Tom Graves / Tetradian

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.

Better write something here, if only to counter the mood of the previous post.

That ‘downer’ was real, and still is, to some extent. A few friends and colleagues expressed concern; some were kind enough to offer advice (for which many thanks); yet for me this is my normal way of life, and hence my responsibility to deal with its consequences. My apologies if that post worried anyone: that was not its intent. It’s just that with no other outlet available, just about the only way of coping with the stress is to be open and honest about, and not pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Few people who live conventionally-’normal’ lives as employees and family-folks and the like will have much experience or, often, much understanding, of what life is like out on here the ‘bleeding edge’. ‘Normal’ lives are stressful enough, I know; and the lives for those guys out on the streets selling ‘Big Issue’ and the like is stressful in the extreme. So I’m well aware I’m luckier than most, in that although by choice I have no home of my own at present, I do have somewhere to live, and enough savings to live off for a while longer, even though they’re dwindling fast. I have no explicit commitments, no mortgage, no family, no ties, nothing. In effect, I have a kind of freedom of manoeuvre that many others might envy. But with that freedom comes responsibility, to create in other ways for the society in which we live: and in my case that seems to come out in the form of deep-exploration.

“Some sow, some reap”, it says in the Bible somewhere. Yet before anyone can sow, someone has to clear the ground for that sowing to take place; and before that, someone has to explore the landscape, to find places where sowing could be viable. And that’s what I do: explore the metaphoric landscape. It’s the only true work I know: oh, I can do other work, of course, and do it well – my standard fallback of information-architecture, for example – but it isn’t my vocation, my ‘real work’, and that conventional work isn’t where this scrambled society gains the most value from my existence. I explore ideas, and the practical implications of those ideas, on a very large scale: that’s what I do best.

But there’s a catch. Just like a physical explorer, much of this work is hard, and literally painful: carving a path through uncharted metaphoric territory also brings with it no small amount of metaphoric thorns and brambles and gorse, falls and failures, dead-ends and seeming defeat, in the short-term at least. Sometimes, just as with physical exploration, it’s hard to keep going: in fact often the only way to keep going is the certain knowledge that there’s no way back.

And whilst the wilderness of the wide-open spaces is exhilarating, that too takes its toll, in the form of an often crushing sense of aloneness and isolation: not only that there’s no-one else there to share it with, but the bleak fact that few will understand it when we finally make it back ‘home’. Just as with the physical explorers of old – and of the present day, for that matter – this strange process of exploration does have value: but that value may not make sense to others for years, decades, perhaps even whole lifetimes. That’s a long time to know that few others will understand or value what we do: hence a sense of isolation back ‘home’ in the ‘normal’ world that’s even more intense than the isolation ‘out there’, driving us back into the wild again as the only place where we seem to ‘fit’. Wild ideas of other worlds, even in a metaphoric sense, make little sense in the comfortably delusory ’safety’ of suburbia. Hence explorer as natural anarchist: the task itself leads to an imposed alienation – literally, ‘making Other’ – leading to self-alienation as a way of life.

And yes, there’s another catch. Some explore, some clear the ground, some sow, some reap: but it’s only at the point of harvest that all of that work ‘pays off’. Hence, in our self-centred culture, so focussed on the ‘now’, there’s an inevitable obsession with harvest, harvest, harvest, with little awareness of what has to happen before the harvest can exist. Just as of old, there needs to be foresight enough to see the whole of the pattern; and just as of old, in our absurd possession-based ‘economy’, an explorer needs a patron with foresight enough to fund that exploration. Yet right now, such foresight is hard to find – especially with the current panic about a ‘credit crunch’, and even more especially in the US, where financial law all but enforces short-termism to prop up the personal profit of stockholder ‘owners’. Hence right now it’s hard to survive as an explorer of ideas – even though it’s all too plain to see that such ideas are urgently needed. Which is a problem – both for me in person, of course, but much more for the wider society.

Again like explorers of old, I provide reports of my explorations: hence the books that have been my main visible work for the past year or so. Most of those, such as the Enterprise Architecture series, aim to provide information that’s immediately useful in day-to-day practice – metaphorically, closer to clearing the ground after exploration, rather than the exploration itself. But I haven’t yet published – dared to publish? – much as yet on the real deep-explorations, not least because much of it is downright scary in everyday terms. Some examples of the metaphoric landscapes that I’ve seen in my travels:

• There are no rights – only responsibilities. Rights are a delusion, and often a dangerous delusion at that; in a social context, only responsibilities are real, whilst purported ‘rights’ are often (mostly?) used as a means to avoid those responsibilities, or to foist them on to someone else either in the present or elsewhen. A Bill of Rights sounds like a great idea, but the self-centredness that arises from it will destroy any society that uses ‘rights’ rather than responsibilities as its core foundation-stone. The evidence for this fact is clear everywhere, but is not likely to be popular anywhere – especially in the US.
• There is a great deal of truth in the old anarchist slogan “all property is theft”, because our society’s core model of property is based on ‘right’ of exclusion. Private possession of property, we are told, is an inalienable right. Yet responsibilities are real, ‘rights’ are not; a responsibility-based model of property – characteristic of most ‘traditional’ societies – is viable, whereas a ‘rights’-based (possession-based) model is not. Once again, the evidence for this fact is clear everywhere, but there’s a sizeable amount of effort being put into ignoring it.
• In the long term, a possession-based economy is not and cannot be sustainable. The only way a possession-based economy can be made to appear to work is to run it as a pyramid-game – hence our culture’s obsession with supposedly-infinite ‘growth’, and hence also bizarre distortions such as the notion that an ‘economy’ depends on people indulging in uneconomic behaviour. Hence sustainability will not be possible without changing the entire economic model on which the dominant culture has operated for the past five thousand years or so. Once again, the evidence for this fact all too obvious, yet this also is not likely to be a popular idea – especially in present-day business, which for the most part believes that it depends on propping up the delusion that the current ‘economy’ actually works.
• Another, perhaps even less palatable fact: women are violent – just like men. To be more precise, the blunt fact is that not only are women violent, but the scale and severity of their violence matches or even exceeds the violence of men. (And yes, I do include the evils of war and the like in that statement.) It is easy to pretend that women are not violent – and indeed, vast swathes of law, and the entire ‘women’s rights’ industry, are founded on the arbitrary and ultimately indefensible assertion that every flaw in the world is the exclusive fault of men. But the moment we understand what violence actually is, in (dys-)functional terms, and look at the issues systemically, rather than through ‘convenient’ blame-based selective snapshots whose primary purpose is the evasion of women’s personal responsibilities for their own actions and behaviours, the evidence for that fact is all too clear: as a society, we do a great deal of work to reduce (and punish) men’s violence, yet instead to exacerbate (and condone) women’s violence, requiring men alone to sort out the resultant mess. It will not be possible to resolve key societal problems such as domestic violence until we face up to the fact and the sheer scale of women’s violence, reject the wildly-unequal so-called ‘equal’ ‘rights’ for women embedded in so much current law and custom, and instead require equal responsibilities from women as much as from men. And yep, I’m well aware just how unpopular that fact will be, too: but it is fact, and the longer we evade that fact, the more long-term harm will be done to our society.

Plenty more home-truths where those came from, but I’ll be unpopular enough as it is just from those few points above… <wrygrin> Hence, yes, not surprising that I don’t get much support for what I do. <alsowrygrin> And hence, yes, no real surprise at the isolation.

My apologies if any of the above upsets you: but that’s who I am; that’s what I do; that’s my work, my life, and I don’t have much choice about that. I don’t have any choice about what I see, what I feel, though I do have choice and responsibilities in what I do with what I see and feel. Simplest to be open and honest about it: if others don’t like it, well, I just have to live with that fact too. And complain about it from time to time – not that it makes any difference!

Oh well.

Still recovering from the TOGAF conference – about which I need to do a blog-report later, ‘cos some major shifts there – and still ridiculously tired from the way-too-early-start, way-too-late-finish days of the conference itself.

But a key point came up yesterday in a conversation with Erik Proper that was nominally about the enterprise architecture notation language ArchiMate. We started by talking about various themes in his ‘meta-blog‘ – “a blog about things I want to blog about” – and the conversation wandered onto Cynefin, which he hadn’t seen before. I described each of the Cynefin domains, at the end of which Erik commented that if the real world is naturally chaotic – naturally anarchic, in the science/physics sense of ‘without rules’ – then all the other modes are ways to guide our understanding of that chaos. The ‘unorder’ segment is where we start the assessment, perhaps, but in practice – at the point of contact with the real world – the ‘chaotic’ domain is where we must always end up, because everything else is just an abstraction for the purpose of ‘making sense’ of what’s going on.

If that’s so, we might note that the analytic segment of Cynefin – the ‘knowable’, complicated domain up in the top right of the frame – is in diametric opposition to the real world. It assumes that there are ‘knowable’ rules – which the real world says there aren’t – and it takes time to do its analysis – a luxury that we don’t have in the real-time interactions of the real world.

So in an enterprise-architecture that would work in the real world, would we need an anarchist counterpart to every analyst? Not just business anarchist, but functional anarchist, process anarchist, security anarchist, data anarchist, storage anarchist? And if so, what would be their work and their role within the enterprise? – keeping things real within that realm, perhaps?

Seems a useful idea to explore, anyway.

For a while now I’ve been describing myself as a ‘business anarchist‘, in part because a sizeable aspect of my work is ‘creative destruction’ of business assumptions and the like, for the purpose of clarifying the direction in which the business really wants to go. But what is an anarchist, anyway?

The literal translation is ‘one who accepts no ruler’, but it’s not quite as simple as that. There are two radically different forms, at opposite ends of a spectrum: one insists on ‘rights’ without responsibilities – what I call ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ – the other on responsibilities alone (because there are no ‘rights’ – in essence, so-called ‘rights’ are a self-centred delusion), as typified by principle-based anarchist groupings such as the Quakers.

I suppose what makes me a natural anarchist – preferably of the latter kind – is that I don’t belong. I’ve never been able to ‘belong’ to anything: a perpetual Outsider. Which, to say the least, is not a comfortable place to be, but it seems to be who I am. Oh well.

I don’t belong to any company: I’ve never been an employee, I’ve only ever been a contractor, a consultant, or an independent business ‘owner’. I don’t belong to any specific discipline, either: I’ve not so much had a career as careered. Which means that I’m good at linking across businesses and domains and skillsets – the quintessential generalist – but it again means that I never settle anywhere.

I don’t really ‘belong’ to any place, any country. I have dual citizenship, for a start (British and Australian); I’ve now lived (vaguely inhabited?) on three separate continents; and (despite that Australian anthem “I still call Australia home” etc), I’ve never felt anywhere to be ‘home’, the place where I belong.

Same with ideas and theories. I would agree strongly with Paul Feyerabend’s dictum that in science “the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is ‘anything goes’”. Like Isaac Newton (though I hope without quite his level of vituperative irascibility!) I’ve probably written and published more on ‘alternative realities‘ than I have on anything else: as a author and theorist, I’m almost certainly better known as a writer on dowsing and related subjects than I am on my current main field of the architecture of the whole enterprise. Busy adapting some of that material right now for mainstream archaeology: as with the idea of ‘Slow Science’ (and yes, I need to find out more about that), it seems they’re at last starting to grasp the importance of balancing the objective analysis with the subjective ‘experiencing’ – I have a joint paper on that coming up in the next issue of the archaeology journal Time & Mind, for example.

And same is true at a social level:I don’t belong to any defined group. I’ve been an occasional member of some society, or a cluster of people playing folk-music, perhaps, but that’s about it. After a fairly short time the internal politics and the narrow focus begin to pall: it’s time to move on. Again. Always moving on. (Might explain why I’m endlessly moving-on on mywould-be holidays, I guess: can’t seem to settle anywhere. Oh well.)

And it’s also true at a personal level. It’s a painful fact that I share almost nothing with my parental family other than accident of birth: again, I don’t feel I belong, and never have – I’ve wanted to, for as long as I can remember, but that feeling was never there. Not excluded, as such; just no way for the ‘in‘ of ‘included’. A quiet absence of connection, rather than its active rejection, I guess: a nothingness. Same also applies to the direct personal side: I have no family of my own, and despite variously-unsuccessful attempts over the decades, I’ve now lived alone for almost three-quarters of my adult life – and as I approach my sixties, I see less and less chance or, now, even hope, that that would change. In an all too literal sense, out of touch with the rest of the human race. Again, it’s not an active absence, an active rejection, as I know it is for some others: it’s more like a subtly-closed door, a fog which prevents any way through, leaving me always as the Outsider, watching from beyond. That so-accurate Welsh term hiraedd describes it so well – “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. The loneliness – an all too literal ‘aloneness’ – never really stops hurting: it does fade into the background most of the time, fortunately, but it never actually ceases to make its presence felt. Gives me a better overview than most people have, I suppose – but that’s about the only ‘advantage’ that can be said for it. Hey ho.

Anarchist by nature. It’s who I am, I guess. My apologies to all, then, for being who I am.

More ramblings on the ‘business anarchist’ theme.

The conventional ’scientific’ assumptions about business reality – as in Taylor’s classic ‘Scientific Management‘ – assume that everything is based on predictable Newtonian-style rules and laws. It’s sort-of true, up to a point, but in practice it only works in the mid-range: many of those supposed ‘absolute rules’ cease to make sense at the scale of the very small (e.g. quantum uncertainty) and the very large (e.g. emergent systems, ecosystems and ‘chaos’-mathematics). And some of the supposed ‘rules’ are just plain daft, such as the ‘rational actor’ assumption in economics (aptly nicknamed ‘the dismal science’ because so much of it is dismal as science) – by contrast, most marketing assumes a non-rational actor, which is a great deal more realistic!

One of the core tenets that we need in a functional business – and elsewhere, for that matter – is perhaps best expressed by the character Odo in Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Day Before the Revolution, with her definition of an anarchist:

“One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice”

This leads us to the key themes of what might be a business-anarchist manifesto:

• There are no rules – only values, and the principles and guidelines that devolve from them
• There are no rights – only responsibilities, including the responsibility for self, and the responsibility for mutual aid

The latter provides an interesting cross-link to the current hype about Charles Darwin and his ‘dangerous idea’ of evolution. (The real ‘dangerous idea’ was not Darwin’s notion of evolution, but the wilful misuse of those ideas by others such as Huxley and Dawkins to justify their own inanities and insanities. I sometimes wonder whether, like the apocryphal tale about Marx, Darwin might at some point have said “Personally, I’m not a Darwinist”… ). Huxley and his successors have endlessly pushed the notion that nature is necessarily and solely “red in tooth and claw”, that “survival of the fittest” means that the only natural prerogative is the “selfish gene”. The reality, as Peter Kropotkin demonstrated in his analysis of animal survival in the extreme conditions of the Siberian tundra, is that the essential driver in nature is not self-centrredness, but is actually one of mutual aid. Kropotkin is often described as one of the fathers of modern anarchist theory: but in fact, like Darwin, he was first and foremost a naturalist.

In any emergent business context, the existing rules have fallen apart; in that sense, there are no rules. What will guide us through an emergent context is a recognition that there are no rights, no ‘entitlements’; all that is real is responsibilities – the ability to choose appropriate responses. That’s what power really is: not ‘rights’, but responsibilities. “One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice – and the consequences of choice.

In response to the current chaotic collapse of so-called ‘capitalism’, we see plenty of finger-pointing, plenty of blame: yet blame is actually the least-useful response to a crisis. To quote Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, “no fight, no blame”; yet the inverse is equally true, “no blame, no fight”. We don’t have the energy or the resources now to waste on fighting: what we need is mutual awareness, mutual aid.

Right now the business world appears to collapsing into anarchy. But I’d suggest that’s not a bad outcome: anarchy is what we need right now. But we also need to be clear about what kind of anarchy is needed: not the kiddies’ self-centred ‘me-first’ pseudo-anarchy that’s got us into this mess in the first place, but the real anarchy of self-responsibility, mutual-responsibility, mutual aid.

Something to think about, anyway.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about the ‘business anarchist‘ idea, following a couple of great conversations yesterday with Bas van Gils in the Netherlands and Stuart Curley in London. Hence a few more notes:

• Every business-consultant is, in effect, a business anarchist: the whole point of their role is to break the existing rules and create something new.
• The same applies to business strategy (unless the strategy is ‘business as usual’ – though that isn’t a viable strategy anyway when “the times they are are a-changin’” ).
• Anarchy is the appropriate response in a chaotic context, but the key concern is what guides the anarchy:
  • self-centric (i.e.”the kiddies’ anarchy”) leads to dysfunctional anarchy and fragmentation
  • principle-based (i.e. anarchy in the true Quaker-style sense) leads to functional anarchy and integration
• At the exact point of action and decision, the business-context is always inherently chaotic, requiring personal responsibility in the moment – hence some level of anarchy is always impled
• In the SEMPER diagnostic, level 1 (actively dysfunctional) and level 5 (wholeness-responsibility) are both examples of anarchy – but the former is self-centric, the latter is principle-based

Definitely seems worth thinking about in more depth. More later on this, anyway.

For some while now I’ve been using the term ‘business anarchist‘ to describe what I do in the business-architecture context – and yes, it is a sort-of joke, of course, but there’s also something very real behind it.

Real anarchy isn’t the kiddies’ concept of “all property must be liberated – but don’t you dare touch my stuff!” that I used to see so often amongst self-style ‘anarchists’ in my student days, rather too many decades ago. Functional anarchy isn’t easy at all – in fact it’s actually the most difficult of all political forms, because to make it work, it requires a relentless discipline of responsibility and self-responsibility. No rules: just a ceaseless demand to be aware of what’s happening, of the needs and constraints, in this moment, in the far past, in the far future, all of the times colliding together, and to respond accordingly. Hence, yes, definitely of interest in a business context, because that kind of proactive awareness is what we need most for an agile, responsive enterprise.

A few businesses have gone partway down this path already: see, for example, the post “The Business Anarchist Is The New Entrepreneur”, on the Bloginization weblog, which references two well-known food-retail chains on the US, John Mackey’s Whole Foods and Tod Murphy’s Farmer’s Diner:

…both share one thing in common as managers: they have disregarded and rejected the norms surrounding their respective industries and have forged new paths to reshape the food industry, arguably much like an anarchist does with a governing system.

But perhaps a better example of such an organisation is one that, technically at least, has been run on strict anarchist lines for almost four centuries: the Quakers (or, to give them their proper title, the Religious Society of Friends). There are clear, explicit guidelines, but no actual rules; clear principles for leadership, yet no formal leaders; no vote, and no majority rule – in fact the exact opposite, the dissenting voice has a near-priority in any debate. And probably the guiding principle is that of personal responsibility – which is perhaps why they’ve long had an influence in social issues and social reform far beyond their mere numerical strength. (And not without risk, either: the question asked each year at the worldwide Annual Meeting, “How many Friends have died in prison this year for their faith?” has never yet had the answer “None”…)

The business impact and importance of responsibility and self-responsibility is something I’ve already explored in some of my enterprise-architecture books, such as Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems and SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness. But it might well be worth linking it more strongly to anarchist concepts, whether formal or not-so-formal (such as one of my favourite science-fiction novels, Ursula le Guin’s masterful The Dispossessed), and then bridging back to the business context.

So yes, it does seem that the idea of ‘the business anarchist’ could have some real value. I’m in the middle of working on yet another enterprise architecture book right now – provisional title Doing Enterprise Architecture: process and practice in the real enterprise, about which more shortly in another post – so I don’t have time right now to play with that idea in more detail: but feels like it’s something that would indeed make yet another book (yep, another one… ), and perhaps quite an important one, too. Watch This Space in the coming months, perhaps?

Another trail following up on Dave Snowden’s comment to my previous Cynefin post, and specifically to this one assertion of Dave’s:

Order exists in the real world.

Sounds obvious: but does it? Does ‘order’ really exist? Or do we simply hope it does?

I know, I know – this’ll sound at first like one of Tom’s dreaded semantic quibbles. But in fact it has huge ramifications, both theoretical and practical, for Cynefin and for how we tackle complexity in business and elsewhere. What it comes down to is this:

• if order is real in the physical sense – a physical fact – then ultimately everything is reduceable to the Cynefin ‘known’ domain
• if order is not a physical fact – is in any way an abstraction from physical fact – then ultimately the only thing that is ‘real’ is the Cynefin central ‘unknown’ domain; any ’sense-making’ – interpretation of ‘order’ – would be an arbitrarily-selected filter on that reality, with all the conceptual, operational and other dangers that that would imply

The classic Taylorist machine-metaphor for business assumes that order is real – in effect, that the ‘known’ is the only Cynefin domain that is real, and that all the others are simply mistakes for which others should be punished. Yet that in turn is derived from arrogant Victorian assumptions about social hierarchy as ‘the natural social order’, and the circular-reasoning of Huxleyan/Darwinian notions of ’survival of the fittest’, underpinned by a seriously-mangled misunderstanding of the limits of Newtonian science. As Cynefin shows us so well, it doesn’t work: it’s only an abstraction, not ‘reality’ itself – and punishing people for failing to conform to our assumptions is neither realistic nor effective…

By current standards, the Newtonian ‘known’ is also very poor science: the cutting edge of current science is closer to the Cynefin ‘complex’ domain, with a few hints towards the ‘chaotic’ domain. A present-day equivalent of Taylorism’s claims to ’scientific management’ would be based much more on complexity and systems-theory, for example.

But it’s questionable that there could ever be such a thing as ’scientific management’, because as Paul Feyerabend argued in Against Method, the only valid principle in science is “anything goes” – order is not ‘real’, it’s only an abstraction. Each of the Cynefin domains is a description of a different type of order – but each is still an abstraction. The only part of Cynefin that is ‘real’ is ‘the unknown’. And the further away from the ‘known’ domain we get, the closer we get towards what is real.

So Dave’s move from the ‘unordered’ domains – more accurately, the not-linear-cause-and-effect domains – to the ‘ordered’ domains (in other words from ‘chaotic’ and ‘complex’ to ‘knowable’ and ‘known’) is just a means to simplify sense-making, and to generalise principles that can perhaps be useful in working with the real world. But doing so increases the abstraction – it moves further away from reality. And the danger is that the ‘known’ domain creates a delusion of control – comfortable for many, of course, but often lethal, especially in contexts such as social work where people are forced to adapt to the system, which is then supposedly ‘true’ because people have adapted themselves to the system… To apply Cynefin in practice, we must move back again in the opposite direction, from the ‘ordered’ domains back to social complexity, then to the chaotic-domain ‘market-of-one’; and then ultimately accept the humility that all we can do is do what we can in the inherent unknowability of here, now, in this place, this context.

The crucial concern here about order comes down to two views:

• order is real, therefore it is true, therefore the world must adapt itself to fit that order – or that the world is at fault if it does not match that order
• order is an abstraction, therefore the concern is about whether that abstraction is useful in guiding adaptation of our responses to the natural ‘un-order’ of the world – that we need to adapt to the world, not the world to our ‘order’

These are, in essence, philosophical positions: archist versus anarchist. And whilst I’ve no doubt many people would prefer the former, I’d place myself firmly in the latter category: I’d describe myself as a ‘business anarchist’, because that’s what works in the real world of business-activities. In my experience, my understanding as a business consultant, the moment we say that “order exists in the real world”, we automatically set ourselves up for failure, because every assumption about order will eventually lead us dangerously astray. Order is an abstraction: it is merely useful, not ‘true’. Hence in business as much as in science, the only valid principle that does not impede progress is “anything goes”. And the limits on that ‘anything goes’ are not some external notion of ‘truth’, but vision and values – honesty, integrity, social responsibility and much else besides.

Cynefin provides us with a useful framework, indicating the appropriate ways to respond in terms of different types of ‘order’. But whatever type of ‘order’ we work with in Cynefin – known, knowable, complex, chaotic – it’s still only ‘order’. It’s still only an abstraction: it isn’t ‘real’ as such. We forget that fact at our peril.