Tom Graves / Tetradian

The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough.

Just Enough Detail.

To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much detail is ‘Just Enough Detail’?”. And I’ll have to admit that there isn’t a simple. certain, predefined answer. You just have to kinda know when enough is enough, you know? – which is why it’s more art than science, I guess. And why experience – usually gained by not getting it right… – is so important here.

One thing I do know is that one of the most-quoted answers is usually just plain wrong for this. John Zachman has always said that we need to document everything in ‘excruciating detail’. In a sense, yes, he’s sort-of right, especially if you hold to his metaphor that enterprise-architecture is essentially the same as engineering an aircraft. (I happen to believe that that’s a seriously-misleading metaphor, but that’s another story.) Yet in the real world – even in aircraft-engineering, as I know from much first-hand experience – much of the detail won’t stay the same for long enough to make that ‘excruciating detail’ requirement achievable in practice. Tricky…

Reality is that everything changes, everything moves. And the more they change, the more the demand for ever-more-detail becomes a trap. And when the pace of change itself is accelerating fast – as is definitely the case in most enterprise-architecture contexts right now – the more dangerous that ‘too-much-detail’ trap becomes, and the more we risk falling into it.

Yet on the other side, not enough detail means we won’t have enough of an anchor for meaningful sensemaking or decision-making – so we risk making bad decisions on the basis of too many arbitrary assumptions. That’s not a good idea either.

Hence Just Enough Detail.

The point is that that ‘just enough’ of Just Enough Detail varies all the time, from context to context, depending on who we’re with, what we’re doing, what we’re aiming to do, the type and rate of change, and all manner of other factors. Take this example from one of my favourite ‘show this to clients’ books, Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School:

There’s actually not much detail in that image. There’s no detail at all of the wall – and yet that’s still enough detail to make out that it is a wall (and probably a white-plaster wall at that). Other than the outline, there’s almost no detail of the woman, or her clothing – and yet it’s enough to get a good sense of who she is, what she looks like. There’s a bit more detail of the church and its dome – enough to tell that it is Brunelleschi‘s masterpiece in Florence – and of the townscape around it. Not much detail, then – and yet that’s all the detail it needs to tell the story. Not too much; not too little; Just Enough Detail.

So, over to you: how much or how little is Just Enough Detail in each part of your enterprise-architecture? How do you show that Just Enough Detail to whoever needs to see the story?

How much does Just Enough Detail change between different layers of abstraction, between different audiences, between backbone versus edge?

How do you know when it’s too much detail, or too little? How do you know when it’s just right? – when it’s Just Enough Detail?

How do you learn this delicate, ever-changing balance of ‘just enough’? From where and in what ways do you learn that balance – without causing too much damage whilst learning it?

Just Enough Detail, always. An interesting challenge, yes?

At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my own business. How does that sound to you?”

Uh, no. Not a good idea. Not just because it’s a really bad deal from our perspective, but much more that Reality Department really doesn’t work that way: there’s no short-cut to experience.

Yes, it all looks simple enough – in fact that’s the whole point. A lot of simple visual summaries, and surprisingly simple-seeming methods, too. Yet it only looks simple because we’ve been through a heck of lot of hard work to make it that way. Hard-won experience, won the hard way through years and years of practice in many, many different contexts, getting it ‘wrong’ time and time again, in many, many different ways in order to get it right.

The real trap is that these simple-seeming ideas and methods aren’t simple rules, prepackaged sense-making and decision-making that will always work in every context. These are simple principles, simple guidelines, the kind of easy-to-memorise information that helps decision-making in real-time, in circumstances that are subtly different every time. (See my SCAN posts for more on these distinctions.) If you try to use them as ‘rules’ for inherently-uncertain contexts, without understanding why those principles apply, or how they need to be tweaked every time to match each different context, you’re going to be in real trouble – along with everyone else around you. Not a good idea…

The same often applies even to things that really are ’rules’. Take that example of perhaps the greatest simplification ever made: e=mc². All the core information you need to build a nuclear power-station is right there in that equation: but there’s a heck of a long way – a heck of a lot of engineering-experience – to go from that one equation to building a nuclear-power station that actually works.

Same with everything else, really: simplification is essential, but can also be deceptive – especially when people mistake ‘simple’ for ‘easy’…

Which is also why I get a bit hot-under-the-collar about the current proliferation of ‘certification-schemes’ in enterprise-architecture and elsewhere. Some of them are genuinely valuable, but others – to be blunt – are little better than money-spinning scams, in terms of the actual value that they (don’t) deliver. And the crucial distinction revolves around the role and recognition of experience.

For example, the TOGAF Foundation and Archimate Foundation certifications have real value. They verify that the respective person has a credible command of the terminology and language – a requirement that matters a lot for communication across a dispersed and disparate team.

Likewise the ATAC certifications should have real value, because each explicitly tests practical experience in the respective area.

But unless they’ve changed it in the past year or so, the full TOGAF certification is delivered through the absurdly-inappropriate mechanism of a multiple-choice test. And to my mind, that’s not merely useless, it’s actually worse than useless, because it’s exactly how not to test for the kind of experience that that type of competence requires. (When I did the TOGAF 8 exam some years back, I almost failed because I answered several key questions correctly in terms of real-world experience, rather than the theory-based wrong-assumptions that the test thought were ‘right’.) The result of that kind of pseudo-test is a bevy of people who can wave a certificate around, but have no idea how to do the work in any real-world context.

A good training-course can make all the difference, and the better training-providers do take up some of the slack here. (I’ll wave a flag at this point for John Polgreen at Architecting The Enterprise, who’s been doing sterling work for years on adapting TOGAF for the US-government context.) Yet none of that competence carries through anywhere into the actual test: so unless we know each of the training-providers, we have no way to tell whether a candidate does actually know what they’re doing, or merely that they have a piece of paper to prove that they know just enough to get into real trouble, but not enough to get out of it again.

In effect, right now, the full TOGAF certification is of less real-world value than the Foundation certification – which is both bizarre and sadly pointless. And I’ll hasten to add that I’m using TOGAF here merely as one example amongst many: it may well be that most of the so-called ‘certifications’ in this field are even more meaningless than that. And the results can be seen everywhere in the trade…

In short, it’s a mess.

What we need to be testing for is genuine understanding of a context, and the ability to adapt for uniqueness. And that calls for much, much more than can be covered in a crude multiple-choice test delivered through a mindless machine. Sure, that kind of test is cheap, and relatively easy to administer: but it’s also all but meaningless for anything than foundation-level rote-knowledge. It really does take years of painful practice to develop the experience needed to do this work well: and if this trade is to gain the credibility that it needs, we need to stop pretending that we don’t need to test for that experience.

Time to re-think how we do this, and how we respect this, too: there’s no short-cut to experience.

[A collection of notes that I made somewhen around May 2010 that I don't seem to have published before, and seem to be relevant now as I explore my own business-model. (Not an April-Fool joke, by the way. ) ]

A culture [enterprise-culture] is a set of prioritised values and goals – usually ill-expressed, conflicting, a muddled-mixtures of tacit and explicit. (Can be revealed by POSIWID – ‘the purpose of the system is what it does’.)

An enterprise begins with a vision.

A vision is a single emotive idea (a ‘parti‘, in architectural terms).

Values are used to identify what is and is not aligned to the vision.

The vision is the heart of a story; the enterprise is that story.

The organisation does not define the story - the enterprise does.

The organisation can choose which story to serve, and its role in serving that story.

The values of the enterprise provide a means to identify [and measure] alignment to the story.

The organisation can change its choice of enterprise to serve; yet doing so may (will) disrupt the values and prioritisation of values on which the organisation at present depends.

The story is the journey itself – there is no ‘final destination. (If there is a goal, the story will end, and likewise the reason for the organisation’s existence; so if there is a goal, plan from the start as to what will happen when the story ends.)

The structures and strictures of the organisation are a means to serve the story.

If you change the choice of story, you’re asking every person in the organisation whether they want to be [remain] in the organisation – to reconsider their ‘reason to be’, in relation to the enterprise and organisation. Not a trivial change!

Every person is ‘in’ multiple enterprises – prioritises which story (or stories) they serve.

To be successful, an organisation provides a clear prioritisation of stories.

The enterprise determines quality - what quality is. The vision is the ultimate anchor of quality (as per ISO-9000).

In the market-model, markets are:

• transactions (physical)
• conversations (virtual)
• relationships (relational)
• purposeful (aspirational)

Markets are all of these things, all together. (There’s a crosslink to here to effectiveness: for example “cheap, easy, gets all the shopping done in one go” etc.)

Market-sequence or market-cycle:

• reputation (also crosslink to vision); trust and respect (relational dimension)
• brand is ‘pre-packed reputation’
• attention and conversation (shift to virtual dimension)
• is often the preferred starting-point in the cycle (hence advertising, pre-brand)
• transaction (physical dimension), profit as ‘extracted value’
• transaction-only is (overly-simplistic) machine-model of the market
• needs full completions – customer, market, shared-enterprise – to complete the cycle and (re)affirm reputation

Hence ‘cost’, ‘profit’ etc are multi-layered – determined by the values of the enterprise.

[A possibly-useful item from the archives - hope it's of some value to someone, anyways.]

Don’t start with How.

Or What, for that matter.

It’s been kinda quiet on this blog the past few weeks, but I’ve been horrendously busy behind the scenes. Some of the ‘busy’ you’ve sort-of seen here, in previous posts about writing and publishing. Other bits you won’t have seen yet, such as the preso for the Africa4IT conference that, in the end, I couldn’t go to – I’ll post the preso on Slideshare soon anyway. A whole load more going on, too.

But most, far worse, I’ve fallen into a classic project-development trap: I started from How.

Fact is that my websites are a mess. My marketing is a mess. Even my email-management is a mess at the moment. And I need to do a heck of a lot to make my material more accessible, rather than buried deep in various blogs and books. So it’s been kinda obvious that I need to get myself together on some kind of web-strategy – or, more correctly, information-relationship strategy. And implement it properly, and urgently.

But what did I do? I started from How.

I’ve spent days – weeks – poring over app-frameworks and web-frameworks and old wiki-code and the Webpress codex, trying to work out the best way to do what I sort-of think I want to do. I’ve reinstalled my old development apps, and some new ones too; I’ve pulled up all manner of development-language reference-guides; I’ve set up  a web-server on each of my test-machines; all the usual stuff. I’ve spent hour after hour agonising over whether I should hold onto my old wiki-formatting, try to go the HTML-sort-of-WYSIWYG route (which I loathe), or go entirely over to Markdown which fits well with my publishing-workflow but still feels way too limited in its formatting. I planned out SQL-schemas that would allow me to reuse the same text on multiple views – mobile and desktop, and on to publishing-flow. I tested out options to go direct to apps-delivery. More and more and more detail.

And in the desperate rush to have something to show as soon as possible, the end-result, so far, is still nothing at all.

Oops…

What I need to do instead is take my own advice:

• slow down from the rush of doing
• stop for a moment
• refocus – where would all of this fit in the big-picture?
• where’s the story that would hold it all together?
• then start again from that Why.

Start again. Not with the What. Or the How. Always start from the Why.

Sigh.

Watch This Space, folks?

Also launched at the Integrated EA 2012 conference was my new book ‘The enterprise as story‘:

Full title: The Enterprise As Story: the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture

ISBN: 978-1-906681-34-0

Description:

Most current approaches to enterprise-architecture describe everything in terms of structure. Yet people work better with story than with structure – and people are the enterprise. As we expand the architecture towards a true whole-of-enterprise scope, we need to describe the enterprise as story. Story is everywhere in the architecture – even the enterprise itself is a story.

This ground-breaking book places story at centre-stage for the architecture, itself using a narrative structure to explore the role of narrative in enterprise-architecture. Via business story-structures such as the Market-Cycle, and genres such as We Sell Certainty, it shows how stories underpin every aspect of the enterprise – and how we can use story within the architecture to enhance overall enterprise effectiveness.

Topics covered include:

• how to use story and narrative to assist in sensemaking for architecture
• how to create engagement in the architecture through story
• how to balance structure and story for better business results
• how to identify and use business-story genres to guide overall architecture
• how to change the organisation’s relationships with its ‘anti-clients’ from business-risk to business-opportunity
• how to use story-patterns to identify and resolve strategic business-issues
• how to leverage your own experience to create stronger architecture stories

If you want to create real engagement in the architecture and the enterprise, this is one book you’ll definitely need.

—

You can already order the printed book from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, and presumably most other book-retailers as well.

(Ignore the comment on Amazon about ‘Temporarily out of stock’: Amazon say that for any print-on-demand book that they themselves don’t produce… It’s at most a couple extra days’ delivery-time, that’s all.)

I’ll also be adding it to the book-set deals on Kevin Smith’s Pragmatic EA bookshop: should be set up within the next few days, anyway.

And new - you can now buy the e-book from Leanpub, as a complete set of PDF (portrait-format), EPUB (for iPad, Sony-Reader etc) and MOBI (for Kindle).

I’ll be doing a lot more publishing via Leanpub from now on: not just e-books of the existing books, but also smaller more focussed e-books on topics such as SCAN sensemaking and modelling with Enterprise Canvas. More details on that in an upcoming post, anyway.

‘The enterprise is the story‘ – my presentation from the recent Integrated-EA enterprise-architecture conference in London – is now online on Slideshare:

The slidedeck is just under 80 slides, split into five sequences:

• “What’s the story?” – introducing the idea of story as a way of working within enterprise-architectures, using the example of Carnaval, in Rio de Janeiro
• “A cast of thousands!” - describing the ‘sharedness’ of enterprises and the enterprise-story, again using Carnaval as its example
• “The plot thickens…” - linking story to process and the practical details of the enterprise
• “To be continued…” - exploring the structure of story, and strategic-structures that cause failure of the organisation’s story
• “Every picture tells a story” - a plea for stronger support of story in our enterprise-architecture toolsets

For once, I did a slidedeck that’s more about visuals than words – and it certainly seemed to go down well with the audience, which is always good fun.

The conference is, for me, one of the highlights of the year, because they cover architectures with such an enormously varied scope: most of the attendees are from defence / security contexts or high-reliability areas such as rail-transport or air-traffic control. I put in a a few sort-of visual jokes that I put in specifically for them – which seemed to go down well, too.

I also did a audio-recording, but it’s a bit crackly. I’ll try to clean it up and, if so, attach it to the slidedeck to make a bit more of a standalone presentation.

Share and enjoy, anyway?

The echoes of the ‘naming-problem‘ around business-architecture and the like continue to rumble on, this time via another happy Twitter-exchange with Ron Tolido:

• rtolido: @tetradian just show me the non-IT people that invented #entarch and / or #bizarch
• tetradian: @rtolido we’re in a circular-definition here: what you call #entarch or #bizarch is whatever was ‘invented’ by IT-people… //  crucial problem is that IT-people labelled as ‘enterprise architecture’ to something that wasn’t ‘architecture of the enterprise’ // likewise with IT version of ‘business-architecture’, which _isn’t_ ‘architecture of the business’ // once we sort out that mess, it becomes obvious IT-people did not invent it – but until then, we have those circular-definitions… // non-IT-people: Deming, Boyd, Beer, Alexander, even Taylor, for heavens’ sake…
• rtolido: @tetradian All true! Just pointing to the actual roots of both #entarch and #bizarch . Not saying it’s a good thing per se.
• tetradian: what you’re doing at present is propping up _fundamental_ mistake: mislabelling of ‘IT-view of business’ as ‘business-architecture’ // ‘Open Group Cert in IT-view of Business’ is fine – just don’t call it ‘business-architecture’, because it isn’t! // Data Architecture 101: don’t assign names to things that don’t mean the same as what those things actually are!

And that last point is actually a good idea: apply a bit of bog-standard data-architecture practice to this problem. Let’s look at this whole mess from the perspective of Data Architecture 101:

– Step 1: A core principle: all entities shall be assigned meaningful names or terms – i.e. that the assigned name shall correspond to the ‘natural meaning’ of the entity.

– Step 2a: If a term that is currently assigned to an entity does not match the ‘natural meaning’ of the entity but is not in common use, the updated name for the term shall be promulgated, and action taken to dissuade use of the former misleading-term.

– Step 2b: If a term in common use is currently assigned to an entity but does not match the ‘natural meaning’ of that entity, an architectural ‘waiver‘ or ‘dispensation‘ shall be issued, acknowledging the current usage of that term.

– Step 3: If a waiver is issued, the waiver does not mean that the misleading usage is acceptable, but rather that although the fait-accompli is accepted in the present, all efforts must be made to prevent the misleading-term from becoming further entrenched, and every opportunity taken to promulgate a replacement ‘natural-meaning’ term.

This is basic stuff, the kind of routine data-architecture work I was doing twenty years ago and more. Software-coders do it every day; web-designers do it; database-administrators do it. But not, apparently, the people who purport to maintain the formal standards for this kind of work. To use a certain famous phrase, “this does not compute…”

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail.

First, that principle from Step 1, the notion of a ‘natural meaning’. A term or entity can of course be assigned any name at all: sometimes projects and the like are intentionally assigned misleading names, for security purposes or because they’re being used only as ‘working title’ or suchlike. Sometimes such names do stick, misleading or not: ‘tank’ is a classic example. But in general – especially in a data-architecture or in any part of an enterprise-architecture – an entity should be assigned a name that aligns with its use and function: for architectural purposes it doesn’t help anyone if we decide to use the label ‘Glue Pot’ for a delivery-truck, for example, or ‘Salmonella Breeding Station’ as the label for the cafeteria business-unit. In general, it’s a lot more helpful if we call a spade a spade, and so on.

[We can take this a bit further, perhaps - hence the old adage that "An Englishman calls a spade a spade, but an Australian calls it a bl**dy shovel"... ]

Hence the notion of ‘natural meaning’, that in order to minimise the potential for confusion, things should be named according to what they are or what they do.

And a simple test for ‘natural meaning’ is inversion of the term: if the inversion gives the same meaning as the assigned term, it’s more probable that, overall, the term won’t cause confusion. (There’s a proper grammatical-term for this inversion, but I’ve forgotten it: someone remind me, perhaps?) Take ‘data architecture’, for example: the inversion is ‘the architecture of data’, which in both cases is what actually happens in the practice of data-architecture – so we can be reasonably comfortable that we have something close to ‘natural-meaning’ there. In practice, ‘data-architecture’ is a term we can trust to make sense.

Likewise ‘security-architecture’, as the architecture of security; or ‘brand-architecture’, as the architecture of the relationships and the like between business brands;  or ‘IT-infrastructure architecture’, as the architecture of the infrastructures of IT-systems. These all make clear sense, whichever way round we put it; and keep the same meaning, whichever round we put it.

But when we try this inversion with the supposedly-’official’ usages of ‘enterprise-architecture’ or ‘business-architecture’, it just doesn’t work:

– enterprise-architecture:

• natural-meaning (from inversion): the architecture of the enterprise (i.e. organisation as a whole, plus extensions into the value-network and overall ecosystem within which it operates)
• common-usage in TOGAF, FEAF etc: the architecture of the IT-systems in use within the organisation, with some reference to the usage of those systems within the organisation’s business

– business-architecture:

• natural-meaning (from inversion): the architecture of the business (or, more specifically, ‘the business of the business’)
• common-usage in TOGAF, FEAF etc: anything not-IT that might impact upon IT, organised and described solely in terms of its actual or potential impact on IT

In both cases the IT-oriented common-usage is a very long way from the natural-meaning of the term – which guarantees confusion as soon as we move outside of the narrow confines of an IT-oriented view. And in both cases that common-usage meaning describes only a very small subset of the scope of the natural-meaning – in other words, wherever the IT-oriented common-usage is dominant, it represents a serious term-hijack that blocks visibility of the remainder of the natural-meaning scope.

Which, in any competent data-architecture, would clearly indicate that have a couple of seriously-invalid term-usages here. Which means we need to do something about it. Which brings us to Step 2.

It’s clear that Step 2a can’t apply here, because both of these invalid terms are very much ‘out there’.

Which means that we move to Step 2b: we issue a waiver.

But we do not forget what a waiver actually means here, and what responsibilities it places on all of us, collectively, in terms of action we must take in future to correct the architectural risk. In particular, it does not mean that we simply throw up our hands in the air and say “oh well, it doesn’t matter” – because clearly it does matter, because equally-clearly that usage of the term will not make sense to anyone outside of the ‘in-group’ cabal. Instead, the waiver says that we must take action to correct the fault – exactly as with any other type of architectural fault.

Which brings us to Step 3. What we actually need in this case is the metaphoric equivalent of a full ‘Cease & Desist’ order, to demand that people not only stop all use of this misleading usage of the terms, but take action to correct all materials in which either of those two misleading usages occur. For example, TOGAF would need to be rewritten from scratch: given the natural-meaning, it wouldn’t be allowed to use the term ‘enterprise-architecture’ just about anywhere in the whole document, and ‘Phase B: Business Architecture’ would either cease to exist, or be reconstructed as a proper multi-domain structure, within which ‘the architecture of the business of the business’ is merely one amongst many other domains that can impact upon IT.

Let’s not beat about the bush here: that is what needs to happen. Anything less represents not only only an architectural risk on a major scale, but an ongoing risk whose impacts increase exponentially with every passing day.

Sadly, Reality Department indicates we’re very unlikely to get this – not least because it would require Open Group, CapGemini, Federal Enterprise Architecture, Gartner, Zachman and all the rest to recall every scrap of their past publications on ‘enterprise’-architecture, and rewrite the whole darn lot. But we need to say, and continue to insist, that this is what needs to happen in future. We do not simply allow them to continue promulgating these (and many other) fundamentally-wrong term-usages in the enterprise-architecture space.

That’s Data Architecture 101, as applied in a perfectly straightforward way to current ‘enterprise’-architecture – what the Americans call ‘eating our own dogfood’.

And if we aren’t willing to do it to our own work, why on earth should anyone else trust us to do it to theirs?

Pretty simple, really.

So, whatcha gonna do about it, folks?

—

One separate but related and very important addendum: I am not knocking TOGAF in itself here, nor anything or anyone else in the IT-architecture space. IT-architecture is extremely important, and Open Group and others have been doing sterling work in that space for many years. To my mind, no-one should doubt this, and I’m very happy to sing their praises on that part of the work, and invite and encourage others to do likewise.

All that I’m saying is that what TOGAF etc call ‘enterprise-architecture’ should not be called ‘enterprise-architecture’, for the simple reason that it is not ‘the architecture of the enterprise’.

Likewise the somewhat jumbled collection of bits-and-pieces that TOGAF and its ilk call ‘business-architecture’ should not be called ‘business-architecture’, for the simple reason that it is not ‘the architecture of the business’.

[The latter point should be obvious when we consider that TOGAF's 'business-architecture' assumes that the entirety of the non- IT executive - in other words, the CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, CHO and any non-IT CTO, and all of their respective domains - can all meaningfully be lumped together as 'the business', with only IT needing aany differentiation from the rest. Anyone who's had any dealings at executive-level will know that it's, uh, not quite as simple as that? :wry-grin: ]

Best leave it there for now, I guess. Over to you?

One of the key reasons why I’m so vehemently against any-centrism and suchlike revolves around the question of competence – or, more usually, the lack of it.

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?

This one is a pick-up from a Tweet by Bert van Lamoen:

• transarchitect: The priority shift we make is from efficiency to effectiveness to co-creativity. #complexity

Of course. Yes. That’s obvious, the moment I look at it.

Except that I’d completely missed before now.

Oops…

I’ve long since drawn a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. Or rather, that efficiency – ‘doing more with less’, ‘doing things right’ – is only one dimension of effectiveness – ‘doing the right things right’.

[The set of five dimensions that I've used to summarise effectiveness, if you're interested, is efficient, reliable, elegant, appropriate, integrated - see  the slidedeck 'What is effectiveness?' or my book SEMPER & SCORE: enhancing enterprise effectiveness.]

Yet that type of ‘effectiveness’ assumes that there’s some kind of pre-ordained plan – ‘effective in terms of the plan’. What if there isn’t a plan? What if we don’t know what the plan is? What if we’ll only know what the plan was – or sort-of ‘was’ – once we’ve completed it? (‘Retrospective causality’, as a certain person would put it.)

That’s where co-creativity comes into the picture. Co-creating a ‘plan that is no-plan‘, together.

And that’s what I’d missed.

[I can see why I'd missed it: to be blunt, I'm, uh, not good at anything that involves being social, and the whole point and focus of co-creativity is that it's social. But it still doesn't excuse the fact that I shouldn't have missed it. Sigh.]

Yet I’m not the only one who’s missed it: there’s a whole societal shift implied here – a completely different way of working. One that doesn’t assume that there’s ‘The Plan’. One that doesn’t assume that there’s The Person In Control, or The Person Who Knows What’s Going On. Or even that there’s anyone who knows what’s going on. Instead, there’s a trust that co-creation will take us where we want to go: an effectiveness that’s an emergent property of the collective, without any ‘plan’ or pre-certainty at all.

I don’t see this as an ‘either/or’ – either effectiveness-relative-to-a-plan, or co-creation-with-no-plan. It’s more a ‘both/and’ – it seems more an effectiveness that arises from a sort-of plan-that-is-no-plan, one that covers the entirety of the SCAN decision-making space:

The classic ‘efficiency’-based approach is mostly about the left-hand side: assertions about ‘the true metrics’ and so on leads to The Plan which leads to control of actions and decisions at real-time – the Belief ‘domain’. It’s very mechanical – often literally so.

Looking at it now, the approach I’d taken to effectiveness did incorporate a lot more of the right-hand side, with a strong acceptance of various aspects of uncertainty – particularly in the human space, the ‘elegant’-dimension of effectiveness. But it still presumes a plan, an Assertion – and hence that’s where it naturally tends to return.

Co-creativity would seem to focus more on the ‘Use’-domain – literally, “What’s the Use?”. I believe that to work well – to avoid a collapse into a dysfunctional-chaotic free-for-all, a ‘co-non-creation’ – it’d still need some kind of guiding-light or anchor or direction, a shared “What’s the purpose here?”. Yet even that would likely be co-created too – a nice recursion there.

Hmm… A lot to think about. Or, preferably, co-create? Thanks anyway, Bert!

This was such a good question from Paul Beckford, in one of his comments on the previous post, that I thought it was worthwhile bringing it out into more accessible form here:

“I don’t understand the recursion you speak of and the real time nature of decision making and how that is different from ‘considered’ decision making.”

I’ll deal with the easy bit first: real-time versus ‘considered’. Let’s use a really simple (and, at present, topical) example: New Year’s Resolutions.

• Did you make any New Year’s Resolutions? If you did, that’s a ‘considered’ decision, at some distance from the point of action – an intent.
• Assuming you did make a New Year’s Resolution, did you actually keep to it, in terms of what you actually do and did? – because that’s a real-time decision.

Given the above, notice how well (or not) the ‘considered’ decision-making lines up with the actual decisions made at the point of action. Overall, that’s an important part of enterprise-effectiveness. That’s what I’ve been working on, with the SCAN posts and the like.

[There's also how review-processes such as PDCA and After Action Review etc link up with all of this: how the review of what we intend versus what we actually did is used to challenge and re-align the linkage between what we intend and what we do next time. If there is a 'next time', of course: it gets even trickier if there isn't... ]

The other point: recursion. For this context, recursion occurs when we use a framework on itself, to review or work with or refine itself. Let’s use the just the sensemaking side of the SCAN frame for this, it should (I hope!) be a safe and uncontroversial example.

So, we would say that this frame has four domains:

• Simple
• Complicated
• Ambiguous
• Not-known, None-of-the-above

And the boundaries of those domains are defined by two axes:

• horizontal: modality – true/false on left, uncertain (‘possibility/necessity’) on right
• vertical: distance in time (or time-available-until-irrevocable-decision) – from point-of-action to potentially-infinite time-available

At first glance, that’s a really simple categorisation. Note the word ‘Simple‘.

Then we notice that our Simple categorisation starts to get Complicated. The boundaries between the domains aren’t as fixed as they might at first seem: although there’s a definite ‘bump’ on the horizontal axis (what I’ve termed the ‘Inverse-Einstein test’), it’s actually a continuous spectrum of modality, from predictable to somewhat-variable to a lot of variation to everything inherently-unique with no pattern at all.

[The Inverse-Einstein test: on the 'order' side (Simple/Complicated), if we do the same thing, we expect to get the same result; on the 'unorder' side (Ambiguous/None-of-the-above), if we do the same thing, we may get a different result, or we may need to do different things in order to get the same result.]

And the vertical axis is always a completely continuous spectrum: there is a clear transition somewhere, between the ‘Newtonian’ (Complicated/Ambiguous) and ‘quantum’ (Simple/Not-known) levels, but we can’t define explicitly where it is.

Then our Simple-but-also-Complicated categorisation starts to get Ambiguous as well: we’ll see this especially when we use cross-maps, such as that one about skill-levels, where each skill-level represents a different mix of ‘order’ or ‘unorder’, again with no clear boundaries, and with a fair few emergent-properties arising as well.

And then we recognise also that there are aspects in this Simple-and-Complicated-and-Ambiguous categorisation that are inherently-unique, scattered all the way through everything we’re looking at, with some bits that are definitely Not-known or None-of-the-above. (In fact that’s the whole point of this kind of exploration, trying to make sense of those Not-known items and come to some useful actionable decisions about them.)

And, yes, once we dig deeper, we’ll find that the same kind of pattern recurs at another level, and then deeper again, and so on.

Fractal, self-similar, recursive; Simple, Complicated, Ambiguous, None-of-the-above, all of them weaving through each other, all at the same time.

That’s what I mean by recursion here: the framework used to explore itself, and explore the exploring of itself, and – of course – of what it is itself being used to explore.

Makes sense? I hope?