Tom Graves / Tetradian

So far in this series we’ve explored the key concept of the extended-enterprise, used that to summarise the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, and started to model the organisation’s value-proposition and business-relationships.

Up until this point we’ve been working top-down, starting from the most abstract layer, the ‘extended-enterprise’. But we do need to to remember that there’s no reason why we have to work only in this direction, and often many reasons why we should make use of the more freeform approach that context-space mapping will allow. And in the usual serendipitous way – via an article in IndustryWeek, ‘Assessing Product Innovation Assets: What’s in your attic?‘ – we now have a useful reminder that the vision and strategy for an organisation may also be reconstructed bottom-up.

Low-cost innovation doesn’t have to be boring or incremental. Sometimes true innovation is as easy (and inexpensive) as evaluating the technologies and capabilities you currently have and expanding them to a new industry or customer base. It is a particularly powerful product innovation strategy during an economic downturn, yet too few companies today are taking advantage of it.

[An] important message for business leaders: “Use something you already own to generate income in a whole new way.” Truly innovative and resourceful manufacturers can embrace this message by reevaluating their existing assets, intellectual property, and product lines to develop completely new streams of revenue with little investment. The assets are already in their “corporate attics.” All a company has to do is unlock the revenue-generating power of those assets.

So let’s use the examples from that article – and a couple of others – to see how this works, in terms of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas.

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So far in this series we’ve explored enterprise-vision (Enterprise Canvas row-0) and high-level business-context (row-1) in a fairly straightforward way. It’s been much the same as any other conventional ‘top-down’ strategy-development, except that we haven’t really mentioned our own organisation at all as yet. (That’s coming shortly. )

A few important points have come up in the comments to those two articles, though, which are worth reiterating here before we move on.

One is to remember why we’re doing all of this. It’s not about abstract ‘blue-sky’ thinking: it’s about building a stable platform for organisational change. In enterprise-architecture, this needs to be a platform in which all of the other architectures – business-architecture, process-architecture, skills-architecture, values-architecture, security-architecture and, oh yes, all the IT-architectures too – can all interweave and interlink and intermesh into a single unified, dynamic whole. But although we talk a lot about the extended-enterprise here – especially in these ‘higher’ layers – this isn’t actually for anyone else at all: unless someone seriously-senior decides otherwise, all of this is solely for our own organisation (or client, if we’re doing this work as external-consultants). Working this way, whatever we develop is always in the context of this broader extended-enterprise: but our own organisation (or client) becomes more and more the centre of our attention as we move down the layers. That transition of emphasis starts to happen here. In short:

In enterprise-architecture, we create an architecture about an enterprise, but for an organisation.

It’s really important to remember that point – not least because it’s the organisation, not the extended-enterprise, that’s paying our bills!

Another point that came up in the comments is that the usual nine-cell structure of the Enterprise Canvas can be a bit misleading in these upper levels. The nine-cell structure is really a kind of functional-decomposition – who’s handling what interfaces, and why. But functional-decomposition assumes or describes specific interfaces and relationships – and we haven’t even got that far yet. In row-0 and row-1 we only deal with each entity as a whole, without any internal subdivision into cells. It’s only here, in row-2, that we start to introduce the idea of relationships and roles between entities, which eventually leads us to relationships and roles within entities, which leads us in turn to that nine-cell structure. If you try to use the nine-cell structure in rows 0 or 1, or in most of the work in row-2, you may have missed the point somewhere: at those levels, it’s only about each entity as a whole.

And finally, I would hope that by now you’ll have realised that this can be a lot harder to do than it might seem at first glance. It’s so easy to fall back to organisation-centric habits, where the organisation is placed as the sole centre of everything. The blunt fact is that it isn’t that ’sole centre’ at all: in fact, the organisation only has a reason to exist if it’s placed within the context of its extended-enterprise. If we don’t understand that broader context, we would have nothing to guide us when that context changes – which, these days, can happen on a literally moment-by-moment basis. One of the keys here is that the description of that enterprise is literally emotive – it drives change. So although a lot of thinking and analysis will be needed here, ultimately it’s not a rational matter – it’s about what feels ‘right’, about identifying what is valued. This is especially true of the vision-descriptor: we need to keep exploring that context-space until we hit upon a phrase that can engender emotions and commitment that are literally strong enough to get people out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, time to move on: time to start looking at the business of the enterprise, and of the organisation itself. To summarise where we’ve gotten to so far with this example, we’d established a row-0 ‘Enterprise’:

We then started a Zachman-style row-1 ‘Context’ with a conventional market-based view of our enterprise, with our own organisation as its centre:

Which didn’t show us many options. But as we started to explore what that enterprise-vision meant in practice, and what kinds of stakeholders would be engaged in that vision, we realised that the actual enterprise was much broader than our current market:

Which should create many more strategic opportunities than we were able to see before. To make this work, though, we first need look more closely at the meaning of a common business-term: value-proposition.

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In the previous post in this series we did a quick review of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas, and set out this into practice with a real-world example that, for me, is very close to home: rethinking my own enterprise-architecture consultancy business.

We started at the top layer, aiming to identify the core ‘enterprise’ within which I work. From exploring my own professional history, it became clear that the main focus of my work is about enterprises themselves, of any size, and always with the aim of enhancing enterprise effectiveness. From that, we ended up with an initial enterprise-descriptor – or ‘vision’ – of “creating more-effective enterprises”.

Notice, though, what’s happened right here, in that paragraph above. In trying to summarise that initial rather clunky vision-statement – ‘creating more-effective enterprises’ – we’ve accidentally hit upon a better one: ‘enhancing enterprise effectiveness’. It reads better, has a smoother flow to it, a poetry almost. It does describe what I’m passionate about – and finding that passion is central to the success of an enterprise. And ‘enhancing’ is actually a much more accurate term for what I do: I don’t often create enterprises in the sense that, say, an entrepreneur would do, but I do work to enhance their effectiveness. So note that this process is typical of what happens in context-space mapping: for example, we arrive at a ’solution’ – in this case, the initial ‘vision’-descriptor – which itself quietly dropped us back into the ’sensemaking’ space. So the trick here is to notice what’s happening, notice these little serendipitous events – and learning how to do that is a real skill in itself. To quote one of my favourite books, William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation:

If these discoveries were made by chance or accident alone, as many discoveries of this type would be made by any inexperienced scientist starting to dabble in research as by Bernard or Pasteur. 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 event which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

Anyway, that’s what we now have as the ‘row-0′ or ‘Enterprise’ layer for the Enterprise Canvas model of my own enterprise:

Now what? Very pretty and all that, but what do we do with this?

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Over on the LinkedIn Business Architecture list, my colleagues Pat Ferdinandi, JD Beckingham and Ron Segal have all helped a lot in challenging me on the Enterprise Canvas concepts. Pat in particular has been has been pushing hard for some more concrete examples of how it all works in practice.

On the other side, I haven’t really posted anything here as yet on the ‘final’ version of the context-space mapping methodology. There are a few scattered posts from a few months back, but the main description is in the chapter ‘Day 8: Putting it into practice’, in my most recent book, Everyday Enterprise-Architecture [at present you can still download the complete PDF e-book via that link].

So it seems worthwhile to develop a worked-example to show how all of these tools and techniques fit together in real-world use.

And for me, right now, the obvious example to choose would be my own work and business. I’m a futurist and maker of conceptual tools, working mainly with the arcane abstractions of enterprise-architectures: none of those attributes and emphases are exactly conducive to fame and fortune… It’s true I do get by well enough at present, yet I would like my work to be better known and more commonly used, and – no surprises here – it’d be good if it could bring in a better income, too. So how can I make that happen? What do I need to do that’s different from what I’m doing now? What do I need to change in the architecture of my own enterprise?

And I’m not alone in this: I know a lot of enterprise-architects and others – especially those of us working in the very new field of whole-of-enterprise architectures – who are in much the same boat at present. In our own quiet ways, all of us are wrestling with much the same questions:

• What business am I in? – really?
• Who else would be interested in what I’m working on? What value do I add right now? – if any?
• Where could I add value? In what contexts?
• With whom would I need to work with in on this? Who would be my prospective partners, clients and other business-relationships?
• For whom could I most add value? Who would pay for it? – and why would they pay for it?
• How can I describe that value? How could I prove that value?
• How would I deliver that value? How would I prove that I’ve delivered it?
• How much could, would or should I charge for this?

And so on: all pretty fundamental questions, really – especially in business. Sounds like a good candidate for some serious exploration – which is where context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas come into the picture.

This’ll probably take several posts, but let’s get started.

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Development of new ideas, processes and practices will always be a social process, and always somewhat messy.

To enable that development to happen, we need social conditions that can support it – and screen out behaviours that prevent it.

Those social conditions can best be described in terms of policy, which from my experience I would summarise as follows:

The debate needs to be respectful of the process – the fact that, by its nature, much of the work must pass through periods of inherent uncertainty. For example, see my Sidewise post ‘On innnovation, foundations, scaffolding and Portakabins‘ for some suggestions on how to handle this.

[Update in response to comment #1 below - many thanks to Paul Jansen for the critique]
The debate needs to be respectful of emotion – the fact that, by its nature, development and debate is inherently challenging, and will hence trigger many different emotions as positions and views are put forth, defended, argued, abandoned and so on. We need to ‘play fair’, ‘be reasonable’, allow ourselves and others to make mistakes, to stumble, to get things ‘wrong’, to feel embarrassed yet still feel safe in being embarrassed, yet also to keep moving towards the desired or emergent aim.
[end of update]

The debate needs to be rational – by which I mean an ability and willingness not only to test the internal logics of the ideas in scope (which in some cases may not follow simple ‘true/false’ binary-logics, by the way), but also to move outside of one’s own assumptions, theories and beliefs.

The debate needs to be honest – by which I mean that each party will need to focus strongly on facing their own personal challenges from the requirements for respect and rationality, both of each other and of respect to the ideas themselves.

The debate needs to exclude all forms of violence and abuse – or at least, given the realities of social interactions in often-challenging circumstances, that all parties in the debate must actively address and minimise these concerns to the maximum extent possible, both within themselves and with and/or from others. (The more positive form of this point is that we should always aim maximise each person’s ‘ability to do work’ in the respective context: see my ‘Manifesto on power and response-ability in the workplace‘.) ‘Violence’ is any attempt, in any form whatsoever, to prop oneself up by putting others down (or the ‘lose-win’ variant, putting self down to prop others up); ‘abuse’ is any attempt, in any form whatsoever, to offload responsibility onto others without their engagement or consent (or the ‘lose-win’ variant, taking responsibility from others without their engagement or consent). This requirement was famously summarised by Bob Sutton in ‘The No-Asshole Rule‘:

Two tests are specified for recognition of the asshole:
1. After encountering the person, do people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves?
2. Does the person target people who are less powerful than themself?

If we wish to be engaged in meaningful debate, it is the responsibility of each of us to uphold that policy to the best of our ability.

In my own case, I challenge myself constantly on that policy. I know that, like everyone else, I will often be ‘wrong’ about some aspect of application of an idea; I know that, like everyone else, I will never have sufficient complete, accurate and final information needed to make concrete, unchallengeable decisions; and I know that none of this process is easy, for anyone.

It is clear, however, that some people, for various reasons such as excessive ego, assumed ‘authority’ or mistaken notions of ‘possession of the truth’, seem to believe themselves to be exempt from such policy, and instead believe that they have the ‘right’ to override others in any way that they wish. The result in each case is failure of the debate, and damage to or destruction of the development in scope – a circumstance from which everyone loses.

It is therefore our unfortunate but necessary responsibility to exclude such people from debate, until such time as they can demonstrate that they are able to hold to that policy.

In some cases we can do so by removing ourselves from the debate: I have had to do so quite often in discussions on LinkedIn, for instance, where there are all too many infamous examples of ‘debate-destroyers’.

Yet in other cases – and a personal weblog is one of them – there is no way to withdraw, and hence the only option is to explicitly exclude the offender.  I’m glad to say that over the past couple of years I have only been forced to do so here on two separate occasions, with two different people: yet it needs to be understood that it unfortunately is necessary in each case, for everyone’s sake. It also needs to be understood that in each case it is solely that that person’s behaviour makes it impossible for the debate to continue: it says nothing about the person as such (a crucial distinction between what they do versus who they are).

Similar policies are in place elsewhere, such as this extract from one of the LinkedIn discussion-groups on enterprise-architecture:

If you are not willing to have a civil discussion, you will not be permitted to play in this educational playground to further the cause of EA. No one that attacks will be permitted to play. This is a healthy environment to exchange ideas … not to better your cause at the expense of others.

I would urge everyone to consider and apply such policy on their own weblogs, on their Twitter-conversations, and everywhere else where difficult discussions need to take place.

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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(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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