Reality is that those ideas are very much in the ‘work in progress’ stage at the moment, and as yet still quite some way from a form that might make much sense to anyone else. To illustrate, for the past couple of weeks I’ve spent rather too many hours staring at and tweaking of a set of whiteboards that look like this:

In other words, it’s coming together, sort-of, but it’ll take a bit more time yet to clean it up into usable form. Watch This Space, perhaps?

A lot of this is still tentative, very much ‘a work in progress’. Yet what I’ve found myself returning to again and again over the past few days, whilst working on the design and workflows for the SCAN app, is a pairing of two words: belief, and faith.

[Don't worry, I'm not going to go all religious on you. (Well, probably not, anyway. ) This is still the same enterprise-architecture exploration about the context of SCAN, about sensemaking and decision-making at real-time, particularly in what some would term the 'Chaotic domain'.

Minor warning, though: this is written in English, and from the perspective of an Anglo culture. I think (believe? guess?) that what follows is close to generic across all human cultures, but note that you may well need to do some translation here, both linguistic and cultural.]

Where SCAN’s ‘Simple’ and ‘Not-simple’ are about about how to describe sensemaking, belief and faith seem more about decision-making – the actual moment of choice that immediately precedes each moment of action. In other words, decision-making in real-time. And because sensemaking, decision-making and action are all intertwined with each other within real-world practice, belief and faith also map onto the SCAN frame in much the same way as for real-time sensemaking.

[There's also a mapping to the full SCAN, that extends this outward to the scope where there is more time available for review, but I'll describe that in another post.]

In short, belief maps to the known, the certain, the Simple; whilst faith maps to the unknown, the uncertain, the Not-simple:

As in sensemaking, the crucial distinction occurs where the modality of the decision-choice changes from a Simple deontic true/false to a Not-simple true alethic logic of ‘possibility and necessity’:

– over on the left-side, belief provides a straightforward black-or-white choice: true or false, right versus wrong, culturally ‘proper’ versus ‘politically incorrect’;

– over on the right, choices are more blurry, more uncertain, more ‘shades of grey’ – or more colourful, perhaps – and the only guide we have is faith or trust that what we do is right. (Right in its own way, but still ‘right’ in some sense.)

Both of these are actually about the individual, about ‘I’. Which it should be, of course, because that’s all we have at the exact point of action: our own choice, and our own ‘response-ability’.

Belief is fast, and importantly doesn’t demand any personal skill as such: the whole point is that they’re deemed to be ‘true’ for all who enact them, regardless of who or what enacts them. (A belief may be believed to apply only to self – such as ‘nothing goes right for me’ – but is still held as an ‘absolute truth’ in that sense.) This has both advantages and disadvantages, mainly relating to how well the belief does match up to actual reality. Advantages include:

• simple beliefs are useful when the person enacting them has only a limited level of skill and ‘response-ability’ – “just follow the instructions, kid…”
• even for those with skill, simple beliefs are useful as a structured fallback for whenever the faith falters in the context and in one’s own ability – “when all else fails, follow the instructions”
• advising acceptance that some contexts are constrained by ‘laws’ of some kind – particularly the physical-world constraints implied by ‘scientific law’ and the like
• beliefs are also useful as a disciplined means to temper excess enthusiasm – “trust to Allah, but tie the camel first”

A classic example of a structured belief of that last type is the checklist - mapping out essential safety-checks and other ‘known truths’ prior to or during any activity that is inherently uncertain.

The disadvantages of ‘prepackaged’ belief-structures are more complex, and often rather more subtle:

• the usefulness of beliefs ultimately depends on the myth of ‘control’, the myth of predictability and certainty – none of which may be valid in a real-world context
• beliefs themselves can and do act as perceptual filters, potentially rendering invisible essential contrary information from the context
• as guides for choice and action, beliefs can apply inappropriate constraints to action in any given context – following ‘the letter of the law’ rather than ‘the spirit of the law’
• in much the same way, beliefs can be used to evade difficult or challenging choices – for example, ‘morals’ as ‘the lazy-person’s ethics’

Faith is often the only choice-mechanism available whenever the context is inherently uncertain. It also correlates closely to skill – so much so that, in essence, ‘skill’ is a proxy for the real-world reliability of faith in one’s own ability to work with the inherent uncertainties of a given type of real-world context. In other words, skill is what determines whether we really can do what we believe or hope we can do in that kind of context.

Sometimes, though, it isn’t about skill: it’s just about faith, or trust. Every change of belief requires ‘a leap of faith’; innovation or experimentation always requires us to accept that we don’t know what the outcome will be. (That’s very different from belief, where we do expect the outcome to be what we expect.) A modal-logic of possibility and necessity is the only place where ‘the impossible’ first becomes possible – and thence, through skill, becomes probable, then predictable, and eventually something resembling certain, a kind of ‘law’ in its own right. It may end up as a checklist or some other pre-packaged set of beliefs – but it always starts with faith, in the midst of a moment of inherent uncertainty.

As with belief, there are disadvantages to faith too: not least what we might describe as ‘misplaced faith’, where lack of skill – or plain old lack of awareness – leads to inappropriate outcomes. Whether we like them or not, sometimes the constraints of belief do apply – such as in most (though not all) assertions of ‘scientific law’ and the like.

So in practice we need to be able to bounce back and forth along SCAN’s ‘horizontal’ axis of modality. Sometimes we need to hold to a Simple true/false belief; sometimes we need to let go into the Not-simple world of faith and trust. And of course, recursively, there are no set rules about which one should always apply at any given moment – which means that this too is a skill in itself. It’s Complicated, perhaps, or Complex… yet in real-time action we don’t even have time for either of those. All we have is this decision, right here, right now – no time for anything else. Belief that we know what to do; or faith that the results we need will arise from within the chaos itself.

All of which means that, as enterprise-architects, we need to understand how belief and faith work within our organisation and enterprise, and provide structures to support them in real-world practice.

Enterprise-architecture implications

It’s essential to draw a distinction here between the individual and the organisation. Belief and faith are expressed in practice directly by the individual, or indirectly by proxy, such as via the design or operation of a semi-autonomous machine or IT-system. Yet in an organisational context, it’s the collective belief and faith that we want expressed in action – expressed by the individuals on behalf of the organisation, the collective.

In effect, that’s the key role of organisational culture – and despite the wishes of executives and others, it’s not as simple as it looks… For enterprise-architects, it also means that we often have to address aspects of organisation-architecture that are more usually the territory of HR and change-management and the like – which means that we have to tread carefully at times, and engage in some potentially-challenging negotiations. But the payoff is an enterprise-architecture that really works – for everyone.

The organisation’s beliefs-in-action are expressed in definitive statements such as work-instructions, reporting-relationships and business-rules. One of the architectural concerns here is to provide support such that these business-rules and the like are actually implemented in practice, in real-time decision-making.

To make this work, we in effect need each individual to take up those shared-beliefs as if they are their own personal beliefs. This is especially important wherever these rules must normally be followed ‘to the letter’ – such as in regulatory compliance.

It’s crucial to understand, though, that rules cannot be imposed onto individuals from outside, whether by fiat or threat of force. Although as an organisation we can give ourselves the illusion that this has been done, it rarely works in practice: instead, there will usually be a myriad of small ‘failures’, ranging from unconscious errors to covert rebellion, which effectively sabotage the intended functional impact of the rules. (The former will tend to occur more often in collective-oriented cultures, the latter especially so in individual-oriented cultures.)

What does work is to engage people in the rules – the ‘why’ as much as the ‘how’ and ‘what’. To use the terms from Hagel, Brown and Davison’s The Power of Pull, we create that engagement by shifting from ‘push’ to ‘pull’. In an enterprise-architecture, we do this by treating organisational-beliefs in much the same way as for organisational-values. The Enterprise Canvas model describes a generic structure for this purpose:

• create awareness of the rules-structure, its purpose and rationale, and the context for its use
• build capability to apply the rules-structure in real-time practice
• apply the rules-structure in run-time decisions
• verify and validate the usage of the rules-structure
• derive lessons-learned from the (attempted) usage of the rules-structure

Working with HR, change-management, process-management and others, we create what is in effect a PDCA-type learning-loop, to develop, apply and revise the business-rules and other belief-structures for the organisation.

The faith-in-action side of that decision-making modality-spectrum deals with anything that isn’t covered appropriately by business-rules and the like – which is a large part of most real-world organisational contexts. For enterprise-architecture, the two key focus-areas are skills-development, to enhance individual ‘response-ability’; and vision, values and principles, to enhance consistency in decision-making across the collective.

The skills-issue is one that is almost completely missing from most current-enterprise-architectures, especially those of an IT-centric bent. That’s rapidly becoming a lethally-dangerous oversight – see the Sidewise post ‘Where have all the good skills gone?‘ – and one that we need to address, working in conjunction with HR, organisational-development units and suchlike. EA will come into the picture by mapping out skills-requirements and competency-levels needed within enterprise-capabilities; the actual skills-development would usually be out of scope for EA, of course, though overall much of it would follow that generic structure for values as above.

The values-issue is one I’ve been pushing for a very long time as the true core of the enterprise-architecture: for example, it forms the topmost layer of abstraction in Enterprise Canvas, and thence acts as the anchor for the generic structure described above for values-management services. The reason why it’s important is that if the organisation isn’t clear about its values, then what will be used instead – as the drivers for ‘faith’-type decision-making – will be whatever values happen to be around for that individual. Which could be anything at all. Including not just a destructive ‘me-first’, but a really destructive ‘me-only’. In other words, not a good idea… clarity on values matters.

A lot more that could be said on all of that, but I’d probably best leave that for the moment. The only point that does need to be added here is the importance of story – the enterprise as story, the enterprise is the story – as the ‘glue’ that holds all of this together.

Overall, the real point here is this: that at the point of action – and despite whatever we might plan beforehand – decisions seem to be taken primarily on the basis of belief, or of faith or trust. Which means that, architecturally, we need to design for that fact. Not a trivial point, then.

More on this in another post soon, but any comments so far, anyone?

(Note: I’m using the term ‘enterprise’ here in the same sense as the IEEE-1471 standard, to mean any group of people who collaborate and share resources towards a shared aim. So a commercial organisation is an ‘enterprise’, but so is a society, a culture, a nation. There’s also recursive nesting, in that a commercial enterprise, for example, exists and operates within a broader extended-enterprise of partners and suppliers, and intersects with the enterprise of its customers and prospects, which exists within the wider enterprise of the market, the nation and so on, as described in my presentation ‘What is an enterprise?‘. If you place the boundaries too narrow, around the organisation alone, you’re likely to miss the point here.)

One of the characteristics of any enterprise is a set of ‘core beliefs’ – the vision, the values and so on. As I’ve explained elsewhere, such as in my presentation ‘Vision, Role, Mission, Goal‘, these are ‘defining characteristics’ for the enterprise, because in a very literal sense they define what the enterprise is. Even more, they also define the priorities for the enterprise: what is important, and what is not.

What’s interesting is that those core-beliefs, almost by definition, are not rational as such: they are chosen, often quite arbitrarily, as an anchor for the enterprise. If we ask why a given belief is there, the only real answer is “Because.” (with the full-stop/period often emphasised in the phrasing) – in effect, it’s beyond question. Perhaps more to the point, if we change that ‘Because.’, it ceases to be the same enterprise.

What’s even more interesting is that very often – perhaps even in every enterprise – at least one of those core-beliefs will be utterly absurd. It seems not to be a mistake as such, indeed in some cases is openly acknowledged as intentional: “credo quia absurdum est”, ‘I believe because it is absurd’, to quote one famous Christian ‘apologia’. In some – perhaps many – cases, overt expression of belief in the chosen absurdity appears to be a condition for membership; conversely, any questioning of the absurdity may lead to expulsion from the ‘tribe’.

(Many groups or cultures require new members to make an irrevocable break with their previous ‘belonging’ – perhaps symbolised by a literal shedding of belongings, for example, or – in the case of changing to a different country – formally abandoning the previous citizenship. Some sub-cultures – particularly gang-cultures – take this to extremes, marking the rejection of the previous mores and customs by committing what would be considered a ‘crime’ in the old culture: theft, burglary, violence, murder or worse, “creating guilt and complicity – a powerful initiation into their new lives”.)

We look at other cultures, and laugh easily at their absurdity whilst failing to look at our own – a point brilliantly made in Flanders & Swann’s delightful ditty from the 1950s, ‘The Reluctant Cannibal‘. Religions provide other examples: just about every one of them has at least one fundamental absurdity at its core – if only something that is absurd in everyday terms. “On the third day he rose again from the dead” – an absurdity in terms of everyday experience, surely? Or consider the gold plates supposedly discovered by Joseph Smith, that define the ‘Book of Mormon‘; or the Scientology belief that we all come from somewhere on another planet. And many of these beliefs have a somewhat circular, self-serving flavour to them: the notion of the Rapture, for example, in which only a select few will be saved; or the many, many cultures who seem to consider themselves to be ‘the Chosen Ones’, the special favourite of their own special deity. All utterly absurd, of course, from a ‘rational’ perspective.

But ‘rationalism’ itself is actually no more rational than the other religions, if we stop to think about it. The notion that the world has an identifiable order to it, made up of identifiable rules: compared to everyday reality, that’s pure wishful thinking, not to mention interestingly arrogant in its placing of ‘rationalists’ in the purported hierarchy of that order. Or look at everyday economics: the bizarre concept of the ‘rational actor‘, when everything we know about psychology and sales tells us that almost all human decisions are ultimately not rational. The same is true for science: despite its pretensions as ‘guardian of the truth’, in reality there is no lack of evidence for Paul Feyerabend‘s assertion that there is no ‘ultimate truth’ in science, that the common notion of ‘the scientific method‘ is an absurd delusion and that the only valid principle in science is “anything goes“, and that we may need to defend our society against science as much as against religion or any other ‘irrational’ belief.

There’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with any of this absurdity, in fact there’s a great deal that’s good. Absurd though they may be, they do at least seem to create social cohesion and meaning, so perhaps the only real test of each belief would be in terms of whether they’re useful rather than ‘true’. And in terms of what they help people achieve, some absurdities are frankly magnificent:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
[US Declaration of Independence, 1776]

The blunt fact is that not one item of this statement was true at the time: “all men are created equal” was clearly absurd in a culture whose economy was based on overt slavery, and the notion that anyone was “endowed” with “inalienable Rights” by an imagined “Creator” was frankly laughable to any ‘outsider’. The document’s creators knew all of that, too: they knew it was nonsense, in terms of the everyday certainties of the time. And yet that absurd belief works, in a very real, tangible, human sense – which is the whole point of such absurdities, after all.

Yet there are also unintended-consequences of each absurdity, many of which may put its real value at risk. For example, the inconsistencies between the lofty ideal of “all men are created equal” versus the blatant inequalities of the real world has led to continual conflict, even war, as the various groups who were manifestly not included in that initial ‘all are equal’ – negro slaves, women in general, immigrants, workers in factories, the peoples of the much-manipulated ‘banana republic’ colonies – struggled (and still struggle) to be acknowledged as equally ‘equal’. And the notion of “inalienable Rights” has led to a tendency to ignore the real responsibilities from which those imaginary ‘Rights’ arise, and a nation slowly collapsing under the sheer weight and wastefulness of its litigation and law. With the result that there’s less and less “Life, Liberty and Happiness” to be had…

Which means that we need to be very careful about those unintended-consequences – identifying them, their sources and impacts, and possible remedies for each, as appropriate. But there’s a catch and a big catch at that: the absurdity is a foundation-stone for the group itself. If we disturb the absurdity, or even overtly call it into question, we could inadvertently destroy the integrity of the group. Which is not a good idea – not least because of the all-too-common tendency to ‘shoot the messenger’, to punish the bearer of any bad news…

Which, by a roundabout route, brings us back to enterprise-architecture and business-architecture – because exactly the same issues will apply in the organisation and the enterprise.

Each enterprise has its own foundational beliefs – each with their own absurdities, each in turn with their own unintended consequences. So as enterprise-architects, we need to identify what those are, their sources and impacts, and possible remedies for each, as appropriate. And we need to do all of this almost by stealth, because disrupting any inherent absurdity may well trigger an unexpectedly extreme response. Interesting…

To make it even more ‘interesting’, we need to note that the same applies to every group and sub-culture and work-team and business-unit and professional discipline within and intersecting with every level and layer of our organisation – which provides plenty of opportunities for clashes between the respective absurdities. Ouch…

And this also applies in relations beyond the organisation itself. The organisation connects with its market and the broader enterprise – whatever that may be – by sharing at least some of its beliefs and vision and values. What absurdity-clashes occur here too? (For example, the belief that organisations exist to serve, versus the belief that they exist only to make a profit? – a clash that will often be highlighted in any work on corporate social responsibility.) In what ways can we resolve those clashes, often without ever overtly acknowledging that the absurdities exist? What are the unintended-consequences both of the inherent absurdities in the respective belief-systems and of the clashes between the belief-systems? How do we resolve those – again often without overtly acknowledging that they exist?

Other even-more-complex clashes occur in large multinationals. Each local subsidiary operates in its own context, reaching its own ‘balance of absurdities’ with its market and environment; but the parent company often expects and demands that the subsidiaries should align themselves with the unacknowledged assumptions and absurdities of the parent’s commercial and social culture – in the US, perhaps, or Germany, or Japan, or some other distant land. Identifying and resolving those clashes has been a key professional focus for me over the past few months – and no, it’s not easy, not least because of the layer upon layer of unintended-consequences that need to be unravelled and resolved in the process.

In the end, what it comes down to is this: many if not most of the foundational-beliefs of individuals, groups, organisations, enterprises, entire nations, are absurd. Utterly absurd. Trying to force those absurdities into a more ‘rational’ form is not a good idea: not only does it create further unintended-consequences, but it’s a proven and painful way to drive ourselves mad. By contrast, if we openly admit that it is absurd, we’re likely to be dismissed as insane. But there is a solution, as the great computer-trade consultant Gerry Weinberg explains in his classic book The Secrets of Consulting:

It seemed as if I had only two choices: remain rational, and go crazy; or become irrational, and be called crazy. For years I oscillated between these two poles of misery, until I finally hit upon another option: become rational about the irrationality.

Being rational about the irrationality may perhaps seem a little crazy at times, especially in the eyes of our more ‘rational’ colleagues; but it does lead towards something that does work, and that does keep the inevitable unintended-consequences down to the bare minimum.

So yes, a belief may well be absurd; but the absurdity is there for a reason – and often very good reasons at that. So as enterprise-architects we need to embrace the absurdity – not fight against it, but work with it, to help create the results that each enterprise will actually need.