Tom Graves / Tetradian

There’s a core theme that reaches right to the heart of every enterprise-architecture: what is the appropriate tradeoff between sameness versus uniqueness?

The classic Taylorist solution has been to emphasise extreme sameness: to force everything – and everyone – to be the same, because it keeps things simple, controllable and easily replicable. But we now know that it’s too simple to work well with the real complexities of the real world. In fact it only ‘works’ as long as we can maintain the delusion that it does work: and whenever it fails – which eventually it always does – there’s a tendency to collapse into complete chaos. Which is not much of a ’solution’ at all.

Yet to focus only on uniqueness all but takes us back to a pre-industrial age where everything is custom-made, everything is different, nothing is actually designed to work with anything else, there are no possible economies of scale, and no certain means to communicate with each other – all of which would seem to be the antithesis of architecture. Which is likewise not a good idea.

Clearly there is an architectural tradeoff there: and hence we need something – some conceptual framework – to help us tackle it.

For at least the past half-decade, and probably longer – see, for example, Andrew Johnston’s 2005 article ‘Architects: Masters of Order and Unorder?‘ – enterprise-architects have turned to Kurtz & Snowden’s Cynefin framework for help on this. For many of us, the Cynefin categorisation of Simple [aka 'Known'], Complicated [aka 'Knowable'], Complex and Chaotic has proven extremely valuable, such as for identifying structural themes and potential problems in conceptual misalignment. One example of the latter, as Dave Snowden has also often pointed out, is the misuse of Simple-domain techniques such as Six Sigma: by definition, these depend on very high degrees of repeatability – literally millions of identical events, in Six Sigma’s case – yet there are frequent attempts to apply them in contexts that have little or no repeatability (‘Complex’ or ‘Chaotic’ respectively, in Cynefin terms), which makes no sense at all.

Beyond that basic categorisation, though, attempting to use Cynefin in enterprise-architecture can itself be problematic, particularly where we need to tackle inherent uniqueness. The explicit focus of Cynefin, and Snowden’s Cognitive Edge consultancy, is the application of techniques derived from complexity-science to inherently-complex areas such as policy. (Which, from a cross-map of Cynefin to the ISO9000 quality-standard ’stack’, is exactly what we should expect: ‘Complex’ maps to the ISO9000 ‘Policy’ layer, in the same way that ‘Simple’ maps to ISO9000’s ‘Work Instruction’.) Yet whilst Cynefin uses the sciences to tackle complexity, what we also need in enterprise-architecture is some means to use complexity to tackle ‘chaotic’ uniqueness – which is not the same at all. Therein lie some serious problems – and some potentially-serious mistakes – if we try to re-use Cynefin concepts in contexts for which it was not designed.

I’ll admit that I’ve probably made some of those mistakes myself. Over the past couple of years I’ve written a number of articles on Cynefin on enterprise-architectures, which made a lot of practical sense to many people, but unfortunately also led to some extremely unpleasant arguments that I have no wish to revisit. What’s become clear to me over the past few months is that the beguiling simplicity of the Cynefin categorisation can blind us to the fact that although its descriptions of the Complex and Complicated domains are essentially the same as we would use for context-space mapping in enterprise-architectures, its definitions and usage of the Chaotic and Simple domains are fundamentally different to those that are needed to tackle uniqueness and sameness in architecture. It’s like comparing a cross-head screwdriver with a flat-head one: at a cursory glance they may seem to be the same, and it’s clear that they are related in the sense that they have similar functions – but in practice they’re not interchangeable, and trying to use them as such will cause a lot of frustration and possibly a lot of damage too. Not a good idea.

So I’d like here to explore what aspects of Cynefin can be used in enterprise-architectures, how and why and where it should not be used, and what we could use as an alternative in those contexts. [I perhaps need to emphasise here that this is not a critique about Cynefin itself, but solely about certain (mis-)uses of Cynefin in enterprise-architecture.]

This again will need to be quite long – apologies – but at least this time there’ll be a fair number of diagrams to break the verbiage into more manageable chunks.

Read more…

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…

Came across this comment whilst exploring laptop.org.au, the Australian arm of the One Laptop Per Child movement [my emphasis]:

Learning is our main goal. … Epistemologists from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Seymour Papert agree that you learn through doing. This suggests that if you want more learning, you want more doing. Thus OLPC puts an emphasis on software tools for exploring and expressing, rather than instruction. Love is a better master than duty. Using the laptop as the agency for engaging children in constructing knowledge based upon their personal interests and providing them tools for sharing and critiquing these constructions will lead them to become learners and teachers.

So why do we think it should be any different for adults in our organisations? – that ‘duty’ will somehow necessarily be a better motivator than love of the work itself?

Then crosslink that with Daniel Pink’s summary of recent research on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivators. From that, we discover that monetary bonuses and other ‘external’ motivators not only don’t help in knowledge-work, they actually make performance worse. What does work is ‘motivation from within’ – especially a commitment to the work itself for its own sake.

Crosslink that with what we know about the skills-learning process, and especially about the need for a ‘commitment of the heart’ – a commitment to the skill itself – to enable the capability to deal with real-world complexity in the context of that skill.

Crosslink that with what we know about the role of vision as a unifying force for and within an enterprise.

Crosslink that again with one of the core themes from the current version of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library – the key international standard on IT service-management), that people do not want products or services as such, they want “satisfaction of a perceived need”; then note that this applies to all people within the enterprise as much as to the enterprise’s clients.

Given all of that, what types of motivation are provided or applied within your own organisation? Is there much evidence of awareness that “love is a better master than duty”? And if not, what would you need to change in the business-architecture or enterprise-architecture – such as in performance-metrics, performance-appraisals and the like – to support more of ‘love’ within the work itself?