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…

Several people asked me to cross-post to other ‘economics’ sites the previous post on ‘Whuffie’ and currencies‘. I wasn’t comfortable doing so without editing-out the comments about the ‘Ready? Fire! Aim…’ syndrome, which were specific to the conversations to which that post referred: hence the re-work in this post here. I’ve also taken the opportunity to extend some parts, to link it more strongly to my ‘day-job’ of enterprise-architecture.

So: what can we learn if we tackle economics as enterprise-architecture? In other words, as if it was just another exercise in whole-of-enterprise architecture, the same as we would do for any large organisation (such as described in my book ‘Doing Enterprise-Architecture‘)? After all, ‘the economy’ is just another enterprise – it happens to be at a very large scale, but the exact same principles should apply.

(This’ll be another long one, hence I’ll place a ‘Read more…’ link here.)

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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!

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

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

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

Read on, anyway.

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A couple of quick follow-ups on my recent post on the Spiral Dynamics cultural-assessment framework, which I use in some aspects of my work on business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

First, as per his comment on that post, Kent Bye has assembled on Flickr an excellent collection of more than 90 descriptive graphics about Spiral: see http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbye/sets/72157622255211051/ . A valuable resource for anyone interested in Spiral: strongly recommended.

Second, I probably need to emphasise a bit more a perhaps subtle distinction between awareness of the Other – as represented by Spiral layers as ‘distance from Self’ – versus responsibility toward the Other. If we’re not aware of the Other, we necessarily have limited ‘response-ability’ toward that Other because we’re not aware of it. Likewise there’s a crucial distinction between unawareness and deliberate indifference – simple ignorance versus a literal ‘ignore-ance’ of the Other and its needs – because in the first case there is no ‘response-ability’, whereas in the second there’s a deliberate refusal to enact ones known mutual responsibilities with the Other (passive dysfunctionality in relationship, otherwise known as ‘abuse’).

To give a direct business example, consider the mutual responsibilities implied in ‘corporate social responsibility’. In classic Friedman terms – “the business of business is business” – a corporation is an ‘artificial person’ and therefore has no responsibilities outside of profit-making: the consequences of such profit-making are, to use Douglas Adams’ phrase, made invisible by assigning them as ‘Somebody’s Else’s Problem’. In this view, there is no ‘Other’ beyond the corporation and its owners: the corporation is the enterprise, the enterprise is the corporation. Yet in order for the profit to be created, there need to be transactions, and a market in which those transactions occur: here, by definition, the enterprise must extend beyond the corporation, hence the Other must exist, and be acknowledged to exist, otherwise the corporation could only make its purported profit by cannibalizing on itself (not that that’s an unusual circumstance in business, of course…). So the Friedman model implies a classic game of ‘have your cake and eat it’: the corporation acts as if there are responsibilities to itself from the Other, but none of itself to the Other.

The relation itself can be highly asymmetric in responsibilities – as it is in functional variants of Spiral ‘Red’, for example, such as the trusted team-leader or platoon-leader – but as long as the responsibilities are mutual and do balance overall, the system will still work. (Spiral ‘Purple’ tribal, ‘Red’ great-leader or ‘Blue’ priest-led models are often essential where there’s a natural asymmetry of decision-making capabilities – hence ‘response-abilities’ – between the leader(s) and the bulk of the group.) But trust will fade and fail when that mutuality of responsibilities is not respected, in either or both directions. There’s usually more tolerance when the failure of responsibility arises from a true lack of awareness; but when the lack of awareness is feigned, or the mutuality deliberately ignored, expect there to be trouble, followed by rapid loss of trust. And from a business perspective, if trust fails, the transactions will also falter and fail – and likewise the profits. Hence one quick way to understand the current ‘Global Financial Crisis’ is that its root-cause has been a betrayal of trust on a massive scale. Another topic for another time, I suspect, but in the meantime, using Spiral as a means for architects to model value-sets, ‘distance from Self’ and mutuality of responsibilities seems like a useful way to go.

This one’s fairly long – quite a bit longer even than my usual over-long posts… Theme here is a framework called Spiral Dynamics (see a previous post on this), which is used to identify value-systems in individuals, groups and organisations. Base-idea is that Spiral’s layered stack of value-systems – all too easily misused as a linear sequence of cultural development – is better understood as a ‘culture-space’ bounded by key dimensions such as distance-from-self, perceived relatedness, and responsibility.

Probably not relevant to IT-architecture, but likely to be of interest to business-architects and others. Click on the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway.

Read more…

Realised that the free-download reference-sheets from the Tetradian Enterprise Architecture books would be useful to have up on Slideshare as well, so have uploaded them there for more general accessibility than solely from the Tetradian Books website.

• “A framework for whole-of-enterprise architecture” – the amended-Zachman reference-sheet from Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects
  
• “A revised TOGAF ADM for whole-of-enterprise architecture development” – the amended-ADM reference-sheet from Bridging the Silos: enterprise architecture for IT-architects
• “Power and Response-ability – a workplace ‘Manifesto’” – the PDF version of the ‘manifesto’ from the Introduction to Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems
  • (note: a Powerpoint version of the ‘manifesto’ is also available on Slideshare)

A minor glitch in that they ended up as ‘Presentations’ rather than ‘Documents’: anyone know how to fix this? There doesn’t seem to be anything about it in the rather limited online help on Slideshare itself: odd…

Hope it helps, anyways.

One more from the archives – or rather, a rework into another format of the ‘manifesto’ from the intro to my book Power and response-ability: the human side of systems. The basic version is part of the book, and also available as a standalone reference-sheet, but I thought some people might prefer it in PowerPoint form, with one concept per page. Note, though, that it’s quite a bit over a hundred slides – 95 ‘theses’ plus the section headings – so it does take a while to skim through.

Another slide-deck from a fair while back (2001, in this case), but still seems relevant today. Many of its quotes reference a section in The Economist edited by Peter Drucker, about ‘the business of the future’.

[It's in PDF format, as the 'Notes View' of the PowerPoint, soslides and script together.]

As part of the setup for getting the ‘What is power, anyway?‘ slide-pack online at Slideshare, I’ve finally gotten round to doing something I should have done a year ago: a three-page reference-sheet version of the ‘Manifesto‘ on power in the workplace, that forms the intro and summary for my book Power and response-ability: the human side of systems.

I did the original version of this way back in 2001, but it’s still just as relevant today. Inspired in part by the structure and content of the Cluetrain Manifesto, it summarises the nature of power in the workplace, with a set of 95 statements under the following section-headings:

• Systems
• Economy and the ‘bottom line’
• Stakeholders and corporate culture
• Purpose and quality
• Knowledge
• Work-relationships
• Power and response-ability
• Human forms of power
• Power in the work-environment
• Sources of power
• Mistakes about power
• Power-addiction, winners and losers
• Scope of power-issues
• Conclusions and actions

As with all the reference-sheets, it’s a free download, of course. Hope you find it useful, anyway.