The first has a working-title of The enterprise as story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. This has been a major theme on this blog for the past couple of years or so: more than 40 posts here on various aspects since ‘The enterprise is the story‘. And as in the post ‘The no-plan Plan: architecture as story‘, it’s one of the five key-themes in my ‘no-plan plan‘ for my current and future work-direction. So it’s something I need to get down on paper, in more direct, usable form.

There’s a definite deadline of end of February for this one, because I’ll need it available in time for my presentation ‘The enterprise is a story: a narrative approach to enterprise-architecture‘ at the Integrated EA conference in London on 6-7 March 2012.

The second has a working-title of The business-anarchist: enterprise-architectures for the edge of chaos. This has perhaps been a less prominent theme on the blog, but it’s turned up quite a few times, such as in the post ‘Analyst, anarchist, architect‘. In essence, it’s about being deliberate and responsible about working with disruption in the business-context, preferably before that disruption is thrust upon us – a concern which is rapidly becoming more and more important almost by the day.

I’ve been nibbling at this one since mid-2009, and even wrote a fair chunk of it at various points last year, but didn’t finish it then, in part because it didn’t feel like the right time. Now, post-Occupy and suchlike, it does feel more like the right time, so I need to get it done. It’ll have to come after The enterprise as story, but with luck and lack-of-distraction it should be ready somewhen in April.

There’s also another enterprise-architecture book I’ve been working on for quite a while now with a colleague in Guatemala, Michael Smith. We don’t have a working-title for this one yet, and it’s rather further away in time – somewhen mid to late next year, probably – but it’s probably worth mentioning at this point. It’ll focus on the Five Elements theme that comes up in quite a few places in my work – for example, the structure of the effectiveness model used in SCORE strategy-assessment and the book Real Enterprise-Architecture, and the core of the market-cycle that’s used in conjunction with Enterprise Canvas.

Will let you know when any of the books become ready and available, but thought I’d keep you up to date with this part of work-in-progress, anyway.

In a comment to my earlier post ‘Making plans, sort-of‘, Robert Phipps asked:

even though you do not have a plan, [...], you probably have a few themes [...] that will feature regularly, and although we can probably infer some from the tone of recent posts and discussions, perhaps you could offer a kind of ‘version 0.1 cut’ of your new programme. Is it still recognisably EA ?

To answer the last part first:

• Yes, it’s all enterprise-architecture

Whether it’s ‘recognisably EA’ is probably another question entirely… – depends on who’s doing the ‘recognising’, I guess? Main point is that it does seem to be about a much larger scope and scale than most current ‘enterprise’-architectures: a ‘really-big-picture enterprise-architecture’, if you like.

But yes, there do also seem to be some distinct themes in there. I’ll summarise them here, and then expand on them in separate posts, so that this one doesn’t get too long (and also so I might be able to get back to sleep, too…).

Quickest overall summary, to paraphrase an old Heineken advert, is that “it’s about the parts that other enterprise-architectures cannot reach”. (Probably it’d be more accurate to say that it’s more “the parts that other ‘enterprise’-architectures don’t reach”, and I don’t know why they don’t reach them, but there ’tis.)

• It’s about the ‘why’ of architecture

Almost all of the current architectures seem to focus on structure, on the ‘How’ and ‘With-What’. In Zachman terms, they also seem to focus almost exclusively on row-3 (‘Logical Model’) and row-4 (‘Physical Model’) with occasional forays up to row-2 (‘Business Model’), but that’s about it. What I want to know about is what happens in the ‘why’ above that, the reasons behind the architecture in the first place – all the stuff that goes on in row-2, row-1, the row-0 that I had to add to understand the idea of ‘the enterprise’, and the row-00 that I seem to be adding now for the ‘really-big-picture’ of where ‘the enterprise’ comes from in the first place. There’s also a strong cross-link there with an emphasis on effectiveness – rather than solely on ‘efficiency’, as in too much of current architecture-work.

• It’s about architecture-as-story

A theme that’s come up a lot for me over the past few years is on ‘the enterprise as story‘. It’s picked up even more momentum since finding building-architect Matthew Frederick’s ‘two points of view‘ about architecture, one of which was the regular view of architecture as ‘an exercise in structure’, but the other of architecture as ‘an exercise in narrative’. Story also seems to be linked both to the exploration of the ‘why’ of the architecture, and the active, living, expression of that ‘why’. Beyond that, I just know that it feels important, so keep following that thread and see where it leads.

• It’s about the architecture-as-change

In part this is what I’ve called the ‘business-anarchist‘ theme, but again it’s very tightly linked to that question of ‘why’ in an enterprise-architecture. It’s also strongly associated with the theme that way too many people still seem to avoid, namely the sense-making / decision-making space that in the SCCC-categorisation is described as the Chaotic-domain. I suspect that there’s a huge breakthrough in there somewhere, on the scale that Taylorism was back at the start of the last century, and which we’re sort of skirting around with ‘design-thinking’ and the like. Dunno quite what it is, but I can sense the general shape of it in there somewhere, and also that it’s definitely important.

• It’s about the dynamics of architecture

This one will still take quite a bit of further exploration and explanation, but it seems to be about how we move between those different sense-making / decision-making domains. It’s also about designing for change – which is going to be kinda important as we head into what’s clearly going to be a period of massive change – and also about breaking free of the dead weight of some frankly daft ideas such as ‘future state’ of an architecture.

• It’s about people in relation to architecture

This is another screamingly-obvious gap in most current ‘enterprise’-architectures: people barely come into the picture at all. Since one of the core definitions of ‘enterprise’ is that it’s all about people and people’s choices and people’s needs – “the animal spirits of the entrepreneur” – it does seem like it’s kind of an important omission, wouldn’t you think? I’ll freely admit I’m not much of a ‘people-person’, but someone has to address this point in enterprise-architectures, and since this obviously links up very strongly with all of the other themes, it may as well be me…

Enough to answer that ‘no-plan Plan’ question for now, I hope? – more detail to follow on each of these themes, anyway.

So can I go back to sleep, please?

Uh… probably that ‘The Plan’ is that there isn’t one? In fact that’s the whole point?

(Or, if you simply must have a plan, I could paraphrase a former colleague and say that the plan is to not have a specific plan.)

Why? Simple reason, really: the purpose of a plan is to control something. And since ‘control’ is itself little more than a rather forlorn myth – especially in this kind of context – then it really doesn’t make sense to have a plan, because ‘control’ doesn’t make sense either.

I do have a sense of the direction I’m headed, though. Call that ‘a plan’, if you like. Sort-of.

It’s still enterprise-architecture. But a much bigger view of enterprise-architecture than you’d normally see associated with that term.

[As an aside, one of the joys of this shift is that I won't have to waste any more time arguing with the IT-obsessed and, now, the business-obsessed, about their misuse of the term 'enterprise-architecture'. I know it's wrong, they know it's wrong, everyone knows it's wrong, and just about everyone knows the damage that that term-hijack is causing, too. But hey, if they really need to keep on 'pissin' in the pool', best to just leave 'em to it, I guess. At least when you come here, you do know that when I talk about 'enterprise architecture', I do mean 'enterprise', and 'architecture', and the way they fit together - and not some piddling point about how two IT-boxes talk to each other. Unless we do need to talk about that. Which we do sometimes, of course. ]

What I’m really aiming at is the architecture of the biggest enterprise we have: the human enterprise. All of it. Which takes place within a broader ecosystem, usually referred to as ‘this planet’ or suchlike. Which is, yes, kinda big…

[In Twitter and elsewhere I'll use the hashtag #rbpea to indicate this type of 'Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture'.]

Why? It’s because I can see there are some big, big, BIG architecture-type questions that just about no-one else seems to have addressed so far, if at all. Or even noticed, in most cases. Kind of ‘oops…’, if you like. A very big ‘oops…’.

Which means that someone needs to be doing something about that ‘very big oops…’. And I look around, and I can’t see anyone else doing it, or putting their hand up to do it. Which, uh, kinda suggests that it’s my turn to do something about it. Yikes… Yeah, kinda challenging, coming face to face with that…

It doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily be much good at it: others would probably be a lot better for this than I am, no doubt about that. But it’s clear that someone needs to hold the fort for now: and right now that ‘someone’ seems to be me. Oh well…

I certainly don’t claim to have ‘the Answers’; at the moment I’d barely claim to have more than a few good questions. But at least it’s something. And I do have some relevant skills and experience, so in that sense I do have some ’response-ability’ here. Hence, in that sense, my responsibility.

So that’s the ‘plan’, really: be responsible. See what I see, hear what I hear, feel what I feel, and then literally ‘be response-able’ about that. Be like Wangari Maathai’s hummingbird – or perhaps, in my case, more like a weary, wary old toad – just doing the best I can.

Not a big plan. Not a complicated plan, with a nice big complicated roadmap from ‘as-is’ to ‘to-be’ and crop-circles an’ all that, like what all those real, proper certififificateded enterprise-architects do.

But a plan. Sort-of.

Hmm…

There’s one part of this plan, though, that a fair few people may not like – and I perhaps ought to apologise for that in advance. (Though might be better to just stop apologising for everything anyway?) It’s just that being responsible also means being honest: and being honest about what I see is going to annoy a few folks – because to be blunt there are a heck of a lot of ideas and actions out there that are just plain dumb. Stupid: the definitely-not-a-good-idea kind of stupid. Often the darn-lucky-if-we-survive-this-one kind of really stupid, too. Sorry, but it’s true.

One example of that kind of ‘really-stupid’ is the notion of ‘rights‘, which just does not and cannot work, no matter how much people try to kludge to make it it look as if it does. It’s bullshit: it’s a ‘kiddies-anarchy’ view of the world, built around evasion of any notion of responsibility. And we need to stop pretending that it’s anything more than that – so that we then do have a chance to rebuild something that actually can and does work.

Ditto the entirety of what’s laughably called ‘economics‘. Ditto the whole notion of ‘intellectual property’ – or most any current form of so-called ‘property’, for that matter. Ditto, behind it, the entire concept of ‘possession‘. All of us know it’s all bullshit, a made-up fantasy to prop up the pretences of people whose idea of ‘making a living’ consists almost entirely of untrammelled theft – an ‘economy’ based on theft-without-end. Gosh: that’s an ‘economy’??? – doesn’t look like one to me… not in any sane sense of ‘economy’ that I’ve ever heard of, anyway… So why not say so? – before we really do all end up in drowning in this bullshit?

Sigh.

In that old fable of ‘the Emperor has no clothes’, it’s a naive kid that unknowingly calls everyone’s bluff, by saying the truth about what he see. But I’ve come to realise that in reality it isn’t some innocent kid: it’s a grumpy old toad like me. Which means that sometimes – often, perhaps – some people ain’t gonna like what I say about what I see. Too bad. Sorry, ’bout that, but there ’tis: there are only two choices here – it’s either be honest, or don’t bother, and from now on I’m a lot clearer about which one of those two I need to pick.

One thing I won’t do is put anyone else down. I’ll challenge the bullshit whenever I see it, and challenge hard about it at times (and expect others to challenge me about that, too): but it’ll always be about the ideas, the thinking, the action – not the person. I promise you that. So if you find yourself ‘taking it personally’ about something I’ve said, please look closely at yourself first, and before you come out all-guns-blazing at me – because it’s in that ‘taking it personal’ that you’re most likely to learn the most, and most likely to find out who you truly are.

Anyway, down to it. That’s the plan, sort-of. And yes, there’s a lot to do – and a lot to talk about with you, too, if you wish?

I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it?  And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? – well, this is what that looks like.  )

So cool it, okay? Calm down. It’s almost certainly not what you might think I’m saying. And don’t panic: ultimately this is more about a practical design-issue in ‘big-picture’ enterprise-architectures than about anything else. Serious, sure: but not misogynistic. Honest.

It’s true that there are specific problems around all closed-category ‘rights’ such as purported ‘women’s rights’ and the like – and I promise I’ll come back to those later. But that isn’t the real point here anyway. The real point is this: the whole concept of ‘rights’ could well be one of the most disastrous mistakes that humans have ever made. And we need to find a way back out from that mistake if we’re ever to achieve some kind of sustainable society.

In terms of well-meant stupidity, the notion of ‘rights’ is right up there with the toffee spear [thank you Terry Pratchett!] and the lead balloon: it doesn’t work, it’s never worked, in fact can’t work, because its cause of failure is built right into its very roots. Scrambled misunderstandings and misuses of the notion of ‘rights’ represent a huge failure-risk, right at the roots of all of our current ‘really-big-picture enterprise-architectures’. And to be blunt, the concept of ‘rights’ is so riddled with calamitous unintended-consequences that we really need to remove it, totally and permanently, from every aspect of every law in every land.

An assertion to which, at present, you might well disagree.

Which is fair enough, of course.

But perhaps allow me to explain?

(And yes, as usual, this is going to be a bit long… but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.)

The right emotions?

First, though, ask yourself this: why is it that that defence of ‘rights’ is, well, so visceral? Existential, almost, for something that’s actually just an idea? What’s going on there?

[By the way, there's an additional source of confusion here that may be specific to the English language: 'right' as in 'it's my right', versus 'right' as 'factually-correct', versus 'right' as 'proper', the socially-proper thing to do. When all those meanings get conflated together, life gets even more, uh, interesting...]

So try this, as not so much a thought-experiment as a feeling-experiment. Let’s play around with that headline a bit, and feel what happens:

• Women’s rights? – just say No!

If that statement makes your blood boil, notice that it does so. In which case, why? And how? – how can a simple statement reduce some people to paroxysms of rage? Notice how you might well want to lash out at me, silence me, all the rest of it – when in reality I’m just the messenger. Ne tirez le pianiste, s’il vous plait? And when you’ve calmed down a bit, notice that you could have read it an entirely different way: for example, that the most important part of ‘women’s rights’ is a woman’s right to say No… in which case, what’s wrong with saying that? Hmm… just what does that tell us about ‘rights’, then?

Anyway, let’s try another version of the headline with a different ‘right’, and see what happens here:

• Human rights? – just say No!

A bit bland, yes? A bit abstract? ‘Human rights’? – have to think about it, rather than feel it? And why would anyone object to that, anyway? – whatever that ‘it’ might be? Hmm…

Okay, try this one:

• Right to silence? – just say No!

That one could well feel a bit abstract too – unless you’ve somewhen found yourself on the wrong side of a so-called ‘justice’-system, in which case it won’t be abstract at all… Right, okay, here’s another one:

• Right to education? – just say No!

This gets a bit complicated, yes? Kind of muddled mixture of trying to think it out, then work out what that negation means, and then the emotions, and so on. But let’s have another one that might have a bit more impact:

• Right to party? – just say No!

Whatever the Beastie Boys might say, the idea of a ‘right to party’ is not as simple as it looks – especially in any real social context. Likewise this one:

• Right of way? – just say No!

That ‘right’ can get seriously complicated in a social context, out on the highway – yet notice too the enormous amount of emotion that can get tangled up with that ‘right’ as well? Odd, that… So let’s ratchet it up even more:

• Right to life? – just say No!
• Right to choose? – just say No!

Whichever way you’d take it, that one’s really tangled… kind of like there’s a huge emotive polarity there, yet can’t actually get a grip on it? – at least, perhaps not enough grip to work out what to throw at me for saying it, for which of those two phrases, and why? Which should definitely bring us back into ‘Hmm…’ territory, perhaps? Anyway, one final example, just to bring us back down to ground again:

• Right to high-speed broadband-internet – just say No!

Before you go ‘Huh???’, note that in Finland, access to broadband is a ‘right’ that’s enshrined in law. And in this case I would hope that the “just say No!” part might get you to see what’s really going on here.

The key point is this: rights are a fiction.

They’re a description of a desirable outcome, in an idealised world that may never exist in the real one. A map of an imagined territory.

That’s it.

Gosh…

Which means that all that emotion is a bit odd… but that’s something we can come back to later. First, let’s deal with this fact about fiction.

Rights are a fiction

‘Rights‘ are a fiction; responsibilities are real. The desired-outcome of each so-called ‘right’ can only arise when someone takes responsibility for enacting the conditions to create that outcome (a point that should be obvious when we think about ‘the right to high-speed broadband’). In a societal context, each ‘right’ is actually created by a complex interweaving of mutual responsibilities – so it’s actually the responsibilities that we need to pay attention to here, together with a solid understanding of those mutualities and interlocks, and the social checks and balances and other conditions that support them.

A ‘right’ is just a very simple shorthand way to describe a desirable outcome that arises only when someone – perhaps individually, more usually collectively – enacts a specific interplay of some very complex mutual interlocking responsibilities, under appropriate forms of governance. To ensure that those outcomes actually do occur, we need keep the focus always on the responsibilities, and the mutuality of those responsibilities – and not on the so-called ‘rights’. Given this, though, it’s easy to see that some serious problems are going to arise if anyone thinks that the ‘rights’ are somehow ‘real’ in their own right, and forgets about the existence or mutuality of those real responsibilities that make it all happen.

Part of the difficulty here, of course, is a straightforward map-versus-territory mistake. The ‘right’ is the over-simplified map; the responsibilities are the real-world territory. It’s easy to see that if anyone thinks that the map ‘is‘ the territory, yeah, it’s gonna get messy for a while… Oh well: common-enough kind of mistake for folks to make, anyway.

Yet where the heck does all that emotion come from? – because no-one would doubt that there’s often a lot of emotion there…

Rights and the ‘terrible twos’

Want to know where the emotion really comes from? Next time you hear yourself (or anyone else) talking about ‘my rights’, do you notice the inner two-year-old that’s actually saying those words? A very angry two-year-old, lost in a possessive temper-tantrum, demanding that the world be other than it is – declaiming that it’s everyone else’s fault that it’s not that way? And in its rage, claiming that it has the ‘right’ to punish those others for failing to deliver what it wants?

Oops…

A two-year-old wants the world to happen in the way that it wants: it has a very clear sense of a personal right to that desired condition of the world. There’s no concept of mutuality here: it sort-of understands the notion of Self, and of separation of Self relative to the world, yet still views everything ‘Other’ as a semi-autonomous extension of its will – everything not-Self as subject of Self. (Yep, we’ll see that word ‘subject’ coming back again later.) So when it wants an outcome that it cannot immediately grab for itself (i.e. Other-as-object), it asserts that it’s only others – the possessed not-Self, its ‘subjects’ – that are responsible for delivering that outcome. It has a ‘right’ to an absence of responsibility, an ‘anti-responsibility’; responsibility is always Somebody Else’s Problem.

So we’ll see an awful lot of declamation of ‘should‘ coming out of that two-year-old, often accompanied by an awful lot of tears and tantrums; and since there’s such an explicit denial of mutuality, such angry assertion of absence of responsibility, we’ll often see an awful lot of ‘should‘ coming back the other way, trying to reestablish the mutuality, reassert the responsibilities that any human of any age will have in any social context. That often-fraught, often-furious clash of shoulds is what every parent will know all too well as the dreaded ‘terrible twos’…

And that‘s what’s actually going on, underneath, in the background, in almost every aspect of the ‘rights-discourse. It’s not about responsibility: it’s about the evasion of responsibility, a desperate attempt to find some way to convert every difficult choice, every difficult action, into Somebody Else’s Problem.

Oops…

And evasion-of-responsibility – “any attempt to offload responsibility onto the Other without their engagement and consent” – is the formal definition for another all-too-well-known term: abuse. Evasion-of-responsibility is abuse. And when evasion-of-responsibility ends up somehow being enshrined in law – which it very often is, as we can see very quickly once we start looking with a mutual-responsibilities lens at most forms of law – what we have is not ‘rights’ at all, but full-on state-sponsored abuse, backed by all the societal force of law.

Oops…

Which just might be why things so often get into such a mess whenever someone introduces the idea of ‘rights’ into the picture…?

What’s actually going on here?

Whenever we come across the notion of rights, what we have in that context are the following:

1. A description and declaration of a desired social outcome (the purported ‘right’)
2. A complex set of mutual interlocking responsibilities (the means to deliver the purported ‘right’)
3. A set of societal checks and balances (to provide governance for the purported ‘right’ and the mutualities that underpin its continued delivery)
   but, all too often:
4. An evasion of responsibility and/or denial of mutuality, often expressed in practice as systematic Other-abuse.

The first three items are what make the ‘right’ happen; the last item is why it so often doesn’t happen.

And whenever we see a strong focus on the first item – ‘my rights!’ – that somehow fails to acknowledge the matching mutualities – ‘my responsibilities’ – then what we actually have there is not ‘rights’ at all, but active Other-abuse. Which pretty much guarantees that whatever-it-might-be is not going to work.

Ouch…

Yet extremely common. And, because it at first looks like it works, but actually doesn’t, is addictive. Very addictive.

Recognise this yet? In just about everything in our current culture, everywhere around you, at work, at home, everywhere else? And in your own behaviour too?

Ouch…

Yup. This is serious. If you want to understand why so many things are so disastrously wrong in so many aspects of our culture, all you need to do is look at all those so-called ‘rights’.

Sigh…

The subject of rights

Just one more step before we start to sort out the mess. This is around the notion of ‘Other-as-subject’ (which, as you’ll see, will also take us right back to the beginning here, and explain why, even for women, ‘Women’s rights’ is not such a good idea…).

For this we’ll use a Spiral Dynamics lens. (We’ll ignore that model’s theory of social development, which to be frank is just millennialist garbage. Oh well.) This gives us a set of colour-coded values-perspectives, within which we can see who supposedly has ‘the rights’, who doesn’t, and who is deemed to be the ‘subject’ of whom:

• Beige: ‘Survival’: Self only, no social context, hence neither ‘rights’ nor responsibilities, and no subject
• Purple: ‘Family/Tribe’: “Mother/Father is right” – all others are subjects of patriarch/matriarch
• Red: ‘Feudal’: “might is right” – monarch is peak of fealty-tree of overlord-rights (‘down’) versus subject-responsibilities (‘up’)
• Blue: ‘The Law’: “God/The Law is right” – the purported ‘agents of the Law’ have rights, all others are subjects of ‘the Law’
• Orange: ‘Democracy’: “individual rights” – all are sort-of-subjects of everyone else
• Green: ‘Collectivism’: “group rights” – all groups are sort-of-subjects of all other groups
• Gold/Turquoise/Coral: ‘Systems’: “only responsibilities are real” – no ‘rights’, no ‘subjects’

Although the only values-perspectives that are stable in this sense are the ‘Systems’ group, all of the other values-perspectives can work. In functional form, all of them represent an appropriate context-specific balance of mutual responsibilities: for example, parents will usually take on responsibilities on behalf of the children, and so on. There is, however, some tendency to drop into a ‘racket‘ or codependency in which each party can evade responsibility by blaming the other: those types of social-dysfunctions are all-too-common in all of the non-’Systems’ values-perspective types.

Yet as soon as the idea of ‘rights versus responsibilities’ comes into the picture – especially when accompanied by any notion that others are the ‘subjects’ of those with ‘rights’ – each structure rapidly becomes dysfunctional in its own way. ‘Rights’ are equated with ‘privilege’ – literally, ‘priority in the law’. Hence in a police-state or a rigid theocracy, for example (dysfunctional-Blue, in Spiral terms), the ‘agents of the Law’ are deemed to be ‘above the Law’: they have the purported ‘right’ to act as they wish, without any mutuality of responsibility to the ‘subject’-population – which gets to be seriously abusive, seriously-quickly, in almost every single case.

Most organisations are still run on what is essentially a feudal model – hence the dreaded org-chart and its ‘report-to’ relationships – with an often-thin overlay of ‘the Law’. Again, it can work: but because of the ‘rights versus responsibilities’ problem and the inherent tendency of a feudal structure to form codependent relationship-pairs (the ‘boss’ blames the ‘workers’, the ‘workers’ blame the ‘boss’, no-one takes actual responsibility for anything), most organisations seem to range between somewhat-dysfunctional to seriously-dysfunctional – a fact reflected in the painful prevalence of Dilbert cartoons…

A typical would-be ‘democratic’ or ‘collectivist’ model starts out with a commitment to full mutuality of responsibilities, which is what actually underpins any notions of ‘universal human rights’ and the like. Yet as described so well in Orwell’s Animal Farm, once the ‘rights’ dysfunction takes hold, this quickly deteriorates into a morass of “some animals are more equal than others”. In the ‘democratic’ model, the assertion is that “I have rights”, whilst in the ‘collectivist’ model it’s more often “we have rights”; and both models assert that only others have responsibility, and in general do not have rights (or at best, rights that are inherently subject to and of lower priority than those of ‘I’ or ‘we’).

Which brings us back to the notion of ‘Women’s rights’.

The wrongs of rights

The notion of ‘women’s rights’ is a very good example (one of many possible examples, I hasten to add) of a ‘collectivist’-model concept of ‘rights’. By definition, it’s exclusive: only women have these rights, they acquire these rights by fact of birth, the rights are not transferable, and, in principle at least, there is no way that anyone from the Other-class can acquire those rights.

[Note that there's nothing inherently 'wrong' with that kind of exclusive-category, of course - it's just a category. It's what happens next that gets, uh, interesting...]

In itself, the existence of the category does make sense: clearly there are a few concerns or experiences that are specific to women. Which means that we need to consider specific outcomes around those concerns. Most of the time, then, when people talk about ‘women’s rights’, what they actually means is the desirability of certain outcomes that are, by their nature, specific to women.

(And in case anyone’s still angry at me about the headline for this post, I perhaps ought to emphasise here that to me those outcomes are indeed desirable, for everyone’s benefit, and that achieving those outcomes is extremely important.)

[By the way, that list of items that are 'specific to women' does not include sexual assault or domestic assault. In many sub-types of those two categories, women are actually the majority of perpetrators - not victims. (And yes, I have done the meta-analysis on that, several times, as part of my professional work, so I do know what I'm talking about there.) Which means that any claim that women should have 'special rights' in those areas solely because they are women is, frankly, a flagrant attempt at yet another form of state-sponsored Other-abuse. Not a wise move, as we'll see shortly...]

To achieve those outcomes, we need to focus on the mutual responsibilities that make it all happen. But the ‘rights-discourse’ just gets in the way: especially that addictive return to arbitrary assertions of “I have rights, you have responsibilities”. Hence all too easily, all too often, instead of helping something happen, it all just dissolves into a chaotic mutual blame-game, with everyone eventually sidestepping their responsibilities, partly because the mutualities are not acknowledged or enacted, and partly because anyone who does take responsibility for anything will immediately get blamed for everything – which kinda acts as a fairly serious disincentive against doing anything at all.

[Note that this is not specific to 'women's rights' - I'm just using this as a worked-example because its inherent-exclusivity makes it easier to see what goes on in this type of 'wicked-problem' or 'mess'.]

As someone’s who’s worked professionally in that field from time to time, I can confirm that the whole gender-issues space is riddled with people – most of them women, as it happens, but by no means all – who are utterly addicted to Other-blame. They’ve literally built their careers on it. And it guarantees that things can’t and won’t work – which is then used to justify even more Other-blame, in an all-too-literally vicious cycle. Oops…

[I sometimes describe these people as 'cuckoos': "a parasite that lays its eggs in other birds' nests, that hatch out into monsters that destroy the hosts' own children". It's a bit unkind, perhaps, but it is a painfully-accurate metaphor...]

The tragedy, of course, is that the ‘subjects’ of that relentless Other-blame and Other-abuse will eventually crack – which is how a structurally-abusive version of ‘women’s rights’ in one era will create the conditions for an ever-more-abusive misogyny in the next. That’s why it’s called a ‘revolution’: it goes round in circles… And when everyone in the game is stuck in ‘toddler-mode’, endlessly demanding their ‘rights’ and trying to do so by trying to make everyone else lose, no-one is going win anything. And hence we don’t get the outcomes that we need. Which means that, in this example, ‘women’s rights’ all too easily becomes women’s tragedy – created by self-styled ‘women’s advocates’ themselves.

Ouch…

And because all of this is driven by addiction, there’s no rational way to resolve it. The only viable option is to bypass the whole miserable mess, and reject the entire concept of ‘rights’. Everywhere. Every possible form. Every possible so-called ‘right’. It’s a mistake: so don’t fall for the mistake. Simple as that.

Hence the second half of that headline here: whatever ‘right’ it may claim to be, Just Say No!

Which, of course, leaves the rather important question of what we do next…

Rights without rights

How do we tackle this problem of supporting the desired outcomes of ‘rights’, without resorting to ‘rights’ themselves? For enterprise-architects and others who are charged with designing what is, in effect, a social-architecture, within an organisation or a broader social context, this is a very real and very urgent problem.

So let’s turn the last part of this rather-too-long post into a straightforward how-to on exactly this point.

Jump back for a moment to the ‘What’s actually going on here? subhead. What we saw there was the following:

• definition – the description of the desired outcome (the ‘right’)
• means – the delivery-mechanisms, described in terms of interlocking mutual responsibilities
• governance – checks and balances to ensure it all works, especially over the longer term

And we have the known problem-areas, the symptoms that indicate that delivery of the outcome is at risk:

• risk-symptoms – evasion of responsibility, denial of mutuality, and/or arbitrary assertion of ‘priority’ or ‘privilege’

And if we phrase it like that – definition, means, governance, risk – it should be clear that it’s actually a straightforward design for service-delivery: little different from any other type of service-design. So let’s tackle it that way.

First, what are the desired outcomes?

We’ll notice straight away that there will be a lot of those in any context, quite a few of which will conflict with each other. Which means we’re going to need some means to help us evaluate priorities between outcomes.

Which is where whole-enterprise architecture comes into the picture, showing us how to identify and define the core Vision or ‘guiding-star’ and its concomitant values.

Once we have those, we then turn to specification, design and evaluation of service-delivery and service-governance.

Which again should be well-known territory for enterprise-architects and the like: it’s about specification, design, protocols, inter-dependencies, coordination, validation, management, and all the other things we need to do to evaluate and ensure service-viability over the longer term. And I won’t write anything more on that here, because it’s all in the books such as Doing Enterprise Architecture and The Service-Oriented Enterprise and Mapping the Enterprise, and in articles on this blog such as ‘Enterprise Canvas as service-viability checklist‘. No big deal, really: just the routine slog of “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”, that’s all.

Which leaves us with the risk-symptom – the tendency to misuse any notion of ‘rights’.

And there’s a really simple answer to that: Just Say No! Don’t allow it to exist, at all, anywhere in the architecture. As soon as anyone makes any mention of ‘rights’, move the discussion straight away to what actually needs to happen:

• What is the desired outcome? (The ‘right’ is a map of a territory: what’s the territory?)
• What are the responsibilities that are needed to achieve that outcome? (For enterprise-architects, we would probably phrase that as the services and business-processes that would make it happen.)
• What are the interlocks and mutualities of those responsibilities? (We would probably talk here about protocols and service-choreography and the like, plus a whole lot about checks-and-balances across the system.)
• What governance is needed to ensure that everything ‘stays fair’ for all stakeholders – because without it being seen as ‘fair’, it isn’t going work? (That’s what in Enterprise Canvas is the role of the ‘guidance-services‘ – particularly the validation-services – and also the Investor and Beneficiary relationships.)
• How does all of this link up with and remain aligned to the overall shared-enterprise Vision?

We’ll probably have to recurse or iterate many times through that loop, or parts of that loop – but it’s all straightforward enough, if we don’t allow ourselves to get distracted by the fiction of ‘rights’. Rights are a fiction, it’s only the responsibilities that are real: the only way to achieve what we think of as ‘rights’ is to not have ‘rights’.

So again, whenever anyone makes any mention of ‘rights’ – any so-called ‘right’ at all – Just Say No!

Because it really is the only way that works.

Am I giving up? No, not at all.

Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll just have to put up with that. )

So what exactly am I doing, then?

All I’m doing here, metaphorically speaking, is that I’m moving along the road a bit: a few metaphoric houses up the road, if you like. Similar sort of work to what I’ve always done, in many ways, but a much bigger picture this time. A much bigger picture. I’m not going to be looking (much) at the ‘enterprise’-architecture of some small bits of detail-level IT any more: I’ll be looking at the ‘enterprise-architecture’ of the whole darn planet…

Arrogant sucker, ain’t I?

In a way, yeah, of course it is, to say something like that. But if you look around on this blog and elsewhere, in effect that’s what I’ve already been doing, for years. All that’s really different now is that I’m making it a bit more explicit.

And to be blunt, looking around a bit, it really does feel as if I’m one of the few people anywhere who has a freakin’ clue about what’s really going on out there (answer: an MQ-9 mythquake [kind of like a worldwide Richter-9 earthquake, only worse]), what chance we have to stop it (answer: none at all), what won’t work (answer: just about everything we might think of as ‘normal’ or ‘business-as-usual’), and what might work (very-tentative-suggested-answer: something on the lines of a responsibility-based service-oriented enterprise model for a global economics, with systematic eradication of any concept of possession – including all concept of ‘rights’ – and total restructure of every possible aspect of politics at every level. In other words, just a few minor changes here and there… ). Seems like there might be a real need, then, for someone with my kind of background in futures, social-dynamics, skills-development, creativity, complexity, innovation, sensemaking and strategy, across a whole swathe of different companies, climates, cultures and continents. Oh, and there’s also enterprise-architectures, of course: reckon that might possibly be useful, too.

Yes: a real big need for that.

Kind of a big anti-want for it, though.

A very big anti-want.

Oh well.

But no problem, really. Do I think I can make a living out of it? Nope, of course not: I’m not that crazy. But I’m not making any kind of viable living out of enterprise-architecture, either, so what’s the difference? As long as I can pay my way somehow in this increasingly-insane ‘economic system’, that’s all I’ll need. And given that I’ve survived somehow for all these years, without ever having suffered the indignity of being a so-called ‘permanent’ employee, I reckon I’ll manage to keep going for a while yet. Somehow. Doesn’t really matter that I don’t know how: the way things are going, pretty soon no concept of a ‘plan’ is going to make sense any more, so perhaps I’m just getting in early to beat the rush?

Yeah, sure it’s lonely at times: I don’t have any real support at all, no family, no partner since literally decades ago, and at my age pretty unlikely ever again. Good: it means that there’s no-one else to get hurt on my behalf if I screw things up.

Sure it’s scary, desperately insecure: I don’t even have a home of my own any more. Good: nothing particularly to lose, then; nothing of that kind that can be used as leverage against me. And I can just up-sticks and go anywhere that I’m needed. Easy. (In principle, anyway… )

I’m useless at organising anything, events, stuff like that. Good: instead of desperately pretending that I can do everything myself, let other people do that stuff instead – they’re much better at it than I’ve ever been or ever will be. Just do my part of the work, and let others get on with theirs. Simple. (Interesting challenges on trust, of course… )

Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. Live this stuff that I’ve been talking about: rather than ‘making a living’, much better to go for ‘making a life’.

Crazy? Sure. Of course it is: never said it wasn’t. But then I come out of a family-background with a long anarchist-style tradition (of the more constructive if occasionally-quixotic Quaker variety, rather than the brainless bomb-throwing kind), and it’s about time I put those principles into real-world practice. Time to give something back – especially as, at age 60, I probably don’t have that many years left in which to do so. That fact matters, a lot. It also brings its own rather interesting sense of urgency…

So what does all this mean, in plain, ordinary, everyday terms?

Various things I won’t be doing:

1. I won’t do any more work here on detail-layer analysis of IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture such as TOGAF or Archimate (unless anyone specifically asks me for an opinion or whatever).
2. I won’t be presenting myself for any more contract-work as an ‘enterprise-architect’. (I’ll still be available to do spot-work commercial consultancy or training for most types of EA, in just about any industry that isn’t finance, banking or insurance – but I will expect to get paid for that, every time.)
3. I won’t offer any more ‘free’ advice on enterprise-architecture or whatever to people who can darn well afford to pay for it. (I’ll still be more than happy to help anyone in any other way – especially any of the upcoming ‘new generation’ of enterprise-architects.)
4. I probably won’t be going to any more ‘enterprise’-architecture conferences, not least because I won’t be able to afford it (unless someone pays at least my expenses, of course).
5. I won’t pander any more to people who to me seem arrogant, bullying, unwilling to think, and otherwise acting in an asinine or irresponsible manner (and yes, there’s been a lot of them I’ve put up with way too often over the past few years…)

Various things I will be doing:

1. I will be doing a lot more research and exploration on ‘big-picture’ themes, developing new types of tools and techniques to tackle those issues in a much more constructive way than as at present; and working with others to develop new toolsets and training-materials for these needs. (It’d be nice if someone else paid for some of that work, but being realistic I wouldn’t expect it, unless anyone else that I’m working with is getting paid for it too.)
2. I will be doing various types of consultancy-work with non-profits, citizen-groups and other organisations that are reaching towards a more constructive world. (Again, it’d be nice if I got paid to do some of that, but I’d only expect it from commercial organisations or government bodies, who should be able to afford to subsidise some of that other work at least.)
3. I will show the EA community and others how to apply those ideas, tools and techniques, within the conventional business context, such as with Enterprise Canvas and the like. (It would likewise be nice if sometimes people would at least offer to pay some of my expenses for doing this, but I do acknowledge that there are too many of us already in this same boat that I am with regard to ‘real-EA’.)
4. I probably will be going to a wide variety of conferences and other gatherings on broader-scope societal-change topics. (As ever, the real limit here will be my probable near-nonexistent income: so if you really want me at your gathering, please do find some way to subsidise my travel-expenses at least.)
5. Much of my work and writing will be a lot more ‘political’ and challenging for a lot more folks: in which case, sorry, but that’s just too bad, because none of us can afford to tolerate outright irresponsibility and abuse any more. (I am very clear about what is and is not abuse in the social context, by the way: see the ‘manifesto‘ on that, from my book Power and Response-ability.)

So that’s it: getting down to work in a different garden – a garden that’s a rather better fit, than that of current mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, for this admittedly somewhat-strange kind of toad.

Comments / suggestions / requests, anyone?

My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an overgrown tangle, and they didn’t have much of a clue about gardening, but it seemed a friendly sort of place. It even had its own toad, hiding in the humid dankness underneath a sprawl of strawberry-creepers that had crept in from under the fence from next-door.

It didn’t take long to see why the toad was there. Next-door’s garden was regimented, ordered, everything under control, just so. And all a bit sad, because nothing was thriving there. Beneath all that would-be perfection, the strawberry-patch was a mess of slugs and snails, stunting all the growth; what few fruit were left were all tiny. Yet over on my parents’ side of the fence, those same plants were producing a lush spread of abundant greenery, enough strawberries to keep a grocery going all on its own – and one very happy toad, who’d made very sure that there was not a single slug to be seen.

My mother realised what was happening in the next-door garden, and even offered to send ‘their’ toad over there. But the neighbour was adamant that she wasn’t having “that disgusting creature” in her perfect space: no way! And continued to fret over the fact that her once-imagined idyll was indeed dying…

Hence interesting that I’ve been writing about ‘the toad in the road‘, because I guess that’s what I am myself right now, in this garden we call ‘enterprise architecture’. A toad in the road: right idea, wrong place. Right idea for somewhere, I’d hope. But wrong place for here-and-now. Oh well.

Yeah, enterprise-architecture. You know, this could be a really nice garden? Especially if you got rid of most of this mess of concrete, and let those tired plants in their cracked concrete tubs get their roots down into the dirt at last. Plenty of potential and all that: to get the water flowing again, you might have to take a stick of dynamite to that ugly-looking paddling-pool that the last lot of kids built for themselves, over in the corner called ‘IT-centrism‘, but hey, it’s all here. Why not do it?

You’d wondered where all the wildlife went, but can’t you see there’s not much that can thrive in this kind of desert? A few bugs and wood-lice and a lizard or two, perhaps, but that’s about it. If you want it to work, perhaps plant a few things that can actually grow here: get a bit of shade going an’ all that. There’s a few plants of my own that might grow well here too, if given a halfway-decent chance: the Enterprise Canvas, perhaps, or that notation-agnostic metamodel; or maybe even a bunch of ideas about value-trees, about the service-oriented enterprise and the structure of management – kinda strange-looking at first, I know, but they really do work in this kind of climate. Only a suggestion, of course: it’s your garden, after all.

I’ll have to admit, though, that this isn’t really my kind of place that you’ve got here. Partly my fault, perhaps: I do know I’m kind of an Outsider – always have been, I guess – though I really have tried, I promise you. It’s just I really can’t cope with all the broken-down bits of machinery parked all over the place, and the possessiveness that still pervades everything: they do kinda get in the way all the time. And a bit too grey, too cold, too lifeless: too corporate, I suppose you could say? I’m gettin’ old, I s’pose: I need somewhere that’s a bit more comfortable with having real people around the place, a bit more aware of the anarchic nature of, well, nature itself? I guess I could do with a bit more of the bigger picture, too: and I don’t mind all those mythquakes that we can see coming down the road a ways, though I know they do worry some other folks a lot.

I’ll still be around, of course: if you need me, you know where to find me. And I’m always happy to drop by in your garden – especially if you find a way to bring it more back to life again.

But yeah, I gotta face the facts: this kind of ‘enterprise’-architecture garden ain’t no place for the likes o’ me – and out here at present I’m just another toad in the road.

So it’s “goodbye and thanks for all the slugs”, I guess? – because it seems like it’s time for this old toad to be a-movin’ on.

I was wandering around down town, doing the shopping. Outside this rather nice old traditional-style grocer’s shop, there’s a mob of 20-something students – Swiss, apparently – from the local ‘English as a Foreign Language’ college. Their lecturer is expounding about this shop, telling them in his somewhat condescending upmarket voice that it’s where they ought to buy real English food (??) to take home, and so on. Then he says:

If you see schoolboys walking down the road here wearing purple blazers, they are from the Royal Grammar School. They are the elite, the cream. At age 11 they have to take a special examination in mathematics and English, and only two percent pass that exam.

It’s kinda interesting to apply a services perspective to that assertion. All that the exam tells us is that it selects for ability in mathematics and native-language. Which means that those pupils will, in later life, probably be well-suited to doing tasks that deliver the kinds of services that make good use of those abilities. But that’s all that it tells us. Since every service is ‘just another service’, there’s nothing in there – nothing at all – that indicates that every one of those young students should therefore be described as ‘the elite’.

In service-architecture terms, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’ of the enterprise, and every service is necessary to the viability of the enterprise, hence it makes no sense to describe any category of services – or the people who deliver those services – as ‘the elite’. (Individuals, yes, perhaps; a specific category, no.)

In short, the only reason why those students with that specific set of (proto)-skills in that location would be called ‘the elite’, is because people who are like them and have similar skills want to believe that they themselves are ‘the elite’.

In other words, it’s nothing more than a myth – the kind of circularly self-centric fantasy that’s guaranteed to cause serious dysfunction in a service-oriented enterprise-architecture.

Oops…

And yes, it gets worse! All the way through school, these young students will be told, time and time again, that they are ‘the elite’. That they are entitled to special privilege and special attention because they are ‘the elite’. Which they aren’t, because it’s just a self-aggrandizing fantasy.

Oops…

And wait – yes, it gets still worse! These young people go on to elite universities, elite business-schools, to become elite businessmen, businesswomen. Which they aren’t, because, again, it’s a fantasy.

Oops…

And now, yes, it gets worse again! – because they go on to become ‘the elite of the elite’, the ‘captains of industry’, the managers, who are ‘elite’ because they’re managers.

Yet management is ‘just another service’. There’s nothing inherently ‘elite’ about that set of services at all: every service is ‘just another service’, and every service is, by definition, essential to the enterprise. In a service-oriented architecture, there is no service that is inherently more important than any other: that’s the whole point.

Hmm…

So let’s ask a very simple question – a very difficult, dangerous, politically-explosive question: if every service is ‘just another service’, why is it that as a category, those who deliver the category of services that are called ‘management’ get to control more, and are given more, and paid more – often so vastly much more – than those who happen to deliver a different type of ‘just another service’?

Because as far as I can see it, from a service-architecture perspective, the only reason that they’re paid more is because they purport that they’re ‘the elite’. Which they’re not, because it’s just an arbitrary, self-important fantasy.

A whole load of smoke-and-mirrors to prop up the fantasy, of course – no surprises there. But beyond that there’s nothing of any substance at all: nothing more than a plaintive little chant of “the elite are the elite because they’re the elite”, and kinda hoping beyond hope that we won’t notice how empty that claim really is.

Oops…

Y’know, there might just be a problem there?

—

[And by the way, yes, I did indeed go to that kind of 'elite' school as a child. Which is why I do know, first-hand,  just exactly how vapid, shrill and empty those claims really are... Hey ho...]

That’s perhaps the shortest summary to a request by Anthony Draffin, in a comment to my previous post ‘Not quite bus-pass day‘:

On a selfish note… It’s apparent that the common thread to dowsing, printing and enterprise architecture is your ability to look at a field holistically and apply logical thought to extract inconsistencies and errors, as well as looking at new ways of doing something more efficiently to meet the original aims. That’s a rare skill. Have you given thought to documenting how you go about doing this? While I imagine it’s the application of a number of taught skills, the way you put these together must be far from ubiquitous. Have you considered teaching this? Personally, as a 27 year old, I want to soak up as much of your approach and thought process as you’re willing to offer.

(Warning, this is going to be another (very) long one, mainly because there’ll be several case-studies.)

Amused that Anthony says he’s 27, because that’s about the age that I really got going on this. (A little earlier, actually: the first dowsing book came out when I was still 24. I used to have to apologise for not being the age people expected me to be, namely at least 75! )

I wouldn’t say that any of what I do is a ‘rare skill’, although it’s true that it’s not often acknowledged or respected – perhaps because, by its nature, it necessarily tends to be disruptive to any comfortable status-quo. I’ve been doing it since a very early age – for as long as I can remember, anyway, certainly way back in primary school – but it’s actually the standard approach used in most forms of design-thinking and the like, as taught in art-college or architecture-school or good engineering courses or even in the US military. It’s also what really happens in scientific research – see, for example, WIB Beveridge’s classic The Art of Scientific Investigation.

My own particular twist on it arose because I’m not much good at doing things, or making things (I tend to describe myself as ‘ambi-sinistral’ – the opposite of ‘ambidextrous’… ). Hence I tend to focus instead on the thinking behind the doing or making or whatever, always searching for the simplest way to do things, the most effective way, and so on. Kind of recursive, if you like, but it works well. Except for that little problem that it tends to be so darn disruptive…

Methods, mechanics, approaches

One place to start would be around skill itself, and the key themes of my Masters thesis, way back in 1976. Back there, I described a skill – any skill – as being made up of three components:

• the methods used in the skill
• the mechanics and other real-world constraints of the ‘objective’ context of the skill – that which is common to everyone
• the approaches, assumptions, mindset, paradigms, physical dexterity and other ‘subjective’ context for the individual (the ‘operator’) – that which is specific to the individual

What I found, very quickly, was that most people seem to focus on the methods used in any skill. But that actually misses the point: the methods used by any skilled operator arise from their own personal resolution of the mechanics and the approaches – the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ components of the skill. This is why using someone else’s methods doesn’t always work, and why ‘best practice’ can be dangerously misleading: the mechanics of the issue remain the same, by definition, but the context is different, and hence may well need different methods.

Focussing on method also makes it much more difficult to tease apart the separate threads of mechanics and approaches. It should be obvious that blurring the objective and the subjective is not likely to be a good idea, and yet that’s exactly what happens whenever we focus only on method.

In all skills-work – in fact in just about every human context – we also come face to face with Gooch‘s Paradox: “things have not only to be seen to be believed, but also have to be believed to be seen”. In an all too literal sense, in skills-work, reality is what we say it is: we actually create it, from nothing, or rather from a combination of imagination and hard work. (In this kind of context, it doesn’t really make sense to ask the question “Is it real or imaginary?”, because the only possible answer is ‘Yes’ – both, therefore neither.) To resolve Gooch’s Paradox, we treat the approaches – our assumptions and beliefs – as if they are part of the mechanics of the context. The danger is that we may forget that point about ‘as if’, and – if we think about those assumptions at all – think that they are part of the fundamental mechanics of the context, rather than an arbitrary choice to achieve some particular purpose.

Once assumptions creep in – in other words, whenever the subjective is blurred into the objective without conscious intent to do so – what we have is a context to which arbitrary constraints have been applied. Which places arbitrary limits on possibility. Which is kinda pointless, really. But the only way that we’ll be able to see that the constraints are arbitrary is to step back a bit, and re-separate the subjective from the objective. Hence a kind of recursive methods-to-look-at-methods, analysis-to-unpack-analysis, and so on. Which is what I do.

As I mentioned in my reply-comment, much of the ‘how I do what I do’ is already documented in various ways throughout the books, such as in Everyday Enterprise Architecture (which focusses on method in a business context) and The Disciplines of Dowsing (which looks more at ‘thinking about thinking’). The core of the latter book is the ‘four disciplines’ section (see the summary on the separate two-page reference-sheet) and the ‘seven sins of dubious discipline’ (currently listed only in the book): it wouldn’t take much work to translate those into almost any other context.

What I’ll use here is the Five Element / effectiveness framework that I use in a lot of my client-work these days (though often in somewhat covert form). It’s nothing special, in fact it’s little more than a recursive use of a pair of matched checklists. The first of these, as summarised in the ‘Five Elements’ chapter in SEMPER & SCORE, is a set of perspectives on the overall context:

• Purpose – what are we aiming to do here? and why? (see also the slidedeck ‘Vision, Role, Mission, Goal‘)
• People – who would be needed for this purpose? what skills and relations do they need? what are their mutual responsibilities?
• Preparation – what planning and logistics would be needed for this purpose? what assumptions and mindsets apply here? what are the key events that trigger action?
• Process – what needs to be done to achieve the purpose? when, how and with what would this be done? when is each process complete?
• Performance – what constitutes ‘success’, and for whom? what information and metrics are needed to keep everything on track? what would be needed to support continuous improvement?

The other checklist is a set of keywords on effectiveness, which are sort-of orthogonal yet also sort-of linked to the Five Element set. Listing these in the same order as above:

• Appropriate – is this on track towards the purpose?
• Elegant – does this support the human-factors in the context? (e.g. simplicity, ergonomics etc)
• Efficient – does this make the best (e.g. least-wasteful) use of the available resources?
• Reliable – can this be relied upon to deliver the required results?
• Integrated – does this help to link everything to everything else in a consistent way?

To assess a context, we can start from anywhere at all. The point is that we use these checklists not as linear lists, but as a reminder to keep looking round, bouncing back and forth between each of the interconnected themes in the two lists, looking at the context from every possible angle, and at every level from really-big-picture to finest-detail, building up a kind of hologram of the overall context, using one form of sensemaking to bounce off others, and so on. The book Real Enterprise Architecture provides a complete worked-example of this kind of recursive process as applied to whole-enterprise architectures.

Questioning everything

Looking back at the various areas I’ve worked in or with, there’s a fairly consistent pattern about what I’ve done and the sequence in which I’ve done it.

The first stage is just getting involved at all: taking the ideas and practices at face-value, and putting them into practice as if they are entirely ‘true’. That usually works for a while (not least because that’s what everyone else is doing).

I then allow myself to start to notice the niggles, the things that don’t quite seem to work, where ‘what it says on the tin’ doesn’t actually deliver what it says on the tin. The problem, of course, is that we can’t assess the validity of a logic from within the logic itself. Yet we also can’t actually work on the context without being inside the logic (or some form of the logic). This is where we hit Gooch’s Paradox head-on: we have to see it to believe it, yet also have to believe it to see it. The only way out of that dilemma is to start to use beliefs as tools – which can be kinda challenging…

In my experience, there are two parts to this:

• identify the big-picture theme for the overall context (the ‘vision’ or, as architects would put it, the unifying ‘parti‘)
• apply design-thinking tactics to question everything, switching beliefs in order to experience the context in different ways, and test the apparent results

The tactics to identify the key-theme(s) are usually straightforward. A classic example is the ‘Five Whys’: just keep asking “why?” until eventually we hit a ‘Because.’ – or rather, a real ‘Because.’ that makes some degree of sense, rather than one that’s just used to get people to stop asking awkward questions! These days I tend to look for a brief overview-statement – usually only about three to five words – that has a distinct three-part structure: it identifies the ‘things’ or concerns that matter to everyone in the context, what’s being done with or to those items, and why it’s deemed to be important. This gives us a stable anchor to which we know we can return, and against which we can test anything in the context.

Then, following standard ‘design-thinking’ tactics, we use a suite of ‘disruptive’ questions about the context – for example:

• what’s another version of this?
• what does this look like at a smaller scale, or a larger scale?
• what happens if we substitute something else for this?
• what happens if we invert some or all of the rules?
• is there a ‘term-hijack’ here? – does a small subset purport to be the whole, blocking the view to any other aspect of the context?

This is where things often get to be, uh, fun… – because it’s very common to find aspects of the context that a) don’t and can’t make any sense, b) clearly don’t work ‘as advertised’, in fact usually work against the nominal aims of the overall enterprise, yet c) there are key players with a lot of vested interest in ensuring that the status quo remains unquestioned and unchallenged. Don’t be surprised at this: it happens every time.

This is where a certain amount of dogged determination becomes essential… Also essential is a very clear, insistent emphasis on the big-picture, on holding to the overall vision for the shared-enterprise, because that’s often the only thing that will persuade people that there’s no ‘personal attack’ here, that instead the only purpose of the challenge and the enquiry is to make things work better, for everyone. (We have to be real about that, too: we need belief in ourselves in order to keep going, it’s true, but we need to keep questioning ourselves as well. It’s one reason why serious self-doubt is a chronic yet necessary occupational-hazard here.)

We need to keep hammering at this until we do start to get a clear separation between the mechanics of the context – which usually turn out to be surprisingly simple – and the approaches to the context – which are, by definition, individual and subjective. Then we can start to work towards new methods that work with the context under the current conditions.

The same seems to apply to just about any type of context: an individual’s personal challenges in developing their own skill, a business, a social context, a single conceptual tool, or an entire discipline.

Scattered throughout this weblog and the sister-weblog Sidewise, you’ll find examples of those techniques in use. Sometimes it’s reasonably straightforward, sometimes rather more controversial, but you’ll see in each case that’s it’s essentially the same principles, the same tactics.

I’ll also summarise here those same techniques in use in four different large-scale domains that I’ve been involved with over the decades: dowsing, desktop-publishing, domestic-violence resolution, and enterprise-architecture.

Example: Dowsing (1970s)

Big-picture theme: finding things, particularly where conventional (mechanical/physical) techniques either won’t work or are unavailable.

History: as a discipline, has been around ‘forever’, and often highly controversial – first from priests who regarded it as ‘the work of the devil’ etc, then later from would-be scientists who wanted to ‘explain’ it and couldn’t. When I first got involved, in the late 1960s, the field was pretty much moribund, with a random mixture of wild claims, erratic discipline, no formal methodology or theory-base as such, a long history of inconclusive scientific experiments, and the first flush of hype-laden New Age ‘thinking’ (if that’s the right term…). Most of the people involved were well into their sixties, seventies or more (which I, uh, wasn’t…). The key players consisted of a kind of closed ‘military club’ (water-finding being very important to an army on the move), a few variously-erratic practitioners (often with wild-eyed ideas about health and the like), a swathe of armchair-theorist camp-followers who talked a lot but did nothing, and a few people who really did know what they were doing and wisely kept themselves well away from the mess.

Conceptual mismatch: The most common assertion was that it was a special ‘innate’ skill that only certain ‘special people’ could do. Methods that often clashed or even flatly contradicted each other could lead to the same result; the same method used by different people would lead to wildly different results. Most of the theory in use – such as notions of ‘waves’ or vibrations’ or ‘radiations’ – was either meaningless or just plain wrong in terms of conventional physics. (Much of it did sort-of make sense as metaphor, but there seemed to be little understanding of the difference between active-metaphor and concrete fact.) Muddle-headed ‘New Age’ ideas merely added to the overall mess.

Vested interests: On the one side was the moribund ‘military club’, who liked the idea of being ‘special and different’, and/or the ‘right’ to tell the ‘lower ranks’ what to do, whether it made any sense or not. On the other side were the upcoming ‘New-Agers’, who were not going to let anything block their path to potential fame and fortune. (I’m being cynical, I know, but that’s exactly what happened.)

Assessment and action: Assess the purported theory, and scrap most of it: it’s meaningless. The only parts of the theory that do make sense and do have solid experimental backing revolve around perceptual psychology and physiology – particularly around weighted-sum merging of multiple channels (which is why there’s no single ‘the method’) and around edge-triggered reflex-response (which is why some experienced water-finders can’t find static water even when they’re standing on top of it). If some kind of tool is used, almost all of the tools act as some form of mechanical amplifier – if I move my hand a little, the tool moves a lot. (I’ve only ever found one case where that principle didn’t apply at all.) Materials, structures, theories and so on seemed to matter only because people believed that they did: in most cases, a simpler alternative would work just as well, if not better. Keep stripping it back to the bare essentials.

It is a true skill – but it’s not one that’s restricted to only ‘special people’. Instead, it’s a learnable skill: anyone can do it – though whether they may or will do so are entirely separate questions! (There was quite a lot of pushback from the ‘military club’ against the idea that ‘anyone can dowse’.) It’s also a skill that requires a lot of practice and a lot of discipline to get right. (Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of pushback from the ‘New-Agers’ on that point, and there still is – see the book Disciplines of Dowsing.) It’s also a skill which often requires a wide range of psychological ‘tricks’ to help people slide past Batcheldor’s ‘witness-inhibition’ and ‘ownership-resistance’ – in other words, “this isn’t happening, and if it is, it isn’t me”.

End-result: After a few months’ experimentation and subsequent practice over several years with a wide range of students, I’d stripped it down to the point where I could get most people started on the basics within less than two minutes, using two bits of fencing-wire from the garden as simple instruments. The notion that ‘anyone can dowse’ is now firmly established in the canon, and the teaching-methods that I developed (based on, self-responsibility, self-critique and continual-improvement) are still some of the most common currently in use.

Example: Desktop-publishing (1970s-80s)

Big-picture theme: getting ideas and information out into the public space.

History: I trained as a graphic-designer/typographer, and became professionally involved in typesetting in the late 1970s, with the early developments in smaller phototypesetting machines. (‘Smaller’ being a relative term here: the first system we bought required a room of its own and a separate darkroom, and cost more than my house.) The big bottleneck was keyboard input: the typesetting unit was capable of running much faster than a single operator. Although the internal technology was extremely complex, the input was not: some machines still relied on a very simple 6- or 7-channel punch-tape reader, using control-codes to extend the effective size of the character-set.

At the same time, simple but usable microcomputers were just starting to come onto the market. (My first microcomputer had only an 8-character LED display, hexadecimal keypad and 256 bytes of memory; the more usable Ohio Scientific systems that we first used for real had a proper keyboard but still only 8kbytes of memory, and the only storage was on audio-cassettes.) Almost all of these machines used a 7- or 8-channel character-set (ASCII or extended-ASCII); most also provided some form of direct data input/output for interfacing to other systems.

It seemed to me that there should at least be some way to use a basic micro as a much cheaper input-terminal, using simple code-translation and a standard hardware-interface. It also seemed probable that other people would want to do the same – taking control of their own publishing, driving a typesetter direct, or both. In the longer term, that could well be quite a large market.

Conceptual mismatch: This is best summarised by the phrase (exact quote, in fact) that “there is no interest in typesetting from microcomputers, and there never will be”. There were all manner of arbitrary demarcation-lines across the whole context, both on the pre-press side – such as between authors, publishers, unions and printers – and on the technical side – particularly between typesetter-manufacturers, computer-manufacturers and various hobbyists and hackers – most of which arose more from historical ‘turf-wars’, ‘positioning’, and mutual misunderstanding than from any concrete distinctions. On the union side especially, there were many arbitrary assumptions, based on the belief that technology could not and would not change, or if it did, it could not and would not be allowed to make any difference to existing processes or roles.

Vested interests: The entire context was riddled with vested interests, almost all of which were in conflict. A stream of intermediaries – agent, publisher, pre-press, press, retail – stood between author and audience. Typesetting-systems were expensive pieces of equipment, yet with not all that much to justify their cost: there was lot of money to made there, both from machinery-sales and from fonts and other consumables, and hence a lot of ‘need’ to protect those sources of income. Until IBM eventually stepped in, most of the microcomputer manufacturers were trying to establish themselves as ‘the manufacturer’, resulting in a plethora of mostly-proprietary, mostly-incompatible hardware and software non-’standards’ – at one point we had to buy two machines whose sole function was to read the two hundred or more different disk-formats used on the four distinct disk form-factors then in common use: 8″, 5.25″, 3.5″ and 3″. Weaving a path between all the different vested-interests and proprietary structures was, frankly, a time-wasting nightmare.

Assessment and action: On our first machine, we’d been told emphatically that it was physically impossible to connect a microcomputer; a weekend spent poring over technical specs and waving a soldering-iron around a bit on a prototype-board soon proved that ‘fact’ wrong, whilst the only software we needed at first was a straightforward lookup-table to translate between character-sets. It really was that simple. (We avoided warranty risks by using opto-isolators, so there was no electrical connection between the two machines.) For our later, larger systems – which were capable of typesetting a reasonable-sized book in less than an hour – the hardware-interfaces were already built in. This gave us ‘direct typesetting’ capability, but it still required operators to know – and use – the distinct formatting-codes for each type of machine.

The next step was to hide the complexity, using the format-code in common word-processors such as WordStar to trigger font-changes and the like. (I believe we were the first people to use style-codes, such that a single hideable code – *F1, for example – would change the entire style, including paragraphs, indents, font-family and so on.) At that point, people could use ordinary word-processors to typeset text: the first true precursor to desktop-publishing.

It worked, but there were still limitations. (Our main competitor, meanwhile, was using a mangled form of SGML which still required people to embed hard-codes in the text; in our system, all of the formatting could be invisible.) The main problem was that people couldn’t see beforehand exactly how much space any text would take up – a very important concern to two of our customers, who were producing page-spread books and partworks, Dorling-Kindersley style. Hence some serious code-hacking (all assembly-language, with multiple overlays to squeeze into no more than 40kb of memory) to create a post-processor that would copyfit line-by-line for the correct fonts and sizes, and output a symbolic result to a dot-matrix printer. This was probably the first viable attempt at a true desktop-publishing system – several years before Macintosh and, later, PageMaker.

End-result: I’m good at creating ideas and markets, and all the preliminary work that gets things going, but I’m not good at running businesses – that’s a different mindset entirely. Eventually we sold out to another pre-press company and (in an all too literal sense) I ran away, first to the US, and then onward to Australia. I believe it’s still running, and certainly made millions for the new owners. (I didn’t, of course.)

Example: Domestic-violence resolution (1980s-90s)

Big-picture theme: reducing and repairing the damage from social harm, particularly between individuals.

History: Fights and power-games between individuals in a domestic context have been part of the human story since forever, but had usually been largely covert and ignored as ‘a private matter’ for most of that time. It was brought into public notice in 1970s by women’s activists, most notably Erin Pizzey, founder of Chiswick Women’s Aid. Unlike Pizzey herself (who has always insisted that domestic-violence (DV) is a human problem, not a gendered one), most activists purport that DV is something that happens almost exclusively to women, and caused almost exclusively by men – so much so that some have called for the term ‘domestic-violence’ to be replaced always by the term ‘violence against women’. Most current law (e.g. US ‘Violence Against Women Act’), support-structures (domestic-violence help-lines) and formal theory (e.g. Duluth) reflect this assertion. I became involved in the field during the 1980s as a member of a pro-feminist men’s group who were taking up the feminist challenge that all violence was caused by men alone, and therefore men’s responsibility alone to resolve the (purportedly) ever-rising tide of men’s violence against women. The issues became more personal later when two of my lesbian friends asked me for advice after they had ended their relationship with a knife fight (without injuring each other, fortunately) but had been explicitly shut out from any help because no man could be blamed for the violence.

Conceptual mismatch: The theory was straightforward: men are the problem, women are the solution, and the only useful thing that men can do is blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in the world. Everything in my background supported that assertion, hence it seemed to make sense: self-blame had been a very deeply ingrained habit for me, going right back to earliest childhood. Yet the whole field seemed riddled with gendered special-cases: behaviours that were definitely violence if done by a man were, if done by a woman, either deemed ‘not violence’ or ‘indirectly caused by men, therefore men’s fault’. In the Duluth model, blame itself was classed as a form of violence only if done by a man, and only if the person being blamed was an adult woman: blaming of men (or in essence almost any other form of abuse of men), was explicitly not classed as violence. And the real catch was that, in terms of outcomes, it clearly wasn’t working: no matter how much we blamed ourselves, and blamed other men, the overall level of violence in the culture around us still seemed to continue to rise.

Vested interests: Looking around, it was very clear that there were a large number of players – mostly but not all women – whose identity and self-worth depended on putting men down, regardless of whether or not this actually helped women in general, or anyone in general. There were also very large sums of money, and large numbers of jobs, that depended on maintaining the assertions around women’s purported exclusive victimhood in this context.

Assessment and action: The first warning-signs appeared in one of our standard text-books, Paul Kivel’s Men’s Work: How To Stop The Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart, which is designed around a series of workshops for senior-school students. The book includes many oddly-unrealistic role-play scenarios in which an adolescent boy or young man is suddenly violent or abusive to a woman; yet the only real example of violence described in the whole book is an actual incident in which two girls had a full claws-out fight when one insulted the other in the classroom – and in which no boys were involved at all, other than to separate the warring parties.

After my lesbian friends had their knife-fight, we discovered that no violence-resolution material was available that acknowledged even the possibility that a woman could be a perpetrator of violence. The standard Duluth model defines violence as inherently ‘male’; on the Duluth Wheel, female pronouns are used exclusively throughout to indicate victim, and male pronouns exclusively for perpetrator, and mutuality (where both parties are both ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’ of each other and of themselves) – which clearly applied in my friends’ case – is explicitly denied. I decided to try a very simple thought-experiment: swap the gender-pronouns throughout, and see if it still makes sense in terms of real-world evidence and experience. It did: in fact for most of the Duluth categories of abuse it made more sense than the ‘official’ way round. Also – importantly – two key categories of abuse were absent from the original model: sexual abuse, and third-party-abuse. It became immediately clear that the Duluth model itself was structured as third-party abuse, primarily leveraged through other-blame – in other words, far from reducing violence and abuse, it was actually designed to increase it. (Whether that mis-design was intentional, or merely arose from incompetence and excess zeal, is a separate issue that I will not discuss here… – but the fact of its unfitness for purpose cannot be in any doubt.) A simple ‘de-gendered’ redesign resolved almost all of the structural problems, sufficient at least to satisfy my friends’ immediate needs.

That exposure of the extreme inadequacies of the original Duluth model forced our group to reassess all of our previous assumptions about gender and violence, and thence to look again at the research on whose purported facts we’d based those beliefs. I did two analyses of a much-published study on which Australian public policy was based – the first analysis on the public version of the paper and political assertions from it, and the second analysis on the original academic study, which took quite a bit of work to obtain, since it was not publicly available. Another colleague, as his MA thesis, undertook a meta-analysis of domestic-violence studies in Australia. The results were shocking. None of the original studies were based on defensible methodologies – in fact many were so riddled with basic methodological errors such as circular-reasoning that they were essentially meaningless. And in all cases, all of the methodological errors either inflated the female injury-rate or risk, diminished or denied the male injury-rate or risk, or both: there were no exceptions. In short, almost none of what we’d previously taken as ‘fact’ was fact at all. The only genuine facts we could establish was that domestic-violence was a systemic issue with some gendered overtones, and that although it that affected both sexes in different ways, overall it seemed to do so almost equally – though there were strong indications from hospital data and the like that the majority of victims were male, not female.

We then looked at public policy, and the provision of domestic-violence support-services. These too were based on the same fundamentally-flawed assumptions and the same unquestioned circular reasoning: women are the only victims, hence support-services are only available to women; and since only women use these services, this proves that women are the only victims. In some of our interviews we discovered that men who’d been abused – knifed, in one case – were referred to police for charges, simply because the models in use automatically deemed men to be the sole perpetrators, regardless of the actual context or evidence. In short, the entire domestic-violence resolution ‘industry’ it was, and still is, an unworkable and fundamentally dysfunctional mess whose structures and methods are all but guaranteed to cause far more harm than good: an archetypal example of the Shirky Principle that any institution will attempt to preserve the problem to which it purports to be the ‘solution’.

End-result: The domestic-violence ‘industry’ is the outcome of a classic example of a ‘term-hijack‘, in which a small subset of systemic issue is misframed as the whole, and strenuous efforts are made to deny or conceal any other aspect of that issue. In effect, the term-hijack converts a resolvable systemic context into a non-resolvable ‘wicked-problem‘, in which every attempt to resolve a problem is constrained by the structural myopia, inevitably making things worse with each iteration. Unfortunately, there are huge vested-interests in maintaining the term-hijack. Anyone who challenges it – as I and many others have learnt to our cost – is likely to come face to face with extreme violence from women who somehow purport that no woman is ever violent. It seems clear that resolving these structural problems would require a high level of honesty and humility from those players – an honesty that in most cases at present seems conspicuous only by its absence…

Some of the material I wrote is out there and in daily front-line use by others – with real success, according to the occasional emails I still receive on the subject. But to be blunt, after a decade of relentless ongoing abuse from almost all sides, I just gave up and literally threw away most of the work that I’d done… the structural dishonesties in this mess are so entrenched and so ‘political’ that I found it just too painful to be involved at all, and it still seems that resolving the mess would require fundamental shifts in societal attitudes and beliefs that would be unlikely to occur within my own lifetime. Oh well.

The issues are generic, though, and can be resolved at a more generic level. You’ll see how some of these exact same issues are addressed in the business-context in my book Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems and its accompanying ‘manifesto‘.

Example: Enterprise-architecture (2000s-to-present)

Big-picture theme: helping organisations and overall shared-enterprises become more efficient and effective (‘doing the right things right, on purpose’).

History: The main focus of enterprise-architecture is around the relationships between structure, purpose and business-execution.As a discipline, it’s been around for at least a century in various forms, such as Taylorism (‘scientific management’), operations-research and organisational cybernetics. I often describe it as based on a single, very simple idea: that things work better when they work together. Although my work often touched on it over the decades, I first became actively involved perhaps fifteen years ago, when trying to tackle issues around long-term knowledge-management in aircraft research. Over the past decade, most of my work has revolved around various aspects of enterprise-architectures.

Conceptual mismatch: The term ‘enterprise-architecture’ implies a very broad whole-enterprise scope. In recent decades, though, the term ‘enterprise-architecture’ has often been (mis)used to denote a very small subset of the real scope, relating to IT-infrastructure or IT-systems in general. This (mis)usage probably arose from a simple conflation of the term ‘enterprise- or organisation-wide IT-architecture’. The result, however, is a very serious term-hijack: the tiny subset of the overall enterprise represented by IT purports to be the whole, with all other aspects of the enterprise – including people, purpose, physical facilities and non-IT machines of any kind – either concealed or denied. In effect, it becomes all but impossible to discuss any aspect of enterprise-architecture without being forced to describe everything in terms of IT – even in contexts where IT-systems are either not relevant or not available.

Vested interests: There are huge vested interests in maintaining the story that ‘enterprise-architecture’ relates only to IT. Many, many billions of dollars are invested each year on IT-systems that purport to resolve inherently-complex enterprise-scale concerns such as customer-relationships, market-relationships, regulatory-compliance and the like. However, by definition, many if not most of these systems are incapable of resolving all aspects of the respective concerns, in effect converting them into non-resolvable wicked-problems; maintaining the ‘enterprise-architecture’ term-hijack makes it possible to conceal or deny the inherent dysfunctionality of the systems, instead maintaining the faith or fiction that the problems created can only be solved by yet another IT-centric system at yet further cost. There are also large vested-interests in training, certification and the like for IT-centric ‘enterprise’-architectures.

Assessment and action: The starting-point for assessment was a simple review of the term itself, deriving the natural-meaning via term-inversion. The ‘natural-meaning’ of a term is the meaning implied by the individual words of the term. The term-inversion here is ‘the architecture of the enterprise’: hence the natural-meaning is ‘anything to do with the structure and purpose [architecture] that underpin the emotional drivers and actions (the animal spirits of the entrepreneur”) in the shared context [enterprise]‘. The purported exclusive-association of enterprise-architecture with IT does not occur in the natural-meaning: in fact the role of IT in the enterprise-architecture is implied only peripherally, as a minor aspect of support for ‘the animal spirits of the entrepreneur’. In other words, what we’re dealing with here is definitely a term-hijack – and an extremely unhelpful one at that, because the constraint on the scope (i.e. ‘enterprise’-architecture constrained solely to IT aspects of the enterprise) has such a limited connection with the actual scope (which would naturally focus more around people than machines).

Most of my work in the past decade, and particularly the past five years, has been focussed on finding ways to highlight the term-hijack, to resolve the resultant problems and dysfunctionalities, and to create models, methods and frameworks to guide a true enterprise-scope architecture, in some cases all the way out to a global scale. The public outcomes of this work so far include several books, a couple of dozen conference-presentations and other slidedecks, and many, many weblog posts.

End-result: We are getting somewhere with this one. Most ‘enterprise’-architecture conferences these days do explicitly include some discussion of the enterprise-scope beyond IT, usually under a banner of ‘business-architecture’, and there’s much stronger linkage to true business-architecture models and techniques such as Business Model Canvas. The real danger now is there’s a tendency towards ‘business-centrism’ rather than ‘IT-centrism’ – in other words, where the architecture sub-domain of ‘the business of the business’ rather than the sub-domain of ‘the IT-systems’ becomes used as the base for yet another term-hijack. The crucial understanding that we’re still somewhat struggling to get across to most of the players in the field is that in a true enterprise-architecture, everywhere and nowhere is ‘the centre’.

But yes, we are getting somewhere with this one. Slowly…

Summary

So that’s what I do, and how I do it:

• explore a context that is of interest to me
• identify the conceptual mismatches that occur within that context, and that make it difficult to achieve effective results within that context
• identify the vested-interests that drive and maintain the current dysfunctionalities in the context, and, where possible, devise strategies and tactics to disarm and disengage those vested-interests
• assess the details of the dysfunctionalities in the context, and identify or design workarounds for those problems, and methods to work on the context when the dysfunctionalities are disengaged
• document the end-results in various forms, as appropriate

It’s a lot of work, and sometimes very painful work, but someone has do it?

A gentle warning on occupational-hazards

To anyone who might want to do this kind of work, I really ought to add some important caveats.

The work itself is actually not that hard. All it requires is a willingness to let go of assumptions, and tackle each of the issues with a rigorous attention to discipline, following the ever-changing rules of the different disciplines that apply at each moment whilst working in that context. Using beliefs as tools can be kind of challenging at times, but again it’s just another skill, and one that’s not that hard to build up over time.

It’s the social aspects of the work that are hard: sometimes very hard…

For starters, it’s often lonely. Very lonely. Part of that is because there aren’t many people who do this kind of work: at a guess, from what I’ve seen around the net and elsewhere, there may be as few as five or ten thousand people in the entire world who work in this space. Social-media does help to ease the loneliness a bit – the people I work most closely with are scattered literally across the entire globe – but it’s not the same as working in close proximity with close colleagues every working day.

Another part of the loneliness is that the feeling of loneliness – and likewise insistent sense of self-doubt – is actually inherent in the work. It’s almost an indicator of success: as Whitney Johnson put it in her HBR article ‘Disrupt Yourself‘, “If it feels scary and lonely, you’re probably on the right track”. To put it the other way round, the times when we feel most certain are probably the times when we’ve most likely missed the point. It’s hard, and it usually hurts, every single day: so if you can’t cope with a relentless, all-pervading feeling of failure, and yet somehow still create the required results, you really shouldn’t to do this work. There are plenty of other much easier ways to make a living, after all. (This isn’t a macho thing, “I’m tough” and that kind of garbage: in my own case, to be honest, I’m probably not suited to do most other kinds of work anyway. For me, though, there’s a real sense of ‘a calling’, an inner drive to do this work, whether I want to or not: and often that’s the only thing that keeps me going… )

Another crucial point is that whilst there’s a great need for this kind of work, there’s also a huge ‘anti-want’ for it. Every aspect of this work implies some kind of mythquake; and anyone who has a vested interest in the status-quo – which in effect that includes most of our would-be employers, amongst many, many others – will not want that mythquake to occur. It’s disruptive: it is, in a very literal sense, often anarchic. So for much if not most of the time, we’ll need to do the work ‘by stealth’, embedding it in other more conventional analysis-work or the like. Doing it ‘by stealth’ is often the only option if you’re an employee, and even then it can be risky: as one of my ProFuturist colleagues put it, “if you’re employed as a professional futurist, and you’re not being fired at least once every year or so, you’re probably not doing your job properly!”

In my own case, I’ve never been an employee: only ever a self-employed contractor, an independent consultant or running my own business. I’ve survived somehow, though often I don’t know quite know how – it’s certainly not an easy way to run one’s professional-life. But I’m well aware that’s not a viable option for many people, especially those with young families. If you are an employee, and you want or need to do this kind of work, you definitely need a Plan B – and work hard on building and maintaining your professional reputation, such that you can recover from being fired after that ‘one disruption too many’.

Another subtle problem that affects many of us arises from the fact that this work requires us to be very good generalists. The good part of being a generalist is that we’re able to learn fast and be interested in anything, at any level of the enterprise. The disadvantage is that, when people compare us to specialists, we almost always come off second-best – and the fact that we specialise in being generalists doesn’t seem to count, especially where the over-simplistic assessments of recruiters and the like so often come into play. In almost all of my contract- or consultancy-work in the past couple of decades, I’ve ended up doing a different (and much broader-scope) role than the one I was nominally employed for: the problem was that I somehow needed to employed for something in the first place, and that can be a real hurdle. So the catch for us is that we need to be at least as skilled as the typical specialist, whilst also being very skilled as a generalist. It’s not easy, and is one reason why the really good enterprise-architects tend to be older, often into their fifties or more – simply because it takes that long to build up the generalist portfolio and experience whilst embedded in what is (to be honest) often a complete waste of time and effort in a ‘required’ but irrelevant specialist role.

Overall, though, it’s probably the loneliness that hurts the most. But if you can cope with that, and with all of the other challenges of ‘the trade’, then yes, we definitely need you… come and join the club, perhaps?

Quite a lot, as it happens – though we might need to take a detour or two to get there, of course.

One point is that it’s not quite as simple as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’. In the classic formulation, the antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis: it doesn’t really add anything, and the so-called ‘synthesis’ is then little more than ‘the thesis after we’ve gotten the antithesis to shut up’, which doesn’t add anything much either. All a bit pointless, really.

So to make sense – to get some real value out of it – we need, as usual, to go back closer to the source. And as the Wikipedia page on Dialectic puts it:

Hegel did use a three-valued logical model that is very similar to the antithesis model, but Hegel’s most usual terms were: Abstract-Negative-Concrete. Sometimes Hegel would use the terms, Immediate-Mediated-Concrete.

The formula, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, does not explain why the Thesis requires an Antithesis. However, the formula, Abstract-Negative-Concrete, suggests a flaw in any initial thesis—it is too abstract and lacks the negative of trial, error and experience. The same applies to the formula, Immediate-Mediated-Concrete. For Hegel, the Concrete, the Synthesis, the Absolute, must always pass through the phase of the Negative, that is, Mediation. This is the actual essence of what is popularly called Hegelian Dialectics.

In other words, the antithesis is not a negation of the thesis, but a challenge to the assumptions on which the thesis is based – which then leads to a synthesis that makes real practical sense. And that starts to look a lot more like enterprise-architecture.

Or, more precisely, in the business context, the three distinct roles of business-analyst, business-anarchist, and enterprise-architect.

Which might need a bit more explanation.

The business-analyst role is well-understood, I think. That’s the ‘thesis’ part of the triad, the Abstract, the Immediate. As the name suggests, it’s all about analysis, often about what can be seen in ‘the Now’, about order, certainty, honing the algorithms, defining the ‘best-practice’ methods for making decisions. It’s very good at enhancing efficiency through careful calculation; very good at doing things right.

The catch is that the real world is not just about efficiency, nor only about doing things right: it’s also about doing the right things, about bringing it all together to enhance overall effectiveness. And with analysis alone, it’s all too easy to create something that is extremely efficient at going off at full-tilt but in the wrong direction – which, in terms of its effectiveness (or lack of it), can easily be worse than doing nothing at all.

Oops…

Which is why analysis alone is not enough.

Which is why we need those other two roles: the anarchist, and the architect.

The business-anarchist role is perhaps the least-understood of the three – certainly the least-popular, anyway. It’s the ‘antithesis’ part of the triad, the Negative, but also the Mediated. One of the key problems for analysis is that it’s entirely dependent on its assumptions: everything within that frame of assumptions would be valid enough if the assumptions are correct, yet analysis has no means within itself to test those assumptions, and make sure that they do indeed align with the real world of “trial, error and experience”. If no-one is willing to question the assumptions – or even admit that they are just assumptions - things can get kinda risky, or worse, very quickly indeed…

That’s a really crucial problem there, right at the core of all analysis; yet unfortunately it’s one that’s evaded all too often in a business context. And that’s especially true where the drive for ‘efficiency’ is allowed to override everything else. So if we’re going to get things to work well in the real world, we need some definite means to face those often rather unpalatable facts. And that’s where the business-anarchist role comes into the picture.

It’s an extremely important role, and also an extremely responsible one, too: namely, challenge every assumption. It’s not about ‘order’, but about ‘unorder‘ (to use Cynthia Kurtz‘s valuable term). It’s about challenging, but it’s not negative, not merely challenging for the sake of challenging: it’s about creating space for mediation, for sensemaking in a deeper, more directed sense. It’s not just about doing things right, but also about being sure that we’re doing the right things, too, making sure that every assumption has a solid basis, so that the analysts can do their job well.

And the architect role is about bringing it all together again. It’s the ‘synthesis’ part of the triad; but it’s also about the Concrete, about making things real, being effective – about doing the right things right in a concrete, practical way. It’s about bringing things together such that everything workswell  together, responsive to change as required, and as a unified whole. Where the analyst takes things apart, and the anarchist takes apart the thinking that takes things apart, the architect brings everything together again, by resolving the fragmentation in new, more effective ways.

Some people seem to think that the architect role is rather abstract. But it’s not abstract at all, because the architect is responsible for bringing everything in scope to real, usable, useful completion in the real world. It’s not abstract: in many ways it’s perhaps the most concrete that anything can get.

And yes, it does indeed all start from the abstract. Sort-of.

Yet the point here is that this is also a triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis; analyst, anarchist, architect. None of these roles stands alone: each depends on each of the others, always in dynamic tension with each other, dynamic balance: “the Concrete, the Synthesis, the Absolute, must always pass through the phase of the Negative, that is, Mediation”. And yet they’re also distinct and often very different roles. Tricky, that…

One way to resolve the architecture of that architecture is to have just one person doing all of those roles – after all, they’re different roles, not necessarily different people. But that can sometimes be quite a ‘big ask’, because each of the roles does demand different skillsets, different paradigms, even different worldviews – again, somewhat tricky. (It’s true, though, that the real ‘business analysts’ of the 60s, 70s and 80s used to do all of that, and many advocates of ‘design-thinking’ and the like would do much the same now. Most advocates of ‘real enterprise-architecture’, too.) But there are many different ways to do it, of course: “whatever works” is probably the best guideline here.

In a small organisation, or a country that has only a small pool of specialist staff, we might not have much choice, because there simply aren’t enough people around to do all the roles required – that was certainly my own experience in Australia over the past decade or so. By contrast, in a large organisations, we might well have the luxury to have separate jobs for separate roles. But whichever way we do it, we have to make sure that all three roles are adequately covered, are adequately supported, and that they do indeed work together in a unified way.

Analyst, anarchist, architect; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. What part(s) do you play in that triad, within your own work? And what happens if any part of it is missing, or out of balance, within your overall enterprise?

Over to you for comments and suggestions, perhaps?

[Many thanks to Anthony Draffin for the initial Tweet that triggered the idea for this article. ]

Have been thinking about this one for quite a while, following up on some great conversations with Kevin Smith (of PEAF fame) and Nigel Green (of VPEC-T fame) about Kevin’s concept of Enterprise Debt – an expansion into the whole-enterprise scope of Ward Cunningham’s concept of Technical Debt:

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation.

In classic IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture, Enterprise Debt occurs with any ‘quick-fix’ IT solution, or any solution that breaches the architecture guidelines. A lot of ‘shadow-IT’ fits into this category, of course. But exactly as with a credit-card, for example, the ‘debt’ doesn’t matter much if it’s cleared quickly: short-term debt is rarely much of a problem or risk, and if managed well does help us to achieve short-term goals. Likewise for longer-term debt, such as a mortgage or a car-loan: as long as we know that the debt is there, and that we’ve allowed for it and managing it, it’s not a problem. Yes, it’s a risk, but it’s a managed risk, and one that allows us to reach towards our longer-term goals. So, to take the metaphor back to IT-architectures, a large-scale solution that breaches the architecture-principles may indeed be a risk – but it’s probably not too much of a risk if we’re aware of it, are managing it and do have specific plans in place to ‘write down the debt’.

For enterprise-architectures and any of the other non-IT-oriented architectures, we take the same principles, and adapt them to the respective scope to identify and address the overall Enterprise Debt and concomitant risks. It’s really no different to Technical Debt, other than in its scope: the tasks to identify and address it are certainly much the same.

So far, so good. But it’s the hidden debt – the debt that we don’t notice or don’t know about – that can be the real killer here. Because we don’t know or notice that it exists, it keeps on building up and building up in the background, until suddenly the metaphoric bill is presented, and we have little or no way to pay it off. A classic example was Y2K – otherwise known as the ‘short-term thinking bug’ which comes back to haunt us again and again. In that context, the use of two-digit dates was a design decision that was sensible enough given the technical constraints of the time, but whose short-term expediency was never redressed, and came back to bite us big-time… a good example of a kurtosis risk.

In enterprise-architectures and the like, there are many sources for hidden risk of this kind, often quietly building up quite terrifying amounts of Enterprise Debt. Some examples to watch for:

• small ‘knock it up over a weekend’ applications and databases becoming used in business-critical processes [no documentation, lack of links to enterprise standards]
• a database for a single team, developed using office software tools such as MS Access or cloud apps, becoming used across a wider spread [security concerns, database stability in a true multi-user context]
• business-processes continuing indefinitely without review [loss of 'fitness for purpose', high efficiency but low effectiveness]
• anything that depends on or assumes specific silo boundaries or organisational structures [because those boundaries or structures may change at any time]
• anything that depends on a single individual or small team [serious maintainability-risks, risk of inability to review design-decisions]

We can tackle some of this with proper governance that provides an appropriate balance between the competing needs for agility and stability, such as in a ‘backbone’ governance-model. We also need a long-term view – often reaching out into decades, for many types of business-critical information and processes – and strategies and tactics for systematic ‘entropy-reduction‘ in the overall architecture.

To me, this is one of the most important tasks of an enterprise-architecture unit: addressing the issues of the past so as to support the needs of the future.

Yet there’s a really nasty booby-trap here, a huge source of hidden Enterprise Debt, of which we definitely need to be aware at every level, especially at an enterprise-wide scope. It’s a variant of Parkinson’s Law, often nicknamed the Shirky Principle after Clay Shirky’s aphorism: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution“. This is a classic wicked-problem whose symptoms include:

• people whose incomes and identities depend on ‘the problem’ not being resolved [very common in social-work contexts]
• ‘hero’-managers and other ‘fire-fighters’ whose prestige depends on having metaphoric fires to fight [hence have vested-interest against preventive strategies or tactics]

To say this is ‘political’ is an understatement… And unfortunately, by its business-anarchist nature, enterprise-architecture tends to highlight the inherent absurdities of these kinds of situations – which means that, when accidentally exposing this, architects themselves often tend to be attacked, often with extreme ‘irrational’ anger, in a classic shoot-the-messenger ‘defence’.

This does mean, though, that many organisations – especially in the government or non-profit sectors – are actually ‘their own worst enemy’. The people, the processes and even the structures will often in effect act to perpetuate the problem they purport to resolve. Tricky… especially for the enterprise-architects who work in those organisations…

There are some practical options, though, for enterprise-architects unfortunate enough to be faced with that kind of ‘mess’. These include:

• be careful never to describe any of this as anyone’s ‘fault’ – it’s a natural tendency at the systemic level
• use narrative or story-based methods such as SEMPER or Causal Layered Analysis to ‘surface’ the structural issues
• always reframe motivations and requirements in terms of being ‘for‘ something – never ‘against’ something

As enterprise-architects, we have to deal with the painful realities of Enterprise Debt as best we can. But first we have to learn to become aware of it: and warnings such as the Shirky Principle can be a lot of help in this.

Hope this helps, anyway – comments/suggestions, as usual?