Tom Graves / Tetradian

In part this is a follow-on from the previous post on the fundamental flaws underlying all forms of currency, but it also has many implications for businesses, enterprise-architectures, societal models, corporate social responsibility and much else besides.

And don’t worry, I’ll aim to keep this one short(ish) [later: turns out it's another long one - sorry...] – though I’ll probably return to the theme quite a bit in subsequent posts.

The key point in the previous post was that no ‘alternative-currency’ would solve the socioeconomic problems that we currently face: the all-too-evident failures and failings of the money-economy are merely at the symptom level, and attempting to replace conventional state-issued currency with some other kind of home-grown alternative would be merely one more variant on the theme of ’shifting deckchairs on the Titanic‘.

Yet clearly we do need something that will enable us to operate the kind of global-scale exchanges that our current economic models allow – because without that, it’s obvious that the city-based cultures especially could quickly collapse into anarchy of the worst possible kind.

It might perhaps be a surprise that what I’m suggesting here as an alternative actually is anarchy – but anarchy only in a strict technical sense, and of a radically different form.

Let me explain.

In the previous post I hope I made it clear that there is no way in which a possession-based economy can be made sustainable. Therein lies the real economic problem: possession is a classic example of the antipattern that “for every complex problem there’s a least one clear, easily-understood wrong answer”.

Underpinning that ‘wrong answer’ is another even deeper ‘wrong answer’: the notion of rights. Possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. (In British law it’s more subtle again, in that it’s actually defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need: as the 18th-century jurist William Blackstone put it, “that “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.) But there’s a catch – a very important catch. To paraphrase Margaret Mead:

Rights are a social fiction; responsibilities are a social fact.

More to the point, it’s probable that responsibilities are the ’social fact’ – that the structure of a society is actually an emergent property that arises from the intermeshing of mutual responsibilities. A society – and hence that society’s economics – arise from those mutual responsibilities. A society’s economics represent its recognised means and controls via which its available resources are shared, exchanged and used – and those ‘means and controls’ are, in effect, defined and circumscribed by mutual responsibilities.

You might ask “So where do rights come into this?” But that’s the whole point: they don’t. Rights don’t even exist in any real sense: they’re just a convenient social fiction, useful for some circumstances – as we’ll see in a moment – but dangerously misleading in others. And economics and purported ‘rights of possession’ are a good example of where the rights-discourse is indeed dangerously misleading – as all of us are discovering right now…

Read more…

Self-doubt.

It can be a real killer – in many different senses. A killer of ideas. Of motivation. Of hope, or joy. In extreme cases, even of people themselves.

For once, I’m very glad to say, it’s not me that’s in the throes of self-doubt here. But I’ve been watching several other colleagues go through it this week, in several different domains: narrative-enquiry, archaeology and enterprise-architecture, to name just a few of their respective work-contexts.

Not fun at all, for any of them. Not easy to help them, either: almost by definition, self-doubt is a very personal struggle…

Yet in some ways it seems an oddly necessary stage in the development of new ideas, or whatever: in the labyrinth, it’s the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ (also known as the ‘”Oh, sod it…” point’ ), where we either have to face the darkness or throw away everything that we’ve gained.

It’s called the ‘dark night’ for a very good reason, because it can be real dark in there, real lonely… Oftentimes in ideas-development we’re assailed by others’ doubts, others’ over-certainties, but here it’s our own doubts that assail us:

• Is this idea any good?
• Will it ever be useful?
• Will it ever make sense to anyone else?
• Will it ever make sense to me?
• Am I just wasting everyone’s time with this?
• Am I just wasting my time with this?
• Am I just a waste of time?

…at which point it tends to go darker still… Yes, not fun…

What’s interesting here is that those who never have to face this space – or who shy away from it – are unlikely to ever create anything new. The ‘best’ that they can do is prevent others from creating anything, developing anything – a ’skill’ that’s of questionable value in the broader scheme of things, perhaps?

So yes, sure, there are plenty of people who are always certain of themselves (or who are careful, perhaps, never to show their uncertainty in public…). Yet in many ways that certainty can perhaps be best understood as a peculiar kind of cowardice, because it takes real courage to face the unknown; it takes real courage to face the dark pain of self-doubt, and keep going through to the other side.

One way to deal with those doubts is to note that often it’s not about us at all: it’s about the idea that we’re working on, trying to find some means to express that idea in a meaningful way. What the labyrinth-model tells us is that that ‘dark night’ is a normal part of the process – an unavoidable stage that we must pass through in order to bring that idea to fruition. The way to break out of the ‘dark night’ is to care for the idea for its own sake – not for what it might bring us. The more we focus on ourselves in the ‘dark night’, the longer we’ll be stuck there.

Self-doubt is an occupational hazard for anyone creating anything new, whether for ourselves alone – such as in development of new understanding, or a new skill – or to be shared with others – such as a new product or process. For those of us whose work revolves around innovation, chronic self-doubt is often our common condition. It’s often made worse by a concomitant feeling that we’re ‘the Outsider’ – yet that ‘Outsider’ is exactly what we are whenever we’re developing something new. But that’s the nature of the work: painful as it is, there’s nothing wrong with self-doubt – in fact if we don’t experience self-doubt in this kind of work, that’s when the alarm-bells should sound.

What helps most, perhaps, is knowing that everyone who creates anything will suffer the same pangs, the same pain, the same inner struggles against a seemingly all-pervasive inner panic. That’s why and where a supportive peer-group will help so much: not just with whom to explore and test ideas, but to remind us that we’re not alone in this.

Self-doubt is hard; yet self-doubt is also good. We need self-doubt in order to create well. When the doubt hits hard again – as it always does, from time to time – it can help a lot to remember this!

[Update: a friend reminded me about Derek Sivers' great TED video, Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy, which seems particularly pertinent here. (The full transcript is on that link, too: well worth reading.) The 'lone nut' who started dancing on the hill-slope probably suffered a few pangs of self-doubt (if perhaps masked for a while by a sufficient overload of alcohol? ) - but kept on dancing anyway, for the joy of the dance itself. Sometimes - as in this example - we gain a 'first follower' who helps us past the self-doubt, sometimes even moving on, as here, to a landslide of response; but sometimes it doesn't - sometimes (often?) there's no response at all. Either way is fine, in the larger scheme of  things: after all, once the dance ends, we're right back where we started (though perhaps a little happier, we'd hope? ). And since either way is fine, self-doubt is fine too - it's a necessary part of doing anything in depth, doing anything worthwhile. Rather than trying to fight against self-doubt, learning to work with it will certainly prove more useful - and probably less painful, too. Enjoy the dance! ]

This one’s about uniqueness and serendipity and ‘chaos’, and I’d better say straight away that it’s a lot more tentative and exploratory than many of my posts of late.

I’m seeing a theme in enterprise-architecture and the like that’s always been there in the background, but seems to have recently started to become a lot more visible to a lot more people. It’s difficult to pin it down precisely, but it can be seen sort-of sideways-on in many other themes:

• design-thinking and the like, now even embedded in the new US Army field-doctrine
• references to the difficulties of designing for uniqueness or ‘being prepared for surprise‘
• a lot of posts on applications of improvisation-training in business, not just for sales-folks but for business-execs as well
• more references to futures (futures-plural, that is, rather than the singular ‘predicting the future’)
• more interest in ideas about personal-level strategies and tactics for innovation, such as those from one of my favourite books, Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation
• a sense that the pace of change in business is heading towards real-time, and often is already at real-time
• a surprising number of references to serendipity in business, often linked to innovation in various forms
• a renewed focus on disaster-recovery, business-continuity and the impact of ‘long-tail’ kurtosis-risk and ‘black swan‘ events
• the recognition that every sales-event is actually a unique ‘market-of-one’, in which the choices at the moment of choice are not predictable or ‘rational’ at all
• the role of visioning and the like within enterprise-architectures, business-architectures, quality-systems and so on

Or, to illustrate, a couple of items from today’s Twitterstream:

• CreatvEmergence: Improvise to Innovate – http://bit.ly/apch2U
• oscarberg: RT@esauve: “The Social Web is moving toward a future where serendipity replaces search” http://wp.me/p4P8c-zug from @gigaom

This isn’t about emergence, or the ways in which unique or ‘chaotic’ events can be used to guide sensemaking and pattern-identification in complexity: others are better-qualified to explore that domain than I am. Instead, what I’m seeing here is almost the inverse of emergence: rather than deriving a pattern within complex events, we choose and use a pattern to guide our choices in inherently-unique events. Not just serendipity, but serendipity by choice – an architecture for uniqueness.

One item that comes to mind here is Gooch’s Paradox, identified by the psychologist Stan Gooch: “things have not only to be seen to be believed, but often also have to be believed to be seen”. To enable serendipity to occur, we first have to be a mental space that allows it at all. In that sense, beliefs themselves become tools.

Another is a quote from The Art of Scientific Investigation:

The truth of the matter lies in Pasteur’s famous saying : “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” It is the interpretation of the chance observation which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

In a truly unique context – and it seems to me that every real-world context must always be in some part unique – there is only chance: there is no actual connection between anything and anything-else, other than that which we give it. Everything is coincidence, in an exactly literal sense of ‘co-incide-ence’: any meaning that we may ascribe (or not ascribe) to such coincidences is our choice.

Yet from Gooch’s Paradox, this also seems to be able to run backwards: we have the meaning first – predetermined beliefs from our culture or ’scientific law’ or the like – and then find coincidences to match. The belief determines what we see – which can lock us out of an ability to see anything else.

So in a business-context, for example, the beliefs that we use to filter what we see need to be tight enough to allow us to make useful sense of what’s happening around us, but also loose enough to allow true serendipity to happen – where the context itself seems to be giving us what we need. Hence Pasteur’s “chance favours only the prepared mind”: a preparation that has the right balance between precision and openness.

Which leads us to the idea of an architecture of uniqueness, an architecture designed to enable and enhance opportunities for serendipity.

Improvisation is one obvious component of such an architecture: a deliberate practice in working with uncertainty, in real-time.

Another component might be some variant of meditation, where continual, consistent repetition of the same actions or conceptual behaviours provides a stable ground within which useful ideas and events can coalesce. (This is the exact inverse of Einstein’s famous remark that “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”. That dictum is true enough in a predictable world; but in an inherently unpredictable world – any context which is truly unique – anything we do will always lead to different results, hence repeating the same action over and over may be the only thing that will keep us sane! )

Sometimes we also need to deliberately ‘trick’ people into a state where serendipitous events can occur. For science-fiction buffs, this is very well described in Noise Level‘, a classic 1952 short-story by Raymond F. Jones: a group of scientists and engineers are asked to ‘reconstruct’ a supposed anti-gravity device, and actually manage to do so – only to be told at the end that the whole thing had been a kind of hoax, to show them how to open their minds to new possibilities that their conceptual filters would otherwise prevent them from being able to see. The method was a deliberate trick, but the end-results were no trick at all: nicely recursive, in that a very practical real-world technique is embedded in a fictional story about a fictional story.

There’s also the key role of visioning – a real enterprise-vision, that is, not the usual useless marketing-puff ‘vision’ – as a principle-based anchor for real-time decision-making amidst inherent uncertainty: the role in the military of ‘Commander’s Intent‘, for example, or John Boyd’s OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) cycle.

And there’s much more, such as the distinctions between analysis and emergence – which only ‘make sense’ outside of real-time – contrasted to the real-time spectrum between the simple and the chaotic; or the need for some kind of boundaries between the ’special world’ or chaos – where anything is possible but can send us into panic the moment we go off-balance – compared to the ‘ordinary world’ of rules, regulations and supposed certainty.

So what’s your opinion on this? What can we do to make this work? What strategies, tactics, models, methods would we need for this ‘architecture of uniqueness’, and architecture to support serendipity? And how would we apply this in enterprise-architectures and elsewhere?

Over to you, if you would?

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.)

Read more…

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.

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!

Apologies: this is going to be another long one, and probably more technical than most people want to see (especially at Christmas? ). But I do promise that it’ll be useful to you if you’re interested in methodology of any kind; and I also promise that despite the problems that arose from the last couple of posts here, it won’t be an angry rant.

The point I’m trying to address here is this: what methodologies do we need to use to assess the validity of methodologies? As with the previous posts, this is still very much a work-in-progress: there’ll necessarily be a certain amount of ‘feeling my way’, and almost certainly a few mis-steps along the way. So please do allow me some room and leeway as you read this; and also, to get the best out of this for yourself and your own work-context, please do expect to have to do some in-depth thinking and cross-correlation of your own.

What I’m trying to tackle here are some of the most complex and paradoxical problems in the methodology of methodology itself: none of this is ‘kiddies’-level’ stuff, and you’ll need a solid background in theory and practice of methodology before you can make much sense of it. So please don’t assume automatically that I’m ‘wrong’, or that I’m some kind of religious nut, because you’ll miss the whole point of this if you do. This does also need to be a collective development, so as before, constructive comments and criticism would be most welcome!

Read on, anyway.

Read more…

(Following up on the furore from my previous post – somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of course, but with a serious point.)

After Dave Snowden started accusing everyone – especially me – of ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘psychobabble’ – I began to worry. What if he’s right? What if everything I do is just pseudoscience, caught up in a cult?

(Oops – another long one: better split it here with a ‘Read more…’ link)

Read more…

Been some time here since I mentioned my other more business-oriented weblog, SideWise.biz. I’ve added a fair few items over the past few months:

• The market as economy: how ‘the market’ consists of much more than just transactions, and how three distinct forms of ‘the economy’ intersect in one place
• Power, responsibility and bullying in the workplace: “When power in the workplace transmutes into bullying, we have a problem. A big problem.”
• Surviving the skills-learning labyrinth: “How do you and your staff learn new skills? And what can be done to make it quicker and easier to learn those needed skills? One answer is to explore the patterns in the skills-learning process.”
• Making continuous-improvement visible: If continuous-improvement consists of many small, almost-imperceptible changes, how do we make overall improvement visible? This article explores how.
• Money is the root of all… wasted time?: The usual claim is that ‘money makes the world go round’; but if so, why is it that the world seems to come to a halt each money has to change hands? This article explores the importance of a whole-of-system view of economics.
• The rise of the business-anarchist: To get the best from a stable system, you need business-analysts; but when the world is changing around you, you need the help of your business-anarchists! This article explains who they are, what they do, how they help to manage change, and how to find them within your own organisation.
• Ten ways to fail – and how to avoid them: “Success often arises just from avoiding failure.” This article explores ten key causes of failure, and what to do to avoid them.
• Where have all the good skills gone?: This article explore a rarely-acknowledged cause of the current ’skills-shortage’: an incomplete understanding of the limits of automation.
• The relationship is the asset: “‘Our people are our greatest asset!’ How often have you stopped to think about what that phrase means – and what it implies in real business practice?”

More to follow over the next few weeks, of course. Share and Enjoy, perhaps?

Found this Volkswagen initiative via Swedish social-media expert Oscar Berg:

Notice the success-metrics: two-thirds more people used the stairs rather than the escalator.

Now: how do we apply those same principles to organisational design and enterprise-architectures?