply – at least, not in the sense that we might use with an IT-system, for example.

And yes, it is tricky. On one side, every anticlient-response represents a potential threat to that licence-to-operate; but it’s likely that we, or our executives or others, won’t want to hear about any complaints, will want to pretend that everything will run smoothly just how we want, without needing to face any real-world complexities or complications at all. Yet on the other side, every anticlient-response provides us with information about how we could or should improve the organisation and its services, in order to better protect and expand that licence-to-operate; and as in that Walmart example, there’s a lot that we can gain from it too, if we turn round and actively engage with our anticlients.

That’s the choice here. Which way you take it, of course, is up to you!

Comments, anyone?

This is a follow-on to the themes in various recent posts such as ‘Migrating from edge to backbone‘ and the slidedeck for my IASA UK Summit presentation ‘Backbone and edge – architecting the balance between continuity and change‘. It’s actually a collation of the notes for that slidedeck, including a swathe of themes and ideas that didn’t make it into the slidedeck itself.

First, an overview using the standard ‘problem; situation; complication; resolution’ structure:

– problem: stability versus change; sameness versus uniqueness.

– situation: Waterfall (‘control’) versus Agile (‘anarchy’).

– complication: one-model-fits-all doesn’t work

• forced-sameness can scale, is fast, work with low skills, but can’t cope with variation or fast change
• forced-difference can’t scale, is slow, requires high-skill

– resolution: apply appropriate model to each context:

• first, identify ‘appropriate context’
• model: control (backbone) <-> complexity (domain) <-> contact (edge)
• governance:
  • backbone: Waterfall-type governance
  • domain: context-specific mix of Waterfall and Agile
  • edge: Agile-type governance
• difference of content: read-only (best in backbone) versus read-write (better in domain or edge)
• difference in context: sameness (backbone, domain) versus uniqueness (domain, edge)
• difference of context: pace-layering, variety-weather, turbulence in present and/or in futures)

Some practical guidelines:

– for sanity’s sake, use a service-oriented approach to architecture

– use a systems-thinking / design-thinking approach to assessment, modelling and design: fractal, self-similarity, ‘everything is connected’; also supports a ‘start anywhere’ principle

– suggest using the Enterprise Canvas concept-build (consistency from big-picture to fine-detail)

– apply filters to select appropriate ‘positioning’ for governance and design:

• high-dependency: implies backbone
• wicked-problems: implies domain and/or edge
• (un)certainty: certainty to backbone, fuzzy to domain, uniqueness to edge
• read-only (system-of-record)
• experimental: implies edge
• regulatory context: zero-tolerance implies backbone, flexibility-allowed implies domain

– governance themes:

• backbone: use Waterfall, keep uncertainty to minimum, focus on ‘fail-safe’
• domain: use complex-aware – e.g. make wicked-factors explicit, acknowledge continuous ‘re-solution’ rather than supposedly-permanent ‘solution’
• edge: use Agile, focus on ‘safe-fail’, design to learn

A brief note on pace-layering versus backbone-and-edge:

– backbone-and-edge is about:

• certainty versus uncertainty
• common (shared) versus unique
• stability versus instability

– pace-layering is about different rates of change

– pace-layering is a factor that impacts on decisions around backbone-and-edge, but is somewhat orthogonal to it

– also pace-layering will need to take variety-weather into account: variability of impact, variability of rates of change

Develop this a bit further with a medical example:

– on the one side, we need certainty about:

• it’s this person: this client, this agent/member-of-staff etc involved in these transactions
• it’s these actions: this prescription, this surgical-procedure, this record etc
• it’s this location: the patient lives at this address, is in this bed in this ward, the operation will take place in this surgical-theatre etc
• it’s these resources: these instruments, these consumables, this anaesthetics-cylinder etc

– on another side, we expect inherent uncertainty about specific or unique aspects of context:

• their own illness
• the day on which something might occur
• the weather on that day
• what they ate or drank or medications they took on that day before arrival
• the staff available on that day
• the equipment, medicines and other resources available in situ on that day
• triage and priority on that day
• sociopolitical interactions – prejudices, assumptions, religious beliefs, values etc of family, social milieu, social-workers, staff and others

– somewhere between, we have the messiness of social-complexity:

• family
• the ‘shoulds’ of politics, religion etc
• the often-politicised trade-offs of triage, priorities, case-management etc
• wicked-problems (often caused by over-certainty)

– for the ‘certainty’ side, we need to governance to assist in creating and maintaining that certainty

– for the ‘uncertainty’ side, we need governance to assist in maintaining value, and minimising failure-demand arising from misplaced over-certainty or ‘control’

– for the ‘complexity’ mid-range, often the emphasis will be more about before and after real-time, rather than at real-time (i.e. there’s little to no time for complexities at run-time)

Various useful comparisons (certainty on the left, uncertainty / uniqueness on the right):

• rates of change (pace-layering): slow <-> fast (don’t have time for Waterfall with fast pace of change)
• distant from action: any level of variety <-> at point of action: max 5-10 decisions
• platform provides certainty <-> affordance / use provides usefulness
• ‘true’ <-> ‘useful’
• remove complexity <-> work with complexity
• release <-> beta/alpha
• production <-> skunkworks

As I said at the start, this is just a set of notes, but hope it’s useful to someone, anyway.

• OliverBaier: Enterprise Canvas: Does the XG flow go down to the next *lower* layer? If not, how does it relate to eg the XD flow?

The quick answer that I gave Oliver on Twitter was as follows:

• tetradian: Enterprise Canvas: XG does connect to next ‘lower’; XD in part includes XG but with broader scope. Will blog.

Hence, this post.

The labels ‘XD’ and ‘XG’ relate to flows between the service in focus (the one we’re mapping on an Enterprise Canvas frame) and, respectively, other services that provide ‘direction’-services (‘XD’ flows), and ‘child’-services that this service manages and governs (‘XG’ flows) – as seen on this version of the Enterprise Canvas summary-diagram:

This part of Enterprise Canvas draws strongly on Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, which, in service-oriented terms, partitions service-relationships as follows:

• system-1: service-delivery – the service itself, the core service represented on the Enterprise Canvas – also encapsulating any ‘child’-services (coordinated by XG-flows) – and exchanges with other service-partners (indicated by XT-, XC- and XB-flows)
• system-2: coordination between services, both under the same governance (peers under the same service-hierarchy) and elsewhere in other parts of the service-hierarchy, or with service-partners (coordinated by XK-flows)
• system-3star: keeping all services on-track to enterprise vision and values (coordinated by XV-flows and exchanges)
• system-3: classic run-time ‘inside/now’ management-role, allocating resources and collating performance-information (coordinated by part of XD-flows)
• system-4: business-intelligence/change ‘outside/future’, to identify how the service needs to change to adapt to its context (coordinated by part of XD-flows)
• system-5: identity and purpose, establishing and maintaining the big-picture ‘why’ for the service (coordinated by part of XD-flows)

In the classic Taylorist view, system-5 remains the exclusive preserve of ‘the owners’, and everything else other than system-1 service-delivery is conflated into a hierarchy of system-3 ‘management’ The system-2, system-3star and system-4 services are all blurred together and merged into an expanded yet often ill-defined system-3; the XV and XK-flows are all merged into the XD-flows, or deemed not to exist at all. In effect, the XD- and XG flows are then regarded as conceptually identical, rolling downward through the management-hierarchy, which is partly embedded within yet also somehow separate from any aspect of service-delivery itself:

This does sort-of work if (but only if) we’re modelling a segment of a system or service where the flows consist solely of information, and where system-4, system-5 and even system-3star are in effect handled entirely ‘outside’ of that part of the system, with no direct connection with this service at all – such as can occur with IT-based automation, for example. In those cases, the respective XD- and XG-flows are essentially the same in structure, and can even be largely the same in their content, too.

Once we move outside of that narrow constraint, XD- and XG-flows can differ a lot:

• XG-flows consist primarily of virtual-assets (such as information about activity-goals and performance-criteria [going 'down'] and performance-reports [coming 'up']) and sometimes also physical-assets (distribution of physical resources for service-activities and tasks)
• XD-flows will often also incorporate or leverage relational-assets (‘who’ – links between real people) and/or aspirational-assets (‘why’ – identity, purpose, commitment, motivation)

Crucially, XK and XV-flows here are not conflated into the XD or XG-flows:

• XK-flows primarily provide coordination between delivery-services, and hence often not ‘within’ immediate service-management or service-governance
• XV-flows link services to means to keep on-track to value, and in the case of audit to the respective value must be separate from immediate ‘management’ – often mandated as such by accreditation-schemes or even by law

In short:

• in Taylorism, the XD and XG-flows are regarded as essentially identical – an assumption that can render the system inherently fragile (insufficient to match the requisite-variety of the context), and potentially unable to adapt to changes in context
• more validly, in certain simple types of information-oriented automation, the XD and XG-flows may be similar or the same, if all system-4, system-5, system-2 change-coordination and system-3star values-management is handled ‘outside’ of the service itself
• in all other contexts, XG-flows represent a selected subset of XD-flows, sufficient only for immediate resource-management and performance-management of a related set of ‘child’-services, that themselves link into their own context-specific XD, XK and XV-flows, linking them directly to the ‘big-picture’ for direction, coordination and validation respectively

I hope that makes sense?

This is another follow-on to the slidedeck for my ‘Backbone and edge‘ presentation at the IASA UK Summit in London last week. Looking at the section ‘Everything-as-a-service’ (slides 18-31) and, specifically, slide 29 ‘In more detail’, Oliver Baier commented:

• OliverBaier: @tetradian 9 cell #enterprise canvas is very useful. However, the 3 rows may not consistently be related to before/during/after periods… // …example: Value return is b4 value creation in prepaid scenarios. Relationship mgmt better continuous for long-running svcs… // …Nonetheless, consideration of pre-/in-/post-service periods as relevant in #entarch as in #servicedesign.

This one’s gonna take some explaining… but first, here’s the Enterprise Canvas graphic in question:

So, start again from the top, much as in the slidedeck. In a service-oriented architecture, we’d say that the reason anyone does anything at all is that there’s a tension between what we have, versus what we want. In other words, a tension between realised-ends versus desired-ends, which we could visualise as follows:

A service provides a means to resolve (part of) that tension. In relatively-rare contexts, it can do so on its own:

[Note that we use the terms 'value' (singular) and 'values' (plural) to mean different things here: the vertical axis is driven by values (plural) linked to the enterprise 'vision', whereas the horizontal flow is an exchange of value. Somewhat confusing, I know, but that's just the limitations of English for you...]

Or, to put this in visual form:

Looking ‘horizontally’ at that value-flow, this gives us an effective partitioning of the service in three ways:

• inbound: interactions on the ‘supply-side’ – consuming others’ services
• this: identifying, creating and managing its own value
• outbound: interactions on the ‘customer-side’ – providing services to others

We then look at how those exchanges and activities actually work – the effective sequence in play. For that, we can turn to Tuckman’s classic Group Dynamics project-lifecycle sequence:

• Forming (Purpose): create the context, idea, intent and purpose for a project (in this context, a mutual exchange) - aspirational stage
• Storming (People): build the connection between people to set the ground for possible exchange - relational stage
• Norming (Preparation): establish the details of how the transaction will proceed - conversational stage
• Performing (Process): do the actual transaction of exchangeable-value - transactional stage
• Adjourning (Performance): complete the project, establish benefits-realisation and lessons-learned for future interactions - completions stage

Or, to reframe it in Cluetrain terms:

• markets are transactions (service-Process)
• markets are conversations (service-Preparation)
• markets are relations (services serve People)
• markets are purposeful (services serve a Purpose)

And also:

• markets continue (services need continual confirmation, review and refresh of Performance)

Which we can visualise in circular form as the Service Cycle:

Or in a more linear form as:

The catch, though, is that most business-models only acknowledge the setup for the transaction and the transaction itself – the conversations stages (‘marketing’) and transactions stages (‘sales’) – and all solely from the organisation’s perspective at that. Not a good idea…

To make the service viable, we need to acknowledge and incorporate all of the interactions between the service and its service-partners – and include proper completions for each of those interactions, too. In the diagram below, a conventional transaction-oriented model would acknowledge only the ‘operations’ and ‘tactics’ interactions – but we need to include all of them:

One way to make sense of this is to partition the service’s activities in terms of that service-cycle: the interactions that happen before the setup for transaction; the interactions during the setup and the transaction itself; and the various completions that are needed after the transaction. Which, when we combine this with the previous three-way partitioning, gives us this nine-cell grid:

And if we explore what actually happens within a service, we can assign generic labels to each of those cells as follows:

Which brings us back to where we started – but I hope it’s now rather more clear as to how we got there!

So, to get back to Oliver’s questions:

• OliverBaier: @tetradian 9 cell #enterprise canvas is very useful. However, the 3 rows may not consistently be related to before/during/after periods… // …example: Value return is b4 value creation in prepaid scenarios. Relationship mgmt better continuous for long-running svcs…

The first point here is that we shouldn’t need to worry too much about the labels – it’s the grid that matters here, not the labels.

The second point – and this one’s really important – is that this nine-cell grid is a simple visualisation of something that’s actually recursive and fractal. For example, in a partner-relationship, the partner is both ’supplier’ and ‘customer’, both at the same time. Quite often – particularly with more distant stakeholders – the interactions will never actually reach the ‘transaction’ stage: it’s all ‘before’ and ‘after’, with no ‘during’, but the interactions still exist and still matter for the overall operation of the service. And transactions and interactions each encompass and incorporate other transactions and interactions, each with their own ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’. In short, think fractally, not linearly.

• OliverBaier: example: Value return is b4 value creation in prepaid scenarios.

Short answer to that one is “No, it isn’t”. To be blunt, it’s a fairly typical example of organisation-centric thinking – thinking of the service solely in terms of the organisation’s view, rather than the service as a whole – and also over-focusssing on money-flow rather than value-flow.

Take this apart again with a bit more precision, thinking fractally rather than linearly. In a prepaid scenario, the sequence involves a recursion: set up the relationship, then an inner loop of prepayment and service-delivery, finalising with overall completion. Service is not complete until the service paid-for is delivered to the customer’s satisfaction: but with linear-thinking, there’s a huge danger that the organisation will tend to think that service is complete once it has been paid. The legal term for that mistake is ‘breach of promise’ – or, in more colloquial terms, ‘theft’. Again, not a good idea… Hence, in turn, important to think of the ‘Value-Return’ and ‘Value-Outlay’ cells not solely in terms of money-flow (although money probably forms part of their concerns) but more in terms of how they handle the full set of completions for the service, all the way through to reaffirmed-trust in and with the respective service-partners.

Oliver came back on Twitter with a valid aside here:

• OliverBaier: re money vs value-delivered: Money is one form of value we seek from customers, right? But true, we need to consider all forms.

Yes, in a commercial context, “Money is one form of value we seek from customers”. Yet it’s essential to remember that the money arises solely in response to service-promise and service-delivery of what is usually not a monetary form of value: in that prepaid scenario, money in, yes, but toothbrushes or breakfast or clothes or cell-phone service or vehicle-repairs are the flows of value that customer is interested in – and the money doesn’t happen without it. Again, forgetting that point is not a good idea.

Going back to Oliver’s initial questions:

• OliverBaier: Relationship mgmt better continuous for long-running svcs…

Again, think fractally, not linearly: yes, relationship-management is key to long-running services, yet even for a ‘one-shot’ service-relationship, we still have to create the context for that relationship before anything else can happen.

Oliver came back again with one more question that, yes, is definitely relevant here:

• OliverBaier: The value proposition cell in the enterprise canvas is somewhat unclear to me. Did you envisage a description of the a) value prop itself, b) processes for establishing it & making/keeping it relevant, c) something else?

The short answer is “All of those”. Think in terms of where it sits in the nine-cell grid: it’s about establishing the relevance of the service’s own story to its suppliers and customers, and thence providing the underlying ‘Why’ for any subsequent interaction or transaction. It links the values (the ‘vertical’ connection to the desired-ends of the broader-enterprise) with a proposition about value that this service can create (the ‘horizontal’ connection with service-partners), which is what creates a shared-enterprise with those service-partners.

The longer answer, in terms of value-proposition in service-modelling with Enterprise Canvas, is in my post ‘What is a value-proposition?‘ – perhaps simplest just to point you to that post, rather than repeating everything here.

One last comment from Oliver:

• OliverBaier: The more we (just me?) actually work with a framework, the more questions etc come up.

Yes, exactly. Enterprise Canvas is often used more of a sensemaking tool or a viability-checklist than a design tool as such: the aim is to elicit questions, from which – once we do get real clarity on those questions – the answers we need tend to arise automatically from the context itself.

Much as with SCAN and most of my other tools, Enterprise Canvas itself is actually quite simple: yet once we learn how to leverage that simplicity – such as by thinking fractally rather than linearly – it also turns out to be surprisingly powerful. A good tool provides good structure and good affordances, but the real trick – the real power – is in how we use the tool, not in the tool itself.

Hope that’s useful, anyway?