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.)

An enterprise-architecture develops in five distinct maturity-levels, which in turn define five distinct groups of work:

1. What business are we in? – core vision, values, resources, decisions etc
2. Clean up the mess – horizontal optimisation of facilities, capabilities and resources
3. What’s our strategy? – top-down definition and implementation
4. Welcome to the real world – bottom-up constraints and localisation
5. Keeping it clean – ’spiral-out’ to tackle ongoing ‘wicked-problems‘

We can do work from any of those maturity-levels at any time, and sometimes relative-priorities will force us to do so. The point is that each layer depends on those that precede it: we can do ‘later’ work, but the results are unlikely to be viable, especially in the longer term. For example, trying to tackle a clean-up before we have any clear idea of where we’re trying to go – which is what most standard IT-centric ‘enterprise-architectures’ try to do – will result at best in a system that’s well-optimised for, uh, something… And although the ‘wicked-problems’ are what the enterprise’s stakeholders will most want us to tackle, we won’t be able to do so successfully without a ‘palette’ of techniques and tactics that will allow us to iterate towards ‘re-solutions’ – and we create that ‘palette’ by working through each step of the maturity-levels in a disciplined way. (By definition, ‘wicked-problems’ are never ’solved’: the best we can do is to create processes by which they are continually ‘re-solved’.)

Any sane observer would recognise that our present economic models not only don’t work well, but at present are still teetering on the edge of catastrophic collapse. Many people’s response has been to rush out and try to create some kind of ‘alternate currency’; but it should be clear from the above that that’s a level-4 or level-5 tactic that’s being applied without any of the ‘upper’ architectural-levels in place – not a good idea, because all it does is further embed the existing ‘wicked-problems’, and often create new ones as well. So let’s turn this round, to do it properly from an architectural perspective:

• Before we can tackle level-5 wicked-problems, we need a solid grasp of what the real-world looks like – in other words, level-4.
• Before we can tackle level-4 real-world problems, we need a framework of law and the like – level-3 – in which those solutions can take root.
• A level-3 framework operates through institutions – so to apply that framework well, we need to do a level-2 clean-up of those institutions to make them more efficient and effective.
• For that level-2 clean-up to work, we need to have a good idea of where we’re going, and, most importantly, why – in other words, level-1.

So to have any chance of success, we need to go right back to the start: in architectural terms, what is ‘the economy’?

If we do it ‘by the book’ (literally – see pp.44-87 in the sample-ebook [PDF] of ‘Doing EA‘), we split that level-1 work into four distinct parts:

• Step 1: Vision, values, principles and purpose
• Step 2: Enterprise context – including assets and resources
• Step 3: Functions and services
• Step 4: Architecture governance

Vision, values, principles and purpose

The word ‘economy’ literally translates as ‘the management of the household’. In the usual sense of ‘the economy’, the ‘household’ in scope is the entire world; ‘economics’ is thus the management of every aspect of that ‘household’.

An enterprise is a ‘community of commitment’: unlike an organisation, it is held together more by internalised shared-beliefs and values than by externalised rules and regulations. The term ‘enterprise’ therefore fits well with the concept of ‘an economy’: in essence, ‘the economy’ is the expression of the internal operations and external interfaces of ‘the enterprise’ that represents the overall ‘community of commitment’ at a global scale.

The vision is a single unifying theme that links all enterprise stakeholders; this includes stakeholders beyond the nominal enterprise itself (see ‘What is an enterprise?‘ on Slideshare), who in this case would include ourselves, other peoples at other places and times than the present here-and-now, the other animals, plants and other ‘actors’ in the broader ecosystem, and the planet itself as a whole. A suggested vision for this context might be appropriate and sustainable utilisation of the available ecosystem resources, functions and capabilities. (In a business enterprise-architecture we would then derive a sequence of ‘Vision, role, mission, goal‘, but I’ll skip over that for here.)

The values are what link the actors to the vision of the broader enterprise. (For this context it’s simplest to focus on the human actors at first, though Deep Ecologists would insist that we should extend that scope indefinitely.) Typical values here would include such notions as fairness, equitability, long-term sustainability, efficiency, reliability, appropriateness and so on.

The principles are practical expressions of the values: values are more about how we feel, principles more guidance for what we do. In effect, principles are the reference-prototypes for all implementation-rules, regulations and the like, and should always be concrete, actionable and verifiable. In this case, that means that we need explicit principles to enact and verify the economy’s alignment with those core values, such as fairness, equitability, sustainability, etcetera. (Again, I’ll skip over the detail there – yes, it needs to be explored in depth, but not in this quick overview.)

Finally, we do a cross-check to compare this nominal-purpose against the ‘effective-purpose‘ of what we currently have, using Stafford Beer’s acronym POSIWID, ”the purpose of the system is [expressed in] what it does”:

“According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances.”

To be blunt, this is where it all gets seriously scary, because a mere few moments’ thought and observation would show that our present money-based ‘possession-economy’ fails virtually every possible test against the necessary values. It is demonstrably unfair; its natural ‘gravitation’ creates and reinforces all manner of inequities; it is clearly not sustainable; it is frighteningly inefficient (so much so that in order to prop up ‘the economy’ we are urged to be as wasteful as possible); and, increasingly, less and less reliable. The foundational principle of this concept of ‘the economy’ is a notion of ‘personal right of personal possession’ – with ‘corporations’ classed as virtual-persons that are assigned greater ‘rights’ and fewer responsibilities than any ‘natural person’ – and implemented by a standardised form of barter called ‘money’. A brief POSIWID assessment shows just how successful the ‘money-economy’ really is(n’t):

• It only deals with point-to-point transactions, not network-effects – especially at a societal level.
• It’s designed to work with ‘alienable’ physical objects, but now no longer has any actual anchor in the real world – instead, we have literally trillions of supposed ‘money’ in imaginary ‘derivatives’ sloshing around the globe.
• It’s very easy to ‘game’ via artificially-constructed price/value mismatches (such as in ’scarcity economics’).
• The implied ‘gravitation’ structure of money-based capital tends to create ‘winner-takes-all’ accumulations – exacerbating social imbalances, often in the extreme, requiring separate sociopolitical action to try to redress the balance.
• Attempts to link ‘intellectual property’ into the money-system have resulted in a system which purports to match finite ‘alienable’ entities (physical ‘things’) with potentially-infinite ‘non-alienable’ entities (information) – which by definition cannot balance.
• Many organisations – particularly banks – are legally ‘entitled’ to invent money from nowhere, in effect assigning themselves an ever-increasing share of the society’s resources.
• A currency, by definition, relies on trust in the institutions that manage that currency, which in this case is the banks – yet much of that trust has been lost, and at present remains at an all-time low (hence the strong societal interest in options for ‘alternative currencies’).
• There are no built-in mechanisms to manage assignment of resources to those ‘outside’ of the monetary exchange-system (particularly children, parents, elderly, disabled and their carers, but also artists, scientists, thinkers, futurists, ‘creatives’ of any kind) – these stakeholders can only be served by ‘external’ mechanisms such as taxation, grants and benefits (which are clunky and kludge-ridden at best), or by forcing them to do work within the money-economy (which means that their actual needed work can no longer be done).
• There is a very strong tendency towards short-termism.
• There is a very strong tendency to try to force everything into a crude, ludicrously-simplistic ‘double-entry life-keeping’.
• There is a very strong tendency to assume that ‘value’ exists only in monetary terms, as ‘valuations’ of ‘resources’ – hence, for example, a forest supposedly has no value until it is cut down, a mountain has no value until mined for its minerals, and so on.
• There is a very strong tendency to assume that anything which cannot be counted and ‘valued’ in monetary terms either does not matter or does not exist.

In effect, POSIWID tells us that the ‘effective-purpose’ for the system we have at present is to create catastrophic failure of the economy in the medium- to longer-term – and that ‘longer-term’ seems to be taking place right now. The current economic system does not and cannot work in relation to the actual vision, values and principles needed to underpin a functional economy for the overall ‘human enterprise’.  Which is not good news…

In architectural terms, that’s the ‘as-is’; the real vision, values and principles provide the desired fundamentals for any ‘to-be’. To begin to define a ‘roadmap’ from ‘here’ to ‘there’, we next need to identify what we have available to us, what the constraints are, and what we can use – starting with the overall context for the enterprise.

Enterprise context

This section of the architectural analysis has two parts: compliance, constraints and standards, and assets, locations and events.

There are two categories of constraints on the system: physical, and social.

The social constraints and implied standards and compliance are invented, by people, in a myriad of forms. In practice, all of these are negotiable, although there is an evident need to construct frameworks that align well with what is ‘not negotiable’ within human nature. Of these, perhaps the core tension is between the individual versus the collective – in network theory, the node versus the network - in part paralleled by the tension between present versus future and/or past. The usual analogues for these are Darwinian (’selfish’ individual) versus Kropotkin (collective ‘mutual aid’). The current ‘Western’ system of ‘private property’ – ‘personal right of personal possession’ – privileges the individual and the present-time, almost to absurd extremes, against the collective and/or elsewhen.

Most of the physical constraints on the economy are absolute and not negotiable. These include finite limits on resources, finite limits to system recovery, and a variety of system factors known to be capable of spiralling positive-feedback loops leading to catastrophic collapse. However, a POSIWID assessment shows very quickly that the present economic system depends on an assumption that growth and resources are infinite, and that there is no fundamental difference between farming (which can be sustainable) and mining (which by definition cannot). This means that by definition the existing economic architecture is non-viable in the longer-term: the question is not if it will fail, but when, and with what structural and other impacts.

The available assets or ‘resources’ include not just physical ‘things’, but also many other entities such as ideas, social-networks, beauty, art, hope and faith. These can be categorised in terms of (at least) four fundamentally-distinct dimensions:

• physical (‘things’; content): independent-existence; alienable; transferable; often destructively consumed
• conceptual (ideas, information; context): semi-independent existence; non-alienable; transferable; non-destructive consumption
• relational (relationships, connections): existence is between two entities; non-alienable; non-transferable
• aspirational (belief ‘in’ something, faith, drive; purpose): existence is from an entity to a conceptualised ‘Other’; non-alienable; non-transferable

Many (most?) real-world entities combine these dimensions: e.g. book = physical+conceptual; shared narrative-knowledge = conceptual+relational; product-brand = aspirational+physical (and/or conceptual), etc. Some people suggest that, architecturally speaking, money is itself another distinct dimension: but in practice it is best understood as a straightforward composite of conceptual+aspirational – a symbol of a belief.

Because of the fundamental differences between dimensions, a ‘currency’ will typically only work well with one dimension. Trying to use a currency in another dimension than that for which it was designed causes serious problems: famously, “money can’t buy me love” – although it can buy an illusion of ‘love’, which is not the same at all. Monetary currencies fit well with physical (alienable) objects, but do not fit well with non-alienable entities; ‘time’-type currencies do not work well with physical objects, especially manufactured objects that accumulate embedded-time; and so on. All currencies tend to create individual-focussed ‘double-entry life-keeping’, which blocks resource-flows at a societal scale, especially over longer timescales. In architectural terms, a currency is a ’solution’ that tries to force all contexts to fit in with its own severe limitations: as a result, ‘currencies’ as an entire class contribute more to ‘the problem’ of economics than to its solution.

The locations of these assets are worldwide – yet, importantly, scattered very unevenly across the physical globe and in social-space, with considerable impacts on core values and principles such as equitability and efficiency. The ‘gravitation’ of the possession-economy tends to exacerbate these structural problems in many complex ways (which I won’t attempt to describe in detail here).

The key events in the economy include births, deaths and many types of interactions between (and within) the respective actors. Births and, especially, deaths indicate with bald finality of one of the many fundamental flaws in the concept of ‘personal property’: in an all too literal sense, we cannot take it with us when we die. (True, historically speaking, many people have tried to do so, but the only real result has been often-serious damage to the respective economy for the survivors and their descendants.)

Transaction-events in practice only make sense for exchangeable entities (physical and/or conceptual), yet even these operate under fundamentally different constraints:

• physical: zero-sum, often leading to a scarcity-based win/lose transactional model; potentially leads to a ‘tragedy of the commons‘
• conceptual: potentially-infinite, for which a scarcity-based model makes no economic sense, and in which the only transactional options are win/win or lose/lose; potentially leads to an inverse ‘comedy of the commons‘, but if misused may instead lead to a ‘tragedy of the anticommons‘

Relational and aspirational assets cannot be directly exchanged, but may undergo transaction-like events in which they are created, ‘read’, updated or destroyed. For example, a brand-relationship (aspirational-asset) may be created via various means, is ‘read’ during each transaction by that person in relation to the branded entity, may be transferred to another brand with great ease by the person but only with great care by the brand-holder (if any), and although the ‘relationship’ is one-sided (from the person to the conceptualised brand), it will be destroyed if either party abandons it.

One useful frame to demonstrate many transaction-variants is the market model. To extend the Cluetrain Manifesto:

• markets are transactions – often but not solely of physical ‘goods’
• markets are conversations
• markets are relationships
• markets are shared-purpose

Although these combine in many different ways, the most typical structure is the market sequence:

reputation -> trust -> respect -> attention -> transaction [ -> barter/money -> individualised 'profit' ]

The main part of the sequence occurs in all economic models, both ‘responsibility-based’ (collective-focus) and ‘possession-based’ (individual-focus).  The section within [..] occurs only in the ‘possession-economy’ add-on, which, in network terms, is essentially a parasitic overlay on a functional responsibility-based economy. (In principle the possession-economy provides governance for management of resources, but use of a non-finite ‘currency’ to manage finite resources makes no sense: the only possible result is ‘inflation’, and increasing assignment of finite resources to those who have the purported ‘right’ to extend – i.e. invent, from nowhere – additional ‘currency’.) The individual-oriented concept of personal ‘profit’ masks and ignores network-effects that frequently lead to huge whole-of-system losses. In practice, the possession-economy overlay contributes almost nothing to the economy, yet creates enormous inequities, instabilities and longer-term risks – and hence, in terms of the actual requirements, is neither useful nor desirable. It seems likely that the only viable option is to strip away the ‘possession-economy’ overlay, and (re-)construct a functional responsibility-based economic model.

Functions and services

The functions and services of ‘the economy’ consist of everything that anyone does, did or will do, in any form, at any time, anywhere in the world – so I won’t attempt to list them all here. The very simplest summary is that we dig things out of the ground, do various things to those things, and put them back in the ground again. (Arguably that includes people too. )

A function is a place within the economy where something can change, acting on resources in accordance with specific rules. (Think of ‘function’ in the mathematical sense: a=func(x,y).)

A capability provides the ability to do something to something. It may be implemented by natural processes, or, in the human economy, by a real person, a machine, and/or (for conceptual-assets) some kind of ‘information technology’. Machines are good at dealing with certainty, but not good at dealing with uncertainty; it’s the other way round for real people. (These distinctions aren’t particularly relevant in a high-level enterprise-architecture, but become more and more important as we get closer to where real work happens.)

A service links together a function and a capability to enable real work. (On its own, a function can do nothing; and on its own, a capability literally has no function.) In a service-oriented architecture, each service presents an interface with its own protocols and service-level agreements, and these services are chained together in some form into processes; in a real-world economy these tend to be a lot more fluid and implicit than in an IT-services architecture, but the principles involved are essentially the same.

Best leave this part of the ‘economy architecture’ at that, but there’s more detail in the Doing EA book (pp.65-76 of the ebook [PDF]) if you want it.

Architecture governance

Viewing the overall economy as an enterprise-architecture, it’s clear that there is almost no integrated governance for the economy as a whole – which immediately implies a ‘natural’ tendency towards fragmentation and disintegration.

Management of the global ‘household’ is split between ‘economics’, which in essence deals solely with money-based transactions; ‘political economy’, which deals with some aspects of the ‘game-rules’ for the money-economy; ‘politics’, which deals with a fairly random subset of game-rules for the non-money parts of the economy; and general sociocultural background, which attempts to re-integrate the resultant mess.

The continued failure of ‘economics’ to deal with just about anything other than point-to-point transactions means that whole-of-system costs are very poorly understood. Frequently, money-transactions themselves introduce huge unacknowledged whole-of-system costs; and as Gil Friend explains, the decisions we make in the delusion that petrol costs only US$3 a gallon are very different from those we would make once we recognise that the real cost at present is more like US$15-20 a gallon and rising.

So there is an urgent need for something – some social institution – to begin to pull all of these threads together. As to what that could be, given the current socio-political shambles, is just about anyone’s guess: over to you for suggestions on that?

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.

—

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!

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.

At first glance, assessing the validity of a methodology might seem simple and straightforward: it’s either scientific or it’s not, for example. But in practice that task is nothing like as simple as it seems, and it’s all too easy to misread what’s actually being described and said, especially when emotions come into the picture – which they always do whenever something new or unfamiliar is being assessed. For example, at one point during our somewhat unhappy interaction over the past couple of posts, Dave Snowden commented that:

Your language in this later post is now the language of cults by the way. You are not understood, you can’t really explain the concept to an unbeliever, you are in a different place. … . People who do not agree with you are not listening so you will have to withdraw from the argument. You are the possessor of disciplines that prevent you falling into error, lesser mortals who do not appreciate this are dogmatic, they disappoint you.

And he’s right: if you choose to read my posts in that way, you can find all of that in there. So if we use only simple language-analysis based on those rules above (i.e. Simple domain, in Cynefin terms), “he’s speaking like a religious fanatic” or suchlike is an automatic conclusion we could reach. (This would especially apply if we’ve thrown in a bit of unconscious pre-filtering – or ‘pattern-entrainment’, in Cynefin terms – to interpret others’ views as ‘cult-like’. This kind of pre-filtering is particularly likely to occur in a Simple-domain context because of the need for fast response rather than considered reflection, as per the Complicated and Complex domains.)

But the problem is that this kind of language isn’t unique to cults. We’ll see exactly the same phrases being used during the exploratory-phase of any new development. Almost by definition, new ideas are hard to describe to others – “you are not understood, you can’t really explain the concept to [others]” – partly because of pattern-entrainment in the critics (in everyone, actually), and partly also because the speaker’s framing and conceptualisation may well be a rickety mess, especially in the early stages of a development-phase. In a metaphoric or even literal sense the speaker may indeed be in a “different place”: that’s the whole point about multiple-viewpoints in enterprise-architecture, for example. That’s also the point of the old story of the blind men and the elephant: each one of them experiences something different, and interprets it in a different way, because each has an incomplete view. In other words, there’s an irresolvable logic-clash: to quote Edward de Bono, “everyone is always right, but no-one’s ever right” – each point of view is ‘true’ within itself, but fails to describe the whole picture.

That’s the rational side of the problem. The remainder of Dave’s summary of “the language of cults” accurately describes common emotional responses to the rejection that follows the logic-clash. The critics are “not listening” because they’re equally certain that they’re ‘right’ – which they probably are, from their point of view. Rejected, it’s quite likely that the speaker will “withdraw from the argument” – the passive side of the old ‘fight or flight’ response. Conversely, the active side of ‘fight or flight’ often leads to ‘propping self up by putting others down’: hence “lesser mortals” who are “dogmatic” and “disappoint you” and so on. We’ll see this kind of interaction all the time in any development environment: it’s one of the most common causes of conflict in business, for example.

But is it a dysfunctional ‘cult’-mentality, or is it the normal logic-clash that we expect to get during a functional, healthy development-process? The problem here is that the simple language-analysis can’t tell the difference between them. And whilst it’s technically correct to say  ”Everyone is always right, and no-one’s ever right”, it doesn’t mean that everyone’s point of view is always valid – and as Dave correctly indicates (or implies, rather) in another comment, a random, rampant ‘anything-goes relativism’ will invariably end up in a seriously dysfunctional mess. To resolve this, we’re going to need better methods – which is where methodology comes into the picture.

The catch is that methodology, and particularly the more abstruse areas such as meta-methodology or ‘methodology of methodology’, has never had a very good press – especially in the Western academic tradition. For example, the clash with Dave reminded me of this incident in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

When the Chairman did appear an interview took place which consisted essentially of one question and no answer.

The Chairman said, “What is your substantive field?”

Phaedrus said, “English composition.”

The Chairman bellowed, “That is a methodological field!” And for all practical purposes that was the end of the interview. After some inconsequential conversation Phaedrus stumbled, hesitated and excused himself, then went back to the mountains.

(Quote is from p.145 on the Scribd version of the book: would recommend also to read at least the rest of that page. I’ll admit that I’ve been strongly influenced by Pirsig’s work on quality and ‘gumption traps‘, though I dislike his subsequent work on value.)

‘Retreating to the mountains’ risks withdrawing into cult-like behaviour, or even to psychiatric illness or worse – as Pirsig’s all-too-literal alter-ego Phaedrus discovered to his cost. Yet it’s also unlikely that anything useful will arise from a fight – especially with someone as bull-headed and over-certain as Phaedrus’ Chairman. So whatever approach we  take here, it needs to steer well clear of those two extremes.

First, we need to acknowledge that, as Pirsig explains, methodology is itself a substantive field. And we need methodology in turn to validate the procedures and techniques used for each substantive field: so in this case we need a methodology for deriving methodologies, a ‘meta-methodology’. (Enterprise-architects would recognise this kind of recursion in that the first of our architecture-principles needs to assert the primacy of principles;  quality-management folks also know that the first procedure we need to write is the procedure on how to write procedures.) Substance and method are fundamentally different in their natures, yet each also includes the other within itself, much as in the classical Chinese ‘yin-yang‘ symbol – hence the Zen allusion in the whimsical title of Pirsig’s book. Getting the right balance between them is critical here – otherwise we end up with the kind of situation above, where the wrong tools are used to assess the required context.

To me, one of the keys to this is systems-theory, because it allows us to create a sense of the whole from whatever small fragments we have – such as the blind men’s different stories of the same elephant. Interestingly, the yin-yang symbol incorporates within the image at least three key-principles from systems-theory: rotation, recursion and reflexion. In my own consultancy-work I add two more – namely reciprocation and resonance – to provide a reasonably complete set of principles for whole-of-enterprise architecture; other people might use others, but these in particular do help to manage the complexities of that need for balance.

Rotation is probably the simplest of these principles: a systematic process of assess­ing a context from multiple perspectives, and then synthesising the result to approximate a picture of the whole. That’s what the blind men would do about their elephant – once they stop arguing about which of them is ‘right’, that is. All of us use this principle frequently in some form in our professional work: for example, even a simple checklist is a form of rotation in this sense. To give a more complex example, the methodology described in my book Real Enterprise Architecture is a kind of rotation through different views on the role and practice of architecture at the whole-of-enterprise scale.

Reciprocation draws on the understanding and experience that, with one key exception, systems must always balance out some­how. What makes it difficult to analyse is that this reciprocal balance is not necessarily direct or immediate. (Incidentally, this highlights one of the key differences between the Cynefin ‘Simple’ domain, which often only deals with real-time,  versus the Complicated domain, which is still rule-based but does have to deal with complex interactions over time and space and context.) In many cases balance may only be achieved over time at a system-wide level, with ‘energy-transfers’ often occurring between the dimensions – a classic business-example being a ‘slash and burn’ tactic which gives a short-term financial gain, but balances out by destroying the organisation’s ability to do work, soon wiping out all of the supposed gains. Again, this is a relatively straightforward principle, one which most of us will use in one form or another in our everyday practice.

Resonance – the feedback-loops which can be found in all complex real-world systems – provides the exception to that reciprocal balance. In systems-theory this can occur through ‘positive feed­back’ or feed­forward – both of which increase the ‘snowball effect’ towards self-propagation – or as ‘negative feedback’, or damping, which reduces the effect. This principle is especially important in assessing methodologies for use in social-systems: whilst most physical-systems operate a ‘win/lose’ dynamics (if variously Simple or Complicated, in Cynefin terms), most social-system operate a genuinely Complex dynamics in which simple reciprocal-balance is relatively rare, and the real choices spread across a very broad spectrum from ‘win/win’ to ‘lose/lose’ – with ‘win/lose’ being an interestingly illusory form of ‘lose/lose’.

Recursion is a ‘nesting’ of a pattern within the same kind of pattern – of which one of the most common forms is the hierarchical  structure of the everyday ‘org-chart’. These are patterns of relationship or interaction which repeat or are ‘self-similar’ at different scales, and again are common in the Complex space: identifying such recursion can make it possible to reduce complex-seeming processes into a much simpler – though rarely Simple – set of patterns. Methodologies that are recursive (and, in most cases, also iterative) are highly desirable for many different reasons: training is simpler, for example, because the same pattern is used on many different scales, and the overall pattern is much the same at every level of skill. In the IT industry, common examples of methodologies that are either overtly or implicitly recursive include TOGAF 9 (enterprise-architecture), ITIL (IT service-management), RUP and EUP (Rational/Enterprise Unified Process for IT-systems development) and the various Agile development-methods.

Reflexion is perhaps the strangest aspect of systems-theory, although it’s a direct corollary of recursion. It suggests that, as indicated in the yin-yang symbol, the whole, or aspects of the whole, can be identified or inferred from within the attributes and transactions of any part at any scale. Everything is connected to everything else, is part of everything else; every point is contained by and contains every other point. A useful analogy here is a holograph: unlike an ordinary photograph, even the tiniest fragment of a true hologram will contain a complete picture of the whole, albeit with less detail. (Fragmentation of a photograph reduces the accessible scope of each fragment, whilst still retaining the same level of detail;  fragmentation of a holograph reduces the level of accessible detail within any given fragment, but not the scope.) The same is true of business systems, social systems and so on: and once we develop an eye for reflexion, and see how it works in practice, we can create change-methodologies that can start anywhere, in any appropriate part of the system, and leverage the results out into the whole.

Use of any of those system-principles provides support for a good balance of flexibility and rigour, especially for methodologies that need to operate in the Complex or Chaotic space. And from almost forty years’-worth of experience developing methods and methodologies of many different kinds in many different industries and contexts, I would argue that any method or methodology that is used to assess other methods and methodologies – a meta-methodology, in other words – should always aim to incorporate all of these principles within its structure and design.

If we don’t do so, the methodology is almost guaranteed to give us ambiguous or seriously-misleading answers to key questions – as can be seen in the problems caused over-simplistic use (or misuse) of Beyerstein’s checklist for ‘pseudoscience’. And use of those principles not only makes the methodology more reliable, but usually also easier to use. Rotation, for example, helps us to balance simplicity with breadth and/or depth of scope. Reciprocation and resonance help us cope with potential problems of balance and perspective. And the combination of recursion and reflexion not only helps to keep things simple without becoming simplistic, but also allows a properly-designed methodology or meta-methodology to be used to assess itself in exactly the same terms as it assesses any other methodology.

That last point is especially important, because it’s one of the few ways in which we can resolve the ‘logic-bootstrap’ problem described earlier. We can only resolve that problem by going into the Complex or Chaotic domains, where we can test the validity of assumptions, but where by definition logic is unreliable. The recursion/reflexion combination provides us with an alternative approach, with a similar level of precision and discipline as in formal-logic, that reflects back on itself in every possible way – top-down, bottom-up, sideways-in, spiral-out. The resultant reflections shine the light of enquiry into every dark corner of the methodology – a process which may well unearth fundamental flaws that must be fixed before using that methodology in significant real-world practice.

The point here is that if this reflection isn’t done, the methodology may be left with gaping holes that can’t be seen from within the methodology itself, because they’re beyond the scope of the chosen logic. Perhaps the most common faults are circular-reasoning and invalid assumptions about supposed ‘universals’ – often from a complete failure to recognise even that the ‘logic-bootstrap’ problem exists. (Self-styled Skeptics’ frequent misuse of ’scientific’ notions provides us with many examples of this, as we saw with Beyerstein’s ‘pseudoscience’ checklist.) Other serious problems arise from misuse of Complex-domain techniques such as post-structural linguistics: this is particularly common in political and social analyses which ‘deconstruct’ everyone else’s text to find structural flaws, but fail to apply the same analysis to their own reasoning. (When we do apply the same analysis reflexively to itself, the flaws that become evident can sometimes be startling. Some of the methodological errors in many of the models currently used in the domestic-violence ‘industry’, for example, are so fundamental, so blatant, and so horrendous in their consequences, that in a political/military context the promoters of equivalents of those models would be classed as war-criminals or worse: the methodologies really are that bad… Which is worrying, to say the least.)

But there are also plenty of examples where the reflection has been applied properly, resulting in methodologies that are simple (yet not simplistic), versatile, flexible, self-correcting and often self-adapting. Some industrial examples that come to mind immediately include variants of kaizen, kanban, Deming’s 14 Principles and much of the work of the Agile movement. In the futures context (professional futurists, not ‘futures’ in the finance-industry sense) one of the most powerful tools is Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis, which applies recursion and reflexion to post-structural linguistics (hence its tagline “postructuralism as method”) to assess a context in many different views, from everyday ‘litany of complaint’ to deep-myth, in a manner which in some ways resembles Cynefin. Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model provides a similarly versatile means to model and manage information-flows at every layer within an overall enterprise, and can also be used in conjunction with his dictum POSIWID (“the [effective] purpose of a system is [expressed in] what it does”) to provide a reflexive means to review and contrast the nominal and actual drivers for an organisation:

“According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances.” [Stafford Beer, University of Valladolid, October 2001]

(My book The Service-Oriented Enterprise explores how to extend Stafford Beer’s system-principles to all other aspects of the enterprise, to create a recursive and reflexive ‘Viable Services Model’. See also the Slideshare presentation ‘Enterprise architecture and the service-oriented enterprise‘ for descriptions of how to link those principles to existing enterprise-architecture tools such as TOGAF and Zachman.)

Finally, one other reflexive theme is an essential for every meta-methodology, and preferably every methodology too: the old ‘Golden Rule’, “do as you would be done by”. Developing a methodology is invariably messy, with many mis-steps: it’s rare that we “get it right” all at once, and even rarer to get it right on the first attempt. This is true for anyone who takes the risk of developing something new, something different. On the other hand, it is very easy to sit on the sidelines from a position of certainty – “that which is already proved” – and tell others that they are ‘wrong’, even though the logic being used to judge ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ may not apply in the respective context. It’s also much easier to demolish a temporary lash-up of a ‘work-in-progress’ than a rigid structure of cross-links and cross-braces – even though in reality it may be the latter that is actually ‘wrong’. So we do need to respect that fact, and respect the aim and intent of any ‘temporary lash-up’, rather than immediately reach out to tear it down.

Or tear down the person, for that matter. There are very good reasons why Deming included the phrase “Drive out fear!” as one of his ‘14 Points’; for much the same reasons, one of the few rules for an After Action Review is “pin your stripes at the door”. Similarly, one of the core principles of 12-Step programmes is the explicit rejection of blame – whether from others or from self – and instead emphasising the centrality of personal and mutual responsibilities. Power enables change, but power is also the ability to do work, not the ability to avoid it – especially avoid it by dumping all of the work onto others and then punishing them for trying to do their best in doing that work, as is all too characteristic in destructive ‘critique’ of new methodologies and tools. More details on the business implications of that, if you’re interested, in this ‘manifesto’ on functional power-dynamics in the workplace.

Better stop there for now, I guess. Hope it’s been useful, anyway, and, as before, constructive comments most welcome.

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.

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

Been having some great conversations over the past few weeks with Michael Smith, a human-context consultant mainly working with government and health organizations in Central America. Main recent topic of discussion has been about rethinking Spiral Dynamics – he’d been at a conference on Spiral in Santa Barbara, CA.

The original work on value-systems that underpins Spiral was done by Clare Graves (no relation) way back in the 1950s, and in the 1990s was extended and rebranded (and, arguably, ‘dumbed-down’ in some ways) by Don Beck and Chris Cowan as ‘Spiral Dynamics‘. In essence, the framework divides value-systems into a set of eight (and possibly more) main clusters or ‘vMemes’, usually labelled by colour, but which we could also describe in terms of perception of ‘rights’:

1. Beige (‘SurvivalSense’): there is no society, everything is focused on the individual need to survive
2. Purple (‘KinSpirits’): we band together as a family to help each other survive – the family/tribe is right (often matriarchal)
3. Red (‘PowerGods’): there is a Great Leader of the tribe, and the leader alone is right (extreme monarchy, often translated in combat etc as ‘might is right’)
4. Blue (‘TruthForce’): there is a Law that is greater than any one person, and that Law alone is right (e.g. theocracy, fascism)
5. Orange (‘StriveDrive’): there is individual ‘freedom’, individual ‘rights’
6. Green (‘HumanBond’): specific groupings have collective ‘human rights’, freedom must be constrained for the greater need
7. Yellow (‘FlexFlow’): the individual is responsible – there is no ‘other’, the only choice that works is ‘win/win’
8. Turquoise (‘GlobalView’): we are collectively responsible for everything

The ‘Spiral’ bit is that these seem to form a kind of linear progression, each value-system building on those before, much like in child-development; and the pattern sort-of repeats, in that ‘Yellow’ is a kind of system-oriented version of self-only ‘Beige’, ‘Turquoise’ a systemic version of familial ‘Purple’, and so on. There’s also a back-and-forth between individual (Beige, Red, Orange, Yellow) and collective (Purple, Blue, Green, Turquoise).

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the ‘linear progression’ concept in Spiral, as it’s wide-open to ‘cultural imperialist’ misuse – as exemplified particularly by the odious Ken Wilber and the followers of his mangled notions of ‘Integral‘-whatever. In that view, ‘higher’ positions on the spiral are deemed to be ‘better’, supposedly leading to some gloriously inevitable future apotheosis of society – a ’spiritual’ variant of the old Marxist delusion of ‘historical determinism’, with the very worst of US capitalism and materialism portrayed as inherently ‘better’ than anything before. Instead, I’d viewed the Spiral value-systems more as a set of sliders on a mixing-desk, each value-set coming less or more to the fore as personal and societal conditions change, without any specific ‘linearity’ to it as such.

What’s intrigued me for some years now is the idea that the Spiral value-systems could perhaps be even better understood not as a linear spiral or a ‘mixing-desk’ (with each value-system distinct from the others), but as natural nodes within a bounded dimensional space. If the dimensions were primarily binary – a sharply-cut spectrum between two diametrically-opposed extremes – each major shift from one value-system to the next could resemble a Gray Code transition, in which one dimension would be changed whilst the values for the others would remain much the same. One clear example of that kind of dimension is the ‘individual vs collective’ distinction from Beige (individual) to Purple (collective) to Red (individual) to Blue (collective), and so on.

I’ve spent a long time trying to identify the right dimensions, and what the Gray-Code shifts would be, since clearly something like it does happen in early-years child-development – particularly the toddler’s transition into and (one hopes!) out of the dreaded ‘Terrible Twos’. The previous post on ‘Dimensions of a Spiral’, a few months back, summarises where I’d gotten to in that exploration by then.

What came up in the discussions with Michael Smith was the centrality of mutual responsibility, in relation to a kind of dimension of relatedness – in effect, ‘distance from Self’ – that describes where the boundary between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ (‘Them’, the Other) is drawn. We can then cross-map Spiral with that dimension of ‘distance-from-Self’:

1. Beige: all is ‘I’, there is no Other – there is only self
2. Purple: ‘We’ – ‘my family’, typically the family unit or extended-family, close-friends, or, in a work-context, the immediate work-team
3. Red: ‘my Tribe’, the people I know personally – self-referential ‘people who relate to me’, typically the scale of a village, or, in a work-context, the business-unit
4. Blue: extended-’Us’, the people of whom I have some actual or potential personal contact – ‘those who follow the same rules as us’, typically the scale of a town to a small region or city-state, or, in a work-context, the organisation; also religious affiliation
5. Orange: ‘my People’, an abstract grouping of ‘extended-Us’ with whom I acknowledge affinity – self-referential ‘all people like me’, typically those of the same nation, language or way-of-thinking, or, in a work-context, the corporation or the industry
6. Green: ‘all of Us’, often with a somewhat fluid boundary between ‘Us’ (people) and ‘Them’ (not-people) – in principle (if often not in practice) the whole human world
7. Yellow: ‘my World’ – self-referential connection with ecosystem – typically bounded by present-time or near to present time
8. Turquoise: ‘the World’ – engagement in / connection with entire ecosystem, without any specific centre – also typically bounded by near-present time
9. (‘Coral’ and other theorical Spiral layers: variations on interaction with timelessness and/or infinity)

If we think in terms of awareness of ‘the Other’ at each distance, we perhaps can view each of these as mixing-desk sliders. A small child, for example, is at first simply unaware of anything beyond self (Beige) and, slightly later, family (Purple). And intriguingly, many tribal cultures would have little awareness of any human contact beyond the ‘my Tribe’ (Red) distance, but probably would have strong awareness of and connection with the beyond-human ‘my World’ (Yellow) and ‘the World’ (Turquoise) distance, because skill as a hunter within a fragile ecosystem will depend strongly on that engagement and empathy with ‘the Other’ – a good example of where so-called ‘primitive’ cultures are necessarily more ‘advanced’ (in linear Spiral terms) than ‘developed’ ones.

Note that in that tribal example it’s not a simple linear progression: there is strong awareness both of ‘close to Self’ and ‘far from Self’, but actually not much in the middle-distance that is more typical of ‘civilised’ – literally ‘city-based’ – cultures. In effect, the apparent linear progression of Spiral is actually an artefact, a side-effect of increasing ‘distance-from-Self’. Hence none of the Spiral layers are inherently ‘better’ than any other: all that the layering means is that – exactly as we would expect – the ability to make finer-grained distinctions at increasing distance-from-Self enables a greater range of possibilities, of choices for action and interaction.

A crucial sub-theme here – and perhaps an example of a near-binary parameter across the ‘distance-from-Self’ axis – is the extent to which there is a perceived alignment with ‘the Other’ (included as ‘We’ or ‘Us’) or separation from ‘the Other’ (excluded as ‘Them’, not-’Us’). This parameter is variable, as can be seen in some examples:

• in war, the ‘enemy’-group  is almost invariably (re-)described as ‘not-human’, an extreme of ‘the Other’ – in effect, artificially increasing the ‘distance from Self’
  • (note that any ‘not-I’ may be viewed as ‘the enemy’ to be distanced here, from ‘my Family’ outwards; likewise even the Self may be treated as the ‘enemy’ – as may be seen even in simple everyday psychological issues such as procrastination or ‘if-only’ self-blame, offloading responsibility respectively to ’self-in-the-future’ or ’self-in-the-past’ to avoid responsibility of ’self-in-the-present’)
• in peacemaking and arbitration, the former ‘enemy’ is explicitly redescribed as ‘human’ again, often using artificially ‘closer’ terms such as ‘our brothers’ or ‘our greater family’
• in many forms of meditation, the sense of separation between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ is explicitly and intentionally suppressed
• in Deep Ecology, the sense of separation between human and non-human is intentionally suppressed – “aims to avoid merely anthropocentric environmentalism … core principle is the claim that, like humanity, the living environment as a whole has the same right to live and flourish”

Next, we need to return to that theme of responsibility. We can view this as mutual and bidirectional at every layer:

• responsibility of Self to the Other
• responsibility from the Other to Self
• responsibility of one layer of Other to another

There are nuances to these mutual responsibilities that we could regard as dimensions in their own right:

• balance or imbalance (disparity) in mutuality – i.e. where responsibilities are not reciprocated
• difference between expectations of responsibility versus actual delivery of responsibility
• variances in capability – i.e. ‘response-ability’

The balance/imbalance dimension maps directly to the scores of dysfunctional versus functional used in the SEMPER diagnostic, which also has some relationship to distance-from-Self:

1. actively dysfunctional – prop Self up by putting Other down (or, in ‘lose/win’, prop Other up by putting Self down) – typical of dysfunctional Red
2. passively dysfunctional – evade responsibility to Other (or, in ‘lose/win’, take on inappropriate responsibility from Other) – typical of dysfunctional Blue and Orange
3. rule-based ‘best practice’ – typical of functional Blue
4. organisation supports individual difference – characteristic of functional Orange and Green
5. individual wholeness-responsibility – systemic awareness – characteristic of Yellow or Turquoise

There’s also an interesting cross-map between Spiral and the Cynefin domains:

• Beige, Purple: there is no certainty – Cynefin Disorder domain, “the state of not knowing what type of causality exists”
• Red: individual ‘great leader’ takes control – Cynefin Chaotic domain
• Blue: pre-ordained rules apply to everyone and everything – Cynefin Simple domain
• Orange: deeper analysis is required – Cynefin Complicated domain
• Green: identify and act on emergent patterns – Cynefin Complex domain
• Yellow, Turquoise: everything is also unique – Cynefin Chaotic domain, also active engagement in Cynefin Disorder domain

Bringing all these themes together provides us with something that can handle a much richer, more nuanced view of value-systems than basic Spiral. For example:

• Beige: no-rules, no-one responsible to/for me, I am responsble to no-one
• Purple: no-rules, family responsible for me, I am responsible to/for family
• Red (functional: chieftain): leader holds rules for all, leader is responsible to all, all are responsible to leader
• Red (dysfunctional: tyrant / ‘terrible-twos’ child): I possess the rules, I am responsible for no-one, all others are responsible to me
• Red/Purple variant (dysfunctional: royalty/aristocracy): single family possess the rules, family is responsible for no-one, all are responsible to the family
• Red/Blue variant (dysfunctional: ‘great leader’ fascist): nation possesses the rules, nation is responsible for no-one, all are responsible to the nation
• Blue (nominally-functional: ‘the Law’): rules possessed by entity beyond the nation / beyond knowable-human, entity responsible for no-one (though prayed to?!), all are responsible to the rules
• Blue/red variant (dysfunctional theocracy): rules from beyond-human entity are possessed by priesthood, priesthood responsible to no-one, all are responsible to priesthood
  • (common Blue theme: ‘responsble to’ = ‘blamed for’)
• Orange (nominally-functional: democracy): rules are possessed by nation, nation responsible to self, self responsible to nation
• Orange/red variant (dysfunctional: US-style ‘libertarian’, ‘kiddies’ anarchy’): rules are possessed by nation, nation responsible to self, self responsible to no-one
  • (dysfunctional Orange/Blue view of environment: I have “dominion” over environment, environment is responsible to Self, Self has no responsibility to environment)
• Green: rules possessed by other-than-self (many variants), other may or may not be responsible to self, self responsible to other
  • (common Green theme: ‘responsible to’ = ‘blamed for’)
• Yellow: no-rules / no-possession, self has personal ‘wholeness-responsibility’ to/for/with other; complex/emergent reality
• Turquoise: no-rules/no-possession, self as member of collective(s), collective has responsibility to/for/with other; complex/emergent reality
• Coral: pure no-rules; interactive ‘response-ability’; chaotic / infinite-complexity reality

Will continue working on this till I can clean it up to something that’s more immediately usable. But to me at least it’s clear that the standard Spiral layering is best seen not as stages, nor as individual sliders, but zones or emphases within a space bounded primarily by dimensions of relationship-with-other and responsibility-to/for-other.

Hope all of this is useful to someone, anyway.

• “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.

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

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.

Probably best viewed as a self-running ‘PowerPoint Slideshow’ – follow the Slideshare link to download it – but works well enough as a simple flip-show.