Tom Graves / Tetradian

What happens when someone gets confused about the nature of different types of assets? Short answer: they try to treat everything as ‘possessions’ – and that’s when the lawyers have a field-day…

A great example of this is described in a BBC article (pointed to by LinkedIn), ‘Man sued for keeping company Twitter followers‘ (27-dec-2011).

The story revolves around social-media figure Noah Kravitz. During his time at tech-news aggregator Phonedog, he accumulated some 17,000 ‘followers’ to his Twitter-account there (@Phonedog_Noah). When he left Phonedog, he changed his username, and the followers either moved with the account, or moved to the new account (dependent on whether he changed the name itself, or moved to a new account – the BBC article doesn’t say). Phonedog regarded the followers as ‘company-property’ – as a ‘customer-list’, to be precise – which Kravitz had taken with him, and were suing him to get it back as their ‘rightful possession’.

There are so many fundamental concept-errors in Phonedog’s actions here that it’s difficult to know where to start… Yet they’re also very common mistakes in the broader business context: hence it’s worth exploring this from an enterprise-architecture / business-architecture perspective.

What we’re actually dealing with here is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of non-tangible assets, coupled with a fundamental misunderstanding about the inherent limitations of an economic model that relies on exchange of ‘rights’ of exclusive-possession over assets.

Let’s start by identifying four fundamentally different asset-dimensions:

• physical: a ‘thing’ – tangible, autonomous, exchangeable and alienable (“if I give it to you, I no longer have it”)
• virtual: information, ideas – non-tangible, semi-autonomous, exchangeable but non-alienable (“if I give it to you, I still have it”)
• relational: person-to-person connection – non-tangible, non-autonomous (exists between two entities), non-exchangeable and non-alienable
• aspirational: person-to-abstract connection – non-tangible, non-autonomous (exists from person to abstract), non-exchangeable and non-alienable

Assets may express multiple dimensions: for example, a printed book is both a physical-asset (the book itself) and a virtual-asset (the information or ideas in the book), and may also act as an anchor for aspirational-assets (people’s sense of connection to the book and/or to the ideas in the book). This linking of multiple asset-dimensions is often described as ‘bundling’.

The current economic-model relies on exchanges of ‘rights’ of ‘exclusive-possession’. It’s a concept that only makes sense with exchangeable and alienable assets – in other words, physical-assets. ‘Exclusive-possession’ does not and cannot make sense with any other asset-dimension. Yet since bundling of asset-types means that the rules for all asset-dimensions in the bundle will apply, the flawed assumptions of the economic model will seem to sort-of make sense as long as there’s some element of physicality in the bundle. But when that element of physicality is dropped? – well, that’s when things get, uh, interesting…

Hence the breakdown of the old media-industry business-models over the past few years. What they actually sell is information, but their old model were based on bundling – printed-books, physical disks, seats in cinemas – hence, with a bit of legal arm-twisting, it could be made to look like a physical ‘exclusive-possession’. But physical things are expensive, with all the concomitant costs and complications of managing them as physical assets: inventory, storage, shipping, building-maintenance, retail-stores and so on. Much cheaper to go all-digital. Which, however, then becomes an unbundled virtual-asset – which can only be exchanged by creating copies, which can then also be exchanged by creating further copies, and so on, all without any exclusive-’alienability’. Oops…

Hence the media-industries first tried an old tactic, which was to use the law of ‘copyright’ (which was and still is focussed only on the ‘possession-rights’ of publishers, not authors) to assert ‘possession’ over those virtual-assets. But the nature of information is that it ‘wants to be free’ – not necessarily in a monetary sense, but in that it’s only usable/accessible by creating copies, and copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies, which at some point will slip outside of any attempts at ‘control’.

Law alone didn’t work, so the next tactic was to try to control some crucial point in the physical ‘pipe’ for information: hence demands that the computer-industry should redesign all processor- or interface-chips to include ‘digital rights management’ that would be controllable only by Hollywood and their ilk. Not surprisingly, that didn’t go down very well with content-creators themselves – or the computer-industry, who happened to have their own lawyers and lobbyists too. Result: expensive stalemate – and still no ‘control’ of those naturally-volatile virtual-assets.

That’s been followed by one attempt after another to ‘control’ information, mostly by threats of legal action and the like. What the media-corporations are still not doing is facing up to the fact that not only is it inherently futile to try to control virtual-assets as if they’re physical, but doing so calls into question the theoretical and ethical basis of the entire possession-economy – physical-assets included. Definitely ‘oops’…

Which brings us back to the Kravitz/Phonedog case.

In that schema above, Twitter-follows are, in effect, a bundling of relational-asset (the perceived person-to-person link between the ‘follower’ and Kravitz) and virtual-asset (the information within Twitter that denotes the link) plus a certain element of aspirational-asset (because with some 17,000 ‘followers’, most of those will be more a link to the idea of Kravitz rather than a true relational-asset person-to-person link). What there isn’t anywhere in there is any physical-asset component – and hence nothing on which a notion of literally-exclusive ‘company property’ can make any sense.

I presume that somewhere there will be some utility that can extract a follower-list from Twitter – in other words, create a sort-of transferrable virtual-asset that Kravitz can give to Phonedog. Yet in practice even that makes little to no sense. First, the followers are not ‘customers’ in a transactional sense, either of Phonedog or of Kravitz: they’re just people who have a passing interest in what Kravitz might happen to say, an interest that may or may not relate to Phonedog as such, even in Kravitz’s (literal!) persona as ‘Phonedog_Noah’. It’s a trust-relationship, not ‘customer’-relationship. And second, transferring the list does not transfer the relationship: in fact it’s more likely to kill any potential relationship with the company, because it implicitly treats the ‘followers’ as if they themselves are nothing more than exchangeable ‘possessions’ – which many (most?) people would take as a fairly extreme insult. Certainly not conducive to creating trust, anyway.

In short, Phonedog’s attempts to ‘possess’ the relationships have all but guaranteed making it impossible for Kravitz to transfer them. The relationships are not under his control: relational-assets are real assets in a business sense, yet they exist only whilst they’re maintained by both parties to that relationship. The only direct option he has within Twitter is to destroy the link, by blocking: he can’t create a new ‘follower’ link, or transfer the link to someone else. (The equivalent is true with direct person-to-person links, of course.) Suing him for damages, about something that by definition isn’t in his control anyway, is both absurd and unfair.

There is (or, by now, probably only was) another option: emphasise the aspirational-asset element (person-to-idea rather than person-with-person), create a strong crosslink between the idea of Kravitz-as-employee-of-Phonedog and the idea of Phonedog-the-company, and use that crosslink to gently persuade Kravitz’s followers to also ‘follow’ Phonedog. (Note that a ‘follow’ to a company has a much higher aspirational-asset component than relational-asset component – something I probably need to explain in another post?) But all of that depends on fairly complex multi-way trust-relationships: for example, the followers need to trust Kravitz’s recommendation, and Kravitz also needs to trust that Phonedog will treat ‘his’ followers with similar respect. And again, there’s not much of those trust-interactions that’s under Kravitz’s personal control – hence again it makes little sense to try to assign him the sole legal responsibility for them.

In practice, Phonedog has done just about everything that they could do to destroy all of those trust-relationships – and then, having done so, tried to blame and even punish everyone else for their ‘loss’.

Not exactly wise, we might say?

Yet also not exactly uncommon, either. Quite the opposite, in fact…

The moral of this sad story, from an enterprise-architecture perspective, is be clear which asset-dimensions you’re dealing with in every context, and ensure that those assets are managed accordingly. Because if you aren’t clear about it, and fail to handle each asset-dimension appropriately, your organisation will inevitably find itself in this kind of mess. And the only people who ‘win’ from this kind of mess are the predators, parasites and scavengers in the legal-profession and elsewhere. Oh joys…

Over to you, perhaps?

Why do we need enterprise-architecture in a business? And why does that EA need to be broader than just IT, often all the way out to a true enterprise-wide scope?

One reason is implied this Tweet by Belgian consultant Patrick Van Renterghem:

itworks: Big discussion now about what happens when cloud vendors go bankrupt or out-of-service. Should [be] in the contract… #BAEA

“Should be in the contract…”: yes, indeed – but what should be in that contract? And why?

Without an enterprise-architecture that covers a broader scope than just the bare IT-transactions, we have no way to know what actually needs to be in that contract – and also in the parts that can’t be covered by contract, and that really do depend on relationships and trust. Which could be a serious problem from a business perspective. Hmm…

I’ve covered a fair bit of the detail of this in other posts here, such as ‘Enterprise-architecture and the Cloud‘. Some people seem to have misunderstood the questions there as somehow being ‘anti-Cloud’, or even ‘anti-IT’: it’s not. It’s about really looking at the whole context – about the whole ‘market-cycle’, about understanding the full implications of a customer-centric view, about maintaining consistency of service across all in-source and out-source relationships, and so on. And we do need to do that: because if we don’t, it can get really expensive.

Yet cloud-outsourcing is only one small example. As enterprise-architects, we also need to be able to extend out to a much broader business-picture, as Steve Denning describes in his Forbes post, ‘Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy‘

when a firm calculates the rate of return on a proposal to outsource manufacturing overseas, it typically does not include:

• The cost of the knowledge that is being lost, possibly forever.
• The cost of being unable to innovate in future, because critical knowledge has been lost.
• The consequent cost of its current business being destroyed by competitors emerging who can make a better product at lower cost.
• The missed opportunity of profits that could be made from innovations based on that knowledge that is being lost.

Failure to apply a proper enterprise-scope architecture-assessment of such themes can be more serious than merely expensive: mistakes at that level can easily kill a corporation. In short, it matters.

That kind of in-depth EA assessment might at first seem pernickety and pedantic, especially to those who just want to get moving. But as John Seddon warns, most of the ‘conventional’ methods to save money and effort usually end up costing far, far more: if we do need to cut costs, for example, we need to take more systemic, whole-of-context view in order to find the real places where those costs can be cut back. And the reality is that often they’re not where we’d expect them to be: hence, again, the need for a true enterprise-scope architecture.

Cloud-IT and other forms of outsourcing often look like the quickest, easiest and most practical way to cut costs. But Steve Denning quotes John Maynard Keynes to warn:

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Most often, those ‘defunct economists’ have failed to account for the hidden costs of a context – particularly the real human costs, which can be ignored only at our peril, especially in the longer term. There are good reasons why those ideas became ‘defunct’: but unfortunately, it seems each new generation has to re-learn those reasons time and time again…

In our domains, those forgotten lessons are reflected in IT-centrism and the like, and the over-simplification of otherwise-valuable ideas such as ‘scientific management’ and ‘business process reengineering’, and, now, cloud-based IT-services. A key role of a whole-of-enterprise architecture, here in the context of outsourcing, is to remind us of why those lessons about the real complexities of outsourcing and the like are so important, and what they mean in real-world practice to Keynes’ ‘practical men’.

In short, use enterprise-architecture to help identify the real hidden-costs of outsourcing – so that your business doesn’t get hit by the bill when those hidden-costs come back to bite…

In case you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ranting about those apparently-abstract ideas about ‘Possessed by possession‘ and the like…

What I’ve been calling ‘Really-Big-Picture enterprise-architecture‘ is about looking at how we can apply enterprise-architecture ideas at a much larger scale, right up to a fully global scope. The simplest way to describe this is as follows:

• every society or culture is held together by mutual responsibilities
• in some (but not all) societies, there may be an overlay of personal possession
• arising from this concept of possession is a notion of property rights
• to support exchange of personal property in accordance with property-rights, we have point-to-point barter
• to resolve the point-to-point nature of barter, we introduce an intermediary currency
• to support futures in a currency-based economics, we introduce the idea of debt-based finance
• to support certain types of debt, we introduce financial-derivatives

All straightforward, all non-pejorative, a simple stack of overlays, each one built on top of the previous layers. We could summarise it visually like this:

There’s only one catch: it doesn’t work.

Most people realise by now that there are huge problems with financial-derivatives and the like: anything that is potentially-infinite that claims to have absolute rights over something that’s definitely finite is by definition going to be problematic. But that isn’t the core problem that we have to deal with.

Debt-based finance is a problem: it tends by definition to concentrate all wealth in the hands of those who control the mechanisms of debt. But that too isn’t the core problem that we have to deal with.

A lot of people argue that the problem lies with the currency: if we could switch to an alternate-currency, they say, everything would work out just fine. There are huge arguments about what kind of currency we should move to – time-based, ‘local energy’, reputation-points or whatever. But the reality is that all of those arguments are almost completely irrelevant, because currency itself isn’t the core problem that we have to deal with.

Some people say that we should drop the whole currency-thing, and go back to barter. But the point-to-point nature of barter causes huge problems, which in many ways currency does help to resolve. But in any case, barter isn’t the core problem that we have to deal with.

Quite a few people say that the real issue is around property-rights. Capitalists and communists alike will argue intensely over who has the right to possess, and who doesn’t. But this misses the point too, because property-rights in themselves aren’t the core problem that we have to deal with.

The real problem is the concept of possession – because that’s what breaks the mutuality of responsibilities on which a sustainable society and its economics depend. Possession is a literally childish view of an economy, one which asserts the primacy of ‘I’ over ‘We’. It’s a view which asserts that that the only thing that matters is my own needs and desires, that I am not responsible to others, either in the present or elsewhen – yet still insists that they are and must still be responsible to me. The reality is that the moment we allow that kind of pseudo-mutuality to exist, by definition we have a broken economy: there’s no way we can make it sustainable – especially over the longer-term.

Imagine an economy that’s run by, for and on behalf of the most childish in the society, and in which anyone who does take responsibility is punished for doing so. That would be insane, wouldn’t it? – in every sense of ‘insane’… Yet what we would have there is something remarkably similar to what we think of as ‘the economy’ in the present day – an ‘economy’ that’s ultimately based on the possessive self-centred temper-tantrums of a two-year-old…

Yet the fact is that anything based on a possession-model will tend automatically to create dysfunctional failure, to not only invent a status of ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ but an ever-widening gap between them, to always assign far higher priority to the present than to future or past, and to create a ‘trickle-up’ pyramid-game structure that can only appear to work as long as it can maintain an illusion of infinite ‘growth’ – because if the growth ever stops, its only option is to cannibalise itself into oblivion. There is no possible way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

Which means that we have a rather serious problem. If possession doesn’t work – and not only doesn’t work, but by definition can’t work - and we need to move towards a truly sustainable economy – which, with seven billion humans and still increasing fast, we clearly do – then it means that we need to rethink not just possession itself, but everything that’s built on top of it. In short, every single one of those overlays is irrelevant, because they’re built on top of something that doesn’t work. Or, to put it in simple graphic form:

If the core problem is possession, then it should be evident that futzing around at any of the layers that are built on top of that myth of possession is not going to make any significant difference. It’s a waste of time, of effort, of everything else – a waste that we can ill afford right now, given the real inescapable all-too-literally ‘deadlines’ that we’re starting to face in the near future. Our only option is scrap the whole lot, and start again almost from scratch – because anything that retains any hint of possession in its structure will cause the whole thing to fail all over again.

And yet it’s scary just how much of our society and economics and the rest assume that possession is the only way to go. Just to give one small example: if “possession is nine-tenths of the law”, what does that tell us about what changes in law would be needed for a sustainable society? Not a trivial problem, yes…?

Yet I do believe that enterprise-architects have skills that could be genuinely useful for this type of challenge. We’re used to working at large scale, and at every scale, across every aspect of a whole system. We’re used to seeing how all of the different aspects come together to make a single unified whole. We’re used to doing roadmaps for change and suchlike – and the, uh, interesting politics that go with any large-scale change. What we have here is still enterprise-architecture, still the ‘big-picture’ – just a rather bigger picture than we’re used to, that’s all.

So that’s what I’m describing as ‘Really-Big-Picture Enterprise-Architecture’ – a form of enterprise-architecture where the ‘enterprise’ in scope is actually everything that happens and will happen in human activity on the entirety of the planet. In other words, probably the largest enterprise-architecture challenge that any of us will ever face. Interested?

Okay, I’ve moved on to a different garden: what next? What’s the plan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a plan. Sort-of.

Hmm…

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

Another week’s worth of Tweets and links, for once almost on time. Usual categories, of course, with a few extra bits and pieces as usual. Over to you?

Read more…

Oh well. The past couple of posts on a ‘thought-experiment‘ in using enterprise-architecture methods to guide a fundamental rethink of economics both seem to have gone down like the proverbial lead-balloon. Fair enough. But I guess I’ll do one more try before going back to more conventional enterprise-architecture themes. (If anyone is interested in this, we can always come back to it later if need be.)

So: here’s the background.

No-one would doubt that, globally speaking, we all have a few problems at present. Global financial crash, some serious environmental overshoots, an evident reshuffle going on in the global power-positioning between various nation-states, and increasing social unrest even (or perhaps especially) in so-called ‘developed’ countries.

Yet those are almost trivial compared to what any competent futurist could see coming up on the horizon. Seriously.

So much of “Seriously.”, in fact, that there’s no possible way that we’d still be able to survive long-term – or even medium-term – with what we currently think of as ‘business-as-usual’. And I don’t just mean business-survival or suchlike – I mean survival. Period.

Hence we’re talking about an urgent need here for some truly fundamental changes. Not just minor tweaks of the deckchairs on the Titanic.

We still see lots of attempts at such ‘tweaking’, of course. The most popular seems to be about trying to tweak individual parts of the existing money-system – which by now everyone knows isn’t going to work. Perhaps the next most popular type of tweak is the search for ‘alternative currencies‘. Yet all of those ideas fail at the first hurdle, because the real source of the problem goes much deeper than that. Trying to build yet another structure on top of something that already doesn’t work is kinda futile, really…

The real problem is about possession. But it isn’t about who has the money, or who possesses the property: those kinds of problems are ‘fixable’ by ordinary political means. No: the real problem is the entire concept of possession itself. And that’s a lot deeper than just politics: that one really is fundamental.

And the problem is that possession doesn’t work. It never has. That’s the whole point. The notion that “possession makes the world go round” is a total delusion: most times, possession is what makes it go stop. Which, ultimately, is why it guarantees a world that doesn’t work. (Like now. Only worse.)

‘Possession’ is a screaming toddler’s refusal to share – a refusal to accept that the complexities and responsibilities that make a social world viable are always mutual, and must necessarily apply to everyone.

To be blunt, the myth of ‘possession’ arose when some foolish parent failed to pacify and placate a selfish, self-centred, screaming child. Kind of embarrassing to realise that so much of our vaunted ‘world-economy’ has its roots in the nursery, in the possessive temper-tantrum of a child lost in the ‘terrible twos’. Most children do grow out of it, eventually; but some don’t grow out of it at all – and that’s where the problems start…

Unfortunately, too many two-year-olds learnt that screaming and stealing and hitting people and holding onto things that they don’t need will seem to give them ‘control’ over others. The screamers do indeed ‘get results’, for themselves, for a while – but only by making it harder and harder for everyone else to sort out the resultant mess.

More unfortunately, it’s very addictive: it gives apparently-good results in the short-term, but at the cost of screwing things up in the longer-term.

Even more unfortunately, it’s also very infective: when stealing ‘wins’, who wants to be the ‘loser’? Which is why, some 5000 years or so after this mistake first became established - apparently starting within a small sub-clan somewhere in what later became called Mesopotamia – we now have an entire global structure that actively rewards even the most obsessive self-centredness, and actively punishes almost any form of responsibility. Which is why we now have a global economy and a global environment right on the brink of total collapse. Oops…

So, what do we about it?

Let’s start right from the beginning:

The core foundation of all economics and social structures is a ‘value-network’ of interlocking mutual responsibilities.

That part of ‘the economy’ does still work. And we know it works, because we can see it do so in many different contexts and at many different scales, from high-functioning households to the internals of high-functioning businesses, and in most of the now-few ‘traditional’ societies that have so far managed to withstand the ravages of ‘development’.

A possession-based economy is, in effect, a dysfunctional overlay on top of a responsibility-based economy. To be blunt, a selfish-child’s version of an economy, in which everything is deemed to be centred solely around themselves. (Technically, it’s a ‘subject-based’ model: all others are deemed to be subjects of self.)

The fundamental basis of a possession-economy is that it ignores or rejects outright many of the mutual-responsibilities that make an economy viable and sustainable over the longer-term. In effect, it ‘sweeps the mess under the carpet’, and attempts to conceal the mess via a myth of ‘infinite growth’. Yet those responsibilities don’t simply disappear because we ignore them: they’re still there, still gathering metaphoric interest (to use the monetary term). So when the myth of ‘infinite growth’ hits up against the real-world’s finite limits – which is what’s happening now – the whole thing is going to come apart at the seams. At that point, the only viable option is to reinstate what does actually work: a responsibility-based economics.

Which means that we’ll have to dismantle the entire superstructure of possession, and everything built on top of that as well; and then rebuild a new set of structures pretty much from scratch, starting from right down at the root-level, and then building upward again from there. Which is definitely a non-trivial challenge: but we really do not have any choice about that. (If we want to survive, that is…)

The catch is that the change-over has to be total: no exceptions at all. Possession is highly-addictive, and fatally-infective: if we allow any of it to remain, it will destroy the economy all over again – and we won’t be able to survive another mess like this one. There’s no getting round that fact: it really is all, or nothing. Literally.

Which where it gets kinda scary…

Possession has to go. Perhaps doesn’t sound so bad at first, because it might seem too abstract to matter. But we mean that this applies to all notions of possession, in every one of its real-world forms. No exceptions. No exceptions.

Which means barter has to go too, because barter assumes that we must already possess something, in an exclusive sense, in order to be able to exchange it for something else.

Which means that money, or currency in any form, also has to go, because in effect that’s just an overlay on top of barter.

Which means, among other things, that the entire monetary-system has to go; the entire banking-system and finance-system has to go; the entirety of microeconomics, the entire system of pricing and valuation, yes, that all has to go too. And the entire tax-system has to be re-thought from scratch, along with the entire social-benefits system, the fundamentals of the insurance-system, the fundamentals of most medical-care systems, the fundamentals of most forms of trade, and much, much, much more.

The entirety of the property-system needs to be restructured from scratch, refocussed around responsibilities: in a responsibility-based economy, we own something not because we claim to ‘possess’ it, but because we declare and demonstrate responsibility for it.

Yep: this isn’t something that we can fix up with a few minor tweaks here and there – which is all that most people seem to be aiming for at present. It’s big. Really big. Huge. And yet it’s probably the only chance that we have to get out of this mess.

And just to make it even more fun, we also have to remove all forms of possession in the social sphere. Of which the most important, most pervasive, and most pernicious, is the concept of ‘rights’. (Ouch… not going to be popular for saying that, am I? )

Yet the blunt fact is that ‘rights’ aren’t real: they only exist because of the mutual responsibilities that create the conditions that we want when we talk of ‘rights’. And the other blunt fact is that most so-called ‘rights’ are actually little more than a sneaky method to evade key aspects of the mutuality of those responsibilities, and attempt to offload the responsibilities onto everyone else. Which is, technically, a form of abuse – and hence, in many cases, a fully state-sponsored form of structural abuse against those who are deemed not to have the respective ‘rights’. Which is why things often don’t work very well – especially whenever someone insists on bringing their purported ‘rights’ into the picture… Most so-called ‘human rights’ exist solely to compensate for someone else’s so-called ‘rights’: and the only viable way to sort out the resultant shambles is to get rid of the whole mess of ‘rights’, and focus on the responsibilities instead.

In short, the entire notion of ‘rights’ is a form of possession – or more often the ‘anti-possession’ of a claimed absence of responsibility. Which is why ‘rights’ have to go, too.

Yes, I’m serious: no rights. For anyone. Anywhere. Ever. Instead, we have to replace every single purported ‘right’ with social-structures that are based on the actual underlying mutual-responsibilities, to deliver the same overall results, and more. (That’s not hard to do, by the way: most businesses do it internally all of the time, in one way or another. Yet for many people, though, the ending of the delusion of ‘rights’ is definitely going to be the hardest part of this to face…)

So: no possession, no barter, no money, and no rights. Think that might mean a few changes to most our existing institutions, then…?

Which, in turn, is why most of those institutions aren’t likely to be much help here either:

• Would you trust a banker to supervise the end of the entire banking-system?
• Would you trust a lawyer to supervise the end of most current law?
• Would you trust an economist to rethink the entire economy?
• Would you trust a government to rethink the entire nature of government?

Hmm… probably not?

So who could do this work that so obviously and urgently needs to be done?

It’s going to need someone with a solid background in futures. Most futurists, though would, only deal with the abstract, the future – they don’t deal much with the nitty-gritty of ‘the now’.

It’s going to need someone with some solid experience in negotiation, in governance, and design for governance. A lot of people in the social-work space could do that – but they usually don’t have much experience of futures, or of dealing with anything that isn’t primarily about people.

It’s going to need to need a total re-think of business-processes, business-models and business in general, in just about every possible field of work. Most business analysts could do that, if it was all about money – which it isn’t. Which kind of rules them out for this work as well.

It’s going to need to cross an enormous scope – in a way, it’d be literally everything. Not a good role for single-domain specialists, then.

Which kinda bring us back to the skillsets of the enterprise-architect: futures-oriented, but practical; people-oriented, but with a solid grasp of the technical too; a lot of experience with re-thinking every aspect of business, outside of a purely money-oriented scope; and above all, consummate generalists.

So yeah, does kinda look like the ball’s in our court, doesn’t it?

Hmm…

Comments, anyone?

The previous post ‘Governance in a responsibility-based enterprise-architecture‘ was a bit long… as usual… So here’s a (somewhat) shorter-form version of the same ‘thought-experiment’ about an EA-based approach to governance and law, laid out in step-by-step format, and without the perhaps rather lengthy explanations that are in that post and the other posts that preceded it.

Step 1: The aim of the ‘thought-experiment’ is to devise a form of governance for a responsibility-based economics for an enterprise of any scale. What we’ll be working on during this thought-experiment is identifying the core constraints for a ‘to-be’ architecture for that requirement.

(Ultimately, we’d need to be talking about governance for economics at a global scale, but it might be best to start with something a bit smaller: your own organisation, for example, in relation to its industry and business-context.)

Step 2: For the purposes of the thought-experiment, take it as a given that any claim of ‘possession’, in any form whatsoever, will cause failure of the respective economic system in the medium- to longer-term. We must therefore class all forms and variants of possession as ‘disallowed’ from the to-be architecture.

(See the previous posts for the background to this assertion. It does happen to be true, but for now let’s bypass any argument by saying that we’re just using it as a nominally-arbitrary assumption for a thought-experiment.)

Step 3: For the purpose here, take it also as a given that possession, and hence all of its overlays, is itself an overlay on top of a responsibility-based economy – a structure of interlocking mutual responsibilities. Because of this, everything that would perhaps more usually be described in terms of possession or its derivatives – the ‘disallowed’ items from the previous step – may instead be described in terms of mutual responsibilities.

(Again, see the previous posts for the detail on that, but for now just take it as an assumption “solely for the purposes of the thought-experiment” etc.)

Step 4: Outline a ‘to-be’ architecture whose core content consists of the responsibility-based replacements for all ‘disallowed’ items. No exceptions can be permitted, because any instance of a possession-based model will inevitably ‘infect’ and eventually destroy the sustainability of the responsibility-based model.

– Step 4a: All concepts of exclusive-possession are ‘disallowed’; societal management of those resources must be described in terms of personal responsibilities for and to those resources, and interlocks between mutual responsibilities for the use (‘exploitation’) of those resources, including all responsibilities to others either elsewhere or elsewhen.

– Step 4b: All concepts of ‘anti-possession’ – a purported ‘right’ to not be responsible for some aspect of a managed resource – are also ‘disallowed’; governance-mechanisms should be defined so as to ensure that the respective personal and/or mutual responsibilities are not evaded.

– Step 4c: All concepts of possession of inherent priority, privilege or ‘entitlement’ are ‘disallowed’. (Note that this means that, by definition, all concepts of supposed ‘rights’ must be ‘disallowed’ – including all purported property rights, right to free speech, right to silence, women’s rights, etc. Which, yes, is going to be seriously challenging for a lot of folks… but for now, play safe, and keep reminding people that this is ‘only a thought-experiment’.) Instead, identify the mutual responsibilities that underpin and/or are evaded in order to create the context for each purported ‘right’ at present, and – as for ‘anti-possession’ – devise governance that would resolve and prevent evasion of mutual-responsibilities in that context.

– Step 4d: From 4a and 4c, all concepts of exclusive ‘property rights’ are ‘disallowed’: this includes physical-property, real-estate, land-title, so-called ‘intellectual property’, brands, cultural-stories and the like. Note that in effect this also includes beliefs about ‘possession of the truth’, such as are common in many forms of law, and in scientism and in similar models of religious or quasi-religious belief. Identify the mutual-responsibilities and evasions of responsibilities that underpin all of these ‘possessions’, and sketch out forms of governance that do also acknowledge and respect people’s emotional and spiritual attachment to things, to places and to ideas.

– Step 4e: All concepts of ‘possession’ of others are ‘disallowed’. Note that such concepts are commonly either explicit or implied in many social relationships, such as employment-contracts, marriage, notions of ‘custody’ of children, etc. As above, identify the actual responsibilities that would be required in each case – taking into account the fundamental differences that would apply in a non-possession-based economic and societal model – and sketch out governance that would support those responsibilities and their mutualities.

– Step 4f: Scan language in use within the context, for possessives such as ‘my’ , ‘your’, ‘his’, ‘hers’, ‘their’, ‘its’, ‘the company’s’ etc, to identify any implied forms or assertions of ‘possession’. All such forms would be classed as ‘disallowed’, as above; identify, document and model the underlying mutual-responsibilities, also as above.

– Step 4g: All concepts of barter presume the existence of a possession-based model of ‘right to exchange’, and hence are automatically ‘disallowed’. Identify the mutual responsibilities implied by any barter-exchange, and devise alternative mechanisms – and governance for those mechanisms – that are based on the actual underlying responsibilities.

– Step 4h: All concepts of ‘currency’ (including money, tokens, time-based currencies, money-based taxes or fines etc) represent purported possession-based ‘rights to resources’, and hence are automatically ‘disallowed’. As for barter above, identify the mutual-responsibilities – and, often, evasions of responsibilities – that underly such concepts, and devise alternative exchange-mechanisms and governance that are based on the actual underlying responsibilities.

(Note that all of the above is the minimum that would need to be in place in order to create and maintain a viable and sustainable economy. A lot of this might no doubt seem seem seriously scary, but it’s essential to realise that there can be no exceptions here. We can’t cling on to some favoured part of the possession-economy, because any remnant part of the existing possession-based structures will inevitably destroy everything – there is no way round that bald fact. Hence the work here.

Don’t forget that, by definition, every form of ‘possession’ and every so-called ‘right’ is actually based on mutual-responsibilities: the responsibilities themselves are rarely acknowledged, and the mutualities of those responsibilities even less so, yet without them, the ‘right’ or whatever would not and could not exist. To illustrate this, try a very simple exercise: take that classic US description of ‘the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and identify the responsibilities that underpin each of those ‘rights’. In reality, every ‘right’ is an arbitrary fiction; but the responsibilities that underly them are real. Hence why we really are best off by discarding the entire concept of ‘rights’, and keep a firm focus on the real responsibilities instead.)

Step 5: Sketch out mechanisms of exchange, and forms of governance for such exchange and relationship, that fully enact and support all of the mutual-responsibilities identify within all the work of the previous step. Document and model all of this as a ‘to-be’ enterprise-architecture for the respective scope.

(Most of this is a straightforward ‘to-be’ architecture-modelling exercise: it’s focussed on governance rather than, say, IT-applications or physical infrastructure, but the principles and process are exactly the same as usual.)

Step 6 (optional):  Map out an ‘as-is’ architecture for the same scope, based on the various current possession-based structures.

(This again should be straightforward: in essence, it’s just describing what we already know and, uh, love…)

Step 7 (optional – requires Step 6): Develop a gap-analysis between ‘to-be’ and ‘as-is’, to identify requirements for change from the present context to a viable and sustainable responsibility-based socioeconomic model.

(This is the part that gets seriously scary for a lot of people… Notice how many existing institutions simply don’t exist any more in the ‘to-be’ model: banks, insurances, pensions, monetary taxes, most concepts of ‘valuation’, the entire money-system, large chunks of the legal system, large chunks of current education, religion, science, and much else besides. What’s interesting is what doesn’t change: for example, most market transactions still have to happen somehow, but via a responsibility-based model rather than via ‘rights of exclusion’.)

Once all of this is done, documented, discussed with stakeholders and the rest… – only then can we sensibly start talking about possible ‘solutions’, ‘roadmaps for change’, and the like.

(Again, this is standard architecture-practice: other than for Agile-style exploratory experiments, we don’t talk about ‘solutions’ until the requirements are properly understood. There are way too many people wanting to rush off into some form or other of instant-’solution’ – particularly around would ‘alternative-currencies’ and the like – but it’s a complete waste of time and effort unless and until this work is done…)

Oh, and in case you wondered whether any of this is feasible? – if so, perhaps take a look at some the various state-wide or nation-wide emergency-management legislation scattered around the globe…? In Australia, for example, the person in charge of a declared emergency already has the legal right to take possession of anything at all “as he sees fit”, offering only “such compensation as he sees fit”: and there’s nothing whatsoever to stop a government declaring a national-scale emergency and literally taking possession of the whole country – with no payment required at all. The same will almost certainly also be true for your own country… interesting, huh?

Anyway, try this out for yourself, if you would? – and let me know what insights arise for you in doing so, perhaps?

Another week’s collection of Tweets and links – somewhat oversized this time, don’t quite know why. Usual categories, anyway, after the usual break:

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I’ve deliberately chosen a rather bland title here for what may turn out to be, for many people, a seriously scary post… because what this is actually about is rethinking, from scratch, the entire basis of property-law and quite a few other types of law, by leveraging from what we’ve learnt in developing governance for whole-of-enterprise architectures.

(Don’t panic: this is only about getting started in doing so – not the whole thing! But collectively, as enterprise-architects, we do need to get started on this, as a matter of real urgency, because the longer we all leave it, the faster we run out of options when the crunch really does come – and all the indications are that that’s not far ahead at all. (Remember that I’ve worked as a professional futurist? From what I see right now, I’d say that we do have perhaps ten years from now to get everything set up, though no more than fifty years beyond that to get the entire world economy changed over to a sustainable model. If we don’t get properly started within the current decade, I’d estimate that we’d have perhaps at most ten more years beyond that of ‘business as usual’ before the whole thing collapses worldwide in an all-too-literally bloody mess. Look at any of the planetary-scale indicators right now: you’ll see that no, I’m not being alarmist at all, and yes, it really is that serious…)

And no doubt you might ask “Shouldn’t it be the lawyers who do should do this – not us?” If so, all I can say is “listen to what you’ve just said…” – because right now, to be blunt, would you trust any lawyer, or certainly any group of lawyers, to lead any kind of constructive change, especially at this kind of scale? I wouldn’t: with very few exceptions, they’re way too embedded in the current models, in every possible way – which makes them almost the least appropriate group to guide a fundamental rethink of governance and the law. By contrast, whole-enterprise architects have a lot of practice at linking things across a very broad scope, at every layer from very abstract to very concrete; and most will have had a lot of experience at all manner of governance-issues of every category, from rules to algorithms to guidelines to principles, dealing with and negotiating on a vast array of interpersonal issues and wicked-problems between just about every feasible group of stakeholders – all of which makes EAs one of the few groups of people who do have the background and experience for this task. Hence this post.)

To make sense of what follows, you’ll probably need to have read at least the following posts:

• (on the Sidewise blog) ‘The future of money is that it has no future‘
• ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘
• ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘
• ‘Responses to ‘EA economics challenge’‘

All of those posts explored one specific aspect of what’s needed for a viable societal model, namely the architecture of its economics. What I want to do here is start going one step deeper, exploring the core architectural-principles for a system of law and governance that would underpin that economics.

(What should be clear to everyone by now is that the current system of economics, and the system of property-law that underpins it, is not sustainable. Or, to put it the other way round, a sustainable economy depends on a system of sustainable law – which doesn’t exist at present. The best that current economic-law can achieve is what I’ve described as ‘That Worst Possible System‘, where resources will inevitably end up where they’re least needed. The worst it can achieve is, well, a lot worse… and from a futurist perspective, it’s patently obvious that that’s where we’re headed right now.

Which, to put it mildly, means that we’re all in trouble. Deep trouble.

The catch, of course, is that most people won’t believe that fact. Or won’t want to believe it, more to the point. Which in itself is a problem – especially for anyone who happens to find themselves in the unhappy role of ‘the messenger’ in the age-old game of “the best way to respond to bad news is to shoot the messenger”…

Hence, for public-consumption, probably best to describe all of what follows as ‘merely a thought-experiment’. Except that it isn’t. At all.

Anyway… to continue…)

I perhaps need to make it clear that I won’t be presenting or promoting anything here that purports to be ‘The Answer’. Any competent enterprise-architect should recognise that we’re nowhere near that stage as yet: we’ve barely even started on ‘The Question’…

We do have a fairly good idea of ‘The Vision’, though – namely something like ‘a world that works in a sustainable way, with an economics that works in a sustainable way’. (I don’t think anyone would disagree with that? – or anyone vaguely-sane, anyway?) So that’ll do as a starting-point: we can leave detailed discussion of values and the like until somewhat later.

Given that starting-point, the next thing we need to establish are the fundamental constraints that any would-be ‘solution’ must address. And it’s those constraints that are the main focus for this first-stage thought-experiment here.

What came up from the research behind the previous posts was as follows:

– The money-system has now become almost completely detached from any concrete reality or from any feasible form of control: so we now have a potentially-infinite system that has no inherent constraints or controls, but that somehow supposedly obtains ‘rights’ to an inherently-constrained pool of concrete resources. That’s a very serious problem in itself: yet money in itself is not the core source of the problems we face.

– The primary purpose of all money-type mechanisms is to resolve a structural problem with barter: barter-exchanges can only take place on a point-to-point basis at or close to real-time, so a ‘currency’ of some kind provides a token of mutual trust that supports multi-way indirect non-real-time exchanges across the agreed jurisdiction of that currency. This in turn depends on a mechanism of ‘valuation’, which in essence is now all but completely broken: yet valuation in itself is not the core source of the problems.

– The same problems apply to all forms of ‘currency’: hence the currency-type is not the core source of the problems. (Hence there is no point is wasting time or effort on any form of ‘alternative-currency’, because by definition no type of ‘currency’ can resolve the real underlying economic problems.)

– Barter assumes some form of exchange of services or resources; in turn, a barter-based economy assumes that everyone has access to ‘exchangeable resources’, or ‘tradable services’ – which is simply not the case at all. Small children, the ill, the elderly, and anyone undertaking care-work or the like for such people, will either have nothing to exchange, or no time to engage in so-called ‘economic activity’. The fact that a barter-based economy – and hence any money-based economy – will therefore be unable to cover the economic relationships of more than perhaps half the people of the world, is in itself a serious problem: yet barter in itself is not the core source of the problems.

– Barter-exchanges assume that each participant has the ‘right’ to exchange the resource or service – which in turn assumes the ‘right’ to withhold that resource or service, otherwise there would be no need for the type of ‘quid pro quo’ exchanges managed through barter and the like. Such purported ‘rights’ of exclusion are typically termed ‘property-rights’, and ultimately almost all trails of provenance for purported ‘property-rights’ end up in some arbitrary act of expropriation – or, bluntly, theft – which is in itself a serious problem: yet ‘property-rights’ in themselves are not the core source of the problem.

– Right at the root – underpinning all of the above – is a concept of possession. It is, in essence, the two-year-old’s view of the world: “Mine!” It arises from an inability to perceive that the economic world depends on complex interlocking of mutual responsibilities, and hence an inability to trust that resources and services will be there as needed. It can also be seen as ‘possession’ of a purported right to not be responsible to others for some aspect of a resource or service – a peculiar form of possession that we might describe as ‘anti-possession’. The result is that all attempts at possession or any of its variants will cause resources and services to not be available where, when and to whom they are needed – and hence possession itself becomes its own dysfunctional self-confirming prophecy.

There’s a lot more detail that could be gone into here, but in essence it all comes down to this: the core problem that underpins all economic dysfunctionality is a concept of possession.

To put it at its bluntest and simplest: no system of sustainable law can incorporate any concept of possession, in any form whatsoever, applying to any type of resource or service. That includes physical-property, intellectual-property, relationships, ideas, theories, beliefs, religion, anything: none of them can be ‘possessed’ in any way.

(Interestingly, any attempts at ‘possession’ usually result in the respective person being ‘possessed’ by that which is considered to be possessed: a point which is expressed well in the Buddhist concept of ‘attachment’. Yet there’s a further twist, in that an attempt at rejection of possession is itself a form of possession, the possession of the absence of something. In a more complete Buddhist view, ‘non-attachment’ – ahimsa - is a synonym not of ‘detachment’, but of non-detachment.)

What does work is mutual responsibility: a model of ownership based on responsibility or stewardship. We ‘own’ something because we accept responsibility for that ‘something’ – and for no other reason. We do not have a ‘right’ to withhold it from anyone, other than as an expression of that personal responsibility.

All economic systems are ultimately based on interlocking mutual responsibilities: ’possession’ is merely a dysfunctional and literally ‘self-ish’ overlay on top of a responsibility-based economic model.

Most ‘traditional’ economies are responsibility-based. The internal operation of most households – the literal meaning of ‘economics’ – is responsibility-based. Most aspects of the internal operations of most organisations are responsibility-based. All possession-based, barter-based, currency-based or money-based economic-models are aberrations that are inherently guaranteed to cause economic failure. This is, of course, almost the exact opposite of what we’re usually taught about economics…

It is true that a possession-based model will seem to deliver better economic results in the short-term: yet it does so solely by offloading some form of economic-responsibility to elsewhere and/or elsewhen. To be blunt, it ‘succeeds’ solely via stealing either from others in the present, the future or, in some specific examples, the past. Its primary method for concealing the theft is via a concept of ‘growth’: once such ‘growth’ ceases – as it always must in any closed system – its only remaining option is to cannibalise itself into oblivion. There is no possible way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

So, that’s the context of this architectural ‘thought-experiment’:

– The vision is a sustainable world.

– The constraints are that since all forms of possession lead to economic relationships that are inherently unsustainable, that world cannot include any form of possession, and hence also cannot include any form of possession-based ‘property’, any withholding-based exchange, barter, currency, money, or finance.

– Corollaries from those constraints include an assertion that any form of ‘growth’-based economics is likely to be delusory; likewise that any concept of ‘control’ is likely to be delusory.

– By definition, possession-based societal-control mechanisms cannot be used for societal control in this model: this includes fines, confiscation of property, and many other types of inclusion or exclusion. Likewise monetary taxes, pensions, benefits and similar mechanisms for ‘wealth-distribution’ and suchlike will not be available. (It’s quite a long list of other things that would vanish, too: banks, insurances, mortgages, loans, credit-cards, wages, salaries, ‘gifts’, bribes and much, much more. Interesting, yes? )

As enterprise-architects we do know how to do governance for this kind of world: it’s exactly what we deal with when we talk about a ‘project owner’ or ‘process owner’ or ‘business-rule owner’. It’s also the type of context that we deal with when getting different stakeholders and project-groups together to resolve architectural conflicts. And we also know how to do roadmaps for change, and how to deal with some of those really difficult change-adoption issues. In that sense, the only real difficulty for this ‘thought-experiment’ should be in scaling all of that experience up to a much broader scope – and again, we know how to handle scaling-issues of this type.

So there’s the governance-challenge:

• How do we make this work?
• What governance do we need?
• In what ways does the governance change in different contexts – simple rule-based ‘law’, legal-algorithm, pattern-based guidelines, or overarching principles?
• What checks and balances are needed for each form of governance?
• Who are the stakeholders in each case?
• What are the responsibilities for each stakeholder?
• How do we identify and monitor the mutualities and interlocks between those responsibilities?
• Within the governance-mechanisms, how do we balance all the conflicting needs?
• How do we support viable, sustainable forms of conflict-resolution that do not simply collapse into ‘wicked-problems’ time and time again?

That’s it. It’s huge, sure; yet it’s also urgent…

So: over to you: any comments? Any questions? Or any answers, perhaps?

It’s back again, by popular (lack of?) demand: another week’s collection of Tweets and links. All the usual categories, confusions and all-too-necessary break before we start:

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