Tom Graves

Another ‘exploratory’, following on from the previous post on ‘Complexity, Chaos and Enterprise Architecture‘, in terms of the Cynefin framework, and again developing out of Dave Snowden’s excellent webinar on complexity and ‘abductive reasoning’.

Cynefin framework (original (c) Dave Snowden / Cognitive-Edge c.2003)

Cynefin is probably one of the most useful conceptual tools that I hold in my ‘consultant’s toolkit’. It is an enormously powerful and enlightening framework to understand the relationships between the simple, the complicated and the complex, and to understand why long-proven approaches such as Taylorism and Six Sigma can sometimes (or often, these days) go spectacularly wrong.

Yet for several years now – in fact pretty much since I first encountered Cynefin – I’ve been concerned that there’s been very little attention paid to the role of the Chaotic domain. So that’s the theme I want to tackle here: how may we reclaim the Chaotic, to make Cynefin more complete?

(I’d better say upfront that there’ll be a fair amount here that Dave and others may disagree with, sometimes quite vehemently – and that’s okay, because this is definitely a ‘work in progress’, and probably with gaping holes in the reasoning in places. I need that critique if this is going to work in practice. In no way do I consider that any of the other work in Cynefin is somehow ‘wrong’ – particularly not the work that Dave and others have been doing in the Complex space, which I regard as crucially important in business and elsewhere. All I’m suggesting here is that perhaps we need to approach the Chaotic domain with the same degree of discipline as we do with the others – and not simply ‘run away’ to the Simple or the Complex as soon as we hit the Chaotic, which is about all that standard Cynefin offers at the moment.)

This one will again be long (my apologies…), but should be useful to anyone who’s familiar with Cynefin, or has any practical concerns about how to handle inherent uncertainties in business and elsewhere. More after the ‘Read more…’ link, anyway.

Read more…

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…

This one was triggered by a Tweet from Shawn Callahan – the grand-master of narrative-knowledge – saying that he on his way to a workshop on Spiral Dynamics. Spiral is an interesting framework, assessing individuals’ and cultures’ responses to their context in terms of value-structures or ‘vMemes’, originating from the work of a guy by the name of Clare Graves (no relation) back in the 1950s or thereabouts. Graves’ work was a bit dry, but very solid – in fact just before his own death Maslow was about to change his well-known ‘Hierarchy of Needs‘ in favour of Graves’ analyses – but Don Beck and Chris Cowan kind of took it to the other extreme, with a California-style gloss that more detracts from its usefulness. (The irony is that, in a disagreement over values, the two now run bitterly-opposed factions – hence the two links above.)

The basic idea in Spiral is that individuals can be categorised in terms of a sequence of distinct layered structures of values, each layer building on the next. (A key component in Graves’ work, which is kind of glossed over in Spiral, is that the same is also true for whole cultures: people experience great difficulty when their own personal value-set is significantly different from the culture’s, as indicated in my own case in the previous post on ‘the natural anarchist‘.) The one-line summary for each colour-coded vMeme value-set is as follows:

1. Beige: there is no society, everything is focused on the individual need to survive
2. Purple: we band together as a family to help each other survive – the family/tribe is right (often matriarchal)
3. Red: 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: there is a Law that is greater than any one person, and that Law alone is right (e.g. theocracy)
5. Orange: there is individual ‘freedom’, individual ‘rights’
6. Green: specific groupings have collective ‘human rights’, freedom must be constrained for the greater need
7. Yellow: the individual is responsible – there is no ‘other’, the only choice that works is ‘win/win’
8. Turquoise: we are collectively responsible for everything
9. Coral: I live connection with everything

The ’spiral’ kind-of repeats itself after six layers: Yellow echoes Beige, Turquoise echoes Purple and so on, but with a systemic awareness that’s absent from the ‘lower’ layers. In principle there ’should be’ another three layers at least, but Graves said that Coral was extremely rare – he only came across a handful of people with that value-set in his entire career – so they remain a theoretical concept only; but the descriptions of the rest are solidly grounded in several decades’-worth of social-science research.

The Spiral crew – aided by by the odious Ken Wilber, whose pompous pronouncements I was supposed to regard as gospel on the Futures Studies course back in Melbourne in 2003 or thereabouts – seem to think that the layers represent a linear progression: “Spiral Dynamics reveals the hidden complexity codes that shape human nature, create global diversities, and drive evolutionary change”, says one gushing proponent. For these folks, Spiral is more like a milliennial religion – which fits well with the ethos of that culture, I guess. But whilst I would agree there’s some parallel with child development and the like, the work I did with Mary Sheridan a third of a century ago (ouch…) suggests strongly that it’d be better to think more in terms of dimensions – like sliders on a mixing-desk – rather than a crude layered hierarchy. Which in turn suggests it’d be interesting to identify those dimensions.

One dimension is obvious even to the Spiral crew: the tension between individual versus collective (represented respectively by the ‘warm colours’ – beige, red, orange, yellow, coral – and the ‘cool colours’ – purple, blue, green, turquoise).

Another dimension, or possibly a pair, is suggested by a cross-map with Cynefin. The transitions from each individual/collective pair – the ‘to’ between each of beige/purple to red/blue to orange/green to yellow/turquoise to coral – map pretty closely to Cynefin’s domains rule-based, analytic, hueristic and principle-based; a cross-map from there – rule-based = ‘inner/truth’, analytic = ‘outer/truth’, heuristic = ‘outer/value, principle-based = ‘inner/value’ – suggest that the inner versus outer and ‘truth’ versus ‘value’ tensions would match well.

Somewhere in there the systems-awareness arrives, because that’s the key difference both in terms of the ’spiral’ repetition, but also in the transition from Green to Yellow – Orange is always looking for some ‘other’ to ‘win’ from in a win/lose ‘game’, and Green is still looking for some ‘other’ to blame, but Yellow and Turquoise recognise that there is no ‘other’, there’s only ‘us’. So the key tension that is see there is one of ‘rights’ versus responsibilities: everywhere before Yellow there’s an endless assertion of some form of ‘right’ – survival is right, family is right, the ruler is right, the Law is right, individual rights, human rights; from Yellow on there’s an awareness that ‘rights’ are a delusion, only responsibilities are real.

And another, perhaps more subtle dimension – maybe even a pair of them, though I can’t quite grasp it yet – is around the notion of rules/ruler/ruled versus non-rule – literally ‘an-archy’, without rule. Beige is a literal anarchy: there is no possibility of rule, there is only survival. Red and Blue are both about as rule-based as it gets: one individual, the other collective. Then we have the ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ of Orange – ‘rights’ without responsibilities – or Green’s obsession with ‘other-blame, which amounts to much the same thing. Then we loop back to functional anarchy – responsibility-based anarchy, the awareness of the the context-dependent limitations of rules – which is individual at Yellow and collective (e.g. Quaker-style) at Turquoise.

That’s where the ideas have come to at present: not final, by any stretch, yet enough to be clear that Spiral ain’t the simple linear-hierarchy progression that they make it out to be, but more a tension across multiple dimensions

I hope that helps, Shawn?

For a while now I’ve been describing myself as a ‘business anarchist‘, in part because a sizeable aspect of my work is ‘creative destruction’ of business assumptions and the like, for the purpose of clarifying the direction in which the business really wants to go. But what is an anarchist, anyway?

The literal translation is ‘one who accepts no ruler’, but it’s not quite as simple as that. There are two radically different forms, at opposite ends of a spectrum: one insists on ‘rights’ without responsibilities – what I call ‘kiddies’ anarchy’ – the other on responsibilities alone (because there are no ‘rights’ – in essence, so-called ‘rights’ are a self-centred delusion), as typified by principle-based anarchist groupings such as the Quakers.

I suppose what makes me a natural anarchist – preferably of the latter kind – is that I don’t belong. I’ve never been able to ‘belong’ to anything: a perpetual Outsider. Which, to say the least, is not a comfortable place to be, but it seems to be who I am. Oh well.

I don’t belong to any company: I’ve never been an employee, I’ve only ever been a contractor, a consultant, or an independent business ‘owner’. I don’t belong to any specific discipline, either: I’ve not so much had a career as careered. Which means that I’m good at linking across businesses and domains and skillsets – the quintessential generalist – but it again means that I never settle anywhere.

I don’t really ‘belong’ to any place, any country. I have dual citizenship, for a start (British and Australian); I’ve now lived (vaguely inhabited?) on three separate continents; and (despite that Australian anthem “I still call Australia home” etc), I’ve never felt anywhere to be ‘home’, the place where I belong.

Same with ideas and theories. I would agree strongly with Paul Feyerabend’s dictum that in science “the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is ‘anything goes’”. Like Isaac Newton (though I hope without quite his level of vituperative irascibility!) I’ve probably written and published more on ‘alternative realities‘ than I have on anything else: as a author and theorist, I’m almost certainly better known as a writer on dowsing and related subjects than I am on my current main field of the architecture of the whole enterprise. Busy adapting some of that material right now for mainstream archaeology: as with the idea of ‘Slow Science’ (and yes, I need to find out more about that), it seems they’re at last starting to grasp the importance of balancing the objective analysis with the subjective ‘experiencing’ – I have a joint paper on that coming up in the next issue of the archaeology journal Time & Mind, for example.

And same is true at a social level:I don’t belong to any defined group. I’ve been an occasional member of some society, or a cluster of people playing folk-music, perhaps, but that’s about it. After a fairly short time the internal politics and the narrow focus begin to pall: it’s time to move on. Again. Always moving on. (Might explain why I’m endlessly moving-on on mywould-be holidays, I guess: can’t seem to settle anywhere. Oh well.)

And it’s also true at a personal level. It’s a painful fact that I share almost nothing with my parental family other than accident of birth: again, I don’t feel I belong, and never have – I’ve wanted to, for as long as I can remember, but that feeling was never there. Not excluded, as such; just no way for the ‘in‘ of ‘included’. A quiet absence of connection, rather than its active rejection, I guess: a nothingness. Same also applies to the direct personal side: I have no family of my own, and despite variously-unsuccessful attempts over the decades, I’ve now lived alone for almost three-quarters of my adult life – and as I approach my sixties, I see less and less chance or, now, even hope, that that would change. In an all too literal sense, out of touch with the rest of the human race. Again, it’s not an active absence, an active rejection, as I know it is for some others: it’s more like a subtly-closed door, a fog which prevents any way through, leaving me always as the Outsider, watching from beyond. That so-accurate Welsh term hiraedd describes it so well – “a longing and a grieving for that which is not, has never been and shall never be”. The loneliness – an all too literal ‘aloneness’ – never really stops hurting: it does fade into the background most of the time, fortunately, but it never actually ceases to make its presence felt. Gives me a better overview than most people have, I suppose – but that’s about the only ‘advantage’ that can be said for it. Hey ho.

Anarchist by nature. It’s who I am, I guess. My apologies to all, then, for being who I am.