Tom Graves / Tetradian » Futures

A question of policy

Tom G — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:16:29 +0000

Development of new ideas, processes and practices will always be a social process, and always somewhat messy.

To enable that development to happen, we need social conditions that can support it – and screen out behaviours that prevent it.

Those social conditions can best be described in terms of policy, which from my experience I would summarise as follows:

The debate needs to be respectful of the process – the fact that, by its nature, much of the work must pass through periods of inherent uncertainty. For example, see my Sidewise post ‘On innnovation, foundations, scaffolding and Portakabins‘ for some suggestions on how to handle this.

[Update in response to comment #1 below - many thanks to Paul Jansen for the critique]
The debate needs to be respectful of emotion – the fact that, by its nature, development and debate is inherently challenging, and will hence trigger many different emotions as positions and views are put forth, defended, argued, abandoned and so on. We need to ‘play fair’, ‘be reasonable’, allow ourselves and others to make mistakes, to stumble, to get things ‘wrong’, to feel embarrassed yet still feel safe in being embarrassed, yet also to keep moving towards the desired or emergent aim.
[end of update]

The debate needs to be rational – by which I mean an ability and willingness not only to test the internal logics of the ideas in scope (which in some cases may not follow simple ‘true/false’ binary-logics, by the way), but also to move outside of one’s own assumptions, theories and beliefs.

The debate needs to be honest – by which I mean that each party will need to focus strongly on facing their own personal challenges from the requirements for respect and rationality, both of each other and of respect to the ideas themselves.

The debate needs to exclude all forms of violence and abuse – or at least, given the realities of social interactions in often-challenging circumstances, that all parties in the debate must actively address and minimise these concerns to the maximum extent possible, both within themselves and with and/or from others. (The more positive form of this point is that we should always aim maximise each person’s ‘ability to do work’ in the respective context: see my ‘Manifesto on power and response-ability in the workplace‘.) ‘Violence’ is any attempt, in any form whatsoever, to prop oneself up by putting others down (or the ‘lose-win’ variant, putting self down to prop others up); ‘abuse’ is any attempt, in any form whatsoever, to offload responsibility onto others without their engagement or consent (or the ‘lose-win’ variant, taking responsibility from others without their engagement or consent). This requirement was famously summarised by Bob Sutton in ‘The No-Asshole Rule‘:

Two tests are specified for recognition of the asshole:
1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than themself?

If we wish to be engaged in meaningful debate, it is the responsibility of each of us to uphold that policy to the best of our ability.

In my own case, I challenge myself constantly on that policy. I know that, like everyone else, I will often be ‘wrong’ about some aspect of application of an idea; I know that, like everyone else, I will never have sufficient complete, accurate and final information needed to make concrete, unchallengeable decisions; and I know that none of this process is easy, for anyone.

It is clear, however, that some people, for various reasons such as excessive ego, assumed ‘authority’ or mistaken notions of ‘possession of the truth’, seem to believe themselves to be exempt from such policy, and instead believe that they have the ‘right’ to override others in any way that they wish. The result in each case is failure of the debate, and damage to or destruction of the development in scope – a circumstance from which everyone loses.

It is therefore our unfortunate but necessary responsibility to exclude such people from debate, until such time as they can demonstrate that they are able to hold to that policy.

In some cases we can do so by removing ourselves from the debate: I have had to do so quite often in discussions on LinkedIn, for instance, where there are all too many infamous examples of ‘debate-destroyers’.

Yet in other cases – and a personal weblog is one of them – there is no way to withdraw, and hence the only option is to explicitly exclude the offender. I’m glad to say that over the past couple of years I have only been forced to do so here on two separate occasions, with two different people: yet it needs to be understood that it unfortunately is necessary in each case, for everyone’s sake. It also needs to be understood that in each case it is solely that that person’s behaviour makes it impossible for the debate to continue: it says nothing about the person as such (a crucial distinction between what they do versus who they are).

Similar policies are in place elsewhere, such as this extract from one of the LinkedIn discussion-groups on enterprise-architecture:

If you are not willing to have a civil discussion, you will not be permitted to play in this educational playground to further the cause of EA. No one that attacks will be permitted to play. This is a healthy environment to exchange ideas … not to better your cause at the expense of others.

I would urge everyone to consider and apply such policy on their own weblogs, on their Twitter-conversations, and everywhere else where difficult discussions need to take place.

A problem of possession

Tom G — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:12:31 +0000

This one’s for Oscar Berg, who this morning sent out the following Tweet:

My best ideas that I use at work are born outside of office hours. Who owns these ideas?

I commented on my reTweet that this was a “key fail of possession-economy”. It’s actually much more serious than a mere ‘fail’, but we’ll come back to that in a moment. First, some more follow-on Tweets from Oscar as he mused further on his experiences:

With social media people have tools that can serve as evidence that they got an idea outside of work before they used it at work

Here’s my idea: if my ideas are free & available for anyone to use, noone can own them -> I can use them as well for whatever purpose

Organizations are obsessed with owning ideas & knowledge

Enterprises should focus on becoming the best environments for ideas to be born, grow and successfully be brought to the market

RT @tdebaillon: “Claiming to own an idea is a political matter, a will to stay in control-and-command logic”

RT @EskoKilpi: “attribution is the new ownership” #ideas

This is indeed a question of ownership – and a highly political one at that, as Thierry de Baillon explains above. Perhaps the key point here is that there are two fundamentally different concepts of ownership: possession, and stewardship (the latter sometimes referred to, perhaps more usefully, as responsibility-based ownership).

Possession-based ownership is the key-stone of the entire Western-style economy – hence the old adage that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’. Somewhat bizarrely, English-derived law (as used in Britain, the US, Australia and presumably many other ex-members of the former British Empire) does not in fact support a concept of possession as such: property is actually defined somewhat back-to-front, in terms of the ‘right to exclude others’ from access to the respective item. Either way, it’s clear that such ‘property’ is considered to be a personal ‘right’. And since corporations are legally classed as ‘artificial persons’, they too have the same ‘rights’ to exclusion-based property.

The concept sort-of works with physical property. One of the key attributes of anything physical is that it is ‘alienable’: if I give it to you, I no longer have it. It’s also possible to build a trail of provenance by which exclusive-owner and each person or entity that added value to that object can be recorded, and – according to the nominal aims of the possession-economy – offered appropriate ‘compensation’ for that transfer of value and/or exclusive-possession. Yet if we follow the logic of this, and follow the trails of provenance all the way to the very far-end, what we almost invariably find is that a) the trail begins with a title-deed to some area of land, and b) the initial ‘owner’ of that land ‘took possession’ by the simple expedient of saying “it’s mine, it belongs to me, and to no-one else”. Often the ‘possession’ took place by enforced ‘dispossession’ of everyone else, by ‘right of conquest’ or whatever; sometimes (as in the case of Australia, for example) the expropriation was slightly more subtle; but in essence it comes down to one rather ugly word: theft. It perhaps may seem strange to consider that even an entire country could be the subject of a theft on a truly enormous scale: but we don’t have to tell the indigenous peoples of former colonies about that kind of theft – they know about it, they live with its consequences every single day…

There’s also the interesting phenomenon of anti-possession – the offloading of ‘the unwanted’ onto others. Pollution is perhaps the most obvious kind of anti-property, but there are many others, including the ‘export’ of undesirable living-conditions or undesirable social stress. In each case, though, it represents a kind of theft – if only a theft from peoples of the future, who are in effect being forced by our inaction in the present to have to deal with the consequences for us, whether or not they might wish to do so.

Possession is actually an avoidance of responsibility, an offloading of responsibility onto others without their engagement and consent – for which the technical term is abuse. Most so-called ‘rights’ can easily be misused as forms of other-abuse, and the ‘right’ of possession is actually a form of legally-enshrined abuse: the ‘right’ to avoid any negotiation about appropriacy or responsibility of use.

So no matter that possession of physical property seems ‘normal’ and ‘everyday’, a ‘common-sense’ way to managing a society’s physical resources, its actual foundation is theft, and its operational basis is societally-enforced abuse. When we go right down to the roots in this way, it becomes very obvious, very quickly, that there is no ethical defence for our current system for ownership of physical property. Which is, yes, kind of a problem… a big problem…

Yet it gets even worse as soon we move outside of the physical domain. So-called ‘intellectual property‘ not only suffers from every one single one of the failures of physical property, but also fails at almost every point where some excuse can be made to support physical-property.

Unlike physical-property, ideas and information are ‘non-alienable‘ – if I give it to you, I still have it. Attempting to apply exclusion (alienability) to non-physical property is ultimately all but guaranteed to fail, because it goes directly against the non-alienable nature of non-physical property (hence the phrase ‘information wants to be free’); the only way it can be made to work at all is by bundling the information with some kind of physical object (such as a book, a disk, a seat in a cinema). The alternate option – and apparently the preferred option for the media industries – is to try to force the virtual world to fit the rules of the physical world – hence the increasing absurdities of ‘digital rights management’ and the like, which again are ultimately guaranteed to fail, because they go directly against the nature of the ‘property’.

Worse, there is no possible way that a trail-of-provenance (the only way in which physical-property can be made to seem ‘fair’) can be established for ‘intellectual property’ and other non-physical property. For example, we have no idea where ideas ‘come from’: the most likely suggestion at present is that they arise from a combination of individual interpretation drawing from a vast untraceable web of information provided by others. We have no means to identify who should and should not be awarded ‘compensation’ – especially given the complication that many ideas will arise from people long-dead, via books and the like. On top of that, in his work on dialogue in the sciences, physicist David Bohm demonstrated that all knowledge is essentially social in nature, and cannot ethically be assigned any one individual as their ‘exclusive possession’.

There’s a lot more that could be said here about the patent-system and the like, but the short version is that there is no functional or ethical basis for any form of ‘intellectual property’ based on exclusive-possession: in foundational terms, all variants of possession-based ‘intellectual property’ represent some form of expropriation, dispossession or theft.

Much the same applies to the two other core dimensions of ‘property’ – relational and aspirational. Relational-property exists as a relationship, typically between individual people, but also collectively to an organisation, for example. Such ‘relational-assets’ are genuine assets in their own right, and need to be maintained as such – hence CRM systems and so on. But the asset is the relationship – not the person: the only time that the usually well-meant phrase “our people are our greatest asset” is correct is when those people are slaves – which is probably not a good idea… Aspirational-assets such as brands are perhaps more complex, but even there will often represent little more than yet another form of theft – Ferrari’s claim to ‘exclusive possession’ of a particular shade of red, for example, or Harley-Davidson’s ‘rights’ to a specific sound. (Things can get interesting when the ‘possession’ is challenged in complex social ways, such as @BPGlobalPR’s relentless parody of BP’s ‘rights’ to their brand.)

There is an alternative to all of this mess, and we use it every day: responsibility-based ownership. When we talk about a ‘process-owner’ or ‘project-owner’ or the like, we don’t mean ‘the person who possesses it’ – in fact it’s when someone does try to take exclusive possession of it that it fails. Within an organisation, we get the best effectiveness by by establishing and enacting responsibilities for each item – and any attempt at any form of exclusive-possession will usually cause a severe loss of efficiency and effectiveness. The same applies in running a household (the literal meaning of ‘economy’, by the way): responsibility is what works, and possession is what causes most of the problems. We know all of this: we put it into practice every day. And yet we try to run an entire world economy on what is little different from the possessive tantrum of a two-year-old, and actively punish any moves towards responsibility, in almost any form. Which, yes, we could probably describe as seriously problematic…

So, to come back to Oscar’s original Tweet: “My best ideas that I use at work are born outside of office hours. Who owns these ideas?”

The short summary is that what works is responsibility; what fails is possession. Any attempt at ‘possessing’ either you or your mind or whatever will usually cause the direct loss of that ‘property’, for the simple reason that it’s part of you and cannot be separated from you. You can’t hand it over to someone else, like physical property: the inverse corollary of non-alienability is the inability to forget. And although the idea is expressed through you, and in that sense is sort-of ‘yours’, its roots actually rest in a myriad of other unidentified and probably unidentifiable people – so you cannot honestly that it was ever exclusively ‘yours’ in the first place. The corporation to which you ‘belong’ may claim that as part of its contract with you, it has the exclusive ‘right’ to any ideas you may have: but that too is a form of expropriation from you, for exactly the reason you’ve said – did the idea arise on ‘their’ time, or ‘yours’? (And with the boundaries between ‘work-time’ and ‘me-time’ becoming increasingly blurred, especially for professionals who are likely to create ‘intellectual property’, that question is becoming increasingly fraught – and the basis of an increasing number of increasingly-insane lawsuits…) And as above, it isn’t ‘your’ idea anyway, so you have no ethical basis on which you could give it to them as their ‘exclusive property’.

In short, the entire ‘intellectual-property’ domain is somewhere between a shambles and a sham. It is, bluntly, a fraud of almost unbelievable proportions, held together solely by bad analogy, wishful thinking, lawyers’ bluff and the sheer force of social habit. It has no ethical or other basis whatsoever. Which is kinda problematic if we want to build a so-called ‘information economy’ on that basis…

(Just doesn’t get me started on the even worse myths of the ‘relationship economy’…)

But what this does do is highlight the fact that even the physical-property possession-economy likewise does not and cannot work: it’s a fraud. As I understand it, there is no possible way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable: it gives better short-term results at the expense of much greater long-term losses, so the only way it can be made to seem sustainable is to run it as a pyramid-game, a Ponzi scheme. And at the world-scale it looks likely that we ran out of room on that pyramid-game about fifty to a hundred years ago: ever since then we’ve been like the cartoon-character who’s run off the cliff and hasn’t noticed yet that there’s nothing holding him up but thin air…

So we can use the absurdities of the notion of ‘possession’ of an idea – ‘intellectual property’ – to start looking much more closely at the entire way in which we manage our economy. The only way that will work is a responsibility-based model: ‘possession’ will literally kill us all if we don’t kill it off Real Soon Now. So yes, do keep asking those kind of questions, and do keep challenging the assumptions on which so called ‘property-rights’ are based: doing so may soon be literally the only way in which, collectively, we can find a way to survive.

That’s actually what Oscar’s question is: a question of life and death for us all.

Interesting, isn’t it?

If the enterprise is a story, what is its backstory?

Tom G — Mon, 17 May 2010 06:56:12 +0000

If the enterprise is a story, what is its backstory? Where does the enterprise come from? What are its deep drivers and experiences that form the foundation for its choices in the present?

This came up last night whilst watching a BBC interview [BBC iPlayer: UK only, until 20 May 2010] with the British character-actor Timothy Spall [Wikipedia, IMDb], talking about his work with the social-realist film-director Mike Leigh [Wikipedia, IMDb]. Leigh’s method for developing a script has some strong resemblances to running a business, in that, as the Wikipedia entry, describes, it’s a mixture of careful preparation for real-time improvisation:

Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over a period of weeks to build characters and storylines for his films. He starts with some sketch ideas of how he thinks things might develop, but does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed. Initial preparation is in private with the director and then the actors are introduced to each other in the order that their characters would have met in their lives. Intimate moments are explored that will not even be referred to in the final film to build insight and understanding of history, character and inner motivation.

The critical scenes in the eventual story are performed and recorded in full-costumed, real-time improvisations where the actors encounter for the first time new characters, events or information which may dramatically affect their characters’ lives. Final filming is more traditional as definite sense of story, action and dialogue is then in place. The director reminds the cast of material from the improvisations that he hopes to capture on film.

Some of that does sound very close to what happens perhaps too often in business: “does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed”. But the real point here, as Spall described in the interview, is that there’s a vast amount of work on backstory – the history behind the character. Leigh often recommends that an actor should pick almost anyone as the base for the character – Spall said that he based one of his key characters on a person he’d once met in real life for little more than half a minute – and then explore every possible facet of who that character might be, what makes them tick. As the actors do this, images come up, seemingly from nowhere, that form a ‘true history’ for each of the characters. The result is something much more ‘real’ than a predefined script.

So, following the same improvisational logic, the same would seem to apply to the collective ‘character’ that is each organisation and enterprise. The surface culture, the ‘espoused culture’ is visible to all, and probably much-paraded via PR and the like: yet what is the deeper culture, the backstory, that drives the real choices, especially under stress? That’s where things get interesting for enterprise-architects – especially if we’re concerned with the structure of the enterprise as a whole, rather than solely the enterprise-IT.

For screenwriters and other ’story-creators’, the equivalent of the enterprise-architects’ Zachman framework is Dramatica and its story-structure chart [PDF, 44kb], which provides a kind of ‘architecture of story’:

The one unique concept that sets Dramatica apart from all other theories is the concept that every complete story is a model of the mind’s problem solving process. To fully explore any issue, an author has to examine all possible solutions to that issue and make an argument to prove to an audience that the author’s way is best.

If you leave out a part of that argument or diverge from the point, your story will have plot holes or inconsistencies. Once you have covered every angle in your argument, you’ve mapped all the ways an audience might look at that problem and, therefore, all the ways anyone might look at that problem. In short, you have created a map of the mind’s problem solving process.

Characters, Plot, and Theme are the thoughts of this Story Mind made tangible. An audience can see them and learn. When a story fully develops this model of the mind, we call it a Grand Argument Story because it addresses the problem from all sides.

Like Zachman, Dramatica is somewhat mechanical in its approach to the architectural concerns, and can sometimes leave us floundering in ‘excruciating detail’ (though Armando Saldaña-Mora’s excellent Dramatica for Screenwriters will certainly help as a practical guide through that forest of theory). Yet unlike Zachman, the Dramatica model does provide both a framework and a structured process to develop characters and story. Although aimed at creation of narrative-style stories, some parts of the process are also useful for exploring the backstory of an overall enterprise – and especially so to identify the drivers for enterprise response to change and innovation. The Dramatica process is based around twelve questions, ten of which are directly relevant to the ’story’ underlying an enterprise and its architecture.

For enterprise-architecture, the equivalent of that ’story mind’ is the single unifying vision that defines and circumscribes the enterprise. Four of the questions relate directly to that continuing story of the overall enterprise, with stakeholders as ‘characters’ within that shared story:

Overall Throughline: If you pull back and look at the enterprise-story from a bird’s eye view, which general area best describes the nature of the problems all the stakeholders are dealing with? Do the story’s conflicts stem from a Situation (external state), an Activity (external process), a Fixed Attitude (internal state) or Manipulations (internal process)?
Overall Concern: Which area of concern are all the stakeholders in the enterprise-story interested in or worried about regarding the overall enterprise vision or ‘goal’?
Overall Issue: What is the thematic issue that affects all of the stakeholders in your enterprise-story ?
Overall Problem: What is the source of the central problem that affects all the stakeholders in the enterprise-story?

Two of the questions focus more on the part (the Role) that the organisation chooses to play within the overall enterprise:

Story Driver: Is the overall enterprise-story driven by Actions first, leading to decisions (reactive response to something happening – e.g. an emergency-response team) or Decisions first, leading to actions (proactive choice – e.g. decision to develop a new product or service)?
Story Limit: Is the overall enterprise-story constrained more by Time (delivery-driven – e.g. logistics) or by Options (investigation-driven – e.g. innovation, legal enquiry)?

(Two other Dramatica questions in that set – ‘Story Outcome’ and ‘Main Character Judgement’ – are more related to the closure of a narrative-story, and don’t really apply to an ongoing story such as that of the enterprise.)

And the final four questions focus more on the organisation itself, as if it were the ‘Main Character’ in an ongoing story.

Organisation Resolve: Does your organisation Change its way of dealing with the problem at the heart of the enterprise-story or remain Steadfast in its convictions?
Organisation Growth (in terms of character, not size): Does your organisation grow by adopting new useful traits (Start) or by outgrowing old inappropriate ones (Stop)?
Organisation Approach: Is your organisation a Be-er that mentally adapts to the changing environment or a Do-er who physically changes the environment?
Organisation Problem Solving Style: Does your organisation emphasise a Logical problem-solving style (formal analysis, ’scientific’) or an Intuitive problem-solving style (relational, holistic, ‘design-thinking’)?

Another way of looking at this is to imagine the organisation as a single character within the story of a novel or a play, where the enterprise consists of all of the characters within that shared story. Using those questions above, we then explore how the previous choices and backstory of our character (the organisation) guide its choices in how it interacts with the other characters in that story:

In general, how does the organisation behave in relation to others in the story? Is it assertive, aggressive, bullying, accommodating, engaging, respectful, childlike, surly? What else?
Why is this so? What aspects of the organisation’s history or choices drive these collective behaviours?
What happens under stress from others? Which is the organisation’s reflex choice amongst the four classic stress-responses: fight (aggressive competition), flight (withdraw), freeze (‘analysis-paralysis’) or fornicate (attempt to merge or take-over)?
What happens under stress from changes in the overall ecosystem, when there is no single ‘target’ to respond to? What are its fallback behaviours? What hopes or fears or past experiences drive these behaviours?

Probably the best way to identify what’s going here is through narrative enquiry – see, for example, the post ‘Storytelling for non-storytellers‘ by the Australian consultancy Anecdote. We can often learn a lot even from a single anecdote or story from anywhere in the enterprise – whether within or outside the organisation – but it’s even more valuable to collect and cross-reference a range of stories to identify common themes or trends. It’s especially important to gather stories from outside the organisation – others’ views of the organisation – as this will tell us much that the organisation does not at present know about itself.

In effect, the stories describe the architecture of the organisation’s culture. As enterprise-architects, this then provides us with choices: about what to emphasise or de-emphasise, what cultural behaviours are valuable or potentially-harmful in the organisation’s relationships within itself and in relation with the broader enterprise.

It’s essential, though, to remember that we’re unlikely to achieve successful change if we offer any direct challenge to any of these deeply-ingrained behaviours. Whether functional or dysfunctional, these habits will seem to be ‘defining characteristics’, the ‘what I am’ of the organisation’ rather than merely ‘what I do’ – hence any challenge is literally a threat to the definition (and existence) of the organisation’s collective self. Instead, we change the culture not by trying to change how people think, but by providing different conditions that make it easier for people to change what they do – see, for example, John Shook on ‘How to Change a Culture‘, based on his decades of experience at GM/Toyota USA.

The enterprise is a story; the organisation is a player within that story. Understanding the history of that enterprise-story, and the organisation’s own backstory, provides enterprise-architects with some of their most powerful options for organisational change. Not easy, perhaps, but well worth the effort!

Are time and responsibility our only real possessions?

Tom G — Fri, 14 May 2010 06:43:39 +0000

Another of those first-thing-in-the-morning ideas, which arose in part from a conversation on social-architectures that I’ve been having with gift-economy maven Alpha Lo.

Our whole economy is built around the idea of possession, and exchange of possessions; yet what do we really possess?

Things? Not really – a point made all too evident by the phrase “you can’t take it with you”…

Ideas? We don’t even know where they come from, so the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’ is a bit moot anyway.

Relationships? They only exist when maintained by both parties, and they usually fail if anyone tries to possess them, so that option doesn’t work either.

Faith? Hope? Belief? A more likely kind of ‘possession’, though it tends to break down for the same reasons as for relationships.

What else?

The only themes I could find were time and responsibility.

We each have a certain amount of time. We have no idea how long that might be, or what will happen in that time, but it belongs to us alone. We can give our use of that time to someone else – hence all the mess of ‘employment’ and ‘compensation’ and ‘familial duties’ and the rest – but we can’t give the time itself to anyone else. It’s our possession alone: our responsibility as to what we do with it.

And we do each have our own responsibility, as ‘response-ability’ – our ability to choose appropriate responses within and to the context. Through responsibility, and through our responsibilities, we express who we are in what we do, how we think, how we relate, what we choose.

We possess our time, and our responsibility. They possess us. Everything else seems to be an option.

Comments/opinions, anyone?

Twitter as environmental-scanning (‘A week in Tweets’)

Tom G — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:48:33 +0000

These days my Twitter-feed has become my main source of environmental-scanning – in other words, as a means to discover what’s going on in my various areas of professional interest.

As with most other Twitter users, I re-Tweet some of what I’ve found – but I also record a whole lot more on my local machine, stored in OneNote (one of the greatest pieces of software from Microsoft, which deserves to be a lot better-known than it is). And for the past nine months or so I’ve republished an extract from that record as my weekly ‘A week in Tweets‘ posts – which, since it averages about 100-150 items each week, has now grown to a sizeable resource of about 5,000 items, which I hope may be useful to others too.

Each week’s items are usually sorted into the following categories:

Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, strategy and business-design in general
Narrative-knowledge, knowledge-management and in-person collaboration
Social-media, ‘enterprise 2.0′ and on-line collaboration
IT-architecture and technology
Society, culture and business-social-responsibility
Other miscellaneous items

A few other categories or clusters pop up from time to time, usually because a specific Twitter-conversation takes off.

Anyway, it’s there for anyone who wants to use it – Share and Enjoy, perhaps?

A week in Tweets: 11-17 Apr 2010

Tom G — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:09:42 +0000

Still doing catch-up, but here it is – another week’s-worth of tweets and links, in the usual categories, with a couple of extras, all after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:

Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, business-strategy and business themes in general:

SAlhir: RT @umairh: techshop = awesomeness = smart growth = rebooting america http://nyti.ms/a8LZQM

SAlhir: RT @Pino_Catania: RT @Worldchanging: Resilience and Ruggedness: Why Faster, Bigger and More Complex May Be Better http://bit.ly/ccDAYq

business_design: Profit is an outcome of getting a customer’s job done WITH the right business model… < #bizarch #bmgen

SAlhir: Deming System of Profound Knowledge: System+Reality+Knowledge+People; that is, System+Variation+Knowledge+Psychology http://bit.ly/9XvNxg

CreatvEmergence: 1st the call…then exploration, study, immersion, discovery, engagement, cultivation, sharing (in nonlinear order)…then emergence, embodiment…then change

CreatvEmergence: http://shareable.net/blog/resilience-primer – A Very Short Primer on Resilience – via @alphalo

enterprisearchs: RT @dougnewdick: Being an architect is like being a jazz band leader. Give people direction and constraints not detailed instructions #entarch

alphalo: Couchsurfing.com has open collaborative qualities- non-hierarchical, emergent, non-owned, participatory, transparent, open // Open collaborative projects can grow much faster. Couchsurfing.com may be bigger than all hotel chains. Similar to how wikipedia>brittanica // Couchsurfing.com is this beautiful gift economy. And like a lot of gift economy projects it breathes trust and community back into world.

hebsgaard: Think What Nobody Else Thinks http://bit.ly/dDAQx

enterprisearchs: RT @AG_Mag: RT @RealiRM: McKinsey: Why business needs should shape IT architecture http://cot.ag/9wmMSj #EntArch < (article requires [free] registration)

CreatvEmergence: A (short) Simpler Way – emergence, creativity, parallelism, messiness, order – http://bit.ly/bOI4iK

unorder: RT @jimseven Gwilym’s disloyalty card http://bit.ly/90aQiK

CreatvEmergence: “We made a mistake; how fascinating!” ~ Benjamin Zander // To the pioneer, explorer, edgewalker or improviser mistakes are dynamic invitations…not static failure.

thoughttrans: RT @sniukas Slides from today’s paperJam Workshop on Strategic Innovation http://ow.ly/1qv3gI #entarch #bizarch #bmgen

thoughttrans: RT @TCagley SPaMCAST 62 Tom Graves – Ent arch is more than an IT phenomenon, arch defines the ent http://bit.ly/aHgC01 #entarch #bizarch

toddbiske: Good read from @rh_forrester on business capabilities and tech strategies http://bit.ly/8Ycnd5 #entarch #itarch #forrester

jdevoo: Spiral Dynamics: Don Beck and the story behind Invictus’ “The master of your faith, the captain of your soul” http://bit.ly/c4Mz9C

bartleeten: Agile Offshoring : It’s hard work but it works! – http://j.mp/cVVPVz

CreatvEmergence: Agreed! RT @venessamiemis – nice post on Holism by @frankspencer http://bit.ly/bZGPva

bergmart: Extending the DYA architecture framework to cover functional and constructional view on business architecture // [@erikproper asks: 'DEMO linkage?'] // A bit, try to cover DEMO viewpoints in a pragmatic way and also include Business Model Canvas stuff

bartleeten: RT @cdetzel: It’s Demolition Time: Say Bye-Bye To Massive, Text-Heavy Requirements Documentation | Forrester Bl.. http://bit.ly/agsG1i #EntArch

jdevoo: Shell Energy Scenarios to 2050 http://bit.ly/bBrqBt and “scenario analysis” Explorers Guide http://bit.ly/9LRBbg

mentoraxis: How to present #entarch to customers? Vital to success. Here is great example. (NIH – US National Institutes of Health) Http://bit.ly/aSgdFE. Other good examples? #togaf #cio

CreatvEmergence: If you do not already know about @VenessaMiemis’s blog, http://emergentbydesign.com, check it out!

joyce_hostyn: RT @rotkapchen: Two great Design Thinking posts from @Rapidinnovation 1) http://twurl.nl/ra01t6 2) http://twurl.nl/a821ak

bartleeten: Complexity. The new world between chance and choice http://j.mp/cgqQM6

alphalo: RT @ComplexitySol RT @juneholley: Will self-organizing groups work? http://bit.ly/dbK90S

alphalo: RT @ShareableDesign Toward a Resilience Pattern Language http://cot.ag/95AhTj

taotwit: RT @pevansgreenwood: What business hates about IT http://bit.ly/9ECNOz – I tested myself with these questions & will keep them in mind.

thoughttrans: RT @gapingvoid Sent manuscript of #EvilPlans (2nd k) http://gapingvoid.com/ep to publisher. Wow. The hard part is OVER. – first quarter of the book is available online at that link

alphalo: Great book on complexity theory, organizations and movements http://bit.ly/cL2wKe

oscarberg: Most people aren’t afraid of change itself – they just don’t like uncertainty, not knowing what will happen to them

AG_Mag: RT @jasonscarlett: Gartner analyst Betsy Burton states 60% of EA consulting engagements relate to “family counseling” issues #gartnerea < ’gosh now there’s a surprise…’ – I’m surprised it’s as low as 60%…

CreatvEmergence: 10 consumer trends for 2010 by Trendwatching.com – http://bit.ly/3V1lWj

hebsgaard: Imperious Institutions, Impotent Individuals http://bit.ly/cRM1HP

mentoraxis: RT @jayincalgary: Realizing the Value of the Business Architecture http://bit.ly/aodtNx #busanalyst #entarch #bizarch

BillIves: RT @20Community: Gil Yehuda: The value of transparency #e2adoption http://su.pr/66yU1I

BillIves: RT @SBoSM: Is freemium still a viable model for social networks? http://ow.ly/1zqgX

AG_Mag: RT @brucemr: Carl Engel of CA FTB at #GartnerEA: “Enterprise Thinking” is what their enterprise wants to do. EA is there to help manage that.

CreatvEmergence: RT @frankspencer: RT @cascio: New Fast Company piece: Futures Thinking Bibliography http://bit.ly/bTu6GQ

CreatvEmergence: RT @HarvardBiz: The Efficient Community Hypothesis http://s.hbr.org/aRggEf effectiveness, not mere efficiency

unorder: I overheard a manager say “yeh, sure we have the new values. But what about the old ones? Don’t we hold those true anymore?”

SystemsWiki: Free self-paced interactive dynamic modeling learning program with online web based model development. http://sn.im/v3abr

business_design: Cool idea: Business Plans 2.0 – Lean and Icon-based http://bit.ly/9LHZKb (via @shawnyeager)

business_design: RT @pictureitsolved: Made for each other: @business_design’s #bmgen + http://plancruncher.com/ + @smartdraw = visual business plans

A set of references to themes around the book ‘The Power of Pull’]

oscarberg: (via @berendjan @GrahamHill) @jhagel From Push to Pull. Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources http://tinyurl.com/y9ewfrl [PDF]

CreatvEmergence: HBR (by @jhagel et al):A Brief History of the Power of Pull: http://bit.ly/dvjViF. what’s calling 2 emerge, w/purpose, guided by relevance

CreatvEmergence: Yes! Great piece on emergence/setting conditions for it – http://bit.ly/bKRfPX via @mjgeek @davidfcox @jhagel

CreatvEmergence: RT @jhagel: I’ve expanded on themes that led to publication of ‘The Power of Pull’ http://bit.ly/bYxjv5

Narrative-knowledge, knowledge-management and in-person collaboration:

DavidGurteen: How Students Learn Teamwork, Critical Thinking And Communication Skills http://bit.ly/bj7Tqf < #learning #km #society

DavidGurteen: Acquiring a new mindset and new skillset http://bit.ly/aytr3q <’agility and autonomy’ – another great piece by @hjarche

tebbo: RT @drmcewan: RT @hjarche: Collaboration belongs to groups, while cooperation is typical of a network. http://is.gd/bpBEO > really useful distinction

unorder: Learned yesterday that some natural storytellers lose confidence when they think about applying storytelling to business.

unorder: Why did @SteveDenning abandon #storytelling? Or did he? http://bit.ly/9FqceD

DavidGurteen: Self organisation in Hanoi http://bit.ly/ctdMuo /so why do we need traffic lights?

getstoried: Check out these slides from MercyCorps – Creating A Culture Of #Storytelling – http://slidesha.re/cYFZLC cc @grizzarkhov

joyce_hostyn: What’s your story? Designing for a holistic customer experience http://bit.ly/dsQPcg

alphalo: RT @CoCreatr: What makes some groups thrive more than others? http://www.designinglife.com/Jack/GroupThrivancy.html by @zenext #Junto #process <’group thrivancy’ – an ugly term, but the underlying concept is good

CreatvEmergence: RT @zenext: Community is about the degree of connection not the scope of consumption / http://bit.ly/4tkQ2N <’four conversations that build community’

getstoried: me too RT @NewNarrative: Added comments to @SteveDenning’s discussion on org storytelling & trad mgt http://tinyurl.com/y2hceb6 #storycon

DavidGurteen: Top ten thinking traps http://bit.ly/9FTPAX

A stream of tweets by @getstoried (Michael Margolis) from #storycon:

Great #km question, from madelyn blair. What r the areas of interest important for you 2 remain current? This one question is key

RT @BlairNSCS: Orgs seeking new language bc old language constrains us and doesn’t bring us into the new story. -Margolis

You have to ask the right question to get the full story. Indicates you’re ready to hear and understand fully. – John morel

Geography of meaning, where are u and how do u find ur way – paul costello // You have to get lost to have a story // Use story to map, that I’m here, and story myself into this room. – p costello taking us down the rabbit hole // Where are we and how far have we gone from here? // Who’s story do you have permission to tell? – Paul costello keeping it real // Scratch that…where are we and how far have we travelled? Are we on the frontier? – Paul costello

Story is like real estate, it’s about location, location, location. If I don’t know where u r, how can we connect? – p costello // Stories take us places which is why we need maps to know where we’ve been taken or travelled // Not just lost our stories but place in them. We lost our life map -costello // The frontier of now and here

Bruce chatwins songlines as reference book to story life mapping // Name of a place is the title of story. There’s always a story behind the name of every place.

Who are the story keepers? Lovely concept, good ethics guidance.

Hot damn! Must read from mikey b!!! @bonifer my yes-and to convo at #storycon Paddles, Balls and Painted Dogs:: http://bit.ly/aujKSC

The official story, familial story, earth story, and aboriginal story: four diff version of the Australia story- Paul costello

Storytelling is also like kryptonite, blows things up…especially in places of conflict – Paul costello #storycon #storytelling

RT @jazzmann91: a reason is an assumption sitting on top of other assumptions where it stops no one knows

RT @kirstinbutler: RT @hudsonette @pourmecoffee photo from Tibetan earthquake of a girl reading her book is really something http://post.ly/bCls

‘Enterprise 2.0’, social-media and on-line collaboration:

oscarberg: In the future there will be two types of people: content creators and non-content creators http://bit.ly/bHlhl4 /via @rossdawson

oscarberg: Environmental Scanning http://bit.ly/dhuy7R by @venessamiemis /via @raesmaa

oscarberg: The Future of Social Software http://bit.ly/awzkYn /via @innovate @raesmaa > in the creative economy, (creative) work is play

tebbo: RT @elsua Collaboration Is More Important Than Ever – 3 Barriers To Adoption http://bit.ly/cc9Kyj

oscarberg: Eric Schmidt: Mobile Is The Future, And There’s No Such Thing As Communication Overload http://dlvr.it/V5RY /via @rickmans

BillIves: RT @dhinchcliffe: RT @enterprisetwo: #E20 Why Best Practices Don’t Work for Knowledge Work http://url4.eu/2aIzM

oscarberg: RT @tobyward: The need for intranet collaborative and discussion spaces http://bit.ly/c7XiD8

BillIves: RT @dhinchcliffe: RT @mashable: 10 Fresh Tips for Community Managers – http://bit.ly/cQQT9r

davidcushman: The transition from linear to web challenges everything – including the very notion of time; how we experience.

SAlhir: @davidcushman Agree wholeheartedly, time & space, and the notion of proximity, are forming a new paradigm for how we experience reality.

SAlhir: RT @nraford: The new Design With Intent toolkit v.1.0 is now online http://3.ly/NewDwI via @rotkapchen @VenessaMiemis

smbounds: RT @elsua Why microsharing is worth it http://bit.ly/doH20U

rlimbanda: RT @Clinton316 If you missed the Evoke Video http://bit.ly/c7dCTY

alphalo: RT @VenessaMiemis: WOOHOOOO! RT @goonth #Junto will officially begin tomorrow w/ a kick-off w/ @VenessaMiemis & the building of a holistic intelligence engine.

oscarberg: 10 Ways to Make a Virtual Team Feel Like You’re Face-to-Face http://dlvr.it/Wnbk /via @rickmans

oscarberg: Blogged: How an organization can learn from internal social media http://goo.gl/fb/RvvSG

VenessaMiemis: hehe… we’re playing in #junto! http://dave.parsons.edu/fms/junto/ [described by CreatvEmergence as "merging technology, consciousness, connection, evolution..."]

CreatvEmergence: Thank you! RT @CoCreatr @CreatvEmergence Thanks. Amazing how fast these connections build & radiate. Trust network http://bit.ly/9imB5C

davidcushman: FasterFuture Welcome to the No-Time Web: Time is a construct – a way for us to make sense of a series of events. http://bit.ly/aSRh29

oscarberg: RT @gridinoc: “Don’t listen to Le Corbusier-Or Jakob Nielsen” http://bit.ly/ctb4Yt /via @bokardo <’engineerism’ vs architecture – great essay, part of the ‘Cheerful Software Manifesto’ – “Cheerful software, above all, honors the truth about humanity: Humans are not rational beings.”

IT and technical-architecture:

bartleeten: Scaling Agile (PDF) – http://j.mp/aGVKY6

simonbrown: Build processes as architectural health indicators? http://bit.ly/crnKqd

AG_Mag: New A&G article: Architecting for Flexible Processes: http://bit.ly/aphQvv #entarch #enterprisearchitecture

enterprisearchs: RT @si_plant: Google site ranking now takes into account website speed of delivery and load in the algorithm http://bit.ly/acUf3Q

theopengroup: RT @MartijnLinssen: My last blog post about #Cloud and #entarch is getting great reads: http://dlvr.it/TqwX

enterprisearchs: RT @CIOMagazine: Cloud Computing: Early Adopters Share Five Key Lessons: Look, Ma, no data center http://bit.ly/c878Np

bartleeten: The CORA model http://j.mp/bf0oqm http://www.coramodel.com – fills key gap to replace TOGAF’s outdated TRM/IIIRM etc

Society, culture, economics and business social responsibility:

alphalo: Essay (in beta) of how economics=politics in a gift economy system http://bit.ly/b7NUrw

alphalo: Money velocity is more important than money. Its the velocity the $50 travels with that determines how many services happens // Money velocity is a point to point to point systems phenomena. Money is a phenomena at one point. // A community can develop feedback systems to bring awareness of money velocity. Feedback can help it adjust behaviors to increase velocity. // Actually service velocity is more important than money velocity. Services can happen without money.

hebsgaard: The Case for Being Disruptively Good http://bit.ly/9sWrTr

CreatvEmergence: RT @ThisIsSethsBlog Seth’s Blog: There is no tribe of normal http://bit.ly/auybWF < #society #culture #innovation

alphalo: my essay on the principles of a gift circle http://bit.ly/c6Z1Fp < #economics #society #collaboration

DavidGurteen: How vulnerable is our high-tech civilisation to black swans? http://bit.ly/a139gh <..such as volcano #economics #society etc

oscarberg: Wouldn’t it be ironic if nature (a volcano), not humans, caused a double-dip in the world economy?

joyce_hostyn: Turning the tables. Design challege for developing countries to help 1st world with issues like obesity, consumption… http://bit.ly/dp8fmg

(via @getstoried) Post by @bonifer: “What he said” – great quotes from Shawnee leader Tecumseh (18thC?) http://bit.ly/cZXJ5J #society

The magical miscellanea:

unorder: RT @GoCollaboration: Google Docs Updates with a Drawing Editor, Real-Time Collaboration … http://bit.ly/dokSTa

rtolido: It’s amazing how fast “it must be true, it’s in the papers” has been replaced by “it must be true, I saw it on Wikipedia”

josvanoosten: RT @hiroquay: RT @nntaleb Technology’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.

EnterprisingA: #rebadged (8) Don’t call it “asking others to do it for you because you can’t do it yourself”. Call it “crowd sourced collaborative working”

oscarberg: “It is hard to be blind, but sometimes harder to be the only one seeing.” (Stenmark) /via @j4ngis

aojensen: seriously, how can I escape this theoretical debris and return safely to earth? Most likely not within the next decade.

thinksmith: So true. http://ow.ly/174ubV Trust me. <’beards as indicators of trustworthiness’ – I would have to agree, wouldn’t I, given that I too wear a beard?

SAlhir: We miss much common sense because we are all too often looking for the uncommon…

oscarberg: Respect does no longer come bundled with a position. You have to earn & deserve it.

Money as the ‘information-shavings’ of the economy

Tom G — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:37:17 +0000

Another follow-on to the theme about the economy as enterprise-architecture and the role of money within an economy. This one picks up from another direction, namely knowledge-management – specifically, a post on KMWorld by Phil Murray, ‘Everything is connected… really… Putting meaning to work‘.

The connecting link is that, in effect, money – or any other form of currency, ‘thing’-based, time-based or whatever – is essentially a form of quantitative information in relation to a belief about economic relationship. The crucial word there is ‘about‘ – the currency denotes something about the relationship, but in itself does not contribute in any way to the relationship.

There’s no doubt that a currency could contribute quite a bit to the overall operation of an economy: such as transaction-governance (‘a token of exchange’) and quantification of overall resources (though for money that’s always been in doubt, and in effect has ceased to function at all since the shift from the ‘Gold Standard’ to ‘imaginary-money’). But perhaps the greatest problem is that it exacerbates the delusion that the currency somehow ‘is‘ ‘the economy’, rather than merely information about the economy. So whilst the whole of Phil Murray’s post is relevant here, the following section seems particularly apposite from this perspective.

What really counts

It’s not that we should – or even can – shift our attention completely away from information (and unstructured information, in particular). It’s that we have failed to address meaning in the context of work. Yet, that is what we need to do in order to transform our economic activities, both as individuals and as groups working toward common goals.

In one of the great ironies of creation of value by humans, we looked at the byproduct of knowledge work – that is, information – and saw in it both the problem and the solution for the central socio-economic problems of our times. We stopped looking at what we do, how we do it and how we create value. Our reaction to knowledge work has been analogous to focusing on the shavings on the machine shop floor instead of on how we create products with those machines.

You cannot – and do not – act on words. You act on meaning. You always have to convert words into meaning before you act. It’s the meaning behind information that counts. And sometimes you don’t need words at all.

Meaning? Yes, “the thing one intends to convey especially by language,” according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. Not the language itself, not the text strings and symbols that fill our books and screens, but the significant stuff that language intends to represent so that we can communicate what we understand. The connections among things. Causes and effects. In the context of work: the relevance or importance of those connections. The subject of logic, argument and epistemology. A pervasive, essential aspect of rational human activities that is accepted as critical to creation of value and economic progress, and yet an idea routinely dismissed as unusable, elusive and unmanageable at the same time. And the missing ingredient in our understanding of work and the creation of value in the age of information.

Perhaps read it again, paraphrasing a bit, and substituting the word ‘money’ or ‘currency’ for ‘information’ throughout, as shown in [..] below:

What really counts

It’s not that [at present] we should – or even can – shift our attention completely away from [money] (and unstructured ['currency'], in particular). It’s that we have failed to address meaning in the context of work. Yet, that is what we need to do in order to transform our economic activities, both as individuals and as groups working toward common goals.

In one of the great ironies of creation of value by humans, we looked at the byproduct of [exchangeable] work – that is, [money] – and saw in it both the problem and the solution for the central socio-economic problems of our times. We stopped looking at what we do, how we do it and how we create value. Our reaction to [exchangeable] work has been analogous to focusing on the shavings on the machine shop floor instead of on how we create products with those machines.

You cannot – and do not – act on words. You act on meaning. You always have to convert words into meaning before you act. It’s the meaning behind [money] that counts. And sometimes you don’t need [currencies] at all.

Meaning? Yes, “the thing one intends to convey especially by language,” according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. Not the language itself, not the [numeric figures] and symbols that fill our [account-]books and screens, but the significant stuff that language intends to represent so that we can communicate what we understand. The connections among things. Causes and effects. In the context of work: the relevance or importance of those connections. The subject of logic, argument and epistemology. A pervasive, essential aspect of rational human activities that is accepted as critical to creation of value and economic progress, and yet an idea routinely dismissed as unusable, elusive and unmanageable at the same time. And the missing ingredient in our understanding of work and the creation of value in the age of [money].

Ouch…

And remember that all of the above applies only to exchangeable work (services delivering ‘things’, actions and/or information) within the constraints of a possession-economy: it excludes much or most of what really matters – such as feelings and faith, past and future – and, for the most part, the greater part of the population – such as parents, children, the elderly and disabled and their carers, or most ‘creatives’ such as artists, scientists, musicians, futurists and academics. Money is merely information about a subset of a subset of a subset of the overall economy: calling it ‘the economy’ is not merely a bad joke, but an increasingly dangerous one as well.

In short, in the current obsession with money and the like, we’ve allowed ourselves to focus on the dust and detritus of the economy, in the mistaken belief that that is ‘the economy. We might be able to patch something useful together from that detritus of the economy, if we recycle it appropriately, but it still misses the point: the real economy is not about the waste-product that’s left lying on the factory floor, but about what we were creating in the first place – that which is the real value, measured most by how we feel.

Money is ‘information-shavings’, the left-overs from real economic activity, real economic relations. Might help all of us if we put it in its proper perspective – and preferably sweep it up into the waste-bin where it has always belonged.

Economics as enterprise-architecture

Tom G — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:01:05 +0000

Several people asked me to cross-post to other ‘economics’ sites the previous post on ‘Whuffie’ and currencies‘. I wasn’t comfortable doing so without editing-out the comments about the ‘Ready? Fire! Aim…’ syndrome, which were specific to the conversations to which that post referred: hence the re-work in this post here. I’ve also taken the opportunity to extend some parts, to link it more strongly to my ‘day-job’ of enterprise-architecture.

So: what can we learn if we tackle economics as enterprise-architecture? In other words, as if it was just another exercise in whole-of-enterprise architecture, the same as we would do for any large organisation (such as described in my book ‘Doing Enterprise-Architecture‘)? After all, ‘the economy’ is just another enterprise – it happens to be at a very large scale, but the exact same principles should apply.

(This’ll be another long one, hence I’ll place a ‘Read more…’ link here.)

An enterprise-architecture develops in five distinct maturity-levels, which in turn define five distinct groups of work:

What business are we in? – core vision, values, resources, decisions etc

Clean up the mess – horizontal optimisation of facilities, capabilities and resources

What’s our strategy? – top-down definition and implementation

Welcome to the real world – bottom-up constraints and localisation

Keeping it clean – ’spiral-out’ to tackle ongoing ‘wicked-problems‘

We can do work from any of those maturity-levels at any time, and sometimes relative-priorities will force us to do so. The point is that each layer depends on those that precede it: we can do ‘later’ work, but the results are unlikely to be viable, especially in the longer term. For example, trying to tackle a clean-up before we have any clear idea of where we’re trying to go – which is what most standard IT-centric ‘enterprise-architectures’ try to do – will result at best in a system that’s well-optimised for, uh, something… And although the ‘wicked-problems’ are what the enterprise’s stakeholders will most want us to tackle, we won’t be able to do so successfully without a ‘palette’ of techniques and tactics that will allow us to iterate towards ‘re-solutions’ – and we create that ‘palette’ by working through each step of the maturity-levels in a disciplined way. (By definition, ‘wicked-problems’ are never ’solved’: the best we can do is to create processes by which they are continually ‘re-solved’.)

Any sane observer would recognise that our present economic models not only don’t work well, but at present are still teetering on the edge of catastrophic collapse. Many people’s response has been to rush out and try to create some kind of ‘alternate currency’; but it should be clear from the above that that’s a level-4 or level-5 tactic that’s being applied without any of the ‘upper’ architectural-levels in place – not a good idea, because all it does is further embed the existing ‘wicked-problems’, and often create new ones as well. So let’s turn this round, to do it properly from an architectural perspective:

Before we can tackle level-5 wicked-problems, we need a solid grasp of what the real-world looks like – in other words, level-4.

Before we can tackle level-4 real-world problems, we need a framework of law and the like – level-3 – in which those solutions can take root.

A level-3 framework operates through institutions – so to apply that framework well, we need to do a level-2 clean-up of those institutions to make them more efficient and effective.

For that level-2 clean-up to work, we need to have a good idea of where we’re going, and, most importantly, why – in other words, level-1.

So to have any chance of success, we need to go right back to the start: in architectural terms, what is ‘the economy’?

If we do it ‘by the book’ (literally – see pp.44-87 in the sample-ebook [PDF] of ‘Doing EA‘), we split that level-1 work into four distinct parts:

Step 1: Vision, values, principles and purpose

Step 2: Enterprise context – including assets and resources

Step 3: Functions and services

Step 4: Architecture governance

Vision, values, principles and purpose

The word ‘economy’ literally translates as ‘the management of the household’. In the usual sense of ‘the economy’, the ‘household’ in scope is the entire world; ‘economics’ is thus the management of every aspect of that ‘household’.

An enterprise is a ‘community of commitment’: unlike an organisation, it is held together more by internalised shared-beliefs and values than by externalised rules and regulations. The term ‘enterprise’ therefore fits well with the concept of ‘an economy’: in essence, ‘the economy’ is the expression of the internal operations and external interfaces of ‘the enterprise’ that represents the overall ‘community of commitment’ at a global scale.

The vision is a single unifying theme that links all enterprise stakeholders; this includes stakeholders beyond the nominal enterprise itself (see ‘What is an enterprise?‘ on Slideshare), who in this case would include ourselves, other peoples at other places and times than the present here-and-now, the other animals, plants and other ‘actors’ in the broader ecosystem, and the planet itself as a whole. A suggested vision for this context might be appropriate and sustainable utilisation of the available ecosystem resources, functions and capabilities. (In a business enterprise-architecture we would then derive a sequence of ‘Vision, role, mission, goal‘, but I’ll skip over that for here.)

The values are what link the actors to the vision of the broader enterprise. (For this context it’s simplest to focus on the human actors at first, though Deep Ecologists would insist that we should extend that scope indefinitely.) Typical values here would include such notions as fairness, equitability, long-term sustainability, efficiency, reliability, appropriateness and so on.

The principles are practical expressions of the values: values are more about how we feel, principles more guidance for what we do. In effect, principles are the reference-prototypes for all implementation-rules, regulations and the like, and should always be concrete, actionable and verifiable. In this case, that means that we need explicit principles to enact and verify the economy’s alignment with those core values, such as fairness, equitability, sustainability, etcetera. (Again, I’ll skip over the detail there – yes, it needs to be explored in depth, but not in this quick overview.)

Finally, we do a cross-check to compare this nominal-purpose against the ‘effective-purpose‘ of what we currently have, using Stafford Beer’s acronym POSIWID, ”the purpose of the system is [expressed in] what it does”:

“According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances.”

To be blunt, this is where it all gets seriously scary, because a mere few moments’ thought and observation would show that our present money-based ‘possession-economy’ fails virtually every possible test against the necessary values. It is demonstrably unfair; its natural ‘gravitation’ creates and reinforces all manner of inequities; it is clearly not sustainable; it is frighteningly inefficient (so much so that in order to prop up ‘the economy’ we are urged to be as wasteful as possible); and, increasingly, less and less reliable. The foundational principle of this concept of ‘the economy’ is a notion of ‘personal right of personal possession’ – with ‘corporations’ classed as virtual-persons that are assigned greater ‘rights’ and fewer responsibilities than any ‘natural person’ – and implemented by a standardised form of barter called ‘money’. A brief POSIWID assessment shows just how successful the ‘money-economy’ really is(n’t):

It only deals with point-to-point transactions, not network-effects – especially at a societal level.

It’s designed to work with ‘alienable’ physical objects, but now no longer has any actual anchor in the real world – instead, we have literally trillions of supposed ‘money’ in imaginary ‘derivatives’ sloshing around the globe.

It’s very easy to ‘game’ via artificially-constructed price/value mismatches (such as in ’scarcity economics’).

The implied ‘gravitation’ structure of money-based capital tends to create ‘winner-takes-all’ accumulations – exacerbating social imbalances, often in the extreme, requiring separate sociopolitical action to try to redress the balance.

Attempts to link ‘intellectual property’ into the money-system have resulted in a system which purports to match finite ‘alienable’ entities (physical ‘things’) with potentially-infinite ‘non-alienable’ entities (information) – which by definition cannot balance.

Many organisations – particularly banks – are legally ‘entitled’ to invent money from nowhere, in effect assigning themselves an ever-increasing share of the society’s resources.

A currency, by definition, relies on trust in the institutions that manage that currency, which in this case is the banks – yet much of that trust has been lost, and at present remains at an all-time low (hence the strong societal interest in options for ‘alternative currencies’).

There are no built-in mechanisms to manage assignment of resources to those ‘outside’ of the monetary exchange-system (particularly children, parents, elderly, disabled and their carers, but also artists, scientists, thinkers, futurists, ‘creatives’ of any kind) – these stakeholders can only be served by ‘external’ mechanisms such as taxation, grants and benefits (which are clunky and kludge-ridden at best), or by forcing them to do work within the money-economy (which means that their actual needed work can no longer be done).

There is a very strong tendency towards short-termism.

There is a very strong tendency to try to force everything into a crude, ludicrously-simplistic ‘double-entry life-keeping’.

There is a very strong tendency to assume that ‘value’ exists only in monetary terms, as ‘valuations’ of ‘resources’ – hence, for example, a forest supposedly has no value until it is cut down, a mountain has no value until mined for its minerals, and so on.

There is a very strong tendency to assume that anything which cannot be counted and ‘valued’ in monetary terms either does not matter or does not exist.

In effect, POSIWID tells us that the ‘effective-purpose’ for the system we have at present is to create catastrophic failure of the economy in the medium- to longer-term – and that ‘longer-term’ seems to be taking place right now. The current economic system does not and cannot work in relation to the actual vision, values and principles needed to underpin a functional economy for the overall ‘human enterprise’. Which is not good news…

In architectural terms, that’s the ‘as-is’; the real vision, values and principles provide the desired fundamentals for any ‘to-be’. To begin to define a ‘roadmap’ from ‘here’ to ‘there’, we next need to identify what we have available to us, what the constraints are, and what we can use – starting with the overall context for the enterprise.

Enterprise context

This section of the architectural analysis has two parts: compliance, constraints and standards, and assets, locations and events.

There are two categories of constraints on the system: physical, and social.

The social constraints and implied standards and compliance are invented, by people, in a myriad of forms. In practice, all of these are negotiable, although there is an evident need to construct frameworks that align well with what is ‘not negotiable’ within human nature. Of these, perhaps the core tension is between the individual versus the collective – in network theory, the node versus the network - in part paralleled by the tension between present versus future and/or past. The usual analogues for these are Darwinian (’selfish’ individual) versus Kropotkin (collective ‘mutual aid’). The current ‘Western’ system of ‘private property’ – ‘personal right of personal possession’ – privileges the individual and the present-time, almost to absurd extremes, against the collective and/or elsewhen.

Most of the physical constraints on the economy are absolute and not negotiable. These include finite limits on resources, finite limits to system recovery, and a variety of system factors known to be capable of spiralling positive-feedback loops leading to catastrophic collapse. However, a POSIWID assessment shows very quickly that the present economic system depends on an assumption that growth and resources are infinite, and that there is no fundamental difference between farming (which can be sustainable) and mining (which by definition cannot). This means that by definition the existing economic architecture is non-viable in the longer-term: the question is not if it will fail, but when, and with what structural and other impacts.

The available assets or ‘resources’ include not just physical ‘things’, but also many other entities such as ideas, social-networks, beauty, art, hope and faith. These can be categorised in terms of (at least) four fundamentally-distinct dimensions:

physical (‘things’; content): independent-existence; alienable; transferable; often destructively consumed

conceptual (ideas, information; context): semi-independent existence; non-alienable; transferable; non-destructive consumption

relational (relationships, connections): existence is between two entities; non-alienable; non-transferable

aspirational (belief ‘in’ something, faith, drive; purpose): existence is from an entity to a conceptualised ‘Other’; non-alienable; non-transferable

Many (most?) real-world entities combine these dimensions: e.g. book = physical+conceptual; shared narrative-knowledge = conceptual+relational; product-brand = aspirational+physical (and/or conceptual), etc. Some people suggest that, architecturally speaking, money is itself another distinct dimension: but in practice it is best understood as a straightforward composite of conceptual+aspirational – a symbol of a belief.

Because of the fundamental differences between dimensions, a ‘currency’ will typically only work well with one dimension. Trying to use a currency in another dimension than that for which it was designed causes serious problems: famously, “money can’t buy me love” – although it can buy an illusion of ‘love’, which is not the same at all. Monetary currencies fit well with physical (alienable) objects, but do not fit well with non-alienable entities; ‘time’-type currencies do not work well with physical objects, especially manufactured objects that accumulate embedded-time; and so on. All currencies tend to create individual-focussed ‘double-entry life-keeping’, which blocks resource-flows at a societal scale, especially over longer timescales. In architectural terms, a currency is a ’solution’ that tries to force all contexts to fit in with its own severe limitations: as a result, ‘currencies’ as an entire class contribute more to ‘the problem’ of economics than to its solution.

The locations of these assets are worldwide – yet, importantly, scattered very unevenly across the physical globe and in social-space, with considerable impacts on core values and principles such as equitability and efficiency. The ‘gravitation’ of the possession-economy tends to exacerbate these structural problems in many complex ways (which I won’t attempt to describe in detail here).

The key events in the economy include births, deaths and many types of interactions between (and within) the respective actors. Births and, especially, deaths indicate with bald finality of one of the many fundamental flaws in the concept of ‘personal property’: in an all too literal sense, we cannot take it with us when we die. (True, historically speaking, many people have tried to do so, but the only real result has been often-serious damage to the respective economy for the survivors and their descendants.)

Transaction-events in practice only make sense for exchangeable entities (physical and/or conceptual), yet even these operate under fundamentally different constraints:

physical: zero-sum, often leading to a scarcity-based win/lose transactional model; potentially leads to a ‘tragedy of the commons‘

conceptual: potentially-infinite, for which a scarcity-based model makes no economic sense, and in which the only transactional options are win/win or lose/lose; potentially leads to an inverse ‘comedy of the commons‘, but if misused may instead lead to a ‘tragedy of the anticommons‘

Relational and aspirational assets cannot be directly exchanged, but may undergo transaction-like events in which they are created, ‘read’, updated or destroyed. For example, a brand-relationship (aspirational-asset) may be created via various means, is ‘read’ during each transaction by that person in relation to the branded entity, may be transferred to another brand with great ease by the person but only with great care by the brand-holder (if any), and although the ‘relationship’ is one-sided (from the person to the conceptualised brand), it will be destroyed if either party abandons it.

One useful frame to demonstrate many transaction-variants is the market model. To extend the Cluetrain Manifesto:

markets are transactions – often but not solely of physical ‘goods’

markets are conversations

markets are relationships

markets are shared-purpose

Although these combine in many different ways, the most typical structure is the market sequence:

reputation -> trust -> respect -> attention -> transaction [ -> barter/money -> individualised 'profit' ]

The main part of the sequence occurs in all economic models, both ‘responsibility-based’ (collective-focus) and ‘possession-based’ (individual-focus). The section within [..] occurs only in the ‘possession-economy’ add-on, which, in network terms, is essentially a parasitic overlay on a functional responsibility-based economy. (In principle the possession-economy provides governance for management of resources, but use of a non-finite ‘currency’ to manage finite resources makes no sense: the only possible result is ‘inflation’, and increasing assignment of finite resources to those who have the purported ‘right’ to extend – i.e. invent, from nowhere – additional ‘currency’.) The individual-oriented concept of personal ‘profit’ masks and ignores network-effects that frequently lead to huge whole-of-system losses. In practice, the possession-economy overlay contributes almost nothing to the economy, yet creates enormous inequities, instabilities and longer-term risks – and hence, in terms of the actual requirements, is neither useful nor desirable. It seems likely that the only viable option is to strip away the ‘possession-economy’ overlay, and (re-)construct a functional responsibility-based economic model.

Functions and services

The functions and services of ‘the economy’ consist of everything that anyone does, did or will do, in any form, at any time, anywhere in the world – so I won’t attempt to list them all here. The very simplest summary is that we dig things out of the ground, do various things to those things, and put them back in the ground again. (Arguably that includes people too. )

A function is a place within the economy where something can change, acting on resources in accordance with specific rules. (Think of ‘function’ in the mathematical sense: a=func(x,y).)

A capability provides the ability to do something to something. It may be implemented by natural processes, or, in the human economy, by a real person, a machine, and/or (for conceptual-assets) some kind of ‘information technology’. Machines are good at dealing with certainty, but not good at dealing with uncertainty; it’s the other way round for real people. (These distinctions aren’t particularly relevant in a high-level enterprise-architecture, but become more and more important as we get closer to where real work happens.)

A service links together a function and a capability to enable real work. (On its own, a function can do nothing; and on its own, a capability literally has no function.) In a service-oriented architecture, each service presents an interface with its own protocols and service-level agreements, and these services are chained together in some form into processes; in a real-world economy these tend to be a lot more fluid and implicit than in an IT-services architecture, but the principles involved are essentially the same.

Best leave this part of the ‘economy architecture’ at that, but there’s more detail in the Doing EA book (pp.65-76 of the ebook [PDF]) if you want it.

Architecture governance

Viewing the overall economy as an enterprise-architecture, it’s clear that there is almost no integrated governance for the economy as a whole – which immediately implies a ‘natural’ tendency towards fragmentation and disintegration.

Management of the global ‘household’ is split between ‘economics’, which in essence deals solely with money-based transactions; ‘political economy’, which deals with some aspects of the ‘game-rules’ for the money-economy; ‘politics’, which deals with a fairly random subset of game-rules for the non-money parts of the economy; and general sociocultural background, which attempts to re-integrate the resultant mess.

The continued failure of ‘economics’ to deal with just about anything other than point-to-point transactions means that whole-of-system costs are very poorly understood. Frequently, money-transactions themselves introduce huge unacknowledged whole-of-system costs; and as Gil Friend explains, the decisions we make in the delusion that petrol costs only US$3 a gallon are very different from those we would make once we recognise that the real cost at present is more like US$15-20 a gallon and rising.

So there is an urgent need for something – some social institution – to begin to pull all of these threads together. As to what that could be, given the current socio-political shambles, is just about anyone’s guess: over to you for suggestions on that?

Whuffie, currency and the ‘ready-fire-aim’ syndrome

Tom G — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:24:04 +0000

Spent much of the past couple of days getting overly-involved in two great threads on Venessa Miemis‘ ‘Emergent by Design‘ blog:

Social Capital is not the same as Whuffie

What could the future of money look like?

The first thread started with a very necessary attempt to distinguish between social-capital and reputation-based ‘currencies’ such as Cory Doctorow’s imaginary ‘Whuffie‘ (as described in his sci-fi novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” – the ‘magic kingdom’ being Disneyland, of course ). The key distinction that Venessa drew – and I think she’s right – is that social-capital is collective, a ‘network effect’ of the social context, whereas reputation is an attribute within the frame of that social-network, typically attached or attributed to the individual: in other words, they’re not the same, and should definitely not be treated as being the same.

This lead to the second thread, about ‘the future of money’, because much of the discussion in the ‘Whuffie’ thread was about the supposed need for some kind of ‘alternative currency’. (Clearly some people in the thread had hoped that ‘Whuffie’ would be it, but despite the efforts of well-meant initiatives such as The Whuffie Bank, it became evident quite quickly that it wouldn’t and couldn’t work in a ‘currency-like’ way.) There was – and at present, still is – a lot of discussion about various ‘currency-like’ proposals, such as TimeBanks, ITEX cashless payment, ‘Quids’ alternate-currency, and so on.

But what I found immensely frustrating was that almost none of them were thinking in true economic terms – and I wasn’t very popular for pointing out this unfortunate fact. Instead of enquiring what an economy is, what it needs to do, what purpose it serves, and so on – what would seem to be essential first-principles concerns about the context – they’d all assumed automatically, without question, that some kind of currency was ‘the answer’, and hence rushed off to create it. In other words, exactly the same mistake as far too many IT-folks: “here’s the solution – how can we force your problem to fit it?”

Ready? Fire!!! … aim…?

oops…

Yeah… really frustrating…

No-one with any sense would doubt that there are serious problems with the present ‘money-economy’ – not so much ’serious problems’ as ‘close to catastrophic failure’, in fact. Everyone in that conversation recognised this – which is why they were pushing so hard for alternatives. But the catch was that none of the alternatives actually resolved the core reasons why a money-economy won’t work; most of the proposed ’solutions’ not only replicated those problems, but actually made some of them worse. What was so frustrating was that in each case it took no more than a couple of minutes’ analysis not only to show that it wouldn’t work, but why it wouldn’t work. Yet no-one, it seemed, wanted to hear this: instead, off they want, charging off down their respective blind-alleys in the blind certainty that they’d found ‘the solution’.

What’s wrong with money, then? Short answer is: a lot. To give just a few examples:

It only deals with point-to-point transactions, not network-effects – especially at a societal level.

It’s designed to work with ‘alienable’ physical objects, but now no longer has any actual anchor in the real world – instead, we have literally trillions of supposed ‘money’ in imaginary ‘derivatives’ sloshing around the globe.

It’s very easy to ‘game’ via artificially-constructed price/value mismatches.

The implied ‘gravitation’ structure of money-based capital means that it tends to create ‘winner-takes-all’ accumulations – exacerbating social imbalances, often in the extreme, requiring separate action to try to redress the balance.

Attempts to link ‘intellectual property’ into the money-system have resulted in a system which purports to match finite ‘alienable’ entities (physical ‘things’) with potentially-infinite ‘non-alienable’ entities (information) – which by definition cannot balance.

Many organisations – particularly banks – are legally ‘entitled’ to invent money from nowhere, in effect assigning themselves an ever-increasing share of the society’s resources.

A currency, by definition, relies on trust in the institutions that manage that currency, which in this case is the banks – yet much of that trust has been lost, and at present remains at an all-time low (hence the strong societal interest in options for ‘alternative currencies’).

There are no built-in mechanisms to manage assignment of resources to those ‘outside’ of the monetary exchange-system (particularly children, parents, elderly, disabled and their carers, but also artists, scientists, thinkers, futurists, ‘creatives’ of any kind) – these stakeholders can only be served by ‘external’ mechanisms such as taxation (which are clunky and kludge-ridden at best), or by forcing them to do work within the money-economy (which means that their actual needed work can no longer be done).

There is a very strong tendency towards short-termism.

There is a very strong tendency to try to force everything into a crude, ludicrously-simplistic ‘double-entry life-keeping’.

There is a very strong tendency to assume that ‘value’ exists only in monetary terms, as ‘valuations’ of ‘resources’ – hence, for example, a forest supposedly has no value until it is cut down, a mountain has no value until mined for its minerals, and so on.

There is a very strong tendency to assume that anything which cannot be counted and ‘valued’ in monetary terms either does not matter or does not exist.

The societal impacts of these problems are rapidly approaching catastrophic levels. Yet none of the proposed ‘alternative currencies’ tackle more than a minute fraction of that list: most offer at best a localised kludge that might address a couple of issues whilst creating several more.

Let’s be blunt about this: the present system does not work. It actually never has – and that’s not surprising, because it was only ever intended to deal with point-to-point ‘trade’-transactions between fairly large groups (tribes, communities etc), hence it’s bit unfair to expect it to be able to run the entirety of an economy. But to create something that does work, we do need to go right back up to the level of the entire economy, and work our way back down from there. Which, yes, might – might – include some kind of ‘currency’ to tackle specific types of transactions: but not as the core of the economy itself.

This is actually no different from any other whole-of-enterprise architecture. (The only distinction is that it’s an ‘enterprise’ at the scale of an entire society, but that’s all.) So we would use the same overall approach:

Who (and/or what) are the stakeholders in this enterprise?

What are the core values? What is ‘value’ in this context? What is valued, and by whom? In other words, what determines ‘appropriate’ in this enterprise?

What are the assets, functions, locations, events, capabilities and decisions within this enterprise? – in other words, the resources of the enterprise that need to be managed, distributed, shared and used in the most appropriate manner.

What are the value-propositions that this enterprise needs to offer to and with its stakeholders?

What mechanisms and responsibilities would be needed to create, deliver and monitor those value-propositions?

What governance would be needed to ensure that all activities within the enterprise are optimised to be ‘on purpose’?

…and so on.

To me, every attempt at a currency will inherently fail because it cannot take network-effects into account: by its nature, a currency is a mechanism for governance of point-to-point transactions, without any direct means to link to whole-of-system impacts. So I honestly believe that all of these attempts at ‘alternative currencies’ are a waste of time: we should be far better served by putting the same effort into understanding how an economy actually works.

And the key to that, to my mind, comes down to perhaps the scariest fact of all: there are no rights. ‘Rights’ are a social fiction; but the mutual, interlocking responsibilities that underpin those purported ‘rights’ are a social reality. If we want those purported ‘rights’, where we need to start is with creating a better understanding the ways in which those real responsibilities need to interlock: a focus on ‘rights’, like a focus on ‘currency’, is at best an unhelpful distraction from this requirement.

Where this gets gets scarier still is that our entire present economic model is based on a concept of ‘right of possession’ – hence a ‘right to personal property’. But there are no rights: only responsibilities are real. And in a network, there is no ‘personal’: only the network is real. Right at the fundamentals of economics, ‘personal property’ is just another fiction – and a very dangerous fiction at that. Yet personal responsibilities for societal resources – the appropriate management, maintenance and use of those resources – are real. And as with ‘rights’, those interlocking responsibilities result in something that looks almost exactly the same as ‘personal property’ – but we now know how we get there, via those responsibilities.

If we turn it this way round, we end up with something that looks very similar to what we have at present: but it resolves all of the structural flaws of a ‘money-type’ economy, and we also know exactly how we get there.

Once we know that that’s what we need to aim for, then we can start talking about ‘intermediate currencies’ and the rest, as part of a transitional ‘roadmap’ towards that more workable model. But those ‘alternative currencies’ are only an intermediate step, and we don’t start from there.

That’s what would change these sad attempts at ‘Ready? Fire! Aim…’ into a more viable ‘Ready? Aim? Fire!’ – and rekindle the fire in our social economy.

Notes on ‘Business Anarchist’

Tom G — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:17:49 +0000

Several people have asked me for more information about the book I’m writing at present, ‘The Business Anarchist‘, so here’s a quick summary of the themes and structure.

Who or what is a ‘business-anarchist‘? Anyone who works with inherent uncertainty in business in an intentional, disciplined way – working with the uncertainty rather than trying to ‘control’ it. Often it’s not so much a person as part of a business-role – a necessary part of that business-role. (Most of the examples in the book will come from my own field of whole-of- enterprise architecture, but the same principles apply in just about every other type of business-role.)

Why ‘anarchist’? Anarchy is about working without rules, working ‘outside the box’. When ‘business as usual’ breaks down, a disciplined form of anarchy is probably the only way through to something new that works well in the new business context.

‘Kiddies-anarchy’ and real anarchy: Anarchy has had a very bad press in the past, mainly because of what I describe as ‘kiddies-anarchy’ – an overdose of presumed ‘rights’ without responsibilities, especially in terms of causing disruption and destruction without any awareness or respect of the consequences for anyone else. Real anarchy is very different – arguably the most difficult of all political forms, because there are no easy rules to fall back on or to blame. Some entire organisations have been run on anarchic lines – the Quakers have done so for centuries – and even some businesses – such as Ricardo Semler’s Semco Group – but here we’re mainly focussing on an often-unnoticed yet everyday set of roles and responsibilities within an ordinary, everyday type of business.

What kind of business? Any business, and any type of business – for-profit, not-for-profit, government or social – from a huge global conglomerate right down to the local bridge-club or the school parent/teacher association.

Business-analyst and business-anarchist: Business-analysts deal with certainty and predictability: they refine the figures, crunch the numbers, track the trends. When your business world is reasonably stable, you need your analysts to help you optimise efficiency and maximise returns. But when your business world is not certain, not predictable, that’s when you’ll need your anarchists. And you’ll need your anarchists then, too. Your analysts can only tell you how to do more of the same, better – which is good, of course, in its own context, but it doesn’t help when what you really need to do is something different.

What’s different about how business-anarchists work? The quickest one-line answer is that analysts rely on rules and algorithms; anarchists rely on guidelines and principles.

What principles should business-anarchists rely on? Obviously this varies from one context to another, but from my work in whole-of-enterprise architecture the three most important design-principles seem to be these:

There are no rules;

There are no rights; and

Money doesn’t matter.

These three principles, and a fourth follow-on principle, Always enhance adaptability, provide the overall structure for the book.

There are no rules: Rules provide a spurious sense of certainty that can let us down badly when our business-world changes around us. The real world is much messier and more complex than any system of rules that we could devise. Hence at times it’s necessary to start off from the assumption and expectation that there are no rules: instead, we have to rewrite the rule-book, by working back to the core-principles from which the rules originally arose. A simple everyday business-example of this is embedded in the ISO-9000 standard on quality-systems: work-instructions provide ‘the rules’ that we need for real-time practice and process, but when the world changes, we need to rewrite the work-instructions by working upward to procedure, policy and, if necessary, overall vision.

There are no rights: ‘Rights’ are an important social fiction, but as with rules, they don’t actually exist in the real world, and in themselves they tell us almost nothing about how to create the conditions that such ‘rights’ would require. In practice, apparent ‘rights’ arise from mutual, interlocking responsibilities – so it’s those responsibilities, and not the purported ‘rights’, that are where we need to start. This has important implications for business-architecture and enterprise-architecture that will be explored in some depth in the book – for example, we need to ask serious questions about “What do shareholders own?” if they possess all the ‘rights’ for the business but without any real responsibilities.

Money doesn’t matter: Money is important for every business, of course, especially in a commercial context – but as with rules or ‘rights’, it’s not the place where we need to start. Money is also only one small part of the overall economy in which the business operates: reputation, trust, attention and respect all need to exist before any money will be placed on the table. And if we state – or show – that we’re only interested in ‘making money’ from our customers and community, why would anyone want to engage with us? As with other ‘rights’, money is solely a social fiction, and profit is an outcome of being ‘on purpose’ to values: to achieve the profits that we may desire, we first need to start from values, with a values-architecture that describes how we engage with everyone within the extended-enterprise of the business.

Always enhance adaptability: Change is the only certainty: we therefore need to design for that fact. Mistaken notions about rules, rights and money often serve only to slow us down, placing the business at risk as the world changes around us. This sections of the book explores how to embed the ‘business-anarchist’ principles into everyday business-practice, especially in business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

—

More details to follow over the next few days, including book-cover, cover-blurb, ISBN numbers and so on. Publication-date is fixed as late-April, so I need to keep moving!