Tom Graves / Tetradian

How is it that what we do doesn’t necessarily match up with what we plan to do? How can we best ‘keep to the plan’? Or, alternatively, how do we know how to adapt ‘the plan’ to a changing context? What governance do we need for this? How do we keep everything on-track to intent in this? And what implications does this have for our enterprise-architectures?

What we’ve been looking at in this series of posts is a key architectural concern: at the moment of action, no-one has time to think. Hence to support real-time action, the architecture needs to support the right balance between rules and freeform, between belief and faith, in line with what happens in the real-world context. And it also needs to ensure that we have available within the enterprise the right rules for action when rules do apply, and the right experience to maintain effectiveness whenever the rules don’t apply.

As we saw in previous parts in this series, this implies is that within the architecture we’ll need to include:

• a rethink of ‘command and control as a management-metaphor [see Part 1 of this series]
• services to support each sensemaking/decision-making ‘domain’ within the frame [see Part 2 of this series]
• services to support the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ paths within the frame [see Part 3 of this series]
• governance (and perhaps also services) to dissuade following ‘diagonal’ paths within the frame

So this is Part 4 of the series, the final part: exploring the architecture of governance – and architecture-governance too – that we need for all of this to work well.

[Those two key reminders again: this is 'work-in-progress'; and all of this is recursive - so you'll likely need to do some work of your own here too.]

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?

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?

Software-architect extraordinaire Simon Brown kindly pointed me to the InfoQ article ‘Agile and Architecture Conflict‘, which summarised the views of various folks on the ‘agile vs architecture’ debate, including myself, Simon and another of my regular co-creators (co-conspirators? ), Jan van Til, all of us looking at different aspects of the idea that agility needs a backbone in order to serve the needs of the enterprise well.

The InfoQ article included a really important question: “But how does it all tie up in the real world?” In other words, what is this ‘backbone’? How does it work? And how do we define it, build it, maintain it, use and reuse it to support enterprise agility? So from my admittedly architecture-oriented side of the fence, here are some suggestions towards a practical answer.

Step 1: It’s all about the enterprise. In effect, the backbone represents the core of the organisation’s relationship with the enterprise. Agility only makes sense if it directly supports the enterprise, and that relationship with the extended-enterprise. So to make any sense of this, we need to identify what that extended-enterprise is – in other words the deep-’Why’ for the organisation and its relationship with others, as expressed in its business-model, system-interfaces and so on. There are quite a few ways to do this: I typically use a workshop based on the sequence Vision, Role, Mission, Goal (there’s more detail on this in various of my books, such as Doing EA and Mapping the Enterprise), but there are plenty of other options.

What we need to end up with at the end of this step is some kind of vision-descriptor (about the extended-enterprise, not solely the organisation!), and an overview of the various players and key assets, activities and resources in use throughout that extended-enterprise. That becomes our starting-point for the next step.

Step 2: What part do we play in the enterprise? For what assets, activities and resources do others come to us and our organisations, or which we need from others? In the IT part of the organisation, this should tell us the types of information of which we need to keep track. We need to take a note at this point to try to distinguish between information whose structure remains stable and is used by many different areas of the organisation and its partners – because those items are likely candidates for the ‘backbone’.

Step 3: What enterprise items are unique to this organisation, and/or to its immediate partners or competitors? For example, the national mail-provider (Australia Post, Royal Mail, USPS etc) will usually have the responsibility ‘on behalf of the nation’ to maintain an up-to-date list of addresses, locations, post-codes and even probable addressees; Google maintains huge physical data-storage capacity and unique search-algorithms; Amazon builds and maintains a vast index and repository of opinions about products. Any such ‘unique items’ are almost certain candidates for the ‘backbone’. Note that these items can be much more than data alone: for example, the armed forces in principle represent unique capabilities for the nation, not just weaponry, but communications, logistics, field-hospitals and much more besides. We may also be able to identify some of these items by reviewing business-processes and other activities: for example, a national mail-provider will also maintain street post-boxes, which represent a ‘unique enterprise asset’.

In some ways what we’re looking for here are similar to ‘core competencies‘ and the like – yet it’s also sufficiently different that we need to take care not to get too sidetracked down that route. For example, equivalents for some data-items, such as industry-wide product- or service-identifiers, may also be held by competitors, by suppliers, or even by customers. The point here is that they’re unique within the shared-enterprise – which again makes them key candidates for inclusion in the ‘backbone’.

Step 4: What enterprise items are essential to our work for and contribution to this enterprise, and will need to be shared across our organisation? For example, if we are a commercial organisation, we’re very likely to have customer-records and service- or inventory records; almost every organisation will have HR records, organisational-structure records, account-codes, and so on. The point is that these are items that will need to be shared by everyone, in a consistent way – because if it’s not described and handled consistently, it’s almost certain to cause problems. If they’re essential to the business of the organisation, and shared across the organisation, they need to be in the ‘backbone’.

Step 5: Using all of the items identified in the previous steps, define the ‘backbone’. We would typically do this through the tools and techniques of the various domain-architectures: data-architecture, applications-architecture, process-architecture, organisational-architecture, brand-architecture and so on. (Notice, by the way, that not everything needs to be in the backbone! We don’t try to record everything in ‘excruciating detail’, in classic Zachman style – instead, this applies only to the items that really are core to the organisation and enterprise as a whole.) We may well need to do a ‘clean-up’ at this point to improve consistency and reduce duplication, such as described in TOGAF and the like. Once any item is included in the backbone, it should be placed under strict governance and change-control, with an explicit item-owner. Each backbone item should also be included in an explicit glossary and thesaurus, which itself should be subject to strict governance and change-control. The scope of governance depends on the context: in some cases it may be constrained to a single business-function or business-discipline, but in others the scope may need to be organisation-wide, or even broader.

Step 6: Define the interfaces to the ‘backbone’. This is where service-oriented architectures come into their own – IT-SOA, service-based process interfaces, and so on – with explicit service-catalogues and the like. Anyone who uses the information or other items (process-functions, assets etc) will need clear rules and, in many cases, development-support, on how to use the item, and the conditions under which it may be changed. There’s nothing particularly new in this: it’s fairly straightforward service-architectures, except that it should not necessarily be constrained only to information or IT.

Step 7: Define the spectrum of governance from waterfall-control to free-form agile, and the conditions that apply to change-projects and experiments at each point along that spectrum. In other words, define a flexible form of governance across the change-space, in which, for example, ‘Shadow IT’ would be explicitly encouraged as long as it’s outside of clearly-defined bounds. Provide support to enable agile projects to identify non-negotiable constraints such as regulation or mandatory standards.

Step 8: Define governance needed to migrate new items into the backbone. This is an important part, because the core will slowly change – some things will be dropped, but new processes and information-stores and the like that have proven both useful and reusable out in the agile space will be valuable in the core. As they move more towards the backbone – i.e. become shared by more people, and those crosslinks become more business-critical – they would also move ‘upward’ in terms of strictness of governance, from free-form agile towards waterfall-control.

The end-point of all of this is that we end up with a layered structure: a core that has a set of defined content with defined interfaces that can be be accessed anywhere required, and all tightly controlled; then a mid-layer in which interfaces tend to be shared across a more limited range; and finally agile hacks and mashups that may well be used only for one business-unit or even for one short- to medium-term purpose, but which still accesses the backbone for anything that is and needs to be common across the whole organisation. Some people might see this as somewhat hierarchical, but in fact it isn’t: mashups can connect to other mashups as required, perhaps bypassing the backbone completely. The point is that the backbone interfaces are guaranteed not to break (or, if they do need to change, then anyone who might be affected by the change would know about it in advance); the mid-range interfaces are not guaranteed; whilst the agile-layer interfaces – if they exist at all – can be all but guaranteed that they will break at some point. And it doesn’t matter that they might break – that’s the whole point. In other words, whilst the backbone must usually be as ‘fail-safe’ as we can make it, and the mid-layer must ‘fail gracefully’, the agile layer is intentionally designed to be ‘safe-fail’ – we often want it to fail, so as to learn from the ‘failure’, and adapt and retry accordingly.

This also resolves some of the classic fights between ‘the IT department’ – the conventional big-IT systems – and the ‘shadow-IT’ of little Excel quick-and-dirty kludges and local databases and HTML5/JSON/NoSQL hacks. In this scheme, each has their explicit place, with their own governance, their own role: each needs the other, and hence needs to respect the other, too. And it also clarifies the role and place of upcoming technologies: cloud, for example, has a really strong place in the agile context – but is often likely to be a very bad idea for the backbone.

So that’s my understanding of all of this: a way to unify architecture and agile, linking process-management, asset-management, information-management and everything else via a systematic enterprise-scope architecture, to support agility wherever it’s needed, and in whatever form is needed.

Something to play with, anyway: comments/feedback/suggestions, anyone?

An important email for me this morning, from management consultant Ray McKenzie, that’s triggered off a significant re-think on the role and label for one of the nine main cells in the Enterprise Canvas model:

While you labelled the bottom row of ‘Enterprise Canvas’ as Value, somehow as I read through the material I kept thinking ‘Governance’, not sure if this was your intent or just my imagination.

And yes, he’s right: of course it’s ‘Value-Governance’ – of course! Why on earth didn’t I see that before? I knew that ‘Management’ wasn’t right when I wrote it, but I couldn’t find the right alternative. Yet there it is, staring me right in the face: of course it’s ‘value-governance’! – in fact, given its role, at the intersection of ‘our value’ and ‘the past’, it really couldn’t be anything else. Using the term ‘value-management’ for that single cell gives it completely the wrong flavour – in fact that’s the main function of the ‘value-direction’ cell in the somewhat-external ‘guidance’ group, so it’s already covered elsewhere. Management is something that happens throughout the service, not just in one place – but it is fair enough to say that overall governance-activities for a service tend to be concentrated in one subdomain of that service, enacted via its own domain-specific roles.

Value-governance makes sense here in both directions on the Canvas’ grid. On the vertical ‘our value’ axis, ‘value-proposition’ deals mainly with what we will do (future); ‘value-creation’ is concerned with what we are doing (present); whilst ‘value-governance’ looks at what we will do, but perhaps even more at what we have done (past), to ensure that they match up correctly. And in the horizontal value-web axis, ‘value-governance’ sits on the backchannel – completions and the past – to hold the balance between what comes in as ‘value-return’ from the customer-side of transactions, and what goes out as ‘value-outlay’ on the supplier-side.

Hence duly-amended versions of the key diagrams – first, the ‘service-cross’ version of the ‘brick’:

…and the ‘robot-chicken’:

Not many people use the shorthand two-letter codes for cells and flows, but these should change from VM to VG (for the cell-label), and XM to XG (for the flow-label). The XG flow now focusses primarily on matters relating to governance between the layers (rather than getting mixed up with overall management and direction, which should probably be associated more with the XD guidance-flow).

In all, this cleans up an inconsistency that had been bugging me for ages in the structure of the Canvas, but I hadn’t been able to see what was wrong or why. Hence, once again, many thanks to Ray McKenzie for this.