Tom Graves / Tetradian

How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture.

So let’s put these questions into practice.

Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping [CSM]. Recently, though, I’ve also ‘enjoyed’ yet another attack from Dave Snowden, in which he made two key assertions:

• that the cross-map process used in CSM is not a ‘mash-up’ but a “hash-up”
• that the entirety of CSM and, by inference, all of the other sensemaking tools and techniques that I’ve developed for enterprise-architecture and related fields are “invalid … in certain essential aspects”

He gave no evidence or reason as to why the cross-map process is supposedly so invalid as to be a “hash-up”, or any details as to what any of those purported “certain essential aspects” might be: so in essence, all we have from him is a circular ‘proof’, that it must be ‘true’ because he asserts that it’s ‘true’. This is a classic form of unprincipled-attack, one which most of us will face at some time or other in enterprise-architecture and the like.

His assertion is that CSM has no value; yet since that assertion itself has no rational basis, there’s likewise little point in trying to use any kind of rational defence. Probably the only meaningful response is ‘proof-of-the-pudding’, to demonstrate in practice that it does have value. And if it does have value – in other words, that it presents insights that had not previously been available, and might not have been available by any other technique – then, in turn, that should demonstrate that the attack does not have merit. We probably wouldn’t expect the attacker to understand this point: but it may help in our relations with others, in a more professional context.

So perhaps I ought to thank Snowden here, because he’s indicated the obvious candidate for this practical demonstration: what I’ll do here is apply context-space mapping to Snowden’s Cynefin framework.

And let you be the judge as to whether this cross-map technique has any practical value.

(This will, again, be long – my apologies…)

Read more…

Why is it that some mornings start off with such a flood of ideas and connections that there’s no way to get it all down and done in the day? Hmm…

[One urgent point first: this is not about Cynefin. I'm not going there: don't worry. It's in the title only because I thought that if you're a Cynefin practitioner, and you don't already know Inayatullah's 'Causal Layered Analysis', you may well want to add it to your complexity-toolbox. If so, the SCCC categorisation (Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic) may help you to hook that technique into what you already do. That's it: you can ignore everything else here. Just a friendly Public Service Announcement for you, that's all. ]

As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about ‘the wrongs of rights‘, and why I think they’re seriously problematic at every scale of an enterprise-architecture.

On Causal Layered Analysis

What came up this morning was a thought that Causal Layered Analysis [CLA] might be a useful tool for ‘the rights problem’. CLA was originally developed by Sohail Inayatullah around a decade ago, and has since expanded into a sizeable body of theory and practice, especially in the futures-domain. For more detail on the practical technique and the ideas behind it, see Sohail’s original paper on CLA (as published in Futures, October 1998) and the Wikipedia article. Here’s the introduction to the paper:

Causal layered analysis is offered as a new futures research method. Its utility is not in predicting the future but in creating transformative spaces for the creation of alternative futures. Causal layered analysis consists of four levels: the litany, social causes, discourse/worldview and myth/metaphor. The challenge is to conduct research that moves up and down these layers of analysis and thus is inclusive of different ways of knowing.

The way that CLA works in practice is indicated by the paper’s subtitle, ’poststructuralism as method’: we apply academic-style ‘deconstruction’ (from linguistic-analysis etc) at each those four layers, or four ‘ways of knowing’, moving up and down the layers to elicit more information and experiences about and views on the overall context.

[Before reading any further here, I'd strongly suggest having a wander through those various materials on CLA - not least because without doing so, much of what follows may not make much sense. ]

The view within ‘the litany’ tends to be a bit simplistic, a very polarised, rule-based and often Other-oriented view of the world – “they should”, “they shouldn’t be allowed to…” and so on - a relentless ‘litany of complaint’. The ‘social causes’ view tends to be a bit more nuanced, more aware of real-world complications; the ‘discourse/worldview’ more complex again; and… Well, you can see where where this is headed, because it obviously suggests a crossmap with the SCCC categorisation of ‘ways of knowing’:

Which is kind of interesting. And which suggests a whole stream of other potentially-useful crossmaps.

[Cynefin practitioners might want to stop reading at this point, because everything onward from here is an exercise in context-space mapping - a different technique. Some of it may look familiar at times, but I should emphasise that it's not 'legitimate Cynefin'. (Probably not 'legitimate CLA' either, but I doubt Sohail would mind as much.)]

Context-space mapping with domains of Causal Layered Analysis

To extend this context-space mapping [CSM], we can identify distinct ‘phase-boundaries’ between the domains in this ‘stack’, such as:

And we can also crossmap those domains with other views – for example, a Jungian-derived set of categories that align well with the CLA set, the set of sensemaking/decisionmaking tactics from the Cynefin framework, and another matching set of decision-drivers:

• ‘the litany’ : Simple : inner-truth (‘Priest’) : “sense, categorise, respond” : rule-based
• ‘social causes’ : Complicated : outer-truth (‘Scientist’) : “sense, analyse, respond” : algorithms
• ‘discourse/worldview’ : Complex : outer-value (Technologist/Magician) : “probe, sense, respond” : experiment, patterns, guidelines
• ‘myth/metaphor’ : Chaotic : inner-value (Artist) : “act, sense, respond” : principles, values

This suggests, for example, that ‘the litany’ would have a strong tendency towards over-certain and over-simplified notions of ‘the Truth’, endless blaming of ‘the Other’ without any form of self-reflection or self-analysis, and knee-jerk responses via over-simple categories, usually predefined by some self-appointed ‘Priest of The Truth’ in an opaque and often literally-unprincipled way. Which might kinda suggest a new verb, ‘to murdoch’, as in ‘to murdoch the truth’? (for which the shorthand might be ‘Fox News’? )

[I'm not saying that's 'the truth', by the way: that would itself be an overly-Simple view. Context-space mapping is more a Chaotic-domain technique, a way to elicit ideas that may be of value in a given context, but they may also not be of value in that context. That's the whole key to understanding CSM: its usefulness, but also its risk, is that it depends on having the skills and experience to determine what is or is not of potential value in a context. Please do take care, because misplaced notions about 'true' or 'not-true' can be disastrously misleading here.]

This crossmap also conflicts quite a bit with the standard Cynefin description of the Chaotic domain that kind-of implies the Chaotic is somewhere we’d usually need to get away from as quickly as possible. The CLA mapping here suggests instead that the Chaotic is a valid and important domain in its own right – somewhere that might well be challenging at a deep personal level, but also where we might want to stay and explore for a while, until the depths get a bit too much and we need to come back elsewhere for air. But notice that in context-space mapping, that kind of apparent-conflict is perfectly okay: both views are ‘true’, the concern is more about which view is useful for a given purpose.

Anyway, at present, this is still a single-axis ‘vertical stack’; yet that last crossmap suggests it’s also a kind of two-axis matrix. To resolve that, we can twist the ‘stack’ into a Cynefin-like layout, with a central ‘the-everything’ domain to remind us that both perspectives are ‘true’:

Which is interesting in itself – for me, at least, because it brings up more ideas about how and where and in what contexts to use CLA, and when to switch between the different types of deconstruction that apply in the respective CLA layers.

Causal Layered Analysis, time-compression and social stress

Previous experience with this type of context-space map also suggests another crossmap-overlay, in this case another vertical axis of timescale, from real-time at the base to infinity at the top:

Which for me is a bit of an eye-opener, with important implications for CLA. The point is that any sensemaking and decisionmaking in the Complex or Complicated domains – ‘discourse/worldview’ or analysis of ‘social causes’ – will take time: a fact that will be painfully obvious to anyone who works in those domains. So as the available time gets squeezed – whether because we’re moving towards real-time anyway, or because of social-panic and similar pressures – we end up being forced more and more into the sensemaking/decisionmaking spaces of the Simple and the Chaotic: otherwise known as CP Snow’s ‘Two Cultures‘, the classic worldviews of the sciences and the arts respectively. (We might also note, using CLA recursively, that the assertions of their respective paradigms become more and more extreme as we move towards real-time.)

What this also suggests is that when a culture is under stress, it will automatically tend towards this kind of ‘Two Cultures’ dichotomy between ‘Truth’ (Simple) versus ‘Value’ (Chaotic) - which, yes, is a dichotomy that itself often becomes over-Simple. The ‘Truth’-meme will tend to dismiss anything ‘not-True’ as ‘anarchic’, but its inherently constrained set of categories will, almost by definition, never be sufficient to deal with inherent-uncertainty: hence the kind of ‘collapse into chaos’ described in the Cynefin model. On the other side, the ‘Value’-meme is – again almost by definition – seemingly unlikely to generate any kind of stable categorisation via which a Simple-domain mode can make sense.

What we see in practice is that as the social stress increases and the links between people fragment, those Simple categories of shared ‘inner-truths’ – “what is True for we” - tend to separate out into self-specific ‘inner-truths’ – “what is True for me‘. This also leads a loss of awareness of the necessary mutuality of responsibilities that underpins all social constructs such as ‘rights’, such that ‘our rights’ becomes reframed solely in terms of ‘my rights’: “we hold these truths to be self-evident” morphs into a self-centred demand to the Other to “hold my truths to be self-evident”, and so on.

And without shared-categories, any social structure based on a Simple ‘sense / categorise / respond’ will by definition start to break down. The usual result is a spiralling descent into an out-of-control litany of complaint, first to ‘What’s in it for me?’, then ‘Me first!’, to a fully self-centred ‘Me-only!’, and eventually a truly chaotic cacophony of ’Me! Me! Me!’ – otherwise known as ‘kiddies’-anarchy’. In a very literal sense, the Simple inherently becomes chaotic. And there doesn’t seem to be any direct ‘truth’-based path back from there, other than via some forceful imposition of rule and rules: either the ‘dictator’s gambit’ or, in rarer cases, the ‘Truth of the Prophet’.

Yet from the opposite side of the ‘truth/value’ dichotomy, what does seem to work is a re-focus on ‘inner-value’, on deep-principles and, especially, deep-myth. It has a surface appearance of the Chaotic, but actually develops its own simplicity: a functional and, often, highly-disciplined form of anarchy, rather than a dysfunctional one. Given that sensemaking/decision-making pattern of ‘act / sense / respond’, the very act of expression often means that whatever arises automatically takes on a social form.

Again, from practical experience, these context-specific images seem to act as ‘seeds’ around which directed action can coalesce – much as would happen in a more usual move into the Complex-domain, except that the time-pressures or social-context pressures mean that it actually remains within the ‘pressure-cooker’ of the Chaotic. The more that the focus can be held in this mode of the Chaotic-domain, te more ideas can be created – and the more the emphasis is held on the decision-making guides of the respective principles and values, the more likely it is that these ideas and images will be experienced as ‘of value’ within that context. The ways in which directed-action can coalesce around these ‘seeds’ can sometimes – perhaps often – lead to enough of a structure to enable a Simple-type ‘sense / categorise / respond’ mode of decisionmaking: in other words, something that is more generally actionable than a highly-personal ‘inner-value’. Which, in turn, can provide enough of an anchor for a more balanced and principles-guided way out of the crisis – a ‘values‘-based way back to ‘truth’.

To summarise this in much shorter form, what this suggests is that the key people in a major social crisis are the artists and the storytellers. The military-commanders and managers and the priests – the ‘truth-holders’ who maintain order – may come to the fore before the collapse, or after the recovery has started: but in the midst of the crisis it is those who normally live close to Chaos to whom the baton must be passed.

A practical summary

Cross-mapping Causal Layered Analysis with the SCCC-categorisation and the ‘now’-to-’infinity’ timescale can deliver some useful insights about how to address high-stress social contexts – such as the kind of ‘mess’ that our entire global economics seems likely to be heading into at present. The main points I see arising from the cross-map include:

• Causal Layered Analysis in likely to be a useful technique in whole-enterprise architecture
• time-compression (reduced time for decisionmaking, often combined with high-contextual stress) is likely to squeeze sensemaking-decisionmaking into a tight dichotomy between Simple and Chaotic SCCC-domains
• Simple delivers consistency under high social-stress, up to a critical collapse-point, and the Chaotic appears to be a potentially-dangerous distraction
• under very high social-stress, Simple tends to collapse into dysfunctional-chaos, whereas Chaotic is usually able to regenerate sufficient basis for rule-structures that restabilise the Simple
• use CLA in the Simple domain (‘the litany’) to identify risk of collapse: the risk increases with increasing social-fragmentation from ‘we’ to ‘me’
• use CLA in the Chaotic-domain (‘myth/metaphor’) to identify and support principles and values that can guide directed action during the peak of the crisis

Some points specific to whole-enterprise architectures:

• identify Chaotic-domain ‘natives’ (people who naturally work at the CLA ‘deep-myth/metaphor’ layer) such as design-thinkers, artists and, especially, story-tellers within the shared-enterprise
• work with these people to identify and express key principles and values within the shared-enterprise that would be viewed as ‘normative’ – i.e. a ‘preferred direction’
  [warning: these principles and values must be allowed to emerge from the collective shared-space, and must be respected as such - they will fail if imposed, or even appear to be imposed, from 'outside']
• ensure that the usual ‘truth-holders’ are aware of and accept that there is a critical point at which they must let go of ‘control’, must allow the Chaotic domain to be what it is, must relinquish authority to the ‘story-tellers’, and must accept and renegotiate with the ‘new order’ that arises out of the ‘guided-chaos’
  [warning: refusal to follow this long-proven success-pattern, or attempts to 'take control' too early in the transit through the Chaotic-domain, will guarantee failure for everyone concerned, including the 'truth-holders']

In effect, this is a method to define a governance-process for use in contexts where a conventional rule-based approach to governance will naturally break down – an interesting architectural recursion!

Anyway, enough for now: over to you for comments/suggestions etc?

Every discipline is blighted by their own versions of an all-too-common problem: “For every difficult, complex, challenging question, there’s at least one clear, simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer”.

In Australian parlance, that type of magnificently-misleading ‘wrong answer’ is known as ‘the toad in the road’.

Every ‘trade’ has its toads, in some form or another. In the case of enterprise-architecture, given our necessarily very broad scope, we do seem to have rather a lot of them. Oh well.

It’s a toad. It sits there, blocking the way. In reality, it’s not actually that big, but it somehow demands our attention, making it difficult to deal with anything else. But we can’t just drive over it, stomp on it, squash it into a literally bloody pulp: I know that some people would do that, but it does have its own right to live, after all. Yet we do need to be careful: some toads are downright toxic. And, it’s well, kinda, yuck… no-one seems very willing to pick it up and put it politely out of the way… Oh joys…

Yeah: that kind of problem.

So how do we deal with ‘the toad in the road’?

It’s different in every case, of course.

Some of the toads in our space are really no problem: they’re just in the wrong place, that’s all. Some of them are positively genial, the kind of toad that, if it had a hat, would doff that hat with a broad smile and an offer to share a slightly-chewed slug. Like all toads, of course, they’re stubborn and they’ll stand their ground, which isn’t exactly helpful when they’re in the middle of the driveway and we need to get moving for the day; but they’re usually quite cooperative as long as we’re respectful about how we shoo them back under the strawberries instead.

Roger Sessions‘ IT-oriented version of ‘complexity’ is one such toad: it’s fine for IT, but for enterprise-architecture it’s an over-extension of ‘order’ into a realm of inherent ‘unorder’, and it really doesn’t work. Likewise John Zachman‘s notion of ‘engineering the enterprise’: it would make sense if an enterprise was an aircraft, which, however, it isn’t. Oops. In both cases, it’s definitely “right idea, wrong place”; and yes, we do all kinda know it. Sure, there will always be arguments about the positioning of that kind of toad: but people like Roger and John are unfailingly courteous and polite, so much so that it’s always a pleasure to disagree with them yet again.  It’s just a kind of game we play from time to time, and we all know it’s a game – sort of how a toad would really like it if the driveway would turn itself into a strawberry-patch because that’s what they know best, and it’s somehow our fault that it isn’t.

There are other kinds of toad that are somewhat similar, but they often seem a bit brainless, so it’s lot harder to negotiate with them. The real problem is that there’s just so many of the darn things: they turn up everywhere, all crawling over each other beneath our carefully-tended bushes and shrubs, digging around for worms and grubs, and generally making a right old mess of everything in the process. Their all-pervasive slime and stench is… well, let’s just say we wouldn’t call it pleasant? – and they don’t really help in any way in the garden.

At present, the dominant toad of that type in our space is IT-centrism, though there are signs that a relatively-new species of business-centrism is beginning to move into our enterprise-architecture garden as well. Perhaps we shouldn’t mind so much, but it’s difficult to get any rest with the constant croaks of “Cloud! Cloud!” and the like… Sigh… Unfortunately, it is hard keep them out of the garden – and if we do somehow succeed in doing so, we’d probably block out all the friendly toads as well, which would be a real loss. Other than the mess that they make, though, these toads are fairly harmless, and there’s probably not much we can do anyway until they get the other side of their current breeding-frenzy (otherwise known as ‘sales-hype’ and ‘certification’). In the meantime, we just need to be careful where we tread, and keep on tidying up the mess as best we can.

There are a few types of toad that we really don’t want in the garden – in fact we need to apply considerable care to keep them out of the entire metaphoric country. These are the cane-toads of a trade – so poisonous that they’ll kill off just about everything in sight, just by their mere presence. Yikes… The real tragedy of the cane-toad, though, is that often it’s initially thought of as some kind of saviour – as was true of Taylorism in our industry’s case, for example. But the reality is that they’re seriously toxic, in almost every possible way – and that toxic nature soon wipes out any possible value they may have had. Not a good idea…

Some disciplines – social-work, in particular – seem beset by cane-toads on every side; by contrast, we don’t seem to have any at present in enterprise-architecture, which makes us fortunate indeed. There’s some risk that IT-centrism and the like could turn into cane-toads, but they don’t seem to have done so as yet – though they’re certainly enough of a problem for us as it is. Taylorism and its more recent sub-species such as BPR and over-hyped ‘business-rule engines’ have been fairly serious cane-toads for us in the past, but each seem now to have faded back into a more natural niche in the overall enterprise-architecture ecosystem. The existence of cane-toads, though, should warn us to be very careful of what we introduce into the enterprise-architecture garden, and to be wary indeed of the ever-present risk of unintended-consequences.

And there a few types of toad that are kind of in the middle – literally in the middle, too, because often it seems that all they really want to do is get in the way. In some cases there may only be one individual of a species in our garden: but like the brainless toad, it somehow manages always to be right in the middle of where need to be – and it won’t budge. At all. Unless it can do so in order to get in our way again… It’s perhaps not as toxic as the cane-toad, but it’s definitely in the wrong place – yet will not respond to any kind of reason, or any request to move on. It just sits there, puffing itself up like a bullfrog, making lots of noise, demanding our attention, and generally acting like it’s the only thing that could matter to anything or anyone in any way. It could perhaps be of use elsewhere in the garden: but since it won’t move there, we never really get much of a chance to find out. What it somehow never manages to accept is that in reality it’s nothing special – it’s just another toad. That’s all. A toad in the road: another darn nuisance that we could really do without…

For enterprise-architecture, IT-centrism has been a bit like that, though it is getting somewhat more amenable these days. All the hype around Cloud is getting to be a bit too much of a toad-in-the-road these days, too. But for me at least, by far the worst toad of this type is Cynefin. It seems we can’t ever talk about complexity without Cynefin insisting on getting in our way. We struggle to talk about even the simple or the complicated without accidentally invoking its unwanted presence. We can’t talk about uniqueness or inherent uncertainty – the business sense of ‘the chaotic‘ – without Cynefin demanding that it alone knows the truth about that space – when in reality it has nothing useful to say other than that we shouldn’t be there. Much like IT-centrism, it has perhaps rather too many characteristics of a cult. And whilst in principle it could be useful in enterprise-architecture, we can’t make much use of it in practice, because its promoter endlessly insists on barging into our space, spitting venom at anything he regards as ‘heresy’ - literally, ‘to think different’ in any way from himself.

We’ve all spent too much time hiding in fear from those attacks: I know way too many people – myself included – who’ve had to invoke Bob Sutton’s ‘No Asshole Rule‘ in that person’s direction, too. The bleak reality is that I’ve spent way too much time and effort pandering to his insatiable demands – much like the pointlessness we supposedly ‘must’ go through in order to get round a toad that endlessly insists on putting itself in our way, and then blaming us for the resultant conflict.

After the last attack, though, I took a more careful look at his snarky putdowns, in which he dismissed my work as valueless, a “hash-up”, “invalid in certain essential aspects” – yet notably failing to give any details as to how or why it should be so regarded. Hmm… time to stand up for myself, for once? So I’ve spent the past few days proving, to myself at least, that my work on context-space mapping is of value, by using it to assess Cynefin itself in terms of its usefulness – or lack of usefulness – for our enterprise-architecture discipline.

The results have been, uh, interesting… (I’ll publish it here if anyone wants, though I’d warn that it’s kinda long even by my standards…) It certainly confirms that, in present form, Cynefin is indeed likely to be useful in the Complex domain; but it’s of questionable value in any other domain, and inherently worse than useless for anything in the Chaotic domain. Another interesting point was that, despite its promoter endlessly railing at anyone who dares to use Cynefin as a categorisation-framework, that’s exactly how he himself uses it in ‘his’ much-publicised HBR paper [PDF]. And that analysis also highlights some nagging suspicions that the base-level Cynefin Framework is actually a Simple-domain technique that’s merely masquerading as a Complex-domain tool – which would be neither helpful nor wise.

Perhaps the most disturbing point, though, is what came up from a more detailed cross-comparison from the context-space map. That’s that the simplified version of Cynefin that’s all that most people see, and the way in which it uses its purported theoretical base in complexity-science, make it an almost perfect tool for (mis)use by any consultant who wants to pander to the fears of worried executives, and provide them with spurious ‘evidence’ that they’re ‘in control’ of something that, by definition, cannot be controlled. That’s not good – doing that would be seriously dishonest, so surely no-one would be so unethical as to do that, would they? And yet that temptation is built right into the very fabric of the framework… worrying indeed…

But the most important point this is this: it’s just another toad. Yes, sure, for our own safety, we might well need a shovel to scoop the wretched thing up: and, despite the strong temptation to use the shovel in another way entirely, we can toss that toad into another discipline’s garden where it might be more at home – and then make darn sure that it doesn’t come back again into ours. That’s probably the best way to deal with that type of toad.

So that’s four types of toad-in-the-road we all have to deal with, perhaps rather more often than we’d like:

• the friendly toad that gets in the way a bit, but is really useful in the right place
• the not-much-use-for-anything toad that gets a bit too much in the way for a while, especially when it’s over-excited
• the darned-dangerous toad that we need to keep out of our space at any cost
• the bloomin’-nuisance toad that we’re best off to toss out of the garden, and keep out as best we can

What’s your experience of ‘the toad in the road’? What are the various types of toad that you have to wrestle with in your own work? And how do you best cope with each?

Comments/experiences/suggestions, anyone?

[Update: A reminder, because a couple of people already seem to have missed this point: in this context, the 'toad' is not a person, it's an idea - "a clear, simple, easy-to-understand wrong answer". For example, the idea of IT-centrism is an example of the second type of 'toad'. This is very important indeed: for example, in no way would I describe either Roger Sessions or John Zachman as 'a toad' (though knowing them both, they might quite like the image above of "doffing a hat with a broad smile and offering to share a slightly-chewed slug"... )]

In the previous articles about context-space mapping with the Enterprise Canvas, we looked at the topmost layer, the extended-enterprise and enterprise-descriptor or vision; then the next layer down, summarising all the player in the enterprise ecosystem; and took a first high-level look at the organisation’s business model with an exploration of value-proposition and business-relationships. All of that was moving ‘top-down’ through the enterprise, so we took a brief detour to see how the same principles can be used for ‘bottom-up’ strategic review, where a re-think of existing technology can lead to a new strategy and even to a new enterprise.

We now do another sideways move, to explore how we might use a modified version of the classic Zachman framework to assess the content and activities of each entity (or service) in scope.

Read more…

So far in this series we’ve explored the key concept of the extended-enterprise, used that to summarise the ecosystem in which the organisation operates, and started to model the organisation’s value-proposition and business-relationships.

Up until this point we’ve been working top-down, starting from the most abstract layer, the ‘extended-enterprise’. But we do need to to remember that there’s no reason why we have to work only in this direction, and often many reasons why we should make use of the more freeform approach that context-space mapping will allow. And in the usual serendipitous way – via an article in IndustryWeek, ‘Assessing Product Innovation Assets: What’s in your attic?‘ – we now have a useful reminder that the vision and strategy for an organisation may also be reconstructed bottom-up.

Low-cost innovation doesn’t have to be boring or incremental. Sometimes true innovation is as easy (and inexpensive) as evaluating the technologies and capabilities you currently have and expanding them to a new industry or customer base. It is a particularly powerful product innovation strategy during an economic downturn, yet too few companies today are taking advantage of it.

[An] important message for business leaders: “Use something you already own to generate income in a whole new way.” Truly innovative and resourceful manufacturers can embrace this message by reevaluating their existing assets, intellectual property, and product lines to develop completely new streams of revenue with little investment. The assets are already in their “corporate attics.” All a company has to do is unlock the revenue-generating power of those assets.

So let’s use the examples from that article – and a couple of others – to see how this works, in terms of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas.

Read more…

So far in this series we’ve explored enterprise-vision (Enterprise Canvas row-0) and high-level business-context (row-1) in a fairly straightforward way. It’s been much the same as any other conventional ‘top-down’ strategy-development, except that we haven’t really mentioned our own organisation at all as yet. (That’s coming shortly. )

A few important points have come up in the comments to those two articles, though, which are worth reiterating here before we move on.

One is to remember why we’re doing all of this. It’s not about abstract ‘blue-sky’ thinking: it’s about building a stable platform for organisational change. In enterprise-architecture, this needs to be a platform in which all of the other architectures – business-architecture, process-architecture, skills-architecture, values-architecture, security-architecture and, oh yes, all the IT-architectures too – can all interweave and interlink and intermesh into a single unified, dynamic whole. But although we talk a lot about the extended-enterprise here – especially in these ‘higher’ layers – this isn’t actually for anyone else at all: unless someone seriously-senior decides otherwise, all of this is solely for our own organisation (or client, if we’re doing this work as external-consultants). Working this way, whatever we develop is always in the context of this broader extended-enterprise: but our own organisation (or client) becomes more and more the centre of our attention as we move down the layers. That transition of emphasis starts to happen here. In short:

In enterprise-architecture, we create an architecture about an enterprise, but for an organisation.

It’s really important to remember that point – not least because it’s the organisation, not the extended-enterprise, that’s paying our bills!

Another point that came up in the comments is that the usual nine-cell structure of the Enterprise Canvas can be a bit misleading in these upper levels. The nine-cell structure is really a kind of functional-decomposition – who’s handling what interfaces, and why. But functional-decomposition assumes or describes specific interfaces and relationships – and we haven’t even got that far yet. In row-0 and row-1 we only deal with each entity as a whole, without any internal subdivision into cells. It’s only here, in row-2, that we start to introduce the idea of relationships and roles between entities, which eventually leads us to relationships and roles within entities, which leads us in turn to that nine-cell structure. If you try to use the nine-cell structure in rows 0 or 1, or in most of the work in row-2, you may have missed the point somewhere: at those levels, it’s only about each entity as a whole.

And finally, I would hope that by now you’ll have realised that this can be a lot harder to do than it might seem at first glance. It’s so easy to fall back to organisation-centric habits, where the organisation is placed as the sole centre of everything. The blunt fact is that it isn’t that ‘sole centre’ at all: in fact, the organisation only has a reason to exist if it’s placed within the context of its extended-enterprise. If we don’t understand that broader context, we would have nothing to guide us when that context changes – which, these days, can happen on a literally moment-by-moment basis. One of the keys here is that the description of that enterprise is literally emotive – it drives change. So although a lot of thinking and analysis will be needed here, ultimately it’s not a rational matter – it’s about what feels ‘right’, about identifying what is valued. This is especially true of the vision-descriptor: we need to keep exploring that context-space until we hit upon a phrase that can engender emotions and commitment that are literally strong enough to get people out of bed in the morning.

Anyway, time to move on: time to start looking at the business of the enterprise, and of the organisation itself. To summarise where we’ve gotten to so far with this example, we’d established a row-0 ‘Enterprise’:

We then started a Zachman-style row-1 ‘Context’ with a conventional market-based view of our enterprise, with our own organisation as its centre:

Which didn’t show us many options. But as we started to explore what that enterprise-vision meant in practice, and what kinds of stakeholders would be engaged in that vision, we realised that the actual enterprise was much broader than our current market:

Which should create many more strategic opportunities than we were able to see before. To make this work, though, we first need look more closely at the meaning of a common business-term: value-proposition.

Read more…

In the previous post in this series we did a quick review of context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas, and set out this into practice with a real-world example that, for me, is very close to home: rethinking my own enterprise-architecture consultancy business.

We started at the top layer, aiming to identify the core ‘enterprise’ within which I work. From exploring my own professional history, it became clear that the main focus of my work is about enterprises themselves, of any size, and always with the aim of enhancing enterprise effectiveness. From that, we ended up with an initial enterprise-descriptor – or ‘vision’ – of “creating more-effective enterprises”.

Notice, though, what’s happened right here, in that paragraph above. In trying to summarise that initial rather clunky vision-statement – ‘creating more-effective enterprises’ – we’ve accidentally hit upon a better one: ‘enhancing enterprise effectiveness’. It reads better, has a smoother flow to it, a poetry almost. It does describe what I’m passionate about – and finding that passion is central to the success of an enterprise. And ‘enhancing’ is actually a much more accurate term for what I do: I don’t often create enterprises in the sense that, say, an entrepreneur would do, but I do work to enhance their effectiveness. So note that this process is typical of what happens in context-space mapping: for example, we arrive at a ‘solution’ – in this case, the initial ‘vision’-descriptor – which itself quietly dropped us back into the ‘sensemaking’ space. So the trick here is to notice what’s happening, notice these little serendipitous events – and learning how to do that is a real skill in itself. To quote one of my favourite books, William Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation:

If these discoveries were made by chance or accident alone, as many discoveries of this type would be made by any inexperienced scientist starting to dabble in research as by Bernard or Pasteur. The truth of the matter lies in Pasteur’s famous saying, “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.” It is the interpretation of the chance event which counts. The role of chance is merely to provide the opportunity and the scientist has to recognise it and grasp it.

Anyway, that’s what we now have as the ‘row-0′ or ‘Enterprise’ layer for the Enterprise Canvas model of my own enterprise:

Now what? Very pretty and all that, but what do we do with this?

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Over on the LinkedIn Business Architecture list, my colleagues Pat Ferdinandi, JD Beckingham and Ron Segal have all helped a lot in challenging me on the Enterprise Canvas concepts. Pat in particular has been has been pushing hard for some more concrete examples of how it all works in practice.

On the other side, I haven’t really posted anything here as yet on the ‘final’ version of the context-space mapping methodology. There are a few scattered posts from a few months back, but the main description is in the chapter ‘Day 8: Putting it into practice’, in my most recent book, Everyday Enterprise-Architecture [at present you can still download the complete PDF e-book via that link].

So it seems worthwhile to develop a worked-example to show how all of these tools and techniques fit together in real-world use.

And for me, right now, the obvious example to choose would be my own work and business. I’m a futurist and maker of conceptual tools, working mainly with the arcane abstractions of enterprise-architectures: none of those attributes and emphases are exactly conducive to fame and fortune… It’s true I do get by well enough at present, yet I would like my work to be better known and more commonly used, and – no surprises here – it’d be good if it could bring in a better income, too. So how can I make that happen? What do I need to do that’s different from what I’m doing now? What do I need to change in the architecture of my own enterprise?

And I’m not alone in this: I know a lot of enterprise-architects and others – especially those of us working in the very new field of whole-of-enterprise architectures – who are in much the same boat at present. In our own quiet ways, all of us are wrestling with much the same questions:

• What business am I in? – really?
• Who else would be interested in what I’m working on? What value do I add right now? – if any?
• Where could I add value? In what contexts?
• With whom would I need to work with in on this? Who would be my prospective partners, clients and other business-relationships?
• For whom could I most add value? Who would pay for it? – and why would they pay for it?
• How can I describe that value? How could I prove that value?
• How would I deliver that value? How would I prove that I’ve delivered it?
• How much could, would or should I charge for this?

And so on: all pretty fundamental questions, really – especially in business. Sounds like a good candidate for some serious exploration – which is where context-space mapping and the Enterprise Canvas come into the picture.

This’ll probably take several posts, but let’s get started.

Read more…

Reading James Taylor’s recent piece “Business rules are king“, pretty much every one of my enterprise-architecture alarm-bells went off.

Yes, it’s a good article – recommended reading. And I would strongly agree with its implication that there’s a real and urgent need for discipline around business-rules. But the reason for the alarm-bells is that it’s promoting business-rules as ‘the answer’ – and for the most part IT-based ‘business-rules engines’ at that.

Which us places straight back in Taylorist territory, along with all those other classic IT-driven business failures such business-process re-engineering. Not a good idea…

The reasons why it’s not a good idea are three-fold:

• placing all the business-rules into an automated system will lead to a ‘fit and forget’ attitude unless there is a very strong emphasis on rule-maintenance – one of many ‘human factors’ that were forgotten about in BPR’s rush to ‘IT-ise’ all business processes
• identification and codification of business-rules assumes that the rules that can be derived from the people who run the existing processes are sufficient, invariant, accurate and complete – which, as early-generation knowledge-management also discovered, they rarely are…
• the viability of using automation for decision-making is dependent on the context – a fact of which frighteningly few IT-system designers seem to be aware

There seems to be a view that everything can and must be reduced to simple rules, following a cart-before-horse thinking that everything should be done by IT, and simple rules are what IT handles best. In other words, dangerously back-to-front. It’s bad enough trying to get anything useful out of IT for decision-support; but using IT for all decision-making – which is the ‘nirvana’ that the article would evidently prefer – is likely to be lethal. And I don’t quite know what we as enterprise-architects can do to prevent this headlong rush into repeating the exact same mistakes as in BPR and the rest – all that’s different this time is that it’s more explicitly coming from the ‘rules’ part of the process, rather than process-implementation overall.

This is clear if we look at it from the perspective of context-space mapping:

The point is that there’s a spectrum of abstraction of rules: principles sit at the low-abstraction end of this spectrum, rules sit at the high-abstraction end – in fact a conventional ‘rule’ is actually an extreme abstraction of a principle that applies to a specific context. If we try to use the wrong level of abstraction, especially in the wrong context or wrong type of context, we are all but guaranteed to hit serious trouble. And I see little to no awareness of that fact in most of the current literature on business-rules: instead, there seems to be an assumption that just about everything can be reduced to simple binary rules that can be implemented by simple IT, because that’s what we want to happen. In other words, the entire approach seems driven by little more than wishful thinking – which again is not a good idea…

IT-systems and simple business-rules work well together: both operate on a binary true/false logic, and both will enable high-speed binary-logic decision-trees – in other words, over on the lower right-hand side of the usual Cynefin-derived context-space base-map.

Most IT-based analytics – over on the upper-right of the base-map – work on the same binary logic as the simple systems, but introduce the ability to handle more and more layers of complication. The catch is that each layer of analysis takes a finite amount of time – which takes it further away from the ‘Now!‘ demanded by real-time decision-making. And the only real result of increased computing-power has been to increase the levels of complication in the analytics, sometimes beyond anyone’s ability to understand it – as was the case with the software systems used in many of the risk-calculation models that drove the current financial crash.

IT-systems are still not good at handling non-binary modal-logics – “the logic of probability, possibility and necessity”, such as expressed in the MoSCoW set of requirements-priorities of must, should, could and can wait. Humans are very good at modal-logic; IT isn’t. James Taylor’s article refers to pattern-based decision-making, which places it somewhat on the upper left of the base-map – but note again that each pattern-match must always take a finite amount of time, and it does not fit well with the underlying binary-logic of current IT-systems. Using IT as decision-support for human decision-making is generally okay, but the more that IT is involved, the higher the risk of what Dave Snowden describes as ‘pattern-entrainment’ – in other words, premature selection of a pattern, trying to force-fit a pattern to the context rather than ‘listening’ to the context itself. Current IT is getting much better at near-real-time pattern-matching, such as face-recognition or smile-recognition on most present-day digital cameras. Yet as anyone who’s used such systems would know, they’re nowhere near accurate enough to decide when a picture is actually any good – and sometimes we don’t want a smile in the picture. Much the same applies in business: using automated pattern-matching is great for decision-support, but extremely dangerous for decision-making.

And no IT-system is likely to be much good at dealing with real-time chaos, ‘the new’, where no possible pattern exists because it is new – but again, real people can handle decision-making in such contexts via skills and principles. In those contexts, there are no rules – and yet business-rule proponents seem to promote the delusion that their ‘business-rule engines’ can handle everything.

So I’m wary: very wary. Before letting any of such systems loose on any real-world context, I would want to make very sure that they’ve done the appropriate context-space mapping, and matched the decision-making methods to the respective contexts. But I don’t see much evidence of that: what I see instead is way too much wishful-thinking, and an almost desperate desire on both the business-side and the IT-side to try to force the world to fit their respective delusory dreams of ‘order’ and ‘control’. Oh well… Guess we have to wait and let them fail yet again, even more expensively, and then set out to tidy up the mess? – though I do worry that we’re getting close to the point where we’re no longer able to afford such expensive mistakes, in any sense of the word…

(This series of posts explores a concept of ‘context-space’ which in part draws on a categorisation immortalised in a certain well-known diagram. It must be emphasised that this is not about ’That Welsh Framework‘ (aka twf) which that diagram illustrates: for details on twf, please contact this company. I apologise for these absurd aliases, but regrettably their necessity has been forced upon us by others.)

We seem to be iterating steadily towards a full description of what I’ve termed context-space mapping (as a more permanent name than the temporary label ‘tinc‘). For example, there’s been some very useful discussion on the previous post, especially by enterprise-architects Paul Jansen and Sally Bean. Paul Jansen followed this up with another Tweet:

@tetradian May the ‘chaotic approach’ be the key to #tinc? http://bit.ly/amJa1o

In fact this leads to what is probably the fundamental difference between twf and context-space mapping (aka tinc): the role of the Chaotic domain. This particularly applies in terms of the respective views of repeatability within the context.

In the hope of preventing yet more repercussions, I won’t say anything about twf‘s approach at this point, other than to express my opinion that, in the terms of context-space mapping, its focus is primarily on the Complex domain, which in turn leads to an emphasis on contexts that are ‘partly-repeatable’ in highly complex ‘unordered’ ways.

Context-space mapping, however, needs to cover all repeatability-types. As twf‘s proponent indicates, the Simple domain of presumed-repeatability is covered by Taylorism et al.; the Complicated domain of analysed-repeatability by hard-Systems Thinking and the like; and the Complex by twf and so on. But there’s so far been little or nothing to cover the Chaotic domain of ‘barely-repeatable’ events and processes. So in practice it’s likely that that’s where whole-of-scope techniques such as context-space mapping will have the most impact.

The central theme in the Chaotic domain of practice is low- to zero-repeatability: some part(s) of the practice cannot be repeated, either because the conditions have changed – including the awareness and experience of the person doing the work. Conventional ‘scientific-analysis’ approaches (Complicated-domain) rely on repeatability, so they’re actually not all that much use in the Chaotic components of any real-world task – in fact will often be misleading because they provide an illusion of predictability. In a way, the same is true of many Complex-domain techniques: they give us a much more reliable picture of an overall uncertain context, but we can’t reliably apply that in reverse to tell us what to do for a specific ‘market-of-one’, such as a specific medical diagnosis.

Ability to engage appropriately in the Chaotic-domain in this sense is almost a definition of skill. It’s also a key component of almost all knowledge-work – which is why this concern is coming much more to the fore, as knowledge-work becomes an increasingly important part of the overall economy.

At the business-process level, one of the key figures is Sigurd Rinde, whose concept of ‘barely-repeatable processes’ is the focus for his Thingamy business-process-execution software. The whole point of Thingamy is that the processes themselves are made up as they go along, by the people doing the work, expressing and applying their expertise. Underneath this, however, is a consistent Simple structure that records every decision, every artefact, every transfer of responsibility – which makes it possible to create any required reports from the process, including conventional statistical analysis. The result is nicely summarised on Sig’s other website, 30megs.com – so-called from his tag-line “Here’s 30 Megs. Now go run Germany”, which in principle is entirely feasible with this kind of decision-support/decision-tracking software. Sig is not alone in this, of course – for example, Stafford Beer developed something similar that in effect ran the entire economy of Chile for a while, way back in the early 1970s – but Thingamy is probably the best example of a software package available today that is designed for true Chaotic-domain processes.

Context-space mapping is part of what needs to happen before we settle on any technique or tool such as Thingamy. It’s about mapping the options available to us, and the decisions that we make within ‘solution-space’, as part of an overall process of sensemaking in order to arrive at appropriate actions for the context. One of the key points in this is an awareness that we are part of the context, part of the ‘solution’: in the classic Chaotic-domain sense, there is a boundary, and there is no boundary, always in the same moment.

We always start from ‘reality’ – that which in twf is termed the ‘disorder’ domain. (Everything does in fact take place within that domain: any purported subdivisions – such as Simple, Chaotic and suchlike – are sensemaking-abstractions that we place onto that domain, but are not actually ‘real’ as such.) From there, we would move into some kind of recursive OODA loop (Observe/Orient/Decide/Act), where sensemaking itself forms one or more of the earliest iterations. In those terms, context-space mapping would typically proceed as follows:

• Observe: What is ‘the context’ here?
• Orient: How do I make sense of what I’m seeing?
  1. What parts of the context appear to be unique (Chaotic), unordered or ‘wicked-problem’ (Complex), complicated but repeatable (Complicated) or universal (Simple)? Using that categorisation, map out the ‘problem-space’.
  2. Given that categorisation, what cross-maps would be useful for sensemaking?
     Note: There are an infinite number of cross-maps that could be used: some examples shown in this series include:
     • here: repeatability and action-tactics; domains and tetradian asset-dimensions; time versus focus; Jungian domains
     • here: twf tactics and types of practice; timescale versus ‘bindedness’; development of embodied ‘best-practice’
     • here: repeatability and ‘truth’; marketing versus sales; the ‘plan / do / check / act’ cycle
     • here: ISO-9000 quality-model; skill-levels; automated versus manual processes; asset-types; data, information, knowledge, wisdom
     • here: cause/effect relationships; decision-mode, timescale and level of abstraction
     • here: nature of boundaries between domains
     • here: phases of matter
  3. Using the categorisations from the cross-maps, what available tools and techniques are ‘situated’ in what regions of the maps’ ‘solution-space’? What can we learn from this?
• Decide: Given what I have learned from sensemaking, what should be my ‘action-plan’?
  1. Select from the available tools/techniques.
  2. Decide on a plan as to how, why, when, where, by whom, with what, and in what order each of the selected tools or techniques should be used.
• Act:  What am I doing as I am doing, and what do I see as I am doing?
  1. Enact the desired action.
  2. Apply the same overall OODA-loop to the action taken – recursively, where appropriate – for review, further sensemaking, decision and action.
• Repeat as appropriate.

(Some people might suggest that this kind of OODA-loop fits more within a twf-style Complex-domain mode than Chaotic-domain. True, there are important similarities, such as the shared focus on ‘unorder’ versus the Complicated/Simple notion of ‘order’. But the key distinction is that this acts on a single, individual, specific context rather than a Complex-domain collective – and is often also much closer to real-time than most Complex-domain decision-making.)

The above is a start towards how we would use context-space mapping, anyway. I’ll leave it there for now: any constructive comments, ideas and suggestions would be most welcome, as usual – over to you?

Previous posts in this series:

• Complexity, chaos and enterprise-architecture
• More on chaos and Cynefin
• Alternatives to the ‘Cynefin’ term, please?
• Solution-space: beyond Cynefin?
• On meta-methodology
• Using ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps
• More ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps
• And more ‘Cynefin-like’ cross-maps
• More on meta-methodology
• ‘tinc’ – a Temporary Inconvenience
• Context-space mapping and enterprise-architecture

Related:

• ‘Two Cryptic conversations‘