Tom Graves

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.

This post is about enterprise-architecture and business-architecture, but we’ll first need a brief diversion into some of the territory of the previous few posts.

(Note: I’m using the term ‘enterprise’ here in the same sense as the IEEE-1471 standard, to mean any group of people who collaborate and share resources towards a shared aim. So a commercial organisation is an ‘enterprise’, but so is a society, a culture, a nation. There’s also recursive nesting, in that a commercial enterprise, for example, exists and operates within a broader extended-enterprise of partners and suppliers, and intersects with the enterprise of its customers and prospects, which exists within the wider enterprise of the market, the nation and so on, as described in my presentation ‘What is an enterprise?‘. If you place the boundaries too narrow, around the organisation alone, you’re likely to miss the point here.)

One of the characteristics of any enterprise is a set of ‘core beliefs’ – the vision, the values and so on. As I’ve explained elsewhere, such as in my presentation ‘Vision, Role, Mission, Goal‘, these are ‘defining characteristics’ for the enterprise, because in a very literal sense they define what the enterprise is. Even more, they also define the priorities for the enterprise: what is important, and what is not.

What’s interesting is that those core-beliefs, almost by definition, are not rational as such: they are chosen, often quite arbitrarily, as an anchor for the enterprise. If we ask why a given belief is there, the only real answer is “Because.” (with the full-stop/period often emphasised in the phrasing) – in effect, it’s beyond question. Perhaps more to the point, if we change that ‘Because.’, it ceases to be the same enterprise.

What’s even more interesting is that very often – perhaps even in every enterprise – at least one of those core-beliefs will be utterly absurd. It seems not to be a mistake as such, indeed in some cases is openly acknowledged as intentional: “credo quia absurdum est”, ‘I believe because it is absurd’, to quote one famous Christian ‘apologia’. In some – perhaps many – cases, overt expression of belief in the chosen absurdity appears to be a condition for membership; conversely, any questioning of the absurdity may lead to expulsion from the ‘tribe’.

(Many groups or cultures require new members to make an irrevocable break with their previous ‘belonging’ – perhaps symbolised by a literal shedding of belongings, for example, or – in the case of changing to a different country – formally abandoning the previous citizenship. Some sub-cultures – particularly gang-cultures – take this to extremes, marking the rejection of the previous mores and customs by committing what would be considered a ‘crime’ in the old culture: theft, burglary, violence, murder or worse, “creating guilt and complicity – a powerful initiation into their new lives”.)

We look at other cultures, and laugh easily at their absurdity whilst failing to look at our own – a point brilliantly made in Flanders & Swann’s delightful ditty from the 1950s, ‘The Reluctant Cannibal‘. Religions provide other examples: just about every one of them has at least one fundamental absurdity at its core – if only something that is absurd in everyday terms. “On the third day he rose again from the dead” – an absurdity in terms of everyday experience, surely? Or consider the gold plates supposedly discovered by Joseph Smith, that define the ‘Book of Mormon‘; or the Scientology belief that we all come from somewhere on another planet. And many of these beliefs have a somewhat circular, self-serving flavour to them: the notion of the Rapture, for example, in which only a select few will be saved; or the many, many cultures who seem to consider themselves to be ‘the Chosen Ones’, the special favourite of their own special deity. All utterly absurd, of course, from a ‘rational’ perspective.

But ‘rationalism’ itself is actually no more rational than the other religions, if we stop to think about it. The notion that the world has an identifiable order to it, made up of identifiable rules: compared to everyday reality, that’s pure wishful thinking, not to mention interestingly arrogant in its placing of ‘rationalists’ in the purported hierarchy of that order. Or look at everyday economics: the bizarre concept of the ‘rational actor‘, when everything we know about psychology and sales tells us that almost all human decisions are ultimately not rational. The same is true for science: despite its pretensions as ‘guardian of the truth’, in reality there is no lack of evidence for Paul Feyerabend’s assertion that there is no ‘ultimate truth’ in science, that the common notion of ‘the scientific method‘ is an absurd delusion and that the only valid principle in science is “anything goes“, and that we may need to defend our society against science as much as against religion or any other ‘irrational’ belief.

There’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with any of this absurdity, in fact there’s a great deal that’s good. Absurd though they may be, they do at least seem to create social cohesion and meaning, so perhaps the only real test of each belief would be in terms of whether they’re useful rather than ‘true’. And in terms of what they help people achieve, some absurdities are frankly magnificent:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
[US Declaration of Independence, 1776]

The blunt fact is that not one item of this statement was true at the time: “all men are created equal” was clearly absurd in a culture whose economy was based on overt slavery, and the notion that anyone was “endowed” with “inalienable Rights” by an imagined “Creator” was frankly laughable to any ‘outsider’. The document’s creators knew all of that, too: they knew it was nonsense, in terms of the everyday certainties of the time. And yet that absurd belief works, in a very real, tangible, human sense – which is the whole point of such absurdities, after all.

Yet there are also unintended-consequences of each absurdity, many of which may put its real value at risk. For example, the inconsistencies between the lofty ideal of “all men are created equal” versus the blatant inequalities of the real world has led to continual conflict, even war, as the various groups who were manifestly not included in that initial ‘all are equal’ – negro slaves, women in general, immigrants, workers in factories, the peoples of the much-manipulated ‘banana republic’ colonies – struggled (and still struggle) to be acknowledged as equally ‘equal’. And the notion of “inalienable Rights” has led to a tendency to ignore the real responsibilities from which those imaginary ‘Rights’ arise, and a nation slowly collapsing under the sheer weight and wastefulness of its litigation and law. With the result that there’s less and less “Life, Liberty and Happiness” to be had…

Which means that we need to be very careful about those unintended-consequences – identifying them, their sources and impacts, and possible remedies for each, as appropriate. But there’s a catch and a big catch at that: the absurdity is a foundation-stone for the group itself. If we disturb the absurdity, or even overtly call it into question, we could inadvertently destroy the integrity of the group. Which is not a good idea – not least because of the all-too-common tendency to ’shoot the messenger’, to punish the bearer of any bad news…

Which, by a roundabout route, brings us back to enterprise-architecture and business-architecture – because exactly the same issues will apply in the organisation and the enterprise.

Each enterprise has its own foundational beliefs – each with their own absurdities, each in turn with their own unintended consequences. So as enterprise-architects, we need to identify what those are, their sources and impacts, and possible remedies for each, as appropriate. And we need to do all of this almost by stealth, because disrupting any inherent absurdity may well trigger an unexpectedly extreme response. Interesting…

To make it even more ‘interesting’, we need to note that the same applies to every group and sub-culture and work-team and business-unit and professional discipline within and intersecting with every level and layer of our organisation – which provides plenty of opportunities for clashes between the respective absurdities. Ouch…

And this also applies in relations beyond the organisation itself. The organisation connects with its market and the broader enterprise – whatever that may be – by sharing at least some of its beliefs and vision and values. What absurdity-clashes occur here too? (For example, the belief that organisations exist to serve, versus the belief that they exist only to make a profit? – a clash that will often be highlighted in any work on corporate social responsibility.) In what ways can we resolve those clashes, often without ever overtly acknowledging that the absurdities exist? What are the unintended-consequences both of the inherent absurdities in the respective belief-systems and of the clashes between the belief-systems? How do we resolve those – again often without overtly acknowledging that they exist?

Other even-more-complex clashes occur in large multinationals. Each local subsidiary operates in its own context, reaching its own ‘balance of absurdities’ with its market and environment; but the parent company often expects and demands that the subsidiaries should align themselves with the unacknowledged assumptions and absurdities of the parent’s commercial and social culture – in the US, perhaps, or Germany, or Japan, or some other distant land. Identifying and resolving those clashes has been a key professional focus for me over the past few months – and no, it’s not easy, not least because of the layer upon layer of unintended-consequences that need to be unravelled and resolved in the process.

In the end, what it comes down to is this: many if not most of the foundational-beliefs of individuals, groups, organisations, enterprises, entire nations, are absurd. Utterly absurd. Trying to force those absurdities into a more ‘rational’ form is not a good idea: not only does it create further unintended-consequences, but it’s a proven and painful way to drive ourselves mad. By contrast, if we openly admit that it is absurd, we’re likely to be dismissed as insane. But there is a solution, as the great computer-trade consultant Gerry Weinberg explains in his classic book The Secrets of Consulting:

It seemed as if I had only two choices: remain rational, and go crazy; or become irrational, and be called crazy. For years I oscillated between these two poles of misery, until I finally hit upon another option: become rational about the irrationality.

Being rational about the irrationality may perhaps seem a little crazy at times, especially in the eyes of our more ‘rational’ colleagues; but it does lead towards something that does work, and that does keep the inevitable unintended-consequences down to the bare minimum.

So yes, a belief may well be absurd; but the absurdity is there for a reason – and often very good reasons at that. So as enterprise-architects we need to embrace the absurdity – not fight against it, but work with it, to help create the results that each enterprise will actually need.

Message from the Amazon is a recent post by one of my favourite writers on corporate social responsibility, Christine Arena. It includes a summary of the ‘oil wars’ occurring at present around purported oil-reserves in the Amazon basin, the work of groups such as the Pachamama Alliance, and in particular the worldview of indigenous peoples such as the Achuar, Shuar and Kichwa:

The Achuar, Shuar, and Kichwa peoples have one thing that oil companies don’t: ancient wisdom. If effectively leveraged, it is hypothesized that such wisdom could translate to a groundswell of public support for the ‘save the rainforest’ cause. Ancient wisdom could potentially build bridges of mutual understanding between indigenous communities and mainstream Western culture. Ultimately, it could help win the ongoing “Amazon oil war” in a way that benefits all humanity.

With one key exception, I would agree entirely with the article. Its description of the Achuar worldview also aligns exactly with my own experience and understanding of the Australian aboriginal context and its concept of the Dreaming.  One of the most interesting points, for example, was about the Achuar’s view of the respective roles of men and women:

“Achuar women’s role is to say when,” says Lien. “They tell men when they’ve cut down enough trees, hunted enough animals, taken enough from the earth. And the men listen.”

To me that makes perfect sense – when it’s in balance. I’ve seen similar descriptions in other indigenous societies, such as the Plains Indians (Sioux et al, I think?) structures for dealing with major decisions: the male Elders (and only the men) discuss the issues, each from a single perspective, after which the Grandmothers (collectively, without discussion) make the decision – and their decision is final. But that’s where the exception comes, because Arena blows it completely here by adding the fatuous remark:

Imagine if Western women wielded that kind of power.

I’m sorry, but I get really annoyed at the underlying implications in that kind of comment, and the selective myopia that drives them. (Very much a ‘Green’ perspective, in Spiral Dynamics terms, rather than the ‘Yellow/Gold’ that’s actually needed here.) The point is that Western women already do wield that kind of power – and that’s exactly the problem, because at present they use that power just as irresponsibly as do Western men. If not more so…

For example, take a look at who really drives Western consumerism. Yes, no doubt at all that we could point a finger or two at ‘men and their toys’: but just note also which sex spends more of their time in the shopping-malls and flicking endlessly through the TV shopping-channels? It’s common to claim that men earn more than women (which in fact they generally don’t in Western societies, as is shown in any real like-with-like comparison), but rather more important is that fact that Western women spend far more than men – something like twice as much as men, in fact. (The huge transfer of wealth from men to women somewhere between earning and spending somehow fails to be noticed in most current feminist studies of economics… strange, that…) So who has the real purchasing power? – and the equally-real responsibilities that go with it? That’s a serious question, which needs a serious answer – which, rather noticeably, we don’t get in that quote above.

Now add into that mix the probable source of that fatuous comment, the all-too-convenient ‘essentialist’ myths that arose with the modern variants of feminism. All of these summarise to a single vain, vapid, self-serving, self-congratulatory assertion that women are somehow inherently ‘better’ and ‘wiser’ than men, that “men are the problem, women are the solution”. If we go further back, to a rather more honest and intellectually-rigorous period in feminist history, one of the main concerns of the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s convention was a demand for acknowledgement by all of each woman’s responsibility for her own life; yet present-day feminism seems far more concerned with evasion of any form of responsibility for women, instead seeking to offload all responsibility onto others via what one rather more aware feminist commentator (Naomi Wolf, I think?) described as “a religion of Other-blame”. And blame itself is a key form of social violence. If we want to resolve these serious world-level issues, we need to be a lot more honest than that.

The physics definition of ‘power’ is the ability to do work; most social definitions of ‘power’ – including those of most modern feminism – are closer to ‘the ability to avoid work’. Therein lie some huge problems for individuals, families, communities, organisations, nations and the world as a whole; it also doesn’t help that most of the so-called ‘rights’ discourse lies on the wrong side of that balance. What we need here is not convenient gender-blame or Other-blame, but some real honesty and real responsibility. That’s the real ‘message from the Amazon’ – and it’s one we all need to learn, and fast.

There are guns everywhere in Guatemala City.

Even a little low-middle-class colonia such as the one where I’m staying has a guard-station with two security-guards, each with a shoulder-slung pistol-grip shotgun, checking each vehicle in and out through the gates.

In the shopping-mall, it’s pretty much gun-city. Just about everywhere there are uniformed security-guards, toting pistols and batons. Even the fast-food place I ate at the other day had its own armed security-guard, barely sixteen at a guess, opening doors politely and timidly for the clients, pistol at his side. His uniform was simply too big for him; he certainly didn’t look old enough to know how to use the gun for real. But in a city where the homicide rate is heading towards ten thousand people a year, and ‘protection’ rackets are big business in any unprotected area, the guns do mean something, I suppose.

So it was really nice to look out of the upper window of the upmarket café we were working in today, to see the car-park security-guard playing air-guitar on his shotgun, changing chords as he went. Pity I didn’t have my video-camera to hand – better luck next time, perhaps?

And here I was thinking that it might actually be quieter when I got back to Guatemala… wrong!

Turns out I’ve arrived here on El Dia Del Diablo – literally ‘The Day of the Devil’, which is an early part of the Christmas-season celebrations. It’s the day when they burn the Devil in effigy, to celebrate his defeat by the soon-to-come Christ. And yes, English folks may well recognise a certain resemblance here to the now-almost-forgotten tradition of the burning of the Guy, because, yes, it’s firework-night. Which means even more bangs and firecrackers than usual. A lot more bangs and firecrackers…

First warning of this was when some kids started letting off seriously big firecrackers just down the street (which in a country already overly awash with over-used guns seemed somewhat irresponsible, to say the least). Then when I went out for a walk at lunchtime (yes, I’m getting a little braver than my last trip here, though all the guys in the office still reminded me “a cuidado!” before I went out of the gate!) I noticed an indigenous woman not with the usual tortillas or junk children’s-toys but a huge table of fireworks. Something going on, methinks. Finally a struggled sort-of-Spanish conversation elicited the information that it’s El Dia Del Diablo. At which point everyone in the office went off to their various celebrations, leaving me literally in the dark.

Didn’t take long to find out what it meant. The guy from across the street hauls out a large cardboard box containing a smiling bright-red effigy, taller than the rather pudgy daughter who was sort-of assisting him. And when his other children finally turn up – the two elder boys from setting off their own bangers just down the road apiece – he sets fire to it. In the middle of the street. With cars wandering past. Various fireworks follow – one almost landing on my head as I watch from the balcony above the street. Casual madness, if all in a very everyday Guatemalan style.

I’m an habitual people-watcher, I fear, so the most interesting part for me was the family dynamics. Father, big and loud, pandering to his three podgy, pouting princess-daughters – aged from about six to ten, I’d guess, each posing with their hands over their ears in play-acted fear, and crying and stomping their feet immediately they didn’t get their own way in even the most trivial of matters. Three boys, one of them perhaps also six, and hanging around vaguely with the daughters, the two elder ones perhaps twelve and fourteen, off doing their own explosive thing. (Some of the fireworks seriously dangerous – they experimented putting a huge thunderflash into a plastic drainpipe as a crude mortar, but it blasted the drainpipe to pieces. Yikes…) Mother standing around, wandering off, being social with the neighbours, barely interacting with the father at all. And a thin quiet girl, perhaps fifteen, much darker skin – hence presumably indigenous rather than one of this family – standing there in the garage doorway with a hosepipe, quietly putting out the blaze at the end, quietly tidying up the amazing amount of mess, all but shut out of the fun, unacknowledged and ignored by all the others. The maid, I suppose, which seems a bit of a surprise in this relatively lower-middle-class suburb – though with six children in the family the mother would certainly need some help. Yet interestingly she was also the only one who noticed me, shared a smile in the dark as I videoed the scene from above. Another person who lives the life of the Outsider. Nice.

Fortunately it seems to be an early-evening thing – most of the flashes and bangs have eased off now, leaving only the ever-present roar of the traffic on the periferico. Who knows, I might even get a good night’s sleep for once!

A popular escape from Mexico City, Tepoztlan is a smallish rural town nestled in the top end of a steep valley that slopes downward for a thousand metres or so towards the open plains to the south-east. (The huge cone of Popocatepetl is just about visible down in that direction, amidst many other lesser and less-active volcanoes.)

Described in the tourist literature as one of Mexico’s ‘Magical Towns’, it’s also popular with the magical crowd: signs everywhere for ‘masaje’, ‘fotografia de aura’, ‘luz azul’ and suchlike wonders well-known to the Glastafari (aka the equally mad denizens of Glastonbury, back in England). And in many ways it is magical: it’s very friendly, it’s easy to wander safely amongst the cobbled streets, it has a wonderful open market in the centre of town and an even busier street-market at weekends, for example, and high up on the vertical cliffs that tower above the town stands the Tepozteco pyramid, a survivor from Aztec times. To my great relief, most of the police here do not carry guns – a hugely pleasant change from Guatemala! And whilst the place I’m staying in is quite a long way up a very steep hill, and the colleague I’m working with is based on the far side of town, everything is compact enough that I can walk anywhere I need – or take one of the many taxis that seem to be everywhere, and cheap (even though the fare can often miraculously all-but-double on the first sign of a tourist-like face!)

But there’s one thing that Tepoztlan doesn’t have: silence. There seems to be an almost religious avoidance of it, more like. Right now the bells at each of the churches are clanking out the hour, preceded every quarter-hour by a slightly mangled version of the Westminster-chimes sequence. Dogs bark all day, all night, everywhere. Cocks crow for a couple of hours before dawn, and often an hour or more after dawn too, just in case you hadn’t heard them the first time. Huge B-double gas-tanker trucks blare their exhaust-brakes all the way down the grade of the autopista on the far side of the valley; smaller trucks grind up and down the impossibly steep cobbled streets of the town, announcing their wares loudly through huge built-in megaphones. The church – which has an apparently unquestioned right to do whatever it likes – sets off enormous thunderflashes at any time of day or night, apparently at random, sometimes two or three in a row. And some mad evangelist has taken to gathering the faithful with a mixture of loud pop-music and even louder religious ranting, amplified to fullest distorted volume, frequently up until 1:30am or later, and starting all over again at 6:30am with massed drums and a marching-band. And since this town is in a natural bowl with thousand-foot vertical cliffs all round, every single sound echoes and echoes back and forth; and, of course, also bounces off the almost perfectly sound-reflecting blank walls and polished tiles of every house in the district. The resultant cacophony can be very hard to block out, even with ear-plugs and noise-cancelling headphones combined. The final result: no sleep. And no sleep. And more no-sleep…

After this, even the strain of Guatemala City – where I’m going back to at the weekend – may seem like a rest!

But other than the lack of sleep, Tepoztlan has been a great place, with great people that I’ll miss. Quieter next time, perhaps?

“Information overload!”, wails my colleague Anders Østergaard on Twitter, “I want vacation, now!” Well, if you need a vacation, and there’s none available, surely there’s always the option of an anti-vacation?

Let me explain – from my current first-hand experience.

At present I’m in Guatemala City, and in theory I’m on vacation. (The ‘in theory’ part is important.) I can’t go out and play tourist, because I’ve been warned that it’s almost a certainty that I would be robbed, or shot, or both. I can’t walk with my laptop to the nearest Starbucks, partly because there isn’t one, and partly because, again, I probably wouldn’t even get there in one piece and/or still with the laptop. According to a poster down the road, there were 6338 homicides here last year; I’m not surprised, because I’ve already twice seen a body-bag lying in the road after some unspecified ‘incident’. There are men with shotguns or pistols pretty much everywhere, most in some kind of uniform, but not always. There were seven or eight armed guards in the small shopping-mall I went to yesterday, and even lower-middle-class suburbs like this one have gates with 24-hour armed guard, and razor-wire on every garden wall. On one main thoroughfare I counted at least four companies who provide bullet-proof armour for ordinary cars. So ’security’ is big business here: no doubt that those who purport to provide it are very happy at the amount of money they’re raking in…

Pretty much no-one else is raking it in, though. Sure, prices are low in relative terms – a Big Mac is about half the price compared to the US, to give one crude but useful metric – and a typical middle-class rent would be the equivalent of about US$250-350 a month. But an IT-tech, for example, earns around 1000-1200 Quetzales a week, or about the same as I would expect to earn in a single morning as a tech in Australia. For the ordinary everyday folk who are the backbone of any economy, life is pretty tough at present – a fact which is all too evident all round me here.

And my ‘hotel accommodation’ ain’t exactly salubrious either. I’m working with a bunch of guys doing key development on what I would consider whole-of-enterprise architecture, with an emphasis on organisational health and whole-enterprise integration. Given the ’security situation’ and the short time I’m booked to be here, I need to be close to them, not hidden away in a hotel; so my ‘bedroom’ consists of a bed in the corner of the office, which in the daytime is shared by at least three other guys. The toilet and shower are half-concealed by a thin curtain: there is no door, and no real privacy. I have no idea of how to get around in this city, and my Spanish is barely past the level of “Buenas dias, ¿que tal?”, so in practice I can’t go out anywhere unless someone drives me there – and only one of the guys has a working car. There’s no heating, and no sound-insulation, so with the main ‘periferico’ freeway roaring away all day and night at the end of the street, and the apparent national passion for letting off firecrackers anywhere at any time, earplugs are an absolute must if I’m to get any sleep at all. To be blunt, I’m exhausted, every night, every day; and at times it can feel more like a prison-cell than anything else.

Some vacation…!

Yet in reality I probably feel more alive and engaged here than I have at any time in the past three years. After struggling so much and so long against the myopically arrogant apathy of the business scene in so much of Britain and elsewhere, being here is invigorating. In just eight days here I’ve already run or participated in three workshops for top-level bank executives – one of those workshops a marathon of more than twelve hours – and another large workshop-event for almost five hundred mid-level employees. All of it has worked well: if ever there was need for proof of the need and value of whole-of-enterprise architecture, it’s right here. At least three more such events, and probably several exec-level meetings too, before we go back to Mexico this time next week. I don’t have time to play tourist; I have so much to do right now that I barely have time even to write in this weblog.

So yeah, it’s crazy – probably unutterably crazy – but does feel good, too.

Watch this space?

One of the professional hazards of working in the futures space is that, by definition, many if not most of the themes I’m working on are five, ten, fifty or more years into the future. Without people like me doing the far-future work, that future will never happen. But whilst there’s a lot of often all-too-literal blood, sweat and tears that go into that work, almost no-one is willing to pay for it, since they don’t seem to be able to grasp what it means or what it’s worth until it’s already too late.

Sure, I can get by at times by doing what I can only describe as ‘junk-work’, base-level architecture and the like that almost anyone could do; but it isn’t my real work, it isn’t where I have the most value for any nominal employer or society at large, and it isn’t what I know I should be doing. Yet whenever I do try to do my real work, all I’m likely to be ‘paid’ is mockery, denigration and theft – because that’s pretty much all that our wondrous society has to offer for those who do not wish to be thieves themselves. (More on that in a moment.) Over the years, there’ve been quite a few folks now who’ve made a lot of money from my work; yet I doubt if I’ve seen a single penny of recompense from of any of them. Which hurts – and not just in the pocket, either.

Few people in the ‘normal’ world have any idea of the intensity of the loneliness that dominates life out here on the far fringes of everyday reality. I’ve never been an employee; always self-employed, or contract consultant, always the Outsider in any professional context. And although I do have occasional colleagues for whom some of the ideas that thrash through my head do make some degree of sense, fact is I probably have no direct peers, anywhere in the world; literally nothing in common with most people I would meet on the street, or anywhere else, really. That doesn’t make me ‘better’ than anyone else – far from it, more like; but it does make me more alone. In four decades as a nominal adult, I don’t think I’ve ever had a partner (in any sense of ‘partner’) with whom I could truly share my life and work; not surprisingly, yet never by choice, I’ve lived most of my adult life alone. Most of my childhood too, for that matter. Imagine that in your own life: no partner, no spouse, no children, no company, church, community, no person or place that is ‘home’; no certainty of any kind; nowhere to belong. No doubt you’ve had some edges of that for a day or two, a month or two; try it instead for a lifetime. You’ve no doubt been there from time to time, yet each time known too that for you “this too will pass”; try it instead knowing that that aloneness and isolation will never change. Being the Outsider hurts; it never ceases to hurt. Ever.

True, those of us who have to live this strange life do somehow learn to live with the hurt, sort of. We don’t have much choice about it, to be honest. But no real surprise that severe depression is one of the more frequent occupational hazards here. ‘Severe’ is perhaps an understatement: the only word I know that expresses it is the old Welsh term hiraedd, sometimes weakly translated as ‘homesickness’, but more an unyielding, unrelenting homesickness for a ‘home’ that we know does not exist – “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. Most of the time I manage to keep that hiraedd somewhat at bay; but right now it’s back with a vengeance. Downer again…

To see why this is so hard, and yet so inevitable, consider just two examples of what, after many years of study, I see as ‘fundamental truths’ that clash with core assumptions that underpin our entire current ‘Westernised’ society, and that put me in direct conflict with the politics of ‘ the right’ and ‘the left’ respectively.

The clash with ‘the right’ is this: there is no way to make a possession-economy sustainable. Our entire economy is based on so-called ‘rights’ of possession: yet whilst it’s true that there are a few ways in which it can be made to seem as if it makes sense with physical objects, it doesn’t actually work in practice, and it does not and cannot make sense for information, for business-relationships, or for just about anything else in the real world. What we might best describe as ‘double-entry life-keeping’ is a downright disaster, often falling into black farce: trying paying back a bequest, for example. And whilst, from a shallow, short-term-only analysis, a possession-model can be made to look more productive than its responsibility-based counterpart, in reality it can only be made to seem ’sustainable’ by running it as a pyramid-game, a myth of perpetual ‘growth’. It’s been run that way for some five thousand years or so; but the blunt fact is that we ran out of room for growth in the pyramid perhaps fifty to a hundred years ago, and ever since then we’ve been like the cartoon character who’s run further and further off the cliff, way out into mid-air, but hasn’t acknowledged it yet because she doesn’t dare to look down. True, we might be able keep up the delusion of ‘business as usual’ for a fair few years yet – but the longer we refuse to face it, the harder will be the fall. We still have a chance to switch over to a responsibility-based model now, while we still have the option to do it by choice; later, when the choice is forced upon us, it will be way, way too late for most of what we currently deem to be ‘civilisation’. Not made any easier, either, that the cultures that call themselves ‘developed’ are the ones who’ve lost the plot, whereas the cultures they deride as ‘under-developed’ or, worse, ‘primitive’, are the only ones who have a clue. It’s going to be messy, to say the least; but leaving it much longer is going to be messier still. We know this; we all know this; yet anyone who says it out loud gets hit hard with the good ol’ game of “shoot the messenger”. Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it, am now too scared to even try any more. Yet someone has to do so: just wish it wasn’t me…

The clash with ‘the left’ goes deeper still: there are no rights. The whole concept of ‘rights’ is a self-centred delusion: only responsibilities are real. What we think of as ‘rights’ are desirable outcomes that arise from interlocking mutual responsibilities; but the ‘rights’ themselves do not and cannot exist in any independent form, however much we might declare them to be “true and inalienable” and the rest. In far, far too many cases, a supposed ‘right’ is actually an arbitrary assertion – petulant demand, more like – that someone else has responsibilities to us and for us, whilst we ourselves do not. Wherever such so-called ‘rights’ are inherently asymmetric, they in essence assign all responsibility onto those who are deemed to not have those ‘rights’ – one infamous example being the entire ‘women’s rights’ discourse, which no doubt started out with good intentions but is now little more than state-sponsored abuse of men. And to be utterly blunt, the huge body of law that exists to protect a so-called ‘right’ of possession is actually a state-sponsored form of theft, either in the present, the future or the past. Whenever we start from the ‘rights’ discourse, someone loses – which in the long term means that everyone loses. The only safe place to start is from responsibilities, and mutuality of responsibilities – which, given that our core economic model is based on those supposed ‘rights’ of possession, is exactly what our current society is least willing to do. One probable outcome is that the much-valued, much-praised Bill Of Rights that underpins so much of the USA’s way of life is what is ultimately most likely to destroy it as a nation – and, if we’re not careful, the rest of the world as well. Scary indeed.

So to understand my position as ‘the Outsider’, try knowing those two facts to be true – that there are no rights, and that there is no way to make a ‘rights’-based, possession-based economy sustainable. Try knowing the full implications of those two facts; try knowing, in a deep, visceral sense, the urgency of the societal need to face those facts; then try to find any way to stay sane whilst nigh-on everyone around you is pretending, as hard as they can, that those facts are not true…

So yeah, no real surprise that I’m back in downer again.

And there’s a lot more where those two clashes came from: a lot more. That’s what I do, that’s my real work: trying to make sense of enterprise-architecture in every scope and sense of ‘enterprise’, sometimes right down in the details, sometimes necessarily right up to the scale of an entire world, present, past, future. And I live with those deep facts, every day, working flat out trying to find any viable ways to help individuals, groups, companies, entire cultures to gain awareness and understanding and action on this, so as to move from ‘here’ – which is not and cannot be sustainable – to ‘there’ – which just might be, if we make that move in time, and if anyone will listen long enough to move at all.

No doubt the downer will ease off somewhen soon; it usually does. But if you wonder why I seem to slump a bit too much from time to time, and seem a little crazed perhaps more often than you might like, the above might help you to see why that’s so.

Hey ho.

Following up a recommendation from Shawn Callahan of Australian narrative-knowledge consultancy Anecdote, I’ve started a new weblog, thinking side-wise.

This existing weblog has developed a more technical emphasis around enterprise architecture, together with an assortment of other personal themes, all of which would best be described as somewhat esoteric. The new weblog is for a more general business-executive audience, exploring how to create new possibilities, new opportunities and options in business by ‘thinking side-wise’ about the structure and nature of business, and its role within the broader enterprise of society at large. Some of these ideas will no doubt seem strange, confusing, controversial, provocative, even downright disruptive – but that’s the whole point when we’re aiming to create constructive change, surely?

So to start off in the right spirit, the first main post should be suitably challenging for most business execs: “What do shareholders own?” (The question itself should seem harmless enough; the real answer isn’t – especially for business. )

Please let others know that these ideas are out there: Share and Enjoy, if you would?

A ‘tweet’ on Twitter pointed me to Colin Beveridge’s post ‘Enterprise Aliens‘, on his “Trillion Dollar Bonfire” website. (Colin estimates that over the past few decades at least a trillion dollars have been wasted worldwide on useless corporate IT – hence the website name.) His theme is that for enterprise architects and executives alike it can be useful to view the enterprise as if from the viewpoint of some imaginary alien or Outsider, so as to break free from corporate groupthink. As he says, this has strong precedents in folklore:

Every culture has age-old tales about rulers disguising themselves to pass among their subjects, often learning vital lessons about policy and behaviours that otherwise go unreported.

(One key cultural point is that the unwitting providers of those often painful ‘lessons’ must be protected against punishment for their honesty. Much the same theme is echoed by Oscar Berg’s recent post ‘Management by Listening Around‘ on his “The Content Economy” blog, about the processes, practices and ethics of using social software to ‘listen around’ in anonymous fashion for real-world management review.)

Many other traditional contexts have an explicit role to provide that ‘alien view’ function: the court jester, for example, or the formal appointment of an ecclesiastical lawyer as ‘Devil’s Advocate’ in reviewing the life and works of a proposed candidate for Catholic sainthood. In both those cases, though in different ways, one function of the role is to disrupt the groupthink and the ‘yes-men’ mentality, and, if possible, provide a palatable way to break through wishful thinking and face the more subtle complexities of reality. In short, to be an anarchist in the midst of the wishful groupthink-’rules’ and regulations of the realm. Enterprise alien as business anarchist.

Which leads to another theme: the roles of analyst and anarchist within enterprise architecture, and within business in general. To use the mediaeval court metaphor, most of the king’s advisers and elders are analysts: they assess best practice from the past, and extrapolate those lessons to the future. The jester’s job is to think sideways, to parody, critique, disrupt – in short, to be an anarchist – and we might note that whilst there may be dozens of elders all jockeying for the prime positions, there’s usually just the one jester. Sure, there’s humour in the act, but often it’s there only to make the critique more palatable, to use self-deprecation to deflect attack: it’s a serious role with serious responsibilities.

The analyst as ‘insider’; the anarchist as ‘outsider’, alien, Other. For each analyst role in business, there’s a matching anarchist whose role is to bring the analysis down to the ground and get real. Compare the the opposing emphases of the roles:

• causality model
  • business analyst: linear – analysis in terms of assumed rules of derivation
  • business anarchist: non-linear – causal relationships either not identifiable or identifiable only retrospectively (”small pieces loosely joined … always a little bit broken”)
• temporal focus
  • business analyst: before action (plan) or after action (assessment / analysis)
  • business anarchist: during action (’the Now’)
• management model
  • business analyst: top-down, controls for predictability – emphasis on machines or IT
  • business anarchist: bottom-up, direction for inherent uncertainty – emphasis on people
• scientific analogue
  • business analyst: Newtonian physics as metaphor – mass-markets, large-scale statistics, Taylorist ’scientific management’
  • business anarchist: chaos-physics as metaphor – ‘market of one’, quantum effects, self-organisation, enterprise as ecosystem
• systems-development approach
  • business analyst: ‘engineering the enterprise’, Waterfall development
  • business anarchist: emergent systems, Agile development

Perhaps the simplest way to summarise is that the analyst relishes taking things apart, but purports to put them together; whilst the anarchist puts things together to work with the real context in real-time, but is blamed for taking things apart in ways that the analysts don’t expect.

That clash is also clear if we merge those summaries above in Cynefin terms:

• business analyst: rule-based + abstract time = ‘complicated’ or ‘knowable’ domain
• business anarchist: non-linear + real-time = ‘chaotic’ domain

…which, in practice, are almost diametric opposites – no wonder there’s a clash.

Yet a key aim of the enterprise architecture must be to provide a framework in which these inherent differences can be resolved. Too often, for example, I’ve seen examples where every nominal business-process is beautifully documented, but what they describe is not how the work is actually done in practice. Management relies on its analysts, but have no grasp at all of what the foreman or equivalent does to keep things moving along as smoothly as possible in the chaos of real-world practice. Anyone can analyse supermarket checkout queues en-masse – the statistics are easy enough to follow, to give average service-times, mean, standard-deviation and the rest – giving rise to the nice illusion of predictability, control. But in the chaos of real queue-flows, the ‘quick-service’ line can easily end up slower than the main checkouts – which hits hard on customer (dis-)satisfaction, for a start. And when it takes longer to get out of the store than it does to select purchases – as seems to occur more often than not in one of this town’s supermarkets – potential customers soon learn to stay out in droves, whether the prices are good or not: price is not the only measure of perceived value here… But the sources of such business issues are all but invisible in statistical analysis: to see them, and to resolve them in business practice, we need the eye of the Outsider, the alien, the anarchist.

Seems an idea worth exploring further, anyway.