Tom Graves / Tetradian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us back to the Kravitz/Phonedog case.

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

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

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

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

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

Not exactly wise, we might say?

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

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

Over to you, perhaps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’ve been quite a few Twitter-responses to my post ‘An economics challenge for enterprise-architects‘, about a literally-fundamental flaw in present-economics, and what we as enterprise-architects could do about it.

(This gets long again: sorry…)

Read more…

As usual, the previous post ‘The architecture of a no-money economy‘ ended up way too long and involved and ‘wordy’. Sorry…

So let’s do a shorter version, in some ways going a bit deeper, but concentrating only on the issues and suggested actions.

Here’s the problem: there is no way to make a possession-based economy sustainable.

(Trust me on that one. I’ve been researching it for at least the past couple of decades: the best outcome we can get from a possession-based economy is ‘The Worst Possible System‘, in which most resources automatically end up where they’re least needed.)

Which is a problem, because what we think of as ‘the economy’ is actually a money-based economy built on top of a barter-based economy built on top of a possession-based economy, scaled up to a full global scope.

Which means, in other words, that there’s no way to make what we think of as ‘the economy’ sustainable.

Which means that in the longer-term – or even in the medium-term, at the rate we’re currently going – if we don’t find an alternative that actually works, we’re dead.

Oops…

So here’s the challenge: find a way to run an economy, in a radically different way, that actually is sustainable. Start at the household level first; then scale it up to a work-team or business-unit; then an entire organisation; and keep on scaling up towards a full global scope.

Big challenge? Yep. Big stakes too…

We can’t use money for this, or any form of so-called ‘alternative currency’. The problem isn’t money itself, but rather the fact that money is a standardised form of barter, which assumes that we have something to withhold from others in order to barter with, which in turn depends on the notion of ‘right to exclude’ that’s built into the notion of possession. And that’s the part that doesn’t work: which means that nothing else that’s built on top of possession will work, either.

The only thing I’ve found that does work is responsibility – literally, ‘response-ability’, the ability to choose appropriate responses in accordance with the needs of the context. Mutual responsibilities interlock within a social context: we can build upward and outward from that fact. Without any form of possession.

But this is where it gets interesting…

For a start, money vanishes from the economy. No banks, no insurances, no pensions, no social-security, no medical bills or grocery-bills or school-bills or college-bills or lawyers-fees or consultants-fees, no sales-commissions, no savings or loans, no credit-cards, no mortgages, no monetary taxes, no salaries, no pay-rates, no threat of lost income from lost job, no threat of monetary fines. Gone. All gone. Can’t use them, either as stick or carrot, or any part of the economy.

Because possession doesn’t work, the entire property-model that we know and, uh, well, know, disappears as well. There are property-responsibilities, in the same sense as we talk about ‘project-owner’ or ‘process-owner’; but all those much-vaunted ‘property-rights’ vanish. Gone. We own something because we declare responsibility for it, and for no other reason. (This isn’t a fiction, by the way: most ‘traditional’ property-models operate this way. What we think of as normal, they rightly regard as an aberration.) So we can’t use that as a stick or carrot, either: whether via the offer of property, or the threat of loss of property, it isn’t going to work.

(It’s not that we can’t make a ‘property’-type model seem to work: that’s actually quite easy to do, and that’s what the present possession-economy does right now, after all. It’s that we cannot build anything of that type that does not automatically fall back to an unsustainable ‘Worst Possible System’. That’s why this challenge is a lot harder than it looks.)

We don’t possess ideas, so ‘intellectual property’ vanishes completely. (It never made any sense anyway, so it’s no loss.) We can be responsible about ideas, but they’re not ours to possess. They never were.

We don’t possess people, either. We can’t really talk about ‘our’ people: that’s treating people as possessions, and the only time when people are assets is when they’re slaves. Not a good idea, especially when you have no possession-based way to bribe or bully them into staying in your chosen place. Which, by the way, means that the usual family-model – ‘to have and to hold’, of children in parental ‘custody’ and the like – also vanishes, in much the same way that no-one ever really possesses a cat. Tricky, that…

Almost all of the usual controls disappear from this scenario. No stick that we can wield, no carrot that we can control. Hmm…

How do we get an economy of any kind to work under these constraints? A global economy? An industry? A town or village? A company? A school? Even a family?

Definitely an interesting challenge… especially compared to what we think of as ‘normal’ at present…

(We know it can be done, because, again, this is how most ‘traditional’ societies operate. But in most cases they do so only in small family or tribal groups in agrarian or nomadic contexts – not huge sprawling megacities dependent on complex supply-chains, high technologies and very high energy-demands. Same idea, very different scale – and scale is where so many of the really hard architectural problems arise…)

As I see it, just about the only way to make this work is by reconnecting to enterprise, via shared-vision and the like. Which is why whole-of-scope enterprise-architecture turns out to be really important in this kind of economics.

Which is why this is a challenge for enterprise-architects almost more than for anyone else.

So: Interested? Over to you for your ideas?

Oh, and for an extra challenge: how do we get from here to there?

[Update: Forgot to mention: my sort-of-novel Yabbies is in part an exploration of these themes: Share & Enjoy, perhaps? (At present, download the whole book for free from here.)]

A couple of days ago I wrote an intentionally-controversial post on my Sidewise blog, saying that ‘The future of money is that it has no future‘.

Was I being serious? Yes. Very serious: I really do mean it when I say that the only feasible future for money and the money-based economy is that it has no future.

Which in many people’s eyes would no doubt immediately mark me as some kind of nutcase. Or worse.

To which all I can say is that if they don’t know how proper futures-work actually works, and how to apply it in practice, that’s their problem, not mine.

Perhaps they needn’t worry, though: the money-system that they know and, uh, love, isn’t going to vanish overnight. (Or rather, it almost certainly will, when the change actually takes place; but that change is probably a fair while off yet. Probably…) My point is that as enterprise-architects we need to be fully ready for that change when it comes: otherwise collectively and societally we really are going to be in a mess.

Which means it’s a topic that as enterprise-architects we perhaps really ought to be exploring right now?

Read more…

I’m sitting in a friend’s office, talking about book-production and enterprise-architecture. Whilst he’s struggling with his recalcitrant computer, my eyes drift to a Wikipedia page pinned on the wall just beyond his head. ‘Galbright_star_model.png‘, says the label. A five-pointed star, apparently describing some kind of business-related concepts. Interested. Look at it again, notice the word ‘Strategy’ in the top-most node. Very interested. Look at it more closely: realise that it has a lot of similarities with the Five Elements model that I’ve used fairly intensively for the past ten years or so. A lot of similarities: oops… Developed by Jay Galbraith (not ‘Galbright’), it says. A useful Wikipedia article on it, too. Then notice the date: 1993, full publication 1995. In other words, ‘prior art’, to use the term from patent-law. Definitely ‘oops’… the perils of prior-art…

Galbraith star model of organisational design [Wikimedia CC]

Then compare that to the core Five Element model that I use to describe organisational dynamics and a swathe of other enterprise-architecture themes. At first glance, the only real difference between the two models is that the positions of ‘Purpose’ and ‘People’ are swapped over: otherwise the rest seems so close in concept that it could be all but identical. Plagiarism on my part, perhaps?

Basic Five Element cycle

In reality, it’s not as bad as it seems. I’ve been using the core Five Elements concepts – adapted from a merge of Tuckman’s Group Dynamics and the traditional Chinese Five Elements or wu xing – since well before 1978, when I included a chapter on classic Five Element theory and practice in my second book, Needles of Stone. And although Galbraith’s diagram shows various linkages between the nodes of his model, it doesn’t seem to indicate any actual dynamics or preferred flow – which the Five Elements model definitely does, in keeping with both Tuckman and wu xing. Not so much ‘prior art’, then, as useful counterpoints to each other: both models talking about the same kind of space, but in usefully-different ways, having arrived there via somewhat-different routes.

I’d have to admit that I’m not much of an academic: I prefer to work from first-principles wherever possible, and I much prefer to read people and contexts in practice than to read book after book of formal theory. I also tend to pick up ideas and images in a rather eclectic way, without really noting the detail of where they come from. There are real advantages to that approach, because it allows and enables fresh ‘mash-ups’ that really are useful in addressing real practical issues in everyday enterprise-architecture and the like. But there are disadvantages too, one of them being the risk of confusion from adaptation of what turns out to be other people’s work, sometimes resolved well (an especial thank-you here to Nigel Green with regard to my ‘repurposing‘ of some of the concepts from his VPEC-T frame), and, unfortunately, sometimes not so well. Oh well. There’s also the real risk of accusations of ‘plagiarism’ or the like from curmudgeonly academics – and I can see their point, because my lack of awareness of ‘prior art’ can sometimes be interpreted that way, even though that’s never the intention, and I do try to give credit to others’ work wherever I know about it. In some ways it’s more a fault of possession-economics again – the delusion, in this case, that anyone can ‘possess’ ideas or facts or truth. But it’s something we do have to live with, in this insane ‘possessionist’ culture of ours, and I know I don’t always deal with it as well as some others might like. Oh well: my apologies, if so. I do the best that I can, is all I can say: and I hope it’s useful, anyway.

At least in this specific case it seems easy enough to show that there’s no direct clash with ‘prior art’: much more that it’s a useful collision of similar ideas. But ‘prior art’ can be a real problem for all of us: perhaps one of which we all need to be more wary, and aware?

This is part of a series of posts that I’ll be doing about ‘The Really Big Picture‘ at a societal/economic level, in relation to enterprise-architecture.

This post sets out some of the scope and scale of the changes that are or are likely to be coming up on the horizon over the next few years and/or decades, and what we can start to do about it right now in our architecture-work within our existing organisations.

First, though, a brief aside about the practical purpose of this series of posts. In a comment to the previous post,  Cynthia Kurtz rightly hauled me over the coals for what might be described as ‘overly apocalyptic’ language in the earlier introductory posts, when I was talking about potential big-picture changes that could be “forced on us”, and the limitation of “Business As Usual”, and so on. Cynthia pointed out that we really can’t pretend to predict any of this: there are many other possible big-picture changes (including none at all – though that does seem very unlikely to me), and there are many, many different forms of ‘business as usual’. As she also commented:

One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of futurist writings is that “what will happen” means “what I want to happen.”

…to which I will have to plead somewhat guilty here, I suppose… – perhaps more than a leeetle bit of wishful thinking on my part, a bit too much ‘normative architecture’ and the like? Oh well. Yet Cynthia’s final ‘courteous challenge’ is the real point here:

How does your really-big-picture EA look in the light of this?

What I really want to do here, I suppose, is explore how to use futures-disciplines properly within enterprise-architecture and the like. In her comment, Cynthia correctly points out some of the common flaws in futures-work – for example, the tendency to use declaratives (“this will happen”) rather than the more correct language of possibility (“this may happen”). The practical problem, though, is that most existing EA tools and frameworks either fail to include any proper futures-techniques at all, or mangle them to the point of misleading unusability.  The TOGAF misuse of ‘scenarios‘ is one particularly egregious example of the latter: there, ‘scenarios’ are defined as little more than a slightly-broader-scope business use-case for IT, whereas the proper futures-usage is more as in the classic Shell scenarios, which cover a literally global scope.

Futures-literacy for enterprise-architecture would include a better understanding of where futures-techniques sit, and the ways in which they can be radically different from those we use for short- to medium-term architecture-development. One key point is that it’s not about planning, about (futile) attempts to ‘predict the future’: instead, it’s about developing the capability to adapt fast to any future – and, in our case, creating an architecture that can cope with potential revolutionary change in the context for our enterprise and organisation.

One illustration from the Five Element set may help here:

Planning and other tactical Preparation are mostly about thinking, about information; likewise the metrics and other information-sources on which we base our understanding of Performance. But to create some kind of handle on the future, we need to be willing to explore feelings and emotions – what we might call the taste or sensing or flavour of the respective future, what the challenges and opportunities might be. And that’s a significantly different skillset, a different kind of ‘thinking’ – much more about People and Purpose – compared to that which we use in the mostly-analytic work of planning and the like.

Hence what I’ll aim to do here is a set of what we might call ‘thought-experiments’ (or ‘feeling-experiments’?), to explore some of these different ‘ways of knowing’. I’ll present these as if they’re ‘factual’, with links and the like to other references – but as Cynthia warns, it’s probably best to think of them as ‘as-if’ scenarios, rather than any kind of certainty or ‘fact about the future’. And because architectures do need to do at least enough design to start off the sensemaking/solution cycle, I’ll present some suggested ideas for ways to address those challenges – though again, Cynthia’s dictum applies.

With all of these posts, I’ll split the material into two parts: ‘The Really Big Picture’, such as what I’m seeing coming up in the medium- to longer-term future, and various ways in which I believe those issues could be addressed; and ‘Putting it into practice’, about ideas and models and techniques to apply the same principles in current, real, everyday enterprise-architectures for commercial businesses or government or whatever.

I hope you’ll it’s a useful and important exercise, anyway: so let’s get started. A little bit of revolution, anyone?

The Really Big Picture

Most enterprise-architects still work primarily in IT, for which in most cases the ‘big picture’ is what TOGAF calls ‘business architecture’ – in other words, ‘anything not-IT that might affect our IT’. In most cases, this boundary of scope will relate only to what happens within this one organisation, though sometimes it might also include a few IT-oriented issues that extend beyond that scope: interface-protocols and standards for information-exchange, for example.

The Big Picture – the kind of ‘big picture’ that we use in a real business-oriented architecture, for example – is rather larger: at that scope, that equivalent of ‘anything not-IT that might affect IT’ becomes more like ‘anything not-business that might affect our business’. In other words, the extended-enterprise. And the scope that concerns us there is mainly in the present or the relatively-near future: in other words, concerns for which we can plan. Sort-of.

But only ‘sort-of’ – because the Really Big Picture is about changes we can’t plan for right now. Clausewitz’s old military dictum applies here: “no plan survives first contact with the enemy”. In a business-context, that translates roughly as “no business-plan survives first contact with the real world” (and it’s perhaps best not to view the real-world as ‘the enemy’ here? ). In the Really Big Picture, we’re always dealing with a real world that we can’t quite predict – or predict at all. And if we can’t predict it, that also means that we can’t control it – a fact which leaves many business-folk feeling very uncomfortable… But since it is reality, we have to find some way to become comfortable with that kind of ‘uncomfortable’ – and help our clients become more comfortable with it, too. That’s where futures-disciplines come into enterprise-architectures.

As enterprise-architects, we also need to be ready for those ‘unpredictable’ risks and opportunities, developing architectures that resilient enough to keep on track to the overall organisational- and enterprise-intent even under the most uncertain of circumstances. (We should already know about the predictable risks and opportunities, of course, and have planned for them in various components of our architecture, such as support for routine business-continuity and disaster-recovery – though amazingly some enterprise-architects and organisations don’t even bother to do that…) The unpredictable risks and opportunities sit some way out on the apparent edge of probability, further down the ‘Long Tail’ – typically referred to by terms such as ‘kurtosis risk‘ or ‘Black Swan event‘.

Futures practitioners refer to this aspect of work as ‘weak-signal detection’: picking up hints of real future possibilities. As Cynthia indicates in her comment, there are many very large-scale ‘known unknowns’ that could hit us, but let’s look at some real examples of ‘revolutions’ whose main effects could be some way down the track, but whose glimmerings are right here, right now.

Consider the environment, the ‘biosphere’ in which all humans live. We might argue about how much of it is actually man-made, and the potential scale of each type of impact, but the fact of major global change in environment is inescapable. Global warming is driving weather destabilisation on a global scale, by comparison with the historical record; major storms tend to be more destructive than – again – the historical record. Meso-climates are shifting their borders, particularly in marginal regions such as the ‘grain-belts’ of Australia or the US Mid-West. With many of the world’s largest cities being located on coastlines, any change in sea-level is likely to place those cities at risk – and as the Japanese earthquake indicated, sea-defences may not be much use if the land itself sinks downward relative to the previous sea-level.

So what, you might say? What’s that got to do with enterprise-architectures? Well, to take those examples:

• actuarial calculations for insurance are mainly based on the historical record – so what happens when the historical trends no longer apply?
• farming-practices are based on meso-climates – so what happens to the farming-industry when an arable region turns into a dustbowl, or a rainforest turns temperate?
• city sea-defences, sewage-outfalls and much else besides are all based on current levels and current risks – so what happens to the city, its population, its industry, its commerce, its ‘property-values’ and everything else, if the sea rises or the city itself sinks?
• conventional calculations often assume an even spread – but what happens if the future isn’t spread evenly?

That last example is much more important than it may seem. Japan was well prepared for earthquakes – even ones much more severe than anything in recent history. They were also prepared for tsunamis, with defences that went right round the coast. But they weren’t prepared for one of the strongest earthquakes on record that also triggered one of the largest tsunamis on record that also swamped the underdesigned defences of a nuclear power-station that had been run ‘on the cheap’ for way too long – with devastating consequences. Each of those items was an identifiable risk considered ‘too unlikely’ to make it worth the effort to address: but it was the interaction between all of those risks that pushed the overall risk much further inward along the ‘long tail’. One of the key tasks of architecture, we might note, is to identify the connections between things: this is a genuine concern for enterprise-architectures.

Consider the revolutions in technology. It’s hard enough trying to guess technological changes even five years ahead: but for this kind of work, we need to look ahead fifty, a hundred or more years. Kurzweil’s much-vaunted Singularity might come to pass, or it might not: what impact would either option have on the architecture of the enterprise? How do we deal with change on a vast scale? Or disappointment on a vast scale?

So what, you might say? What’s that got to do with enterprise-architecture? Well, to give just one example, people are living much longer than they did, thanks to advances in medical technology and the like. But all of the actuarial calculations for state-funded pension-schemes and the like were based on typical life-expectancies back when people started paying into those schemes, three and four and five decades ago – when life-expectancies were much closer to the nominal retirement-age. And there are also many fewer younger-age people coming into the ‘base-level’ of those schemes, to pay for those who’ve reached retirement age. The result? – an almost unmanageable shortfall in pension-funds, with no solution available that does not involve betraying someone, or everyone, on a huge scale. Oops.

And consider the very real social and economic revolutions beginning to take place even now. On one side there’s a major financial/economic mess: as UK Business Secretary Vince Cable described it, it’s hard to explain just how bad the current ‘economic crisis really is. “Ultimately it comes back to this defensiveness and an unwillingness to accept that Britain was operating a model that failed”, he said – a problem of paradigms that we’ll come up against often in any form of futures-work. Then, in part as an aspect of that financial mess, there’s a huge problem of rising prices for food and other fundamentals, coupled with an ‘unemployment’ problem, seemingly on a worldwide scale – with the socioeconomic tensions that powered the ‘Arab Spring’ now starting to appear in Spain, as reported by the BBC and by the Qatar-based news-service Al Jazeera. And behind it all, perhaps, there are other socioeconomic themes, all rising and falling and interweaving with each other, such as described in the BBC documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace.

Again, it’s not just the individual themes, but how they all interact. Looking further back in the past, for example, we could look at the huge social upheavals in 14th-century Europe, during and after the Black Death wiped out a third of the entire population. Or, also in Europe, the ‘mini Ice Age’ of the 17th-century, when it was cold enough to freeze the Thames for a ‘Frost Fair‘ several years in a row; or, by contrast, the warm-period of the mid 18th-century that apparently gave enough relief from subsistence to provide the impetus needed to get the nascent Industrial Revolution going.

Then consider too the military and political changes that have occurred throughout those periods: the rise and fall of colonialism, for example, and the complex structures of monopoly and privilege and (to be blunt) corruption that underpinned them. Consider what impacts those would each had had on the architectures and operations of the respective enterprises – not trivial at all.

So note that, given how many of these kinds of major changes have occurred throughout the world, and how often, it’s probable that it’s quite unlikely that you would not have to deal with a change on that scale somewhen during your working-lifetime as an enterprise-architect… Which means that it might perhaps be wise to be ready for that kind of change? – even though you will likely have little or no knowledge beforehand exactly what form that kind of change will take?

And that’s where the futures-disciplines come into the picture – even, or perhaps especially, for enterprise-architecture.

Putting it into practice

The simple suggestion here is to find out more about the futures disciplines and the overall ‘futures toolkit’. Obvious places to start would include the Wikipedia summary, or one of the formal futures bodies such as the Association of Professional Futurists.

Everyone has their collection of preferred tools, though mine would include the following:

• Shell’s guide to scenario-development
• Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis (also Wikipedia summary) – one of the most powerful tools for exploration of ‘deep myth’ in a futures context
• a simple Futures toolkit from the [UK] Local Government Association
• another online Futures toolkit from the ‘Brighter Futures Together’ group in northern England
• the Carnegie Trust toolkit ‘Using scenarios and futures thinking‘ [PDF] – includes an extensive set of references and links

These are all tools that can be put to immediate practical use with architecture-stakeholders at various levels. Whichever way you use these tools, expect to find some real surprises about your own business-context – and about what the future may hold in store for you and your organisation.

Somewhere to start, anyway? – and post other links and queries here as appropriate, of course.

Watch This Space, though – there’ll be quite a few more posts to come in this series.

This is in part a follow-on to ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘.

As a discipline, enterprise-architecture is still in the throes of a multi-year struggle against IT-centrism – in our context, the dangerous delusion that enterprise-scope IT-architecture somehow ‘is’ enterprise-architecture. There are signs now that that struggle is at last beginning to be won: a much better recognition in Open Group conferences, for example, that business-architecture is not merely “anything not-IT that might affect IT”.

But we need to be aware, and wary, of the next trap: business-centrism. Business-architecture is, and should be, the architecture of the business. But it is not the architecture of the enterprise: the two are fundamentally different. Or, more accurately, business-architecture is a detail-layer subset of enterprise-architecture – and exactly as with IT-architecture, it is essential not to mistake any subset for the whole.

Let’s take a classic business-architecture frame, Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas:

Business Model Canvas [(cc) Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur et al.]

This provides an excellent way to describe a commercial organisation’s business-model: products and services, how the customer is contacted, revenue-streams, supply-chain concerns, costs and so on. We definitely need all that information in a business-architecture, and in considerable detail.

But what this doesn’t do is show how this expands downward into the fine-detail of implementation and operational-management – which is what we need in order to realise that business-model. For example, for the IT-related components of that business-model, that’s where the IT-architectures would come into play: information-architecture, data-architecture, applications-architecture, infrastructure-architecture and so on. We would also need to connect with BPM (business-process management), security-architectures, skills-mappings and a whole load more, especially on the ‘human’ side of business practice. So on its own, a business-centric architecture could be misleading: a big-picture that’s useful, and usefully descriptive, but not actually usable in real-world practice.

And that business-oriented ‘big-picture’ is not actually big enough: it ignores a whole swathe of information about the broader business-context, and hence is left to make arbitrary assumptions about that broader context – assumptions which may well turn out to be wrong. In essence, the Business Model Canvas – and almost every other business-architecture frame that I’ve seen – will summarise the core working of the organisation, its relationships with the ‘near-field’ aspects of the supply-chain, and some description of how it will relate to customer-prospects: but that’s usually as far as it will go. Which is dangerously incomplete in relation to the whole scope of the extended-enterprise:

Relationships with the ‘outside’ part of the extended-enterprise, beyond the core market, are primarily driven by values – not solely monetary concerns, which for the most part apply only at the market-transaction level. Failing to pay proper attention to those broader values can kill the viability of the business-model and even the business itself – even though those ‘transactions’ may not touch the actual business-model at all. We can perhaps see this best through what I call the ’market-cycle’:

Another cyclical view of the relationships between all these layers also illustrates the source – and danger – of the all-too-common ‘quick-profit’ short-cut version of the cycle, which is guaranteed to drive a business into the ground in the medium to longer term:

The greyed-out area described as ‘tactics + operations’ in that diagram is usually the maximum scope of a business-architecture. An enterprise-architecture must, by definition, cover the entire scope. A ‘business-centric’ version of enterprise-architecture would constrain us to the business-specific scope – which is why everything else would be left to arbitrary and often unconscious assumptions. Not a good idea – in fact actually worse than the IT-centric version of ‘enterprise’-architecture, because at least in the latter case the limitations are obvious to most people, whereas in the business-centric version the gaps are easier to miss.

One of the things that that unhelpful troll on LinkedIn mocked me for – and others have done much the same, in the past – was my attempt to explain that in an enterprise-architecture we must take into account the value-transactions and interactions: we can’t simply reduce it all to monetary terms. As should be obvious from the diagrams above, there are relationships between those value-transactions and the monetary-type transactions that come later in the market-cycle: but those relations are usually complex, non-linear and non-reversible, so we can’t start from a monetary view (as in so many conventional ‘value-proposition’ concepts) and return directly to a monetary view (as monetary ‘profit’). The transforms from there to the much-vaunted and apparently much-desired ‘shareholder-value’ are even more complex and non-linear: as Michael Porter once put it, the obsessive quest for ‘shareholder-value’ is “the Bermuda triangle of strategy“, in which so many companies sink without trace… Yet even Michael Porter misses the point in that article: he refers to ‘economic performance’, when what he means is ‘overall performance as measured in monetary terms’ – which is not the same thing. As business-architects we can sometimes get away with that kind of kludge: but as enterprise-architects, we can’t get away with it – especially at the Really Big Picture level.

So yes, heave a sigh of relief as we finally break free from IT-centrism in enterprise-architecture. But beware of the next trap – the trap of ‘business-centrism’ – and instead keep the focus and emphasis, at all times, on the extended-enterprise as a unified if always somewhat-chaotic whole.

The ‘Really Big Picture’ for enterprise-architecture is a sustainable world that works well for everyone.

Okay, that’s a bit of a bald statement. Let’s step back a bit.

To me, every enterprise-architecture is anchored in a vision of some kind – a descriptor for the aims of the overall enterprise. (One classic example of an enterprise-vision is the one used by the TED conferences: “ideas worth spreading”.) To achieve what I regard as the core aim of enterprise-architecture – that everything works better when they work together, on purpose – we use the vision as a stable reference-point to which everything in the enterprise can align. All fairly straightforward, both in principle and in practice.

Yet enterprises intersect and nest within each other: each enterprise that we might work on in EA also depends on the enterprises ‘above’ it in terms of scope. Those ‘higher-level’ enterprises provide part of the context for ‘our’ enterprise and its enterprise-architecture. So what is the highest-level enterprise-scope? And what is the implied vision for that enterprise – the Really Big Picture for our own enterprise-architecture? It seems to me that that tag-line above is about the closest we would find to a vision-descriptor for that highest-level enterprise: a sustainable world that works well for everyone.

(We could quibble about some aspects of that enterprise-descriptor: for example, it implies a human-oriented scope. But remember, we always develop an enterprise-architecture about an enterprise but for an organisation – and the ‘organisation’ in context at present is probably no broader in scope than ‘all humans, through all time’… )

That’s the enterprise-architecture at the Really Big Picture level: technically speaking, everything else is a kind of ‘solution-architecture’, building on constraints that are imposed upon us by Reality Department, and other relatively-arbitrary constraints that we ourselves impose on the solution-design.

At that Really Big Picture level, the kind of constraints imposed by Reality Department include the fact that we live on a single very small ball of a planet with limited resources and a fragile overall ecosystem, and there aren’t any spare planets that we could plunder or run away to within conceivable reach at the present time. At the same Really Big Picture level, the self-imposed constraints mainly arise from what in causal layered analysis would be described as the ‘deep-myth’ layer: largely-unconscious assumptions and assertions about ‘how the world really works’. We see these latter constraints as the underpinnings of economics and politics – which combine and merge, for example, in the notion of ‘rights of possession’.

In principle, the enterprise-architecture discipline is a decision-support function, not a decision-making one. Yet it always ends up being somewhat normative, not least because that there are consequences that increase enterprise-risk every time we implement something that points away from the enterprise-vision. (My colleague Kevin Smith would describe that misalignment as increasing the ‘Enterprise Debt‘ – and too much Enterprise Debt can kill the whole enterprise, or at the very least the organisation’s place within that enterprise.) So we need to advise our clients and stakeholders of those consequences, and research and explore alternatives that will still fit all of the unavoidable constraints, yet will also help to minimise – and preferably reduce – the overall long-term Enterprise Debt.

The hard part, for enterprise-architects, is that that process of research will often involve challenging some deep-seated myths and assumptions… which can make us very unpopular if we’re not very careful…

At the Really Big Picture level, what we have to face right now is that probably the core assumption of our entire mainstream economics – the concept of ‘right of possession’ – simply does not work. In an all too literal sense, we’re possessed by possession. (I’m not saying that possession is ‘wrong’, or ‘immoral’, or ‘evil’, or whatever: all I’m saying is that it doesn’t work – it doesn’t and cannot align with the survival-imperative of that Really Big Picture enterprise-vision – and therefore puts everyone at ever-increasing risk.) And if it’s clear that that doesn’t work, we face a literally fundamental re-architecting and redesign of just about everything that we currently think of as ‘normal’ in our economics, politics and pretty much everything else as well. Not an easy fact to face: to be blunt, it’s a very scary picture indeed. Yet to also be blunt, we don’t have much time in which to do it: the morass of indicators on key concerns such as resource-availabilities all tell us that we have perhaps only a few decades at most – if we’re lucky – in which to make that change. Which means that right now, whether we want to or not, we need to be taking that Really Big Picture into account in every aspect of our current everyday enterprise-architecture.

It’s urgent. Really urgent. Yet the scale is so huge, and the scale of change is so huge, that there’s no way we can do it all at once. Instead, like most other aspects of real-world architectures, it’s iterative, tens and hundreds and thousands and millions upon millions of small steps all slowly yet steadily converging on the same overall Really Big Picture vision, yet all happening in the small details of the everyday. In that sense, it’s just like any other form of enterprise-architecture: “challenging, confronting, and intensely political”. But we do need to do it; and we do need to get started now.

So over the next few days I’ll write a series of posts summarising where I think we are now in terms of that Really Big Picture, various thought-experiments that we could explore to build a better sense of the implications, and how we can apply those understandings in our everyday work in enterprise-architectures and the like. (I’ll prefix each of these posts with ‘RBP-EA’ – Really Big Picture enterprise-architecture.) In reality this is about a fundamental shift in paradigm or worldview – the ways we think, the ways we interact with others, the ways we act on the world – but in practice it’s not that big a change, because we apply it in small adjustments to how we think and what we do in our enterprise-architectures and the like. Even at the end of this, everyday life will go on, much as before – because that is the way that things work. But those small tweaks will all help to re-align to the overall human enterprise, and help to reduce the overall human Enterprise Debt. And in the meantime, it should also lead to everyday enterprise-architectures that are more efficient and effective – which means that our existing architecture-clients will be happy, too. Everyone wins.

That’s what we’re aiming for here, anyway.

—

Where did this start? In reality, I’ve been working on this for years – as you’ll see if you scroll back through the earlier posts in this weblog, for example. But this particular exercise was triggered off after trying to explain yet again on one of the LinkedIn enterprise-architecture lists that we need to think more broadly than monetary terms alone when developing even the business-oriented layers of an enterprise-architecture. For some reason, US folks in particular seem really to struggle with the idea that there can be any other form of value than money – perhaps because US corporate law all but enforces this sadly lethal form of mercantile myopia. This time, though, it was one of the more annoying British-based ‘enterprise-architecture’ trolls who laid into me about this, gleefully launching into mockery and petty personal put-downs as a shallow pseudo-substitute for any form of analysis or thought. (The pointless persistence of those pathetic trolls is one of the reasons I’ve all but abandoned LinkedIn these days. Oh well.) There’s never any point in trying to argue with a troll, of course: everyone on the net has learnt that lesson the hard way. But in any case the responses to those questions would take a lot more space than LinkedIn allows: hence bringing the discussion back to here, where we do also have some means to keep the trolls at bay.

There’s a lot of work to do, to make sense of the Really Big Picture level and its implications for enterprise-architectures. I certainly don’t claim to have ‘all the answers’: the best I can offer is some of the perhaps more useful questions, and some themes and thought-experiments around which new ideas and new options might start to coalesce. And as always, the devil will be in the details – and there’ll be a lot of detail here. But it should be a start, at the least. And constructive comments and suggestions would be very welcome, too.

More later, anyway: Watch This Space?

If ever you might need a clear example of the difference between a responsibility-based economy versus a possession-based one, and the fundamental dysfunctionality of the latter, take a look at the international response to the current natural-disaster in Japan, with huge problems arising from a massive earthquake and tsunami all down its north-east coast, and collateral impacts such as damage to and failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

It should be obvious – more like blindingly-obvious, I hope – that there is a massive need for resources there, of all kinds. The human impact is huge: the immediate fact that so many have died is almost trivial compared to the inner-work that each of the survivors will need to do, over years and decades to come. Many villages and towns and even cities have been all but erased from the map: the physical costs of rebuilding the homes and shops and workspaces and infrastructure need to be matched by all the other types of costs involved in rebuilding human community. It’s clear that whatever happens onward, the power-plant is already seriously damaged, possibly beyond repair: which means that Japan has lost a significant proportion of its power-generating capacity, partially crippling its entire industrial and social base, not just for a few days or weeks, but probably for several years to come, until a replacement can be brought on-line. (The costs of decommissioning the damaged plant are another story again…) And right now, all of those people directly affected by the disaster – at least half a million people, and probably many more – need food, clothing, shelter and much more; and in the long term, rebuilding not just the physical spaces and work and everything else that goes with it, but rebuilding hope as well.

A responsibility-based economy matches the resources to the need. It prepares for that need, too – as can be seen in Japan’s rapid, well-rehearsed response, including mobilising 100,000 troops in the disaster-recovery effort (a distinct non-warfighting role for its armed-forces). Around the world, nations and NGOs alike have sent not just words but practical aid: and even if the sheer scale of the problems tends in practice to render many of these well-meant efforts down to little more than token gestures, the fact that mutual-responsibility is acknowledged there is important, with more than just token effect.

Contrast that with the response from the possession-economy – in other words, that which currently presents itself as ‘the economy’. In a sense that response could best be summarised by an, uh, unfortunate ‘Freudian slip’ by US economics-commentator Larry Kudlow, as reported by the largely apolitical lifestyle-magazine Vanity Fair:

In these tough economic times, isn’t it nice to know that calamitous natural disasters needn’t have an adverse affect on your investment portfolio? After the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan failed to induce a market nosedive, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow expressed his relief in terms that seemed to appall even his fellow cheerleaders for capitalism: “The human toll here,” he declared, “looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”

Yet whilst the disaster “failed to induce a market nosedive” in the US, the immediate ‘economic’ response to Japan has been very different. The national bank, for example, ‘released’ trillions of yen (hundreds of billions of dollars) to protect the national economy – yet in effect diluted and devalued the price-worth of every other yen currency-unit by doing so, because the price/resource balance has to come from somewhere. And in almost every other market elsewhere in the world, share-values in just about anything Japanese – car-companies, electronics, whatever – have taken a steep nosedive, already by 10% or more, and going down further with each new item of bad news. Insurance-companies worldwide have also been badly hit. In other words, the possession-economy’s response to a disaster of any kind is to reduce the available resources to recover from that disaster – just at the point where they are most needed.

In short, the possession-economy is driven not merely by the myths of ‘possession’ – the purported ‘right’ to claim exclusive access to shared resources, and to withhold those resources from others on personal whim or for personal gain at others’ expense – but also by anti-possession – the purported ‘right’ to avoid any inherent responsibilities that arise from that claim of possession. This is the dysfunctional side of entrepreneurship – where an entrepreneur acts not as a symbiotic catalyst in the economic ecosystem, but as a literal ‘between-taker’ ['entre', between; 'prendre', to take], a parasite whose sole ‘service’ is to take, and take, and take, whilst giving little or nothing in return.

Like a ‘fair-weather friend’, the possession-economy demands its (often excessive) ‘cut’ whenever times are good, but is nowhere to be seen whenever times are bad. In fact that’s when we discover that our so-called ‘friend’ has instead taken away whatever we need for recovery, and may even actively hinder us as we struggle to recover, creating an enforced dependence in order to maximise any future ‘take’. Responsibility accepts the costs of caring; whilst possession ‘succeeds’ because it does not care – placing itself above all others, demanding responsibility from those others, but evading the duty and mutual-responsibility of care for others in return.

There will always be some parasites in every ecosystem, of course. But to put it in its bluntest form, the paradigmatic parasitism of the possession-economy is a ‘luxury’ we can no longer afford. If we are to have any chance to survive in the longer term, we have no choice in this: somehow – and even if as yet we have no idea as to how – we must bring the possession-economy to an end.