Tom Graves

Another week, another month, and it’s back to the usual collection of Tweets and links. Usual layout, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link.

Read more…

(This series of posts explores a concept of ‘context-space’ which in part draws on a categorisation immortalised in a certain well-known diagram. It must be emphasised that this is not about ’That Welsh Framework‘ (aka twf) which that diagram illustrates: for details on twf, please contact this company. I apologise for these absurd aliases, but regrettably their necessity has been forced upon us by others.)

We seem to be iterating steadily towards a full description of what I’ve termed context-space mapping (as a more permanent name than the temporary label ‘tinc‘). For example, there’s been some very useful discussion on the previous post, especially by enterprise-architects Paul Jansen and Sally Bean. Paul Jansen followed this up with another Tweet:

@tetradian May the ‘chaotic approach’ be the key to #tinc? http://bit.ly/amJa1o

In fact this leads to what is probably the fundamental difference between twf and context-space mapping (aka tinc): the role of the Chaotic domain. This particularly applies in terms of the respective views of repeatability within the context.

In the hope of preventing yet more repercussions, I won’t say anything about twf’s approach at this point, other than to express my opinion that, in the terms of context-space mapping, its focus is primarily on the Complex domain, which in turn leads to an emphasis on contexts that are ‘partly-repeatable’ in highly complex ‘unordered’ ways.

Context-space mapping, however, needs to cover all repeatability-types. As twf’s proponent indicates, the Simple domain of presumed-repeatability is covered by Taylorism et al.; the Complicated domain of analysed-repeatability by hard-Systems Thinking and the like; and the Complex by twf and so on. But there’s so far been little or nothing to cover the Chaotic domain of ‘barely-repeatable’ events and processes. So in practice it’s likely that that’s where whole-of-scope techniques such as context-space mapping will have the most impact.

The central theme in the Chaotic domain of practice is low- to zero-repeatability: some part(s) of the practice cannot be repeated, either because the conditions have changed – including the awareness and experience of the person doing the work. Conventional ’scientific-analysis’ approaches (Complicated-domain) rely on repeatability, so they’re actually not all that much use in the Chaotic components of any real-world task – in fact will often be misleading because they provide an illusion of predictability. In a way, the same is true of many Complex-domain techniques: they give us a much more reliable picture of an overall uncertain context, but we can’t reliably apply that in reverse to tell us what to do for a specific ‘market-of-one’, such as a specific medical diagnosis.

Ability to engage appropriately in the Chaotic-domain in this sense is almost a definition of skill. It’s also a key component of almost all knowledge-work – which is why this concern is coming much more to the fore, as knowledge-work becomes an increasingly important part of the overall economy.

At the business-process level, one of the key figures is Sigurd Rinde, whose concept of ‘barely-repeatable processes’ is the focus for his Thingamy business-process-execution software. The whole point of Thingamy is that the processes themselves are made up as they go along, by the people doing the work, expressing and applying their expertise. Underneath this, however, is a consistent Simple structure that records every decision, every artefact, every transfer of responsibility – which makes it possible to create any required reports from the process, including conventional statistical analysis. The result is nicely summarised on Sig’s other website, 30megs.com – so-called from his tag-line “Here’s 30 Megs. Now go run Germany”, which in principle is entirely feasible with this kind of decision-support/decision-tracking software. Sig is not alone in this, of course – for example, Stafford Beer developed something similar that in effect ran the entire economy of Chile for a while, way back in the early 1970s – but Thingamy is probably the best example of a software package available today that is designed for true Chaotic-domain processes.

Context-space mapping is part of what needs to happen before we settle on any technique or tool such as Thingamy. It’s about mapping the options available to us, and the decisions that we make within ’solution-space’, as part of an overall process of sensemaking in order to arrive at appropriate actions for the context. One of the key points in this is an awareness that we are part of the context, part of the ’solution’: in the classic Chaotic-domain sense, there is a boundary, and there is no boundary, always in the same moment.

We always start from ‘reality’ – that which in twf is termed the ‘disorder’ domain. (Everything does in fact take place within that domain: any purported subdivisions – such as Simple, Chaotic and suchlike – are sensemaking-abstractions that we place onto that domain, but are not actually ‘real’ as such.) From there, we would move into some kind of recursive OODA loop (Observe/Orient/Decide/Act), where sensemaking itself forms one or more of the earliest iterations. In those terms, context-space mapping would typically proceed as follows:

• Observe: What is ‘the context’ here?
• Orient: How do I make sense of what I’m seeing?
  1. What parts of the context appear to be unique (Chaotic), unordered or ‘wicked-problem’ (Complex), complicated but repeatable (Complicated) or universal (Simple)? Using that categorisation, map out the ‘problem-space’.
  2. Given that categorisation, what cross-maps would be useful for sensemaking?
     Note: There are an infinite number of cross-maps that could be used: some examples shown in this series include:
     • here: repeatability and action-tactics; domains and tetradian asset-dimensions; time versus focus; Jungian domains
     • here: twf tactics and types of practice; timescale versus ‘bindedness’; development of embodied ‘best-practice’
     • here: repeatability and ‘truth’; marketing versus sales; the ‘plan / do / check / act’ cycle
     • here: ISO-9000 quality-model; skill-levels; automated versus manual processes; asset-types; data, information, knowledge, wisdom
     • here: cause/effect relationships; decision-mode, timescale and level of abstraction
     • here: nature of boundaries between domains
     • here: phases of matter
  3. Using the categorisations from the cross-maps, what available tools and techniques are ’situated’ in what regions of the maps’ ’solution-space’? What can we learn from this?
• Decide: Given what I have learned from sensemaking, what should be my ‘action-plan’?
  1. Select from the available tools/techniques.
  2. Decide on a plan as to how, why, when, where, by whom, with what, and in what order each of the selected tools or techniques should be used.
• Act:  What am I doing as I am doing, and what do I see as I am doing?
  1. Enact the desired action.
  2. Apply the same overall OODA-loop to the action taken – recursively, where appropriate – for review, further sensemaking, decision and action.
• Repeat as appropriate.

(Some people might suggest that this kind of OODA-loop fits more within a twf-style Complex-domain mode than Chaotic-domain. True, there are important similarities, such as the shared focus on ‘unorder’ versus the Complicated/Simple notion of ‘order’. But the key distinction is that this acts on a single, individual, specific context rather than a Complex-domain collective – and is often also much closer to real-time than most Complex-domain decision-making.)

The above is a start towards how we would use context-space mapping, anyway. I’ll leave it there for now: any constructive comments, ideas and suggestions would be most welcome, as usual – over to you?

Previous posts in this series:

• Complexity, chaos and enterprise-architecture
• More on chaos and Cynefin
• Alternatives to the ‘Cynefin’ term, please?
• Solution-space: beyond Cynefin?
• On meta-methodology
• Using ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps
• More ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps
• And more ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps
• More on meta-methodology
• ‘tinc’ – a Temporary Inconvenience
• Context-space mapping and enterprise-architecture

Related:

• ‘Two Cryptic conversations‘

This one starts with a note from Belgian enterprise-architect Kris Meukens:

I couldn’t agree more with your post last month on “Architecture is non-functional“, and appreciated it very much.

However, the case is most often made for “system” architecture. With the right arguments – as also my experience has proven – that case can be made convincing to business people. But as soon as one tries to translate the same case to the less tangible “enterprise” architecture, I have been experiencing a lot more difficulty, although I am convinced it translates well.

I was wondering if you have any thoughts on this and/or you could help me on this one, which I consider pretty fundamental to enterprise architecture.

There are at least two different ways you could use to tackle this, depending on the context and who you’re talking with.

One is to take the same approach as Richard Veryard describes in his blog-post on ‘So-Called Non-Functional Requirements‘. In IT architecture, the functions are often relatively straightforward, and wouldn’t change all that much between different implementations. But some of the ‘non-functional’ requirements can demand huge differences in system-design, and will themselves demand different supporting-functionality: consider a system for a low-security context (store-directory for a shopping-mall) compared to a high-security-context (funds-transfer in ATM in a shopping-mall), or a low-bandwidth informational system versus high-bandwidth transactional system versus medical-imaging system for use in remote conditions with unreliable power-supplies. As Richard says:

The architect needs to worry about those ['non-functional'] requirements that have major structural implications, and can mostly leave the functional requirements to the business analysts and developers.

So the same applies to an organisation: it’s relatively easy to plug in new functionality or features into organisation-level systems (which is why projects so often suffer from ’scope-creep’ or even rampant ‘feature-itis’), but changes to ‘non-functional’ themes such as safety, quality, environmental management and interpersonal communication may well demand a fundamental re-think right the way through the entire organisation. In effect, the ‘non-functional’ determines much if not most of the ‘functional’ – especially when we take it right up to the whole-of-enterprise level and view the overall vision and values of the extended-enterprise as the foundational ‘non-functional requirements’ for the business as a whole.

Hence the second approach to this, which is to draw a distinction between organisation and enterprise.

The crucial distinction is that an organisation is bounded by rules and responsibilities, whereas an enterprise is bounded by shared commitment – in effect, by principles and values.

Each organisation exists within the scope of a broader ‘extended-enterprise’: its suppliers, partners, customers, prospects, overall environment and so on. (For more on that, see ‘What is an enterprise?‘) Without that relationship between organisation and enterprise, the organisation literally has no purpose: or, to put it the other way round, the enterprise is the organisation’s purpose. Which, in terms of what we’re discussing here, means that the foundational ‘non-functional requirements’ for an organisation are defined by its enclosing enterprise.

We then link that back to Richard Veryard’s point, that the ‘non-functional’ requirements create more fundamental demands than the ‘functional’ ones.

To do this, we first need to note that organisations form natural hierarchies, and likewise enterprises also form their own natural hierarchies. (Enterprises actually form intersecting ‘communities of interest’, or ‘communities of commitment’, and occasionally organisations do so too; but for these purposes it’s easier to think of them as simple nested hierarchies.) For example, ‘the business’ is often viewed as a single ‘the organisation’, encompassing a structure of business-units consisting of departments made up of sub-departments which consist of work-teams and so on, each with their own explicit rules and responsibilities. And sometimes the boundaries of an enterprise will coincide with an organisation-boundary: for example, each of those ’sub-organisations’ is also an enterprise in its own right – a ‘community of commitment’.

Hence the somewhat misleading notion that ‘the organisation’ is also ‘the enterprise’. It’s misleading because of that point above: the foundational requirements for an organisation (whole-organisation, business-unit, department, work-team etc – whatever its level in the business-hierarchy) are defined by the enclosing enterprise for the respective organisation – not by the organisation itself. If ‘the enterprise’ has the same boundaries as ‘the organisation’, the foundational requirements in effect become self-referential – literally detached from the outside world. Which is not a good idea…

[Update: the term 'Step' below may be misleading, especially for some non-native English speakers - my apologies. Here it's not a step within a process, for example, but means a pace or step outward from the boundary of the organisation. If in doubt, use 'Layer' as an alternative to 'Step'.]

In practice the foundational requirements need to be drawn from an enterprise at least three steps larger than the organisation in scope:

• Step 1: partners and suppliers, including outsource and contract relationships
• Step 2: clients and prospects, including ex-clients and anti-clients
• Step 3: non-clients and community, including government and broader environment

Again, these are nested – so for an IT department, for example, Step 1 might include HR, equipment providers and outsourced help-desk, Step 2 would be the business-contacts, project-managers and general users of the department’s services, and Step 3 would include overall business policy and governance. In a production environment, Step 1 is the incoming side of the immediate supply-chain, Step 2 is the outgoing side and the schedulers, and Step 3 is production policy. At the whole-organisation level, the steps are as described above: partners and suppliers, clients and prospects, and non-clients and community.

Step 1 largely defines your costs; Step 2 largely defines your income. The relationships between them are relatively simple to model – such as with the Business Model Canvas. Hence many business-planners stop there, because those transactions do make straightforward business sense: but that’s a dangerous mistake, because as you’ll see from each of the examples above, governing policy is primarily derived from the commitments and values of Step 3 – not Steps 1 or 2.

In ISO-9000 terms, policy is derived from ‘vision’ – the guiding commitments, principles and values of the enclosing enterprise. In effect, policy is ‘non-functional requirements’ that determine response to change. And as ISO-9000 explains, it is indeed possible to run an organisation for a while without high-level guiding policy: but as soon as there’s any significant change, you’ll run that organisation straight into the ground – which, again, is not a good idea. So as enterprise architects, we need to understand and model all the way out to Step 3, in order to identify the overall requirements for the ’system’ of any type of ‘organisation’ at any level within the organisational hierarchy.

To summarise in perhaps over-simplified form:

• Step 0 (’the organisation’) is the boundary of the ’system’ in scope
• Step 1 (’partners and suppliers’) describes functional requirements for input-side for that system
• Step 2 (’clients and prospects’) describes functional requirements for output-side for that system
• Step 3 (’non-clients and community’) describes non-functional requirements for overall governance for that system

To paraphrase Richard Veryard again, we can mostly leave the functional requirements in Step 1 and Step 2 to the business analysts and developers; the architect needs to worry most about “those ['non-functional'] requirements that have major structural implications” that arise from Step 3.

So perhaps use this as a way to explain to others the criticality of ‘non-functional’ requirements at “the less tangible ‘enterprise’ level” – in other words, how far out we need to model ‘enterprise’ in order to identify the real requirements for ‘the enterprise’ that is the organisation as a whole.

Hope this is useful, anyway – and as usual, constructive comments / suggestions etc would be gratefully received!

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.

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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!

(This series of posts explores a concept of ‘problem-space’ versus ’solution-space’ which in part demonstrates alternative uses and interpretations of the Simple / Complicated / Complex / Chaotic categorisation originally described in the Cynefin diagram. It must be emphasised that this is not about the Cynefin Framework; for details on Cynefin, please contact Cognitive Edge.)

This post represents yet another attempt to describe certain fundamental differences in approach from twf (aka ‘That Welsh Framework‘ – so-called because we’re no longer allowed to use its official name at all) and to find an alternative term that might reduce the ongoing friction in that quarter.

To do this, we need to go right back to first-principles: the core concept of context-space, which eventually leads us to context-space mapping.

(Another long-ish post: more after the ‘Read more…’ link.)

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Not actually ‘cryptic’ in the usual sense – just that the cafe in the Crypt below the church-cum-concert-hall of St Martins-in-the-Fields is a useful and pleasant place for meetings in the middle of London. (It’s just off Trafalgar Square, and a very long time since it was literally “in the fields”, next to the garden of the convent that is now known as Covent Garden.)

Anyway, two great conversations yesterday with Chris Potts and Sally Bean on enterprise-architecture and an assortment of other related topics. More details after the ‘Read more…’ link.

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(This series of posts explores alternate uses of the Simple/ Complicated / Complex / Chaotic categorisation originally described in the Cynefin diagram. This discussion is not about the formal Cynefin Framework; for details on the Cynefin framework proper, please contact Cognitive Edge. The term ‘beyond-Cynefin’ is solely a placeholder to indicate this separation of concerns.)

Back to theory again – apologies… – following on from comments on the previous posts, especially ‘On meta-methodology‘.

The aim of this post is to try to create a bit more clarity around the notion of ‘problem-space’ versus ’solution-space’. To do this, I’ll draw on a variety of sources, ranging from dowsing to enterprise-architecture, Sigurd Rinde’s work on ‘barely-repeatable processes’, activity/response-models such as OODA and PDCA, and much more besides.

Will again be long, hence more after the ‘Read more…’ link.

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It’s another week. Which means another exciting (or somesuch) collection of Tweets and links. Which – yes, as you’d no doubt expect – means the usual categories preceded by the usual ‘Read more…’ link.

Over to you if you’re interested, anyway.

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(This is part of an ongoing series that explores alternate uses of a generic conceptual categorisation originally described in the well-known Cynefin diagram. This discussion is not about the formal Cynefin Framework; for details on the definition and use of the Cynefin framework proper, please contact Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge. The term ‘beyond-Cynefin’ is here used solely as a placeholder to indicate this separation of interests.)

Here’s another collection of ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps that I’ve found useful for sensemaking in enterprise-architecture and related work:

• ISO-9000 quality-model
• Skill-levels
• Automated versus manual processes
• Asset-types
• Data, information, knowledge, wisdom

More details after the ‘Read more…’ link.

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It’s another week of Tweets and links – somewhat late due to overload elsewhere. Usual categories, usual ‘Read more…’ link.

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