Tom Graves

Courtesy of a link by fellow enterprise-architect Sally Bean, I’ve just spent the past couple of hours viewing and then reviewing an online seminar on complexity by one of the thought-leaders on complexity-theory and practice, Dave Snowden:

From Induction to Abduction: a new approach to research and productive enquiry

This seminar will provide a summary of both the theory and practice of a new approach to research based on the large scale capture of self-interpreted micro-narrative.  The approach has been described as the first technique for distributed ethnography and has been developed over the past decade with project based funding from the US, UK and Singapore Governments in the context of risk assessment, horizon scanning, cultural mapping and weak signal detection.  It allows the linkage of research with knowledge management and impact based measurement.  Current projects involve measuring the impact of development projects in Africa, narrative based knowledge management for the US Army in Afghanistan and cultural mapping of various inner city communities within the UK.

The theoretical origins lie in the application of complex adaptive systems theory to social systems together with new understanding about the nature of human decision making from the cognitive sciences. The seminar will summarise the theory, but will also use a series of projects to combine theory with practice.  One of the goals is to create learning systems that work on continuous capture of material in the field as it happens linked with a capacity for feedback loops and sophisticated representations that allow people to learn by doing, building on the micro-narratives of day to day experience.  Narrative forms of knowledge lie between the experiential and the symbolic, allowing complex interactions and interventions in multiple social situations.

Abductive reasoning is, as Dave explains, “the logic of hunches”, and plays a key role in helping to develop understanding of how themes emerge in social contexts such as in business and elsewhere. It’s all fascinating stuff – very strongly recommended. The depth and versatility of the techniques will be a real eye-opener to anyone who hasn’t previously seen Dave’s work, and its applicability to whole-of-enterprise architecture and the like should be self-evident.

Read more…

A few days back, one of my fellow Twitterers (I forget who – my apologies) pointed me to a brief video, ‘Context is King‘, by futurist David Houle. His theme in the video and elsewhere is that we are in an “evolution shift” from ‘the Information Age’ to what he calls ‘the Shift Age’. In the video he suggests that:

In the Information Age, the phrase was “Content is King”. While that may still be true, in the Shift Age, “Context is King”

Yet whilst that also “may still be true”, it doesn’t go anything like far enough. At the very least, we need to add ‘connections’ to that list, and probably ‘purpose’ as well – and, perhaps most important, the integration that links all of those dimensions together.

(Oh dear, yet another one that’s getting a bit long, and probably a bit too abstract too. Mainly enterprise-architecture and the like, so click on the ‘Read more…’ link if that’s of interest to you.)

Read more…

Been some time here since I mentioned my other more business-oriented weblog, SideWise.biz. I’ve added a fair few items over the past few months:

• The market as economy: how ‘the market’ consists of much more than just transactions, and how three distinct forms of ‘the economy’ intersect in one place
• Power, responsibility and bullying in the workplace: “When power in the workplace transmutes into bullying, we have a problem. A big problem.”
• Surviving the skills-learning labyrinth: “How do you and your staff learn new skills? And what can be done to make it quicker and easier to learn those needed skills? One answer is to explore the patterns in the skills-learning process.”
• Making continuous-improvement visible: If continuous-improvement consists of many small, almost-imperceptible changes, how do we make overall improvement visible? This article explores how.
• Money is the root of all… wasted time?: The usual claim is that ‘money makes the world go round’; but if so, why is it that the world seems to come to a halt each money has to change hands? This article explores the importance of a whole-of-system view of economics.
• The rise of the business-anarchist: To get the best from a stable system, you need business-analysts; but when the world is changing around you, you need the help of your business-anarchists! This article explains who they are, what they do, how they help to manage change, and how to find them within your own organisation.
• Ten ways to fail – and how to avoid them: “Success often arises just from avoiding failure.” This article explores ten key causes of failure, and what to do to avoid them.
• Where have all the good skills gone?: This article explore a rarely-acknowledged cause of the current ’skills-shortage’: an incomplete understanding of the limits of automation.
• The relationship is the asset: “‘Our people are our greatest asset!’ How often have you stopped to think about what that phrase means – and what it implies in real business practice?”

More to follow over the next few weeks, of course. Share and Enjoy, perhaps?

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.

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.]

Still recovering from the TOGAF conference – about which I need to do a blog-report later, ‘cos some major shifts there – and still ridiculously tired from the way-too-early-start, way-too-late-finish days of the conference itself.

But a key point came up yesterday in a conversation with Erik Proper that was nominally about the enterprise architecture notation language ArchiMate. We started by talking about various themes in his ‘meta-blog‘ – “a blog about things I want to blog about” – and the conversation wandered onto Cynefin, which he hadn’t seen before. I described each of the Cynefin domains, at the end of which Erik commented that if the real world is naturally chaotic – naturally anarchic, in the science/physics sense of ‘without rules’ – then all the other modes are ways to guide our understanding of that chaos. The ‘unorder’ segment is where we start the assessment, perhaps, but in practice – at the point of contact with the real world – the ‘chaotic’ domain is where we must always end up, because everything else is just an abstraction for the purpose of ‘making sense’ of what’s going on.

If that’s so, we might note that the analytic segment of Cynefin – the ‘knowable’, complicated domain up in the top right of the frame – is in diametric opposition to the real world. It assumes that there are ‘knowable’ rules – which the real world says there aren’t – and it takes time to do its analysis – a luxury that we don’t have in the real-time interactions of the real world.

So in an enterprise-architecture that would work in the real world, would we need an anarchist counterpart to every analyst? Not just business anarchist, but functional anarchist, process anarchist, security anarchist, data anarchist, storage anarchist? And if so, what would be their work and their role within the enterprise? – keeping things real within that realm, perhaps?

Seems a useful idea to explore, anyway.

More ramblings on the ‘business anarchist’ theme.

The conventional ’scientific’ assumptions about business reality – as in Taylor’s classic ‘Scientific Management‘ – assume that everything is based on predictable Newtonian-style rules and laws. It’s sort-of true, up to a point, but in practice it only works in the mid-range: many of those supposed ‘absolute rules’ cease to make sense at the scale of the very small (e.g. quantum uncertainty) and the very large (e.g. emergent systems, ecosystems and ‘chaos’-mathematics). And some of the supposed ‘rules’ are just plain daft, such as the ‘rational actor’ assumption in economics (aptly nicknamed ‘the dismal science’ because so much of it is dismal as science) – by contrast, most marketing assumes a non-rational actor, which is a great deal more realistic!

One of the core tenets that we need in a functional business – and elsewhere, for that matter – is perhaps best expressed by the character Odo in Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Day Before the Revolution, with her definition of an anarchist:

“One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice”

This leads us to the key themes of what might be a business-anarchist manifesto:

• There are no rules – only values, and the principles and guidelines that devolve from them
• There are no rights – only responsibilities, including the responsibility for self, and the responsibility for mutual aid

The latter provides an interesting cross-link to the current hype about Charles Darwin and his ‘dangerous idea’ of evolution. (The real ‘dangerous idea’ was not Darwin’s notion of evolution, but the wilful misuse of those ideas by others such as Huxley and Dawkins to justify their own inanities and insanities. I sometimes wonder whether, like the apocryphal tale about Marx, Darwin might at some point have said “Personally, I’m not a Darwinist”… ). Huxley and his successors have endlessly pushed the notion that nature is necessarily and solely “red in tooth and claw”, that “survival of the fittest” means that the only natural prerogative is the “selfish gene”. The reality, as Peter Kropotkin demonstrated in his analysis of animal survival in the extreme conditions of the Siberian tundra, is that the essential driver in nature is not self-centrredness, but is actually one of mutual aid. Kropotkin is often described as one of the fathers of modern anarchist theory: but in fact, like Darwin, he was first and foremost a naturalist.

In any emergent business context, the existing rules have fallen apart; in that sense, there are no rules. What will guide us through an emergent context is a recognition that there are no rights, no ‘entitlements’; all that is real is responsibilities – the ability to choose appropriate responses. That’s what power really is: not ‘rights’, but responsibilities. “One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice – and the consequences of choice.

In response to the current chaotic collapse of so-called ‘capitalism’, we see plenty of finger-pointing, plenty of blame: yet blame is actually the least-useful response to a crisis. To quote Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, “no fight, no blame”; yet the inverse is equally true, “no blame, no fight”. We don’t have the energy or the resources now to waste on fighting: what we need is mutual awareness, mutual aid.

Right now the business world appears to collapsing into anarchy. But I’d suggest that’s not a bad outcome: anarchy is what we need right now. But we also need to be clear about what kind of anarchy is needed: not the kiddies’ self-centred ‘me-first’ pseudo-anarchy that’s got us into this mess in the first place, but the real anarchy of self-responsibility, mutual-responsibility, mutual aid.

Something to think about, anyway.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit more about the ‘business anarchist‘ idea, following a couple of great conversations yesterday with Bas van Gils in the Netherlands and Stuart Curley in London. Hence a few more notes:

• Every business-consultant is, in effect, a business anarchist: the whole point of their role is to break the existing rules and create something new.
• The same applies to business strategy (unless the strategy is ‘business as usual’ – though that isn’t a viable strategy anyway when “the times they are are a-changin’” ).
• Anarchy is the appropriate response in a chaotic context, but the key concern is what guides the anarchy:
  • self-centric (i.e.”the kiddies’ anarchy”) leads to dysfunctional anarchy and fragmentation
  • principle-based (i.e. anarchy in the true Quaker-style sense) leads to functional anarchy and integration
• At the exact point of action and decision, the business-context is always inherently chaotic, requiring personal responsibility in the moment – hence some level of anarchy is always impled
• In the SEMPER diagnostic, level 1 (actively dysfunctional) and level 5 (wholeness-responsibility) are both examples of anarchy – but the former is self-centric, the latter is principle-based

Definitely seems worth thinking about in more depth. More later on this, anyway.

For some while now I’ve been using the term ‘business anarchist‘ to describe what I do in the business-architecture context – and yes, it is a sort-of joke, of course, but there’s also something very real behind it.

Real anarchy isn’t the kiddies’ concept of “all property must be liberated – but don’t you dare touch my stuff!” that I used to see so often amongst self-style ‘anarchists’ in my student days, rather too many decades ago. Functional anarchy isn’t easy at all – in fact it’s actually the most difficult of all political forms, because to make it work, it requires a relentless discipline of responsibility and self-responsibility. No rules: just a ceaseless demand to be aware of what’s happening, of the needs and constraints, in this moment, in the far past, in the far future, all of the times colliding together, and to respond accordingly. Hence, yes, definitely of interest in a business context, because that kind of proactive awareness is what we need most for an agile, responsive enterprise.

A few businesses have gone partway down this path already: see, for example, the post “The Business Anarchist Is The New Entrepreneur”, on the Bloginization weblog, which references two well-known food-retail chains on the US, John Mackey’s Whole Foods and Tod Murphy’s Farmer’s Diner:

…both share one thing in common as managers: they have disregarded and rejected the norms surrounding their respective industries and have forged new paths to reshape the food industry, arguably much like an anarchist does with a governing system.

But perhaps a better example of such an organisation is one that, technically at least, has been run on strict anarchist lines for almost four centuries: the Quakers (or, to give them their proper title, the Religious Society of Friends). There are clear, explicit guidelines, but no actual rules; clear principles for leadership, yet no formal leaders; no vote, and no majority rule – in fact the exact opposite, the dissenting voice has a near-priority in any debate. And probably the guiding principle is that of personal responsibility – which is perhaps why they’ve long had an influence in social issues and social reform far beyond their mere numerical strength. (And not without risk, either: the question asked each year at the worldwide Annual Meeting, “How many Friends have died in prison this year for their faith?” has never yet had the answer “None”…)

The business impact and importance of responsibility and self-responsibility is something I’ve already explored in some of my enterprise-architecture books, such as Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems and SEMPER and SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness. But it might well be worth linking it more strongly to anarchist concepts, whether formal or not-so-formal (such as one of my favourite science-fiction novels, Ursula le Guin’s masterful The Dispossessed), and then bridging back to the business context.

So yes, it does seem that the idea of ‘the business anarchist’ could have some real value. I’m in the middle of working on yet another enterprise architecture book right now – provisional title Doing Enterprise Architecture: process and practice in the real enterprise, about which more shortly in another post – so I don’t have time right now to play with that idea in more detail: but feels like it’s something that would indeed make yet another book (yep, another one… ), and perhaps quite an important one, too. Watch This Space in the coming months, perhaps?