Tom Graves / Tetradian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet the real problem here is somewhat more subtle:

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

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

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

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

Comments, anyone?

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

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

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

Except that I’d completely missed before now.

Oops…

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

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

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

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

And that’s what I’d missed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s customary at this time of year to do some kind of review: what’s happened in the past annual cycle, hopes and intentions for the next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we then wonder why it doesn’t work.

Duh…

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

Oops…

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

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

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

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

Hmm…

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

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

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

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

In designing management-structures, why is it so often assumed that responsibility-relationships only go one way?

Our organisations often place enormous attention on insubordination, a refusal or failure to follow ‘orders from above’; yet why don’t they place the same level of attention on insuperordination, the refusal or failure to respect the the same relationships and responsibilities to those ‘below’?

For that matter, why do we still prop up the misplaced myths of ‘above’ and ‘below’ anyway? After all, in a service-oriented view of the enterprise, there is no hierarchy - they’re all just mutual peer-level service-relationships, no different in nature from any other. And does anyone benefit from those myths any more? – other than people who need to prop up arbitrary and unwarranted delusions about their own importance?

This came up for me today from three different directions:

• reviewing several posts here on management-architectures, particularly ‘Rethinking the architecture of management‘, ‘Management as ‘just another service’ ‘ and ‘Rebalancing top-down management-architectures‘
• a Tweet from SystemsWiki, pointing to a brilliant HBR paper by Gary Hamel, First, Let’s Fire All The Managers‘ [PDF]
• thinking about ‘bosses’ I’ve known – some good, some not-so-good, and some just plain incompetent

I’ll happily give names to the good ‘bosses’ – Helen Mills at Australia Post, for example, or Graeme Burnett at DSTO. For the others, well, I’d best be a bit more circumspect, hadn’t I? – which is an interesting point in itself…

But there’s one of the latter that comes particularly to mind. It was on a large engineering-project a couple of decades or so ago; almost all of the team were contractors, some of them world-class level, because it was a genuinely innovative system that had to do things that had never been done before. To make it all work, and to hold the team together, we needed a manager at the same kind of skill-level. What they gave us instead was – to be blunt – an incompetent idiot, a classic civil-service time-server, eking out his last years before retirement. Not a good choice…

He was way, way out of his depth and his comfort-zone – a fact that became painfully obvious even before the first day was out. He had no experience or understanding of the inherent anarchy of innovation: as an ex-military-type, all he knew was command-and control. Which really, really, really didn’t work.

We limped on under his endless incompetence for a few months, until one day it all came to a head. At a particularly fraught team-meeting, every one of the contractors blew up at him, saying that he alone was the reason why the project was so far behind schedule; furious, he rushed out, accusing everyone of insubordination, and yelling – and I quote – that “I’ll have all of you frog-marched out of the establishment!”

At that point, the executive realised they needed to intervene, kinda urgently… The team explained to them that whilst, yes, they would perform best with a good manager, they would actually be better off with no manager at all than with this guy. And for once – hooray! – we actually had senior-management who had some real grasp of what was going on – and they agreed. So for the rest of the project, we ran as a self-organised team, without any manager at all.

In short, our incompetent manager had been fired for insuperordination – failing to deliver the required management-services to the level needed within that context.

Looking around at most management-structures, it’s clear that that needs to happen a lot more often…

And this, of course, is where it can get v-e-r-y tricky for enterprise-architects and the like. We can see what’s not working. We can see why it’s not working. We know exactly what to do to get it working again. And yet we’re supposed to pretend that the myths of management-hierarchy are somehow sacrosanct, that insubordination is real and punishable, but insuperordination and plain management-stupidity is not. We’re allowed – in fact required – to ‘fix’ anything and everything except that which is the blatant cause of the problems, namely those myopic myths of management, which we’re not allowed to challenge at all. Hmm… About time we started being honest this, don’t you think?

Implications for enterprise-architecture

Insuperordination isn’t just lack of leadership: it’s a structural failure of the management-model to support essential symmetries of responsibility in mutual service-relationships.

And as a structural flaw – one that has serious impacts on overall enterprise risk – it’s very much a concern for enterprise-architecture.

The key requirement here is to stop thinking in terms of hierarchies. If we take a service-oriented view, it’s clear that management-services have a very real function, as information-aggregators and resource-distributors, dealing with the trade-offs across a functional-silo.

Yet those types of services are not well-suited to managing end-to-end cross-silo process-flows: there needs to be a separate category of coordination-services that handles that task – a fact which immediately implies matrix-relationships of some kind.

And those matrix-relationships need to be peer-to-peer – which doesn’t fit at all with any Taylorist-style concept of top-down management-hierarchies.

In short, top-down ‘command-and-control’ hierarchy is an overlay on top of a tree-structure that arises naturally from aggregator/resource-distributor relationships. The tree-structure provides a genuine service; the hierarchy, all too often, a genuine disservice. Don’t conflate the two structures: they’re not the same.

The way to separate them is that the tree-structure could be viewed in any orientation: top-down, bottom-up, sideways-in, centre-out – it’s all the same. But the hierarchy is always described as top-down: it can’t be made to (seem to) make sense in any other way.

The top-down management-model is essentially a leftover remnant of a supposedly long-dead feudal past, in which position in that hierarchy denotes ‘rights’ to demand subservience on pain of punishment for ‘insubordination’. As a structure based entirely on ‘power-over‘ – with all the dysfunctionality that that implies – it can only be made to seem to work as long as there is no need to engage the ‘subordinates’ actually in the work: “check your brain in at the door” is how one colleague described it. But when the work does require that kind of personal engagement – as is becoming more and more common throughout almost every business context – then the overall system will either operate only at low efficiency, or even fail to operate all, if that ‘conventional’ command-and-control hierarchy is allowed to remain in place.

It’s an architectural choice. Command-and-control hierarchy will only work with low-agility: if we need to preserve command-and-control hierarchies, we will not be able to achieve high-agility in that context. If the organisation – or some part of the organisation – needs high-agility, we must define a structure in which that section of management is peer-based, as ‘just another service’ – and in which the responsibility-failures of insuperordination must be recognised as exactly symmetric with insubordination.

In any given context, we can choose one model, or the other: they don’t mix well, and we can’t have both in the same context – as even current military doctrine [PDF] now makes clear.

If we want our organisations to work, we need to stop pretending that insuperordination doesn’t exist – and instead acknowledge that it’s one of the most serious sources of organisational risk.

That’s the message that we need to give to our enterprise-architecture clients.

Challenging, yes – but it’s the only way that this is going to work.

Comments/suggestions, anyone?

What’s the point of competition, in a business-context? Perhaps more to the point, what is competition in a business-context? And why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therein lie the roots of some serious problems for business…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implications in business-architecture and enterprise-architecture

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

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

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

Which leads us to one very simple test:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But a plan. Sort-of.

Hmm…

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

You what? “Say no to women’s rights” – you’re kiddin’ me, right? What kind of misogynistic claptrap is this…?!?

I’ll admit it: I’m being deliberately provocative here. (Did get your attention, though, didn’t it?  And don’t forget I did warn you that what I’m doing these days could be a lot more challenging for many folks? – well, this is what that looks like.  )

So cool it, okay? Calm down. It’s almost certainly not what you might think I’m saying. And don’t panic: ultimately this is more about a practical design-issue in ‘big-picture’ enterprise-architectures than about anything else. Serious, sure: but not misogynistic. Honest.

It’s true that there are specific problems around all closed-category ‘rights’ such as purported ‘women’s rights’ and the like – and I promise I’ll come back to those later. But that isn’t the real point here anyway. The real point is this: the whole concept of ‘rights’ could well be one of the most disastrous mistakes that humans have ever made. And we need to find a way back out from that mistake if we’re ever to achieve some kind of sustainable society.

In terms of well-meant stupidity, the notion of ‘rights’ is right up there with the toffee spear [thank you Terry Pratchett!] and the lead balloon: it doesn’t work, it’s never worked, in fact can’t work, because its cause of failure is built right into its very roots. Scrambled misunderstandings and misuses of the notion of ‘rights’ represent a huge failure-risk, right at the roots of all of our current ‘really-big-picture enterprise-architectures’. And to be blunt, the concept of ‘rights’ is so riddled with calamitous unintended-consequences that we really need to remove it, totally and permanently, from every aspect of every law in every land.

An assertion to which, at present, you might well disagree.

Which is fair enough, of course.

But perhaps allow me to explain?

(And yes, as usual, this is going to be a bit long… but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.)

Read more…

When I said I was moving on, in the previous post ‘Time for this on toad to move on‘, yes, I was serious: I’m moving out of mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture.

Am I giving up? No, not at all.

Am I actually leaving the entire enterprise-architecture domain? Nope. (Sorry to disappoint a few folks there, but you’ll just have to put up with that. )

So what exactly am I doing, then?

All I’m doing here, metaphorically speaking, is that I’m moving along the road a bit: a few metaphoric houses up the road, if you like. Similar sort of work to what I’ve always done, in many ways, but a much bigger picture this time. A much bigger picture. I’m not going to be looking (much) at the ‘enterprise’-architecture of some small bits of detail-level IT any more: I’ll be looking at the ‘enterprise-architecture’ of the whole darn planet…

Arrogant sucker, ain’t I?

In a way, yeah, of course it is, to say something like that. But if you look around on this blog and elsewhere, in effect that’s what I’ve already been doing, for years. All that’s really different now is that I’m making it a bit more explicit.

And to be blunt, looking around a bit, it really does feel as if I’m one of the few people anywhere who has a freakin’ clue about what’s really going on out there (answer: an MQ-9 mythquake [kind of like a worldwide Richter-9 earthquake, only worse]), what chance we have to stop it (answer: none at all), what won’t work (answer: just about everything we might think of as ‘normal’ or ‘business-as-usual’), and what might work (very-tentative-suggested-answer: something on the lines of a responsibility-based service-oriented enterprise model for a global economics, with systematic eradication of any concept of possession – including all concept of ‘rights’ – and total restructure of every possible aspect of politics at every level. In other words, just a few minor changes here and there… ). Seems like there might be a real need, then, for someone with my kind of background in futures, social-dynamics, skills-development, creativity, complexity, innovation, sensemaking and strategy, across a whole swathe of different companies, climates, cultures and continents. Oh, and there’s also enterprise-architectures, of course: reckon that might possibly be useful, too.

Yes: a real big need for that.

Kind of a big anti-want for it, though.

A very big anti-want.

Oh well.

But no problem, really. Do I think I can make a living out of it? Nope, of course not: I’m not that crazy. But I’m not making any kind of viable living out of enterprise-architecture, either, so what’s the difference? As long as I can pay my way somehow in this increasingly-insane ‘economic system’, that’s all I’ll need. And given that I’ve survived somehow for all these years, without ever having suffered the indignity of being a so-called ‘permanent’ employee, I reckon I’ll manage to keep going for a while yet. Somehow. Doesn’t really matter that I don’t know how: the way things are going, pretty soon no concept of a ‘plan’ is going to make sense any more, so perhaps I’m just getting in early to beat the rush?

Yeah, sure it’s lonely at times: I don’t have any real support at all, no family, no partner since literally decades ago, and at my age pretty unlikely ever again. Good: it means that there’s no-one else to get hurt on my behalf if I screw things up.

Sure it’s scary, desperately insecure: I don’t even have a home of my own any more. Good: nothing particularly to lose, then; nothing of that kind that can be used as leverage against me. And I can just up-sticks and go anywhere that I’m needed. Easy. (In principle, anyway… )

I’m useless at organising anything, events, stuff like that. Good: instead of desperately pretending that I can do everything myself, let other people do that stuff instead – they’re much better at it than I’ve ever been or ever will be. Just do my part of the work, and let others get on with theirs. Simple. (Interesting challenges on trust, of course… )

Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. Live this stuff that I’ve been talking about: rather than ‘making a living’, much better to go for ‘making a life’.

Crazy? Sure. Of course it is: never said it wasn’t. But then I come out of a family-background with a long anarchist-style tradition (of the more constructive if occasionally-quixotic Quaker variety, rather than the brainless bomb-throwing kind), and it’s about time I put those principles into real-world practice. Time to give something back – especially as, at age 60, I probably don’t have that many years left in which to do so. That fact matters, a lot. It also brings its own rather interesting sense of urgency…

So what does all this mean, in plain, ordinary, everyday terms?

Various things I won’t be doing:

1. I won’t do any more work here on detail-layer analysis of IT-oriented ‘enterprise’-architecture such as TOGAF or Archimate (unless anyone specifically asks me for an opinion or whatever).
2. I won’t be presenting myself for any more contract-work as an ‘enterprise-architect’. (I’ll still be available to do spot-work commercial consultancy or training for most types of EA, in just about any industry that isn’t finance, banking or insurance – but I will expect to get paid for that, every time.)
3. I won’t offer any more ‘free’ advice on enterprise-architecture or whatever to people who can darn well afford to pay for it. (I’ll still be more than happy to help anyone in any other way – especially any of the upcoming ‘new generation’ of enterprise-architects.)
4. I probably won’t be going to any more ‘enterprise’-architecture conferences, not least because I won’t be able to afford it (unless someone pays at least my expenses, of course).
5. I won’t pander any more to people who to me seem arrogant, bullying, unwilling to think, and otherwise acting in an asinine or irresponsible manner (and yes, there’s been a lot of them I’ve put up with way too often over the past few years…)

Various things I will be doing:

1. I will be doing a lot more research and exploration on ‘big-picture’ themes, developing new types of tools and techniques to tackle those issues in a much more constructive way than as at present; and working with others to develop new toolsets and training-materials for these needs. (It’d be nice if someone else paid for some of that work, but being realistic I wouldn’t expect it, unless anyone else that I’m working with is getting paid for it too.)
2. I will be doing various types of consultancy-work with non-profits, citizen-groups and other organisations that are reaching towards a more constructive world. (Again, it’d be nice if I got paid to do some of that, but I’d only expect it from commercial organisations or government bodies, who should be able to afford to subsidise some of that other work at least.)
3. I will show the EA community and others how to apply those ideas, tools and techniques, within the conventional business context, such as with Enterprise Canvas and the like. (It would likewise be nice if sometimes people would at least offer to pay some of my expenses for doing this, but I do acknowledge that there are too many of us already in this same boat that I am with regard to ‘real-EA’.)
4. I probably will be going to a wide variety of conferences and other gatherings on broader-scope societal-change topics. (As ever, the real limit here will be my probable near-nonexistent income: so if you really want me at your gathering, please do find some way to subsidise my travel-expenses at least.)
5. Much of my work and writing will be a lot more ‘political’ and challenging for a lot more folks: in which case, sorry, but that’s just too bad, because none of us can afford to tolerate outright irresponsibility and abuse any more. (I am very clear about what is and is not abuse in the social context, by the way: see the ‘manifesto‘ on that, from my book Power and Response-ability.)

So that’s it: getting down to work in a different garden – a garden that’s a rather better fit, than that of current mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture, for this admittedly somewhat-strange kind of toad.

Comments / suggestions / requests, anyone?

Strange things, metaphors: they kind of have a life of their own sometimes…

My mother tells the story of the first house she and my father lived in, some small place way up in the north of England somewhere, back when my elder brother was still a babe-in-arms. The garden they’d inherited there was an overgrown tangle, and they didn’t have much of a clue about gardening, but it seemed a friendly sort of place. It even had its own toad, hiding in the humid dankness underneath a sprawl of strawberry-creepers that had crept in from under the fence from next-door.

It didn’t take long to see why the toad was there. Next-door’s garden was regimented, ordered, everything under control, just so. And all a bit sad, because nothing was thriving there. Beneath all that would-be perfection, the strawberry-patch was a mess of slugs and snails, stunting all the growth; what few fruit were left were all tiny. Yet over on my parents’ side of the fence, those same plants were producing a lush spread of abundant greenery, enough strawberries to keep a grocery going all on its own – and one very happy toad, who’d made very sure that there was not a single slug to be seen.

My mother realised what was happening in the next-door garden, and even offered to send ‘their’ toad over there. But the neighbour was adamant that she wasn’t having “that disgusting creature” in her perfect space: no way! And continued to fret over the fact that her once-imagined idyll was indeed dying…

Hence interesting that I’ve been writing about ‘the toad in the road‘, because I guess that’s what I am myself right now, in this garden we call ‘enterprise architecture’. A toad in the road: right idea, wrong place. Right idea for somewhere, I’d hope. But wrong place for here-and-now. Oh well.

Yeah, enterprise-architecture. You know, this could be a really nice garden? Especially if you got rid of most of this mess of concrete, and let those tired plants in their cracked concrete tubs get their roots down into the dirt at last. Plenty of potential and all that: to get the water flowing again, you might have to take a stick of dynamite to that ugly-looking paddling-pool that the last lot of kids built for themselves, over in the corner called ‘IT-centrism‘, but hey, it’s all here. Why not do it?

You’d wondered where all the wildlife went, but can’t you see there’s not much that can thrive in this kind of desert? A few bugs and wood-lice and a lizard or two, perhaps, but that’s about it. If you want it to work, perhaps plant a few things that can actually grow here: get a bit of shade going an’ all that. There’s a few plants of my own that might grow well here too, if given a halfway-decent chance: the Enterprise Canvas, perhaps, or that notation-agnostic metamodel; or maybe even a bunch of ideas about value-trees, about the service-oriented enterprise and the structure of management – kinda strange-looking at first, I know, but they really do work in this kind of climate. Only a suggestion, of course: it’s your garden, after all.

I’ll have to admit, though, that this isn’t really my kind of place that you’ve got here. Partly my fault, perhaps: I do know I’m kind of an Outsider – always have been, I guess – though I really have tried, I promise you. It’s just I really can’t cope with all the broken-down bits of machinery parked all over the place, and the possessiveness that still pervades everything: they do kinda get in the way all the time. And a bit too grey, too cold, too lifeless: too corporate, I suppose you could say? I’m gettin’ old, I s’pose: I need somewhere that’s a bit more comfortable with having real people around the place, a bit more aware of the anarchic nature of, well, nature itself? I guess I could do with a bit more of the bigger picture, too: and I don’t mind all those mythquakes that we can see coming down the road a ways, though I know they do worry some other folks a lot.

I’ll still be around, of course: if you need me, you know where to find me. And I’m always happy to drop by in your garden – especially if you find a way to bring it more back to life again.

But yeah, I gotta face the facts: this kind of ‘enterprise’-architecture garden ain’t no place for the likes o’ me – and out here at present I’m just another toad in the road.

So it’s “goodbye and thanks for all the slugs”, I guess? – because it seems like it’s time for this old toad to be a-movin’ on.