Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, often don’t bother to say that they’re competent – perhaps because they don’t need to say it, their actions say it well enough instead. The outcome of competence is fairly certain, even in contexts of high uncertainty.

Non-competence is where someone doesn’t know what they’re doing, and will either not do it, or will do the best they can, yet with the explicit intent to use it as a learning to improve their competence. Importantly, they will usually say that they don’t know what they’re doing. The outcome of non-competence is uncertain, even in nominally-certain contexts, but at least we are aware of the risks.

Incompetence is where someone doesn’t know what they’re doing- i.e. is non-competent to do the task – but either purports and/or believes themselves to be competent. They will usually say that they are competent, even though demonstrably they are not; they claim to be responsible, yet have limited ‘response-ability’. The outcome of incompetence is fairly certain, and frequently dire, yet lack of awareness of the risks is often rampant, or in some cases the risks actively concealed.

Someone who is non-competent can become competent by learning the respective skills, or be competent by proxy, via finding someone else who is competent at doing the respective type of task. I treasure my non-competence, because it means there’s always more for me to learn. And as an enterprise-architect, I am, almost by definition, non-competent in much if not most of the detail-aspects of areas that I need to cover: hence one of my key competencies is the ability to learn enough of a new area fast enough to be able to guide meaningful exchanges between people who are fully competent in some detail-area but are not competent in others with which they need to connect.

Yet one of the key criteria for non-competence, and to separate it from incompetence, is a willingness to accept that we are non-competent, and say so. If we’re not aware that we’re non-competent, we automatically increase the risk of being incompetent. And if we know that we’re not competent, yet somehow ‘need’ to claim that we are competent, we would, again, automatically be incompetent – with a very high risk of inappropriate or ineffective outcomes of the work.

In part it’s a cultural problem: the risk of incompetence increases wherever a culture exhibits any of these characteristics:

• prioritises content over context, ‘truth’ over context-dependent usefulness
• has an insistent ideological base (leading to the same as above)
• is typified by rampant egotism, self-advertising and self-centrism
• is frequently swayed by tides of hype and ‘following after the latest fad’
• displays an almost desperate need to be ‘right’

Unfortunately, all of these attributes are extremely common in business, and in many cases are actively prized… By definition, they’re also more likely to be common in any ‘truth’-oriented domain, one which operates primarily on ‘true/false’ decision-making – hence, in practice, the tendencies towards IT-centrism and finance-oriented business-centrism, both of which rely on simple true/false logic for most of their operational decisions.

In SCAN terms, all of these are where the Simple certainties of Belief – either as ideology and/or as self-belief – are inappropriately applied to the far side of the Inverse-Einstein Test, where the uncertainties of the Ambiguous and the Not-Known cannot be avoided.

This gives us a dysfunctional ‘diagonal’ decision-path, where Assertion is imposed on the Not-known, or Ambiguity ‘solved’ by arbitrary Belief:

Yet the real problem here is somewhat more subtle:

• someone who is competent will typically not bother to say so, but will just get on with the work instead
• someone who is non-competent will typically say that are not competent, but will often actually be adequately-competent, or at least willing to learn to become so
• someone who is incompetent will typically claim that they are competent, and will usually not be willing to learn how to become so, because to do so would betray to themselves and others the fact that they are actually not competent

Which, in practice, leaves us with a huge dilemma:

• those who do not claim to be competent usually are competent
• those who do claim to be competent frequently are not competent

Hence, again, the kind of mess that we see so often in enterprise-architectures, wherever IT-centrism, business-centrism and the like predominate… Oh well.

Comments, anyone?

Yes, I do know that those questions might seem to fit more in philosophy or psychology. But as per the previous post, they also have huge ramifications in user-experience and user-interface design, in product-design, in sensemaking and decision-making, and in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, security-architecture and many other architectures in general.

Quick summary so far:

• there’s a decision-making ‘I’ – “I am that which chooses”, that which experiences the world as ‘I’ and responds accordingly, and which can be highly volatile, especially in terms of real-time decision-making
• there’s a kind of presentation-layer of ‘I’, which is expressed through surface-appearance, through digital-personas and suchlike
• there’s a kind of interaction between each ‘I’ and that presentation-layer – an interaction which is particularly clear in work with Masks, as I’ll return to in a moment
• there’s a distinct identifier-layer for ‘I’, comprised of identifiers acknowledged or imposed by others as well as self, and typically associated roles, rights and responsibilities for ‘I’ – with the identifiers often associated with external or assigned personas (digital or otherwise)
• beneath it all, in most cases, there seems to be a kind of unitary ‘I’ that is experienced by self as ‘I’, and perhaps also experienced by others as one’s ‘I’ – though with reservations on that such as indicated by the classic Johari Window model

So, to identity and Mask.

I’ve just finished re-reading Keith Johnstone’s classic ‘Impro: improvisation and the theatre‘. To me, it’s absolute must-read for anyone interested in the human side of enterprise-architecture: its sections on status, spontaneity and narrative can be real eye-openers for understanding how organisations really work. (Or, more often, don’t work…) Yet for me it’s always been the last section in the book that’s always stood out the most: the section on Masks.

The term ‘Mask’ has a special meaning here – hence the initial-capital on Mask, to distinguish it from a more everyday theatrical mask. In many ways the Mask is just an ordinary half-face mask: the difference is more in how it’s used, not just as a costume-prop but as an active persona or literal ‘per-sona’ – an active filter on ’that through which I sound’.

[There's also another set of techniques that work with full-face Masks, or Tragic Masks, but I won't go into any of that here.]

The context in the book is improvisational theatre, of course – not enterprise-architecture. Yet there are a few themes that are extremely relevant for us.

One is that it’s a real and intensive research-environment. True, it’s subjective-research rather than objective-research, but in essence the principles of of investigation are the same, and certainly the level of discipline required is much the same if they’re to get usable results. So don’t dismiss it out of hand because it’s not IT…

Given that, note what is probably the key theme there: that there’s some kind of interaction that goes on between actor and Mask. It’s not as simple as a one-way ‘I am wearing this prop’: wearing a Mask has definite impacts on the actor, and it seems there’s even some continuity between different people wearing the same Mask:

Another Mask was called Mr Parks. This one used to laugh, and stare into the air, and sit on the extreme edge of chairs and fall off sideways. Shay Gorman created the character. I took the Mask to a course I gave in Hampshire. The students were entering from behind a screen and suddenly I heard Mr Parks’ laughter. It entered with the same posture Shay Gorman had adopted, and looked up as if something was very amusing about the ceiling, and then it kept sitting on the extreme edge of a chair as if it wanted to fall off. Fortunately it didn’t, because the wearer wasn’t very athletic. It really makes no sense that a Mask should be able to transmit that information to its wearer.

I’ll very carefully make no comment here as to how that kind of information could pass from one actor to another, just through the medium of the respective Mask: just note that it is so, under those types of technical conditions.

Also explained in the book is that the whole thing depends on some quite specific psychological or psychosocial conditions. To translate it into the terms I’ve been using with the SCAN framework, it’s all happening in the real-time space, and it just does not work on the Belief (‘control’) side of the decision-modality spectrum. It only works either on the Faith-side of the decision-spectrum – where conscious choice of some kind is available, though primarily as a kind of ‘intentional surrender’ – or when there’s no conscious thought at all – which also means no conscious choice.

The fundamental point in Mask work is that there is a sense not so much of loss of ‘I’, as a kind of negotiation with the Mask as to what that surface-’I’ will be. And the Mask can impose some fairly severe constraints on what it can allow, its ‘repertoire’ and suchlike: for example, it can be very difficult to do any kind of predefined script whilst doing Mask-work. If there’s no awareness of that negotiation with the Mask, there are two likely outcomes: either the student will attempt to’take control’, which results in poor outcomes and sometimes literally ‘wooden’ performances; or the student will fail to notice the impacts of the Mask, and in effect believe that the results are their own choice of ‘I’, rather than the default sort-of-choices imposed by the Mask. Which might well not be a good idea…

So what on earth has any of this to do with enterprise-architecture?

The answer is this: anything can be a Mask in this sense. Anything.

To be slightly more specific, anything that can act as a surface-level filter or persona – a ‘that through which I sound’ – can act as a Mask in this sense. Whether or not we are consciously aware of it doing so.

And anything that can act as a filter on ‘I’, also in effect changes the surface experience of ‘I’, of how others experience that ‘I’, and also the actions and choices of that ‘I’.

A couple of really simple everyday examples:

– Someone may be the most mild-mannered person face to face, but suddenly an absolute demon behind the wheel of a car.

– Conversations in Twitter often seem artificial, terse, mechanical – the Mask of the 140-character constraint.

Consider all the ‘professional props’ of just about every trade and tradition: the doctor’s stethoscope, the barrister’s wig, the consultant’s clipboard. All of them are Masks: the person’s behaviour, demeanour, stance and language will all change the moment they pick up that prop.

Consider a business uniform, a brand, a shop layout, a user-interface layout: they’re all Masks in this sense too – an active filter for a persona, as ‘that through which I sound’, impacting on and constraining the choices and actions of the respective ‘I’.

Every role is a Mask. Every digital-identity or digital-persona is a Mask. (Think for a moment about the impact of that on the ways that people interact with digital systems – especially when multiple personae intersect.)

Layer upon layer upon layer of Masks, changing continuously throughout every day.

And, if we’re not conscious of those impacts and constraints on ‘I’, will find our ‘I’ seeming to change with each change of Mask, yet not knowing how or why.

In short, the sense of identity may – and probably will – become fluid in the context of a Mask.

And almost anything may act as a Mask.

Often in unpredictable and/or emergent ways.

Affecting interaction with just about everything else.

Hence, also in short, a definitely non-trivial concern for security, privacy, user-experience design, process-design, branding and a whole host of other themes in enterprise-architecture and elsewhere.

Identity and Mask might perhaps seem somewhat abstract at first. A bit less abstract by now, I hope?

Over to you for comment, anyway.

Yeah, I know, sounds like philosophy and stuff – woefully abstract, deep and pointless. Yawn.

But those ‘pointless’ questions are the core – the heart – of a lot of really important everyday concerns for enterprise-architecture: privacy, security, sales and marketing, just to name a few. The core of ‘enterprise’ itself. Abstract, yes; yet also just about as pragmatic as it gets. Hmm…

Where this got started was a post by Brian Hopkins, on his Forrester blog:

• practicingEA: 2012 Predictions – Technology Will Shape Who We Are As People And Businesses

The post itself is a quick summary of some key themes happening in the IT side of enterprise-architecture at the moment: the fading of ‘Big IT’, a new focus on data, the convergence of social, mobile and local, and the ongoing hype around cloud. Fair enough: interesting to IT-oriented folks, certainly. The comments, though, focussed in on questions about identity in that space – and that’s where things got really interesting…

In essence, we ended up with those questions above. There’s a lot in those comments on Brian’s post, and I won’t repeat it all here: go look at it in the original, it’s well worth the read, especially the notes by Stephen Wilson on on digital-identity. What I’d like to pick up on briefly here are four of those themes:

• identity is simple, complicated, complex, ambiguous, unknowable – all at the same time
• identifier and identity are not the same
• identity and persona are not the same
• identity is filtered through many layers of persona

Identity is complex – that’s the shorthand version, anyway. It’s fluid, it stays the same: we can recognise friends after thirty years’ absence, we barely recognise our own face in the mirror each morning. For me, it changes with the clothes I wear, both in my own sense of identity, and how others seem to see and interact with me. I am my car, my house, my phone, my ideas, my memories: I think I possess them, but they also possess me.

Identity is like a hologram: blurry, muddled, indistinct – until the light shines on it in just the right way. For a brief instant, identity is certain, crystal-clear – and then vanishes again. Until the light shines on it from another direction, showing a different facet, a different face – yet of what is still the same hologram of identity.

Identity is multi-faceted, bewildering, chaotic. There’s one sense I have of ‘I’ when I’m at home, another in the office, another when I’m on stage at a conference, yet another with friends or colleagues in the cafe, and different again when chatting online, or chatting with the ‘checkout chick’ at the market or the mall. On the surface, and from the ‘the inside’, those can be very different people: so which one is me? Which one is real? Which is the myth? And when two or more of those myths collide – meeting work-colleagues at home, for example – there’s a kind of ‘mythquake‘, where for a brief panicked moment nothing seems real at all. Is everything just an act, a mask? Is there anything real behind all of those masks? And yet there is a single unitary ‘I’ in there somewhere, the one voice behind all of those different voices – otherwise we couldn’t recognise it as ‘I’. To quote the Cluetrain Manifesto:

…These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Yet Cluetrain is also about another kind of identity-clash: the distinction between individual and collective, the identity of ‘I’ versus the identity of ‘We’. When I’m part of ‘We’, where is ‘I’? Which one is real? Which one is the mask, the myth?

Confusing, to say the least. And if that’s at the core of so much of enterprise-architecture, it’s no wonder that that’s complex too. Too complex: hence no surprise that so many people try to make it out to be simpler than it is – and that’s where things get messy…

Identifier and identity are not the same - an identifier is not identity, it’s a proxy for identity, for when we don’t have other means to recognise identity. An identifier is just information - and information about something is not the same as the thing itself. It seems this should be obvious, yet evidently it isn’t –  especially to many of those who work on Digital Identity and suchlike, designing IT-systems that seemingly assume they are the same.

We talk about ‘identity-theft’, yet in most cases – perhaps all? – it’s theft of identifier, not identity. An identifier links not to identity, but to a persona associated with that identity – the identity as a role, a set of rights, responsibilities, authorities, tasks. In a possession-based culture, an identifier provides ‘rights’ of access to resources, ‘the right to know’, the right to use: if the identifier is hijacked, those ‘rights’ are hijacked too. That’s what all the worry is about: loss of access to resources, loss of control, loss of concealment for key information. That matters, obviously. But it’s identifier-theft, not identity-theft: the distinction is important.

Going the other way, identity is not identifier. I may put on a company-uniform to identify myself to others as a member of the company; my business-card carries both my own name (a personal identifier) and the company-name (a collective identifier); but that doesn’t mean that I am the company, or that the company ‘is’ me. I use the company-identifier as a persona, and others may recognise me via that persona: yet it isn’t who I am. That distinction is important, too.

[A side-note here: in terms of asset-dimensions, relational-assets link to identity, whereas aspirational-assets mostly to the persona - concrete versus abstract. For more on this, see the post 'Relational-assets are not 'possessions' '.]

Identity and persona are not the same – a persona is an overlay of identity, in exactly the same sense that my clothes are an overlay on myself. A persona is literally ‘that through which I sound’ – a filter, a mask. Online, we have many different personas – not just as represented by distinct avatars and the like, but every online account is in a sense a persona, a ‘that through which I sound’ to or with the respective application.

And the same the other way: the application presents a different persona – a different interface – for us depending on whether we’ve logged in or not, and in some cases (such as the Amazon website) may even adapt itself over time to match the changing history of the relationship. Note the ‘identity-confusion’ that can occur when we present a mismatched persona – such as entering the wrong username / password combination, or using the same avatar in different social contexts.

So too in the offline world. Almost everything is or can be used as a persona: clothes, props, language, body-stance, the way we may drive differently in a rental-car compared to a car we consider ‘ours’. And it’s not just one-way, from us outward: we feel different in different clothes, in different cars, in different climates. There’s an interaction between people and place, and the place has choices too – certainly in a metaphoric sense, perhaps in a literal sense as well.

Identity is filtered through many layers of persona. Persona is ‘that through which I sound’ – a Mask. Each of us has layer upon layer of Masks, some of them seemingly our choice, others less conscious, and yet others sort-of imposed by culture, by context, by the impacts of advertising and the like. It’s complicated… complex…

[One of the best sources to get a sense of of all of this is in impro-theatre: for example, see Keith Johnstone's classic 'Impro: improvisation and the theatre' - particularly the later section on Masks.]

In enterprise-architecture, one of the more useful concerns is provide conditions under which the distinctions between identity and persona become more visible – are ‘surfaced’, to use the psychology-jargon. When people become aware of those distinctions, they also become aware that they can choose the extent to which they identify themselves with a persona – and can let it go and choose an alternative that is a better fit to a changing context. Often we might intentionally set up some kind of ‘ritual’ to mark the boundary: for example, donning a safety-helmet on a building site also triggers a more safety-aware persona.

There’s a lot more to explore here, of course – anyone interested in taking it further?

[Sometimes these reviews can be a bit too predictable in their over-focus on prediction? As Forrester enterprise-architect Brian Hopkins put it in a nicely ironic Tweet this morning, "I predict that the volume, velocity and variety of tech predictions will require #MapReduce to analyze by Dec 2012."... Hence, uh, no predictions as such here: apologies if that disappoints you... ]

For me, though, it’s been an interesting exercise to explore cycles within cycles, and the often urgent need to avoid the ‘gumption trap‘ of what Johnnie Moore terms ‘the Tyranny of Excellence‘:

We flounder when we over-react or repress failure. … [O]rganisations flounder if they set up procedures and practices that appear to be about excellence but are more about being in denial of our variability and complexity as human beings. Efforts to make meetings a guaranteed success quite often just lead to the repression of doubt or criticism. …

The risk is that we set impossible standards for ourselves and then get demoralised by not reaching them. The demand for perfection makes us hypercritical and we fail to appreciate what we are actually achieving. When we lose that sense of reality, ironically, we’re more likely to fail or perhaps to give up altogether.

(‘Flounder‘ seems a painfully-accurate metaphor there: a flatfish whose eyes have both migrated to the same side of the head, able to see only one side of the story… But I digress… – return to the story.)

That gumption-trap of floundering can be particularly destructive for those of us who have distinct peaks and troughs in our work-patterns. For example, looking back, I did quite a lot last year: amongst other things, I presented at three very different enterprise-architecture conferences, edited two books, and wrote coming on for two hundred blog-posts on enterprise-architecture and related themes – often three to four thousand words or more each, adding up to the equivalent of several entire books. And I spent a fair bit of time travelling for work, too: a longish stay in Australia, a shorter one in Brazil, and a couple other brief trips as well.

Yet there were distinct patterns in all of that. All of the conferences happened in the first half of the year, as did all of book-editing and most of the travelling; by contrast, most of the blog-posts were in the second half of the year, with a lot of intense work on themes such as metamodels, service-architectures, management-structures and ‘really-big-picture’ enterprise-architecture, and, currently, on tools-ideas and SCAN for sensemaking. Every now and then there would be a definite slump, a kind of ‘mini-burnout’ – I’m in one now, as it happens, where I’m struggling to get much of anything done at all, and on previous experience may well go on for another few days yet.

Within each day, there are definite cycles too. For me, my peak creative-time is usually in the mornings: best time for writing, anyway. The less- creative time in the afternoons tends to get used for editing, for doing diagrams, for – oh joy… – all the administrivia that our ‘sensible’ business-world currently requires. Sometimes in the evening I find myself back in the creative space; sometimes not.

If I try to force myself to do creative work in the off-cycle, I risk ending up doing no work at all, because the all-too-predictable feeling of failure can trigger that gumption-trap of floundering. Just to make things worse, as Paul Graham warns in his classic 2009 essay ‘Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule‘, one interruption during that creative-time – or even just the threat of an interruption – can destroy creative productivity for the entire day: which again reinforces that sense of failure.

[The mindsets of 'makers' and 'managers' really don't mix - a fact I've been discovering to my cost whilst living in the same household as an elderly person who needs every day's activity to be regimented hour by hour on a rigid timetable, and who now literally cannot cope with any significant change of plan... Not fun, I can tell you: and seriously damaging to creativity, too... ]

And everyone has their own cycles, all of them somewhat different; and often those cycles will change over a lifetime, too, as the lethargic teenagers who can’t get out of bed before midday will change their habits when they become the parents awoken by a crying child at three in the morning. Daily cycles, yearly cycles, the cycle of a lifetime: cycles within cycles.

Yet what happens within most organisations? That’s right: we design systems that assume that people are machines, that they always work exactly the same all the time, in a measured, certain, predictable way. Or that they’re creative geniuses, every possible moment of every possible day.

And we then wonder why it doesn’t work.

Duh…

And then punish people for failing to work to our expectations. (Or teach them to punish themselves for ‘failing to meet expectations’, which comes to much the same thing.)

Oops…

So perhaps it might be a bit more wise to create organisational architectures that actually respect the fact that people are people? That they do each have their own cycles within cycles within patterns within flows within feelings, each subtly or strongly different? That some people indeed do not and cannot give their best work on a ‘manager’s schedule’? That that so-popular Taylorist attitude that regards people as second-class machines is perhaps a guaranteed path to mediocrity and poor performance?

Perhaps it might be more wise to respect people for who they are?

Strange idea for many managers, I know. But perhaps it’s the one that works?

And perhaps a reason why we really need to remind those managers that sometimes the best service they can provide to the whole organisation is to keep out of everyone’s way – such that the people who do actually make things can get their work done on their own natural schedules, rather than the ‘manager’s schedules’ of unusable, fragmented, discombobulated time?

Hmm…

Just reflecting on the passing year, the passing day, the passing time, that’s all.

[Update: as is so often the case, a perfect Tweet came up between writing this and checking Twitter - this time from Michelle James:

• CreatvEmergence: We need workplaces where people can engage and express more of their whole creative selves, not a reduced fraction of themselves

Expresses the point just as well as all of the above, really, and a lot shorter, too. Oh well. ]

For many people, it’s ‘the ‘Holiday Season’, or Christmas, or New Year, or something like that. A calendrical marker-point, anyway. Something to celebrate, perhaps.

The culture I come from is nominally Christian, hence ‘Christmas’ and suchlike, so that’s the label others around me tend to use. (Though it doesn’t quite have the same sense for me, I’ll admit: in religious terms, my family-background is in the Quaker tradition, which historically regards Christmas as ‘just another day’.)

[These days 'Christmas' in this country seems barely Christian anyway: it's much more about families - which sadly doesn't have much relevance for me - and, even more, about the real 'state-religion', the Church of Conspicuous Consumption, which I try to avoid as much as possible...]

As a perennial Outsider, my real colleagues are scattered around the globe: I have stronger connections with people in the Netherlands, Australia,Guatemala, Brazil or the US, for example, than with just about anyone in this town. Those friends and families and colleagues all follow different faiths, different traditions, different worldviews: even the Christians amongst them will celebrate their Christmas on different dates, from 1st December right through to 6th January (‘Twelfth Night’, also known in England as ‘Old Christmas’). And even a nominally-secular marker such as ‘New Year’ can be almost as problematic: there seem to be dozens of different definitions of ‘New Year’, few of which make much sense to anyone else.

So it’s kinda tricky knowing what to ‘celebrate’, or know which date-marker to use. For purely pragmatic reasons, I tend to focus on astronomical markers such as solstices and equinoxes, because they’re probably the ‘safest’ in social terms. Hence today, being the solstice closest to the most-acknowledged festival in these parts, and also closest to the New-Year point for this culture.

Even so, which solstice? It’s winter-solstice here, but summer-solstice for my friends down south; and solstices don’t mean much anyway to my friends in the tropical-regions, whose ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ and the like align with other real-world markers. Hmm… see what I mean by ‘kinda tricky’?

So what can a not-particularly-social not-particularly-anchored-anywhere soft-of-digital-native do or say these days, in terms of others’ societal celebrations?

I guess the best I can offer is that however, whatever and whenever you choose your celebrations to be, have fun, and Have A Happy Whatever!

Enjoy! – and thanks again for sharing this journey with me over the passing year.

Another of those ‘obvious’ question-themes that turn out to be not so obvious at all… And the answers are very important in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture and business-model design: not least because if we get it wrong – as too many people still seem to do, in business and elsewhere – then we’ll likely find ourselves on a guaranteed path to business failure.

Was reminded of this by two Tweets earlier today, both from Swedish social-business specialist Oscar Berg:

• oscarberg: RT @letterpress_se: In war, there can be only one winner. Not so in business – Stop Competing to Be the Best  http://s.hbr.org/soHqME
• oscarberg: Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia et al…please fight your wars in the marketplace, not in courts

The HBR article, by Joan Magretta, that’s referenced in that first Tweet, describes the key part of the point I want to make here. The second Tweet illustrates what happens when people don’t get that point: business-energy gets wasted on things that don’t actually matter, until all the players in that ‘game’ get so wasted, in various senses, that none of them can survive.

[There's one subtle yet crucial disagreement I'd have with that comment above from Joan Magretta's article, that "In war, there can only be one winner". I know it's a popular belief, but it's wrong - lethally wrong, often in an all too literal sense. No-one wins from being involved in a war: the only 'winners' are those who take care not to be involved, and the parasites who profit from picking up the pieces afterwards - and who often set up the war in the first place, for exactly that reason. No-one wins from a war: everyone loses. We'll see why that's so in a moment - and also why that fact matters a very great deal in business.]

So is competition good, or not good? For that matter, should we cooperate with others, or not? In all of those questions, the obvious answer is “It all depends…” – but what it most depends on in each case is what we understand as the nature and purpose of competition, and its apparent counterpart in cooperation. And that, in turn, depends on what we understand as the nature and purpose of power.

What’s the purpose of competition? Is it to win? If so, win what?

Is it to beat the other guy? If so, what happens next?

Or is it less about winning as such, but more about not having to face the feeling of failure, of being labelled ‘the loser’, and everything else that goes with that label in so many societies?

Yeah, that last one starts to hit a bit closer to home, doesn’t it? Oops…

Behind most of the myths of competition is a hugely tangled mess of mostly-unacknowledged feelings and fears. The details change from culture to culture, and I won’t go into much of that detail here, but the real core of it is a really simple set of mistakes about the nature of power in the workplace and elsewhere. Again, I won’t go into the detail – see my book Power and Response-ability, if you’re interested, or the associated brief ‘manifesto‘ – but in essence what it comes down to is this:

– the physics definition is that power is the ability to do work

– most social definitions are closer to the notion that power is the ability to avoid work

Therein lie the roots of some serious problems for business…

In the myths around ‘winning’ and ‘losing’, most of the work being avoided is relational and aspirational: in other words, work that can only be personal, not collective. On one side, it’s often a failure to grasp that, on a finite world, we are always in a closed, finite context where ultimately there is no convenient-scapegoat ‘Them’, but only ‘Us’ – hence there is no-one that we can ‘win’ against. On the other side, we actually can’t force others to face our own feelings for us – no matter how much we would want that to happen – because they’re actually our feelings. And in reality there’s no way to win, in any real sense, unless we find the courage to turn round and face that work – rather than wasting what little energy we have in futilely trying and, by definition, failing to ‘export’ it to everyone else.

Do we really think we can ‘win’ by making someone else ‘lose’? The reality is that the most we could achieve is a temporary respite from that ‘feeling-work’, at the cost of actually increasing the damage and the load across the overall system. At best, we gain a short-lived ‘high’ – exactly like any other form of addiction. Which is why most of the myths about ‘winning’, and most of the myths about ‘beating the competition’, are a literally deadly delusion.

[There are plenty of people who would promote such myths, of course - especially the parasites who profit from the ever-popular 'game' of 'let's you and him fight'. The point here is that those myths don't help you - even (or perhaps especially) in a business-context.]

Competition is good: we need competition if we’re to improve our skills, our competencies, our overall game.

But it’s only good – is only successful, in the longer term – if we compete with others. Not ‘against’ others.

Cooperation is good: we need cooperation if we’re to do anything that we cannot do solely on our own.

But although cooperation is always going to mean working with others in some sense or other, it’s only good – is only successful, in the longer term – if the overall aim of the cooperation is with all others. Not ‘against’ others.

There are only two choices here: either everyone wins, in some way; or everyone loses. There is no ‘win/lose’: it’s a delusory form of ‘lose/lose’, in which an apparent gain for one party masks a greater overall loss for everyone – including the nominal ‘winner’.

If we compete with others, and with ourselves, everyone wins. Sometimes one player is ‘the winner’, sometimes another: but overall, over time, everyone wins in one sense or another – and the overall ‘competing’ is a key part of what helps everyone win.

If we compete against others… – well, in short, everyone loses. No matter what it looks like in the shorter-term, everyone loses.

[Except for the scavengers and parasites, of course. And yes, we all know who they are in business. Except we're so often required to pretend that we don't, and that they're not. Oh well.]

And there’s no way round any of that: all of that comes from the real nature of power itself.

So if we’re going to compete – and in business, we’re going to want to compete, and also often have to compete - then we have to compete with others, not against them. Because if we don’t, we’re going lose – even, or perhaps most, when we seem most to ‘win’.

Which is no doubt somewhat different from what we’d hear in most everyday ideas about ‘business as usual’. But it’s also the only way that works. Which can be kinda tricky – especially in enterprise-architectures and the like, where we do need to deliver something that actually does work. Hmm…

Implications in business-architecture and enterprise-architecture

In architectural terms, what all of this comes down to is one very simple fact:

• every instance of ‘competition-against’, in any form whatsoever, represents an active source for loss of overall effectiveness, and a potential point for catastrophic-collapse of the overall architecture

That applies right up to an overall business-model, onward through design of performance-bonuses of sales, or managers’ resource-allocation, right down to real-time relationships between web-services and code-level conflicts. Competition-with is (usually) good: no doubt about that. Yet every time we allow some form of competition-against to slip through and become embedded in the system-structures, we increase the risk of total system-failure.

Which leads us to one very simple test:

• wherever the architecture includes some form of competition, is it competition-with, or competition-against?

In many cases, perhaps most, we’ll want our architecture to encourage competition-with.

Yet we must eliminate every form of competition-against – otherwise we’re designing an architecture that, by definition, is designed to fail.

And yes, this kind of design is all doable - despite all those conventional delusions about power and the like in ‘business as usual’. We just need to be rigorous about it, that’s all.

There are plenty of examples of how and why this works, at every level of the architecture. For business-architecture, see Joan Magretta’s HBR article referenced above, or Michael Porter’s work on strategy, or Tony Hsieh on customer-service. (For an interesting real-world example, see the small Welsh-border town of Hay-on-Wye, whose core business is built around a ‘competition-with’ web of specialist bookstores.) In the mid-range, see Dan Pink’s work on motivation, perhaps, or John Seddon on service-design. On the factory floor, see Deming’s classic ‘14 Points‘. I’ll admit I don’t know enough current code-level IT to give detailed examples there, but I know plenty of people who could.

It’s all doable. None of this is new, as such; and in itself, none of it is especially difficult, either.

[What is difficult is shifting the mindset - the usual myths of competition, the delusion that we can only 'win' by making others lose. That's hard, true: but it's also the only way that works.]

Architecturally, the only thing that makes it hard is artificial boundaries between segments of the overall system. This is one area where we need a whole-of-system perspective, and where the obsessive IT-centrism of conventional ‘enterprise’-architecture would be far more of a hindrance than a help. For much the same reasons, we need regular business-folk to understand that the overall enterprise runs on a great deal more than just money. But again, all of this is doable.

More to the point, it’s all been done – and proven in practice, too. And since overall it’s quite easy to prove that competition-with is more efficient and effective than competition-against – as can be seen in the bitter farce of the current fights between cellphone-manufacturers, as in Oscar Berg’s first Tweet above – there’s an interesting point that those who don’t ‘get’ the value of competition-with stand to lose ground against their nominal competitors…

There is, however, one serious structural problem of which we need to become very much aware. Competition-with is the only way that works, but sadly a lot of people still believe that they can be ‘the winner’ in any game of competition-against. (And there are plenty of parasites and predators who’ll prop them up in that belief, too. For a while, at least…) There are plenty of businesses that operate that way – as we all know all too well.

Yet unfortunately the game is naturally weighted in a way that props up those delusions. We know that win/win is the only way that works; we know that we can only win if others win too. But if they believe in win/lose, then they’ll be certain that they can only win by ‘making’ others seem to lose. In other words, whenever we come across someone like that, we want them to win, but they want us to lose – which is not a good place for us to be…

In those circumstances – to quote the old children’s-film War Games – “the only way to win is to not play”. So once we do get properly onto competition-with, we cannot engage with anyone who indulges in competition-against – because we will always lose, in one sense or another, whenever that occurs.

[In fact everyone will lose whenever that occurs - but it's our organisation for which we're designing the architecture, hence that's what needs to be our focus here.]

So that test – explicitly excluding any interaction with any form of competition-against – needs to be embedded right the way through every aspect of the architecture, without exception. And yes, that’s hard. But essential. Seriously.

And that’s what’s actually implied, in architectural terms, from those two Tweets above. Interesting, I trust?

Anyway, enough for now, I guess. Comments, anyone?

If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues outside the women’s toilets – queues that you’re unlikely to see outside the men’s.

Those queues don’t happen because “it’s just the women are all putting their lippy on”, as one sarcastic male colleague put it. It’s actually a fairly serious service-design failure – and it’s the kind of failure that happens whenever anyone fails to understand that identical is not always the same as equal.

By ‘identical’, I mean that the same service is provided, usually occupying the same physical or virtual space – typically the physical or virtual dimensions, in terms of the asset-tetradian.

By ‘equal’, I mean that the service is experienced as leading to the same or equivalent outcome – typically the relational and aspirational dimensions of the asset-tetradian.

To illustrate the point, let’s explore that specific example of service-provision: toilet-space in public places.

[This is solely about service-design: nothing else. It happens to be a particularly clear example of this kind of design-flaw, that's all.]

Many cultures – most ‘Western’ cultures at least – provide separate toilet-spaces for males and females.

[We'll ignore the cultural drivers for this - they're not particularly relevant for this example. All we need to note is that this is so.]

Toilet-spaces typically include one or more of three distinct forms: individual cubicles, individual urinals, and collective urinal. Individual cubicles take up the most space, collective urinals the least.

For reasons of simple anatomy and – dependent on culture – clothing-design, in general only males will be able to use urinals.

Again dependent on culture and clothing-design, usage of cubicles will often usually involve partial removal of clothing – especially for females. Again for social reasons, this means that in most cases some form of privacy would be expected, typically requiring the cubicle to be large enough to incorporate a closable door.

A typical truck-transportable ‘portakabin’-type toilet – such as used at many event-venues – would be able only to accommodate a single row of perhaps ten cubicles, compared to a double-sided collective-urinal that could accommodate at least a dozen people either side.

A simple time-and-motion study [pun not intended!] indicates that usage of a cubicle takes some two to three times as long as using a urinal.

If we put all of these factors together, we’ll recognise that women will probably need more than twice as many toilet-units as men, occupying around five times as much space as that for men, in order to achieve an equal outcome – same numbers of relieved customers in the same time – from the same nominal service-provision.

Conversely, if we provide the same amount of space – as is still all too common in, say, a theatre-design – then the same usage of service-provision overall is going to take around five times as long for women as for men. Hence those inordinate queues…

The all-too-literally painful lesson here? – Identical is not the same as equal.

In most societies now, structural-inequality is pretty unpopular. In most businesses, inequality of outcomes can create not just loss of future business, but increased risk of serious anti-client problems. In short, it’s not a good idea.

Hence it’s not a good idea to allow our service-designs to create that kind of unequal-outcome by default, through carelessness on our part in the service-design process.

Which means that we need to be careful to distinguish between the service-provision itself, and the outcomes of that service-provision – and design counter-mechanisms to cope with contexts where the circumstances themselves would tend to create unintended inequalities.

Just another not-so-unimportant point to ponder, perhaps?

Sorry… my fault… many apologies…

Or should I be apologising for the apologies…?

Over-apologising for everything seems a peculiarly English affliction… (Talking with a Polish guy in the post-office the other day, he said that the first three words he learnt when he first came to England were “Please”, “Thank-you” and “Sorry”…) On average I’d guess I say ‘Sorry’ well over a hundred times a day, on the street, in shops, when driving, and perhaps especially at ‘home’ with my increasingly-deaf and increasingly-elderly mother. Yet most other cultures don’t seem to do it; in fact often it seems that most other people don’t do it, even when an apology is definitely required. But in my own case, growing up in this decidedly screwed-up Anglo culture, it was a habit that was hammered into me from earliest childhood: and it’s an often-dysfunctional habit that’s proven very hard to break – even when it doesn’t make sense to apologise. Sorry…

Sure, there are some things for which I definitely do need to apologise. For example, I take on far too much, and then wonder why I don’t get much done at all. I ask for help, and then don’t follow through when help is offered. I perhaps say ‘Thank you’ too much in person, but perhaps nowhere near enough on the net – especially on Twitter, where all the ‘thank-yous’ and #FFs and the like clutters up the space so much, yet probably does matter quite a lot… Oh well. Not good, I know.

And I’ve been ‘the Outsider’ for most of my life – sometimes enforced, sometimes just from an inability to connect, yet so much so that I often do have huge difficulties relating with people in the ‘normal’ way. I’ve never been an employee: I’m not sure I could even cope with it now. Right now I’m back in my all-too-frequent ‘recluse’-mode, so deep into it that my last sort-of ‘social’ event was a meetup with a colleague from Brazil, well over a month ago. I know it’s messed some people around, but I really don’t know how to get out of it now. Seems to be part of who I am. Sorry.

Yet there are also some things I definitely need to stop apologising for.

To use Snowden’s phrase, I’ve definitely become more ‘curmudgeonly’ of late. I’m well aware that the ‘trade’ I’m in – enterprise-architectures and the like – can often be challenging in many different ways: we all have much to learn – myself very much included – so mistakes and flat-footed errors are all fair enough. Yet I’ve become much less tolerant of ‘game-plays’ by people who really should know better: yes, all of us – again, myself included – have perhaps too much ego invested in ‘our’ careers and ideas, but none of us should have to put up with some people’s obsessive ‘need’ to believe that they’re ‘better’ than everyone else, simply by the fact of their existence. I won’t apologise for being ‘curmudgeonly’ about that that: I think we all should, to be honest…

(I haven’t ‘named names’ so far, about some of the more appalling offenders within the EA community and elsewhere, but I must admit I’m getting darned close to that point now. I won’t apologise for doing so, either: most of those people know darn well who they are, so take this as “last and final warning”, perhaps?)

And I certainly won’t tolerate abuse any more, from anyone to anyone. There’s way too much of it, almost everywhere, in every form – see the model and manifesto on this, if it it isn’t already obvious to you. (Yes, I do know that I too fall into it at times – I’m all too human too – but I challenge myself on this a lot harder than I do anyone else, whilst some people seemingly never challenge themselves on it at all. ::sigh:: ) Too many people still seem to believe that they have a ‘right’ to abuse others, which in itself is a societal form of structural abuse: I have no apology and, now, no compunction for calling them on it. None of us can afford to waste the time and energy any more in propping up others’ obsessive self-centredness, or ‘protecting’ those people from the consequences of their wilfully childish refusal to accept their real responsibilities in a complex social world: it’s got to stop. Abusing others is not a ‘right’: I won’t apologise for saying so.

(In fact it’s about darned time that collectively we acknowledged that there are no ‘rights’. The whole idea of ‘rights’ is an arbitrary fiction, built on top of real responsibilities that few people seem willing to acknowledge. To be blunt, most so-called ‘rights’ have become little more than a means to evade responsibilities, by offloading them onto everyone else – in other words, yet another form of structural abuse that could well do without. But that’s another story – though another much-needed story that I won’t apologise for either…)

Perhaps most, though, I really need to stop apologising for who I am.

Yes, I’m cantankerous and curmudgeonly, and write too long with too many confusing complications and complicated words. So what? At least I’m willing to explain things in reasonable depth and precision, and stand up for what I believe in, too. That’s who I am. My reflex is to say “Sorry…” – yet it’s not something I need to be sorry about at all.

Yes, I’m eccentric, with strange ideas that often may not seem to make much sense; and yes, I think a lot about far-future, about the ‘really-big-picture’ and the like. So what? Someone has to do that: and we need something that’s literally ‘offset from the centre’ if we’re to have enough leverage to create needed change. Why should I be sorry that I’m willing to do it when others won’t?

Yes, I skitter around from one field of work to another, sometimes almost minute-by-minute, and sometimes with a (lack of) attention-span to match. But so what? I’ve never claimed to be a specialist: so why should I apologise that I’m not? This work requires an enormous scope: the lack of detail can sometimes be a problem, it’s true, but I wouldn’t be much use as a cross-disciplinary generalist if I didn’t cover as much breadth as I can. Nothing to apologise for there – other than perhaps feel sad at times for our culture’s often excessive faith in the cult of the specialist…

Yes, in many ways I all but live for my work, and perhaps push others too hard at times too. But so what? Again, someone has to do it, and I am doing it: why apologise for that?

Yes, it’s probable I don’t fit well enough with most social ‘norms’: it’s true that I’ve never been an employee, no family of my own, don’t even have a home I could call my own any more. I’m perhaps too much of an Outsider, too: I don’t seem to ‘belong’ – or even able to belong – to anything or anywhere or with anyone, in fact I seem to move between countries and continents as often as other people change houses. And I’ve lived on my own for most of the past quarter-century and more, much of it striving to get away from other people as far as I can: by now I may well be almost constitutionally incapable of ‘normal’ relationships of any kind, and it can be hard not to inflict that kind of inner insecurity on others at times. Oh well.

But so what? That Outsider view is very valuable at times, especially in the type of work that I do; and whilst Thoreau’s bleak phrase “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation” applies to me as much as it does to anyone else, at least I do strive to ensure that “and go to the grave with the song still in them” does not apply. And sure, like anyone else, it’s perhaps hard not to feel sorry for myself at times; but I certainly don’t need to say ‘Sorry’ to anyone else about it – or ask others to feel sorry on my behalf, either. I am who I am: enough said, really.

I’ve been apologising way too much for everything, for everyone. Even apologising for the apologies, which is just plain daft…

Sorry…

Yep, a difficult habit to break. But perhaps what I most need to do now is stop apologising – and just get on with life instead.

(This is probably another politically-risky post for me to play with, but never mind… )

In recent weeks I’ve repeatedly come across four seemingly-distinct themes:

• deeper exploration of the architectural idea that everything in the enterprise is or represents a service
• watching architecture colleagues in several different organisations struggle yet again with inane demands from management-hierarchies that simply don’t work
• deeper exploration of conceptual flaws in current economics, particularly around the concept of possession and ‘rights of possession’
• watching yet deeper cracks appear in the current worldwide economic system

For me there’s been a kind of nagging suspicion that there might be some strong interrelationships across all of that conceptual space. Which in turn leads me to several deeply-worrying questions – from an architectural perspective, if nothing else:

• If everything is a service, what services – if any – does management actually deliver to the enterprise?
• If everything is a service, why should management be assigned any priority over anything else?
• Why are management-services and management overall so consistently and notoriously inefficient and ineffective?
• What part does organisational-structure play in rendering management-services so seemingly-ineffective in practice?
• Why is it assumed that ‘promoting’ someone into management will necessarily improve overall service-delivery?
• Why is it so often assumed that the most effective way of organising management-services is a top-down hierarchy of supposed ‘control’ of all other services?
• Following the trails of prioritised service-relationships, why are financial-shareholders so often assigned priority over every service, when in many cases the only ‘service’ they offer seems, in essence, little different from a ‘protection-racket’ – enforced compliance to demands under threat of removal of ‘protection’?
• In the current socio-political context, what – if anything – can we do architecturally to make any of this work any better?

For that matter, what can we do to make it safe even to ask such questions…?

Hmm…

(Warning: this will no doubt be another long post…)

Let’s explore a bit more about each of those questions above.

If everything is a service, what services does management nominally deliver to the enterprise?

In Enterprise Canvas, the services typically delivered by ‘the management’ are described as ‘direction services’, with three distinct components:

• ‘develop the business’ – identify organisational and enterprise vision, and keep the organisation on-track to vision (VSM: ‘system-5′, “decisions to maintain identity”)
• ‘change the business’ – explore external (and internal?) context, to identify required strategic change (VSM: ‘system-4′, “development, research and marketing”)
• ‘run the business’ – use tactical and operational information to assess activity, allocate resources and guide decision-making (VSM: ‘system-3′, “operations planning and control”)

In essence, in classic Taylorism, anything that is not specifically about production or service-delivery (VSM: ‘system-1′), and could be construed as in some way related to ‘control’ of others, is placed under the exclusive purview and privilege of ‘management’. Taylorism places a strict boundary – some would say a social class-boundary – between ‘management’ and ‘workers’. Yet from a service-architecture perspective, management itself is another form of service-delivery, namely the delivery of ‘management-services’ – it is not and cannot be viewed as structurally different from anything else.

If everything is a service, why should management be assigned any priority over anything else?

Short answer: no valid reason at all – from a services-perspective, anyway. It’s just another service, or set of services.

The only feasible reason why management might be assigned arbitrary priority over other services is from left-over delusions about ‘rights of control’. For the most part, these delusions arise from an unfortunate coincidence of functions within the ‘management-services’:

• services for strategic-assessment – potentially giving the delusion that ‘knowing more about big-picture’ inherently means ‘responsibility to tell others what to do’
• services for coordination of resource-allocation – potentially giving the delusion of authority over others via ‘right to withhold’, in turn arising from delusions about the (dys)functional role of purported ‘rights of possession’ within the broader society, and hence within an organisation’s economic model.

In short, architecturally speaking, this is not a defensible reason for priority. Every service is ‘just another service’ that is required for enterprise viability: hence no service can be said to have inherent priority over any other.

Why are management-services and management overall so inefficient and ineffective?

The main reason is failure to understand that management-services are ‘just another service’, without any inherent priority over any other.

Mistaken concepts of inherent-priority and inherent authority ‘over’ others underpin and maintain a broad suite of highly-addictive power-problems and power-delusions – see the ‘Manifesto‘ from my book ‘Power and Response-ability: the human side of systems, and the SEMPER framework documented in SEMPER & SCORE.

In essence, the assumption of inherent-priority feeds a possessionist delusion of ‘right’ to regard and treat others as either ‘object’ or ‘subject’ of self. For obvious reasons, this rarely works well in a social context…

What part does organisational-structure play in rendering management-services ineffective in practice?

The short answer is probably a lot – though it’s often far from obvious as to exactly how and why this should be so.

Two themes do come to mind. One is that the Taylorist split between ‘management’ and ‘workers’ means that anything ‘not-work’ is pushed into the ‘management’ space. (This is another variant of the same driver that creates IT-centrism or business-centrism, but kind of in reverse – more “I am not-that” than “I am that”.) A key side-effect of this is that the non-run-time coordination-services and virtually all of the validation-services are subsumed under the ‘management’ banner – where they most definitely do not belong. As the Viable System Model makes clear, these categories of services are necessarily somewhat orthogonal to the direction-services (‘management’); if they are in effect subsumed into ‘management’, the automatic result – as evidenced in every ‘control’-oriented organisation – will be the creation of somewhat-covert ‘shadow-networks’ in order to get the respective work done. This inevitably creatives inefficiencies, misalignment, miscommunication, and many, many conflicts with ‘the management’ – as can be seen in almost any Dilbert cartoon…

The other theme arises from the Victorian (and hence Taylorist) passion for hierarchies of ‘control’. A tree-structure works well as a means to aggregate information and develop abstractions and overviews, and also as a means to distribute guidance-information (and resources in general) from a central point. However, a tree-structure is not good for coordinating end-to-end business-processes, because it forces all cross-silo coordination up towards the ‘top’ of the tree, creating serious bottlenecks for flows. And as Deming showed, it’s also often a very poor structure for decision-making and control, because of the ‘Taylorist trap’: the skillsets and abilities needed to solve concrete front-line problems become less and less available the further ‘upward’ – more-abstract – that we move in the hierarchy-tree.

There are probably many other examples of how management-structures impact effectiveness: there’s a lot more exploration needed here. These two themes are destructive enough already, though…

Why is it assumed that ‘promoting’ someone into management will improve overall service-delivery?

In a technical sense, we could suggest that it’s an odd historical artefact of three related yet distinct strands: possession-based economics, capitalism, and the last vestiges of feudalism. Possession-based economics provides the notion of personal ‘rights’ to collective resources; capitalism provides the concept that ‘the owners’ have exclusive ‘rights’ to organisational resources, and hence have exclusive say in how those resources are distributed and used; whilst feudalism provides the notion of ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’, and the purported ‘right’ of ‘superiors’ to determine and demand the actions of their ‘inferiors’. The result is a peculiar tree-type structure that can work well for specific functions in certain specific contexts: the Roman army is perhaps the classic example. In all too many cases, though, it tends to collapse into a dysfunctional mess where position with the tree-of-control denotes ‘authority without responsibility’ – riddled with all too many illustrations of what goes wrong when ‘power’ is defined as ‘the ability to avoid work’…

In possessionist capitalism, ‘rights’ to organisational resources are directly related to ‘position’ on the tree-of-control; ‘promotion’ (and its counterpart ‘demotion’) is a re-positioning on that tree, and hence an amendment of ‘rights to resources’ – both organisational resources and, via ‘remuneration’ and the like, to societal resources. To put it in a less technical way, ‘promotion’ is the main mechanism within the current employment-based model via which competent people get more recognition and more ‘stuff’. Because the tree-of-control is associated almost exclusively with the management-services, this often means that the only available means of enhanced recognition and remuneration is via ‘promotion’ into the management-structure.

In principle, a management role implies increased responsibility to guide others: in a service-oriented enterprise, that’s the real purpose for the management-services – and when that is the purpose for a ‘promotion’ into management, it does work well. The problem is that the ‘management=promotion’ assumes both that the person both wants to do that type of work with that increased responsibility for others, and is competent to do it anyway – and in many cases the answer is ‘No’. Yet if the only means of increased recognition or resources is ‘promotion’ into management, then that’s what they’ll do – and sometimes they have no choice about it anyway.

The result is often serious damage to organisational effectiveness. The competence-problem is well documented in the Peter Principle, that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence”. The other side of the ‘promotion’ is that someone who is usually very skilled at some other type of service-delivery is no longer available to do that work any more. To make it worse, becoming out of touch with front-line service-delivery may result in a steady erosion of their original competence – yet they may still believe that they know as much, if not more, than those who are currently doing front-line delivery. Courtesy of Taylorist theories about the nature of organisations, they may even believe that they automatically know more than others because they have been ‘promoted’ to a management role. The consequences can be very messy indeed…

A first-hand example, from a place where I once worked as a contract web-developer. (I’ve tweaked some of the details here to protect my colleagues, but otherwise this is essentially a factual description.) A very experienced engineer, who’d been very effective as a cross-discipline trouble-shooter for many years, was finally forced to take ‘promotion’ into managing the overall section. He was not a good administrator – but unfortunately believed that he was, and quickly learnt to blame everyone else rather than take responsibility for his own mistakes. Worse, he decided that, as manager, he now had the ‘right’ to review and amend anyone else’s work, often without bothering to tell them. The climax came when he changed a core part of our application late one evening, bypassing the code-management system to do so, and causing the application to break the following morning, right in the middle of a demonstration to key stakeholders. After that, everyone learned to block him out from anything that they were working on. So the only effective result of the ‘promotion’ was that we lost a very good troubleshooter, and gained a barely-competent manager and a frankly dangerous meddler – all in the same person.

Why is it assumed that the most effective way of organising management-services is a top-down hierarchy of ‘control’?

Most of this comes from Taylorist and pre-Taylorist belief-systems, as summarised above.

The problem is two-fold. One part is that a tree-structure is a good way to aggregate and abstract from performance-information, and to distribute directions within any context where centralised decision-making makes sense. There’s therefore a tendency to assume that it will therefore work well in all contexts – which is not the case. In essence, if the work is essentially robotic, can be defined by simple rules, and aggregation of control- and performance-information can be handled by a simple tree-structure without ‘top-of-tree’ inter-silo bottlenecks, and the context itself is not undergoing rapid change, then a top-down hierarchy will usually work well. If the work is knowledge-based and/or relationship-based, requires any form of localised decision-making, or any form of ‘any to any’ communication, or the context itself is changing – all of which frequently apply in present business-contexts – then a top-down control-hierarchy will not work well, and an alternative structure for management-services within that context must be used.

The other part of this is a hang-over from feudal times, where authority, responsibilities and ‘rights’ were defined in terms of strict rules within their own networks of fealty-oaths. A duke had the responsibility to lead an army, but was also responsible to raise the funds and everything else that the army would need; a count was responsible for taxation within a region, which often entailed the need for a small army to enforce that taxation; and so on. A feudal model defines that all people ‘below’ in the tree-of-control are subjects – literally, subject to the will of the ‘superior’, or acting as extensions of the ‘superior’s will.

(Psychologically speaking, it’a a very interesting ‘racket’, because it enables all parties to claim the ‘rights’ to any rewards but also the ‘right’ to avoid responsibility for the consequences. The ‘superior’ orders the action, but can avoid responsibility only the ‘inferiors’ actually did the action; the ‘inferiors’ did the action, but can claim that they weren’t responsible because they were ‘only following orders’ from the ‘superior’. The Nuremberg Principles are now used to overrule this ‘game’ in terms of war-crimes, though not yet applied to business-crimes: it will be interesting to see what happens when they are…)

In short, it’s just an arbitrary assumption: nothing more than that. It’s the result of a classic logic-error, assuming that because something did work in one context, it must therefore continue to do so in that context and all other contexts. Architecturally speaking, we need to challenge this assumption in every case, because the consequences to the organisation’s effectiveness are not good.

Why are financial-shareholders so often assigned priority over every service?

Short answer: no defensible reason. In practice, it arises from interestingly-selective myopia, from the usual dysfunctionalities of the possession-economy, and from a failure to grasp that the fundamentals of capitalism have actually changed somewhat during the past few hundred years…

The myopia is that financial shareholders are merely one category of investors in the organisation and enterprise: in almost all organisations and enterprises, there are many other types of investment than money, and many other categories of investor. Financial-shareholders are also often some of the least-responsible investors, given that the shareholding may now last mere milliseconds in some cases, and that shareholding in limited-liability companies involves quite considerable ‘rights’ with almost zero responsibilities other than risk of loss of financial investment. Structurally, this represents a very high risk to the enterprise.

The arbitrary privileging of financial-investment, and purported ‘rights of possession’ solely on the basis of financial investment, are rooted in an early-18th-century model of capitalism that is ludicrously out-of-date relative to the present-day business-context. For example, given that the core capital of many current organisations resides primarily in the minds and relationships of individual employees, the shareholder-model is often tantamount to a declaration of ‘right of possession’ of those individuals themselves – a claim which, as Charles Handy and other business-writers have pointed out, is utterly indefensible in law, because it’s tantamount to slavery. Again, huge structural problems here, for business-architecture especially – with a real risk that some of these structural flaws are already moving towards a point of catastrophic-failure.

What can we do architecturally to make any of this work any better?

All of these are architectural problems, all with very severe consequences, and hence definitely of serious concern in all aspects of enterprise-architecture and its various domain-architectures.

However, in most cases they arise from very deep political roots – which are not fun to deal with as an enterprise-architect…

The key here is to remember that, especially at this level, the architect’s role is primarily one of decision-support – not decision-making. In most of these cases, the decisions belong to senior executives, boards and, further out, regulators and politicians and the like. We should not attempt to usurp any of those decisions!

What we can do, and should do (in my opinion, anyway!), is to gather the evidence that others will need in order to make those decisions. In many cases we also could or should develop and document preliminary options – including documenting the implications and social and other costs and consequences – so that, again, those others can make informed decisions (or at least, more informed decisions than they seem to do at present…). That’s our task here: attempting to do anything more than that will probably help no-one – and may cause a lot more harm than good, especially to us.

Probably the simplest way to deal with this, in an architectural sense, is to class all of the problems described above as ‘dispensations’, breaches of valid architectural principles that have been allowed to go ahead anyway because of some overriding reason. In most cases, we can document the reason for the dispensation as a ‘political’ or ‘gold-plated requirement’ (to use the respective term from the Volere requirements-framework) – in other words, an arbitrary choice that has no real reason other than that someone said “because I said so”. Because all unresolved architectural-dispensations should be subject to regular review, eventually someone will have the courage to tackle these problems – and we can then at last take action to resolve them. But until that happy day, we can at least ensure that they don’t shoved into the dreaded ‘too-hard basket’, where far too many important problems languish indefinitely without attention until they’ve already gone past the point of no-return.

Yes, it’s frustrating – very frustrating. Especially for those of us – such as most architects, perhaps, by now? – who can see where this mess is heading at present. Yet as architects, that’s probably the best we can do for now: so let’s at least do that, I would hope?

Over to you, anyway.

Each of these conferences brings their own special brew to the enterprise-architecture party. Open Group has its solid emphasis on the detail of IT-architectures; Integrated EA focusses on real complexity in the real world; AE Rio brings its own unique Latin flavour, with a stronger emphasis on business; yet IRM-EAC’s combination of EA and BPM was a heady brew indeed – definitely looking forward to next year on this one!

My own presentation was on ‘Respect as an architectural issue’, based on a real consultancy engagement some while back for a bank in Latin America – I won’t say exactly where or who, for obvious reasons The session went very well: some nice Tweets about it, at the least – though one of them said “@tetradian is light-years ahead of us …”, which is flattering yet also somewhat scary…! Anyway, here’s the slidedeck itself:

Description: The client: a large bank in Latin America. The business problem: loss of respect of the company in the market and the broader community, plummeting from highest to lowest in the region in a matter of months, with impacts throughout all aspects of the business. This real-life case study explores, step-by-step, the actual practices and underlying architecture principles that were used to tackle a major strategic issue with enterprise-wide scope, and set the groundwork for subsequent process development.

Key takeaways:

Hope you find it useful: Share And Enjoy, perhaps?