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?

History seems to be all in vogue in Cynefin circles at present. On one side, for example, there’s Cynthia Kurtz – the too-often-unacknowledged co-creator of Cynefin, and originator of some of its key concepts such as the crucial distinctions between ‘order’ and ‘unorder’ – who’s recently written some truly excellent posts on her past involvement with Cynefin and her subsequent development of those ideas into her current Confluence model. Very strongly recommended.

On another side, Dave Snowden has been busily documenting his own ‘history of Cynefin’, in a series of blog-posts with that title. In Part 4, for example, I’m very glad to see that he does indeed describe Cynthia’s crucial role in the development of Cynefin. And in Part 5, bizarrely, he uses my own work on context-space mapping – uncredited, unacknowledged, and, of course, completely out of context – as his sole example of an ‘illegitimate approach’ to usage of Cynefin concepts. I suppose I ought to be flattered at this singular censure, though to use Dave’s own words, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” at this, because all it really demonstrates is his continuing inability to get the point. Oh well…

(Unlike Dave, I’ve never laid claim to the mantle of ’scientist’. I’m a toolmaker, a creator of conceptual tools: my real field is metamethodology, the methodologies for creating methodologies to create context-specific methods like those in Cynefin – and although there’s always a large theoretical component to that work, the core focus is always on practice, not theory. In a classic Two Cultures sense, might the real problem here be that we’re operating in different metaphoric ‘worlds’? No matter: it is what it is (or isn’t), and that’s that.)

The point that Dave seems to be missing is that he’s still using entirely the wrong criteria to assess what context-space mapping is all about. None of it is about ‘truth’ in the formal scientific sense: it’s much more about ‘mashups’, about the quest for something useful, that has value in a given context – which is a fundamentally different concern. To use one example he so pointedly dismisses in his ‘History’, if we were to merge the Cynefin categorisation with the classic ‘data, information, knowledge, wisdom’ stack, and claim that it was somehow ‘true’, that would make indeed no sense at all: if I’d actually done that, Dave’s critique about ‘illegitimacy’ would indeed be valid. But the whole point here is that in context-space mapping and many other related techniques – such as the venerable SWOT – we intentionally create crossmaps with  nominal-’mismatches’ of that type, and use the resultant cognitive-dissonance to trigger new ways of looking at a context. Mistaken notions of ‘truth’ or ‘legitimacy’ simply get in the way of this process: the legitimacy is determined from the discipline and precision of process, not from an ultimately-arbitrary ’scientific lineage’.

It’s possible to argue that I continued to associate what’s now context-space mapping with Cynefin for a little while too long – a month or two, perhaps – beyond the point where it had become probable that their paths had diverged too much to make sense. It’s a common enough mistake, though, and perhaps a less reprehensible one than simply renaming someone else’s work as one’s own, without any actual difference in model. (Is acknowledging influence a greater ’scientific crime’ than denying it? – I honestly don’t know.)

There’s also the blunt reality that every ‘new’ model is sort-of ‘illegitimate’ – Cynefin included, as Dave makes clear in his history – in the sense that it’s a kind of ‘bastard child’ of many different ideas coming together in unexpected ways. For context-space mapping, I’ll freely admit that the overall method and model each have many different ‘parents’, some of which I’ve long since forgotten and some I may never even have known. Yet that’s true for the work of most of us, I’m sure.

So in the current spirit of exploring the history of our respective models, I’ll point to a key influence behind context-space mapping, which came up in several different forms, most of them predating my involvement in Cynefin by several decades.

Read more…

Urgently need to do a catch-up on the ‘week in tweets’ series: I’m running almost four weeks behind, which is not good – many apologies.

Usual categories and a couple of extra items, anyway, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link:

Read more…

Reading James Taylor’s recent piece “Business rules are king“, pretty much every one of my enterprise-architecture alarm-bells went off.

Yes, it’s a good article – recommended reading. And I would strongly agree with its implication that there’s a real and urgent need for discipline around business-rules. But the reason for the alarm-bells is that it’s promoting business-rules as ‘the answer’ – and for the most part IT-based ‘business-rules engines’ at that.

Which us places straight back in Taylorist territory, along with all those other classic IT-driven business failures such business-process re-engineering. Not a good idea…

The reasons why it’s not a good idea are three-fold:

• placing all the business-rules into an automated system will lead to a ‘fit and forget’ attitude unless there is a very strong emphasis on rule-maintenance – one of many ‘human factors’ that were forgotten about in BPR’s rush to ‘IT-ise’ all business processes
• identification and codification of business-rules assumes that the rules that can be derived from the people who run the existing processes are sufficient, invariant, accurate and complete – which, as early-generation knowledge-management also discovered, they rarely are…
• the viability of using automation for decision-making is dependent on the context – a fact of which frighteningly few IT-system designers seem to be aware

There seems to be a view that everything can and must be reduced to simple rules, following a cart-before-horse thinking that everything should be done by IT, and simple rules are what IT handles best. In other words, dangerously back-to-front. It’s bad enough trying to get anything useful out of IT for decision-support; but using IT for all decision-making – which is the ‘nirvana’ that the article would evidently prefer – is likely to be lethal. And I don’t quite know what we as enterprise-architects can do to prevent this headlong rush into repeating the exact same mistakes as in BPR and the rest – all that’s different this time is that it’s more explicitly coming from the ‘rules’ part of the process, rather than process-implementation overall.

This is clear if we look at it from the perspective of context-space mapping:

The point is that there’s a spectrum of abstraction of rules: principles sit at the low-abstraction end of this spectrum, rules sit at the high-abstraction end – in fact a conventional ‘rule’ is actually an extreme abstraction of a principle that applies to a specific context. If we try to use the wrong level of abstraction, especially in the wrong context or wrong type of context, we are all but guaranteed to hit serious trouble. And I see little to no awareness of that fact in most of the current literature on business-rules: instead, there seems to be an assumption that just about everything can be reduced to simple binary rules that can be implemented by simple IT, because that’s what we want to happen. In other words, the entire approach seems driven by little more than wishful thinking – which again is not a good idea…

IT-systems and simple business-rules work well together: both operate on a binary true/false logic, and both will enable high-speed binary-logic decision-trees – in other words, over on the lower right-hand side of the usual Cynefin-derived context-space base-map.

Most IT-based analytics – over on the upper-right of the base-map – work on the same binary logic as the simple systems, but introduce the ability to handle more and more layers of complication. The catch is that each layer of analysis takes a finite amount of time – which takes it further away from the ‘Now!‘ demanded by real-time decision-making. And the only real result of increased computing-power has been to increase the levels of complication in the analytics, sometimes beyond anyone’s ability to understand it – as was the case with the software systems used in many of the risk-calculation models that drove the current financial crash.

IT-systems are still not good at handling non-binary modal-logics – “the logic of probability, possibility and necessity”, such as expressed in the MoSCoW set of requirements-priorities of must, should, could and can wait. Humans are very good at modal-logic; IT isn’t. James Taylor’s article refers to pattern-based decision-making, which places it somewhat on the upper left of the base-map – but note again that each pattern-match must always take a finite amount of time, and it does not fit well with the underlying binary-logic of current IT-systems. Using IT as decision-support for human decision-making is generally okay, but the more that IT is involved, the higher the risk of what Dave Snowden describes as ‘pattern-entrainment’ – in other words, premature selection of a pattern, trying to force-fit a pattern to the context rather than ‘listening’ to the context itself. Current IT is getting much better at near-real-time pattern-matching, such as face-recognition or smile-recognition on most present-day digital cameras. Yet as anyone who’s used such systems would know, they’re nowhere near accurate enough to decide when a picture is actually any good – and sometimes we don’t want a smile in the picture. Much the same applies in business: using automated pattern-matching is great for decision-support, but extremely dangerous for decision-making.

And no IT-system is likely to be much good at dealing with real-time chaos, ‘the new’, where no possible pattern exists because it is new – but again, real people can handle decision-making in such contexts via skills and principles. In those contexts, there are no rules – and yet business-rule proponents seem to promote the delusion that their ‘business-rule engines’ can handle everything.

So I’m wary: very wary. Before letting any of such systems loose on any real-world context, I would want to make very sure that they’ve done the appropriate context-space mapping, and matched the decision-making methods to the respective contexts. But I don’t see much evidence of that: what I see instead is way too much wishful-thinking, and an almost desperate desire on both the business-side and the IT-side to try to force the world to fit their respective delusory dreams of ‘order’ and ‘control’. Oh well… Guess we have to wait and let them fail yet again, even more expensively, and then set out to tidy up the mess? – though I do worry that we’re getting close to the point where we’re no longer able to afford such expensive mistakes, in any sense of the word…

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.)

Read more…

As can be seen from the comments to the previous post, the demands that we find another name for this framework-that-has-no-name have become increasingly strident.

Various urgent online and in-person conversations have ensued. The only directly-meaningful name we came up with was ‘solution-space mapping‘, but several people have disagreed with that, and in any case there is already a well-established usage of the acronym ‘SSM’ in this context, namely Checkland et al’s Soft Systems Methodology.

There’s a long-standing software tradition of assigning arbitrary names as working-titles for projects. Someone suggested ‘Eric’, which was a name they’d used when developing an IT system for an airline, and which reminded me of a nonsense-phrase I’ve often used, that “anything unknown is called Fred”.

But even an arbitrary proper-name seems too concrete for something that is necessarily abstract and, as a name, necessarily temporary. We couldn’t think of any meaningful acronym, so we played with sounds for a while, until someone came up with this:

tinc

It’s the sound of the penny dropping, as someone ‘gets it’; the small bright sound that the imaginary light-bulb makes at the ‘Aha!’ moment in solution-space. A quick, recursive echo of a sound. And it’s also a contraction of what this name really is: a temporary inconvenience.

Since it’s clear we’re not even allowed to use the name of the framework that this isn’t in order to describe what it isn’t, we would have to apply the same process to give us a temporary name for that. So we might note that in Welsh the plosive sound ‘toof!’ would be spelt as twf, which should give us a relatively-safe acronym for That Welsh Framework. (‘Twf‘ is also the name of the Welsh Language Board website, by the way – “Cymraeg o’r Crud, Two Languages from Day One”.)

So there we have it: tinc, for the framework, and twf, for the-framework-that-it-isn’t. A temporary inconvenience, but it’ll have to do for now.

(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.

Read more…