Yes, I do know that those questions might seem to fit more in philosophy or psychology. But as per the previous post, they also have huge ramifications in user-experience and user-interface design, in product-design, in sensemaking and decision-making, and in enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, security-architecture and many other architectures in general.

Quick summary so far:

• there’s a decision-making ‘I’ – “I am that which chooses”, that which experiences the world as ‘I’ and responds accordingly, and which can be highly volatile, especially in terms of real-time decision-making
• there’s a kind of presentation-layer of ‘I’, which is expressed through surface-appearance, through digital-personas and suchlike
• there’s a kind of interaction between each ‘I’ and that presentation-layer – an interaction which is particularly clear in work with Masks, as I’ll return to in a moment
• there’s a distinct identifier-layer for ‘I’, comprised of identifiers acknowledged or imposed by others as well as self, and typically associated roles, rights and responsibilities for ‘I’ – with the identifiers often associated with external or assigned personas (digital or otherwise)
• beneath it all, in most cases, there seems to be a kind of unitary ‘I’ that is experienced by self as ‘I’, and perhaps also experienced by others as one’s ‘I’ – though with reservations on that such as indicated by the classic Johari Window model

So, to identity and Mask.

I’ve just finished re-reading Keith Johnstone’s classic ‘Impro: improvisation and the theatre‘. To me, it’s absolute must-read for anyone interested in the human side of enterprise-architecture: its sections on status, spontaneity and narrative can be real eye-openers for understanding how organisations really work. (Or, more often, don’t work…) Yet for me it’s always been the last section in the book that’s always stood out the most: the section on Masks.

The term ‘Mask’ has a special meaning here – hence the initial-capital on Mask, to distinguish it from a more everyday theatrical mask. In many ways the Mask is just an ordinary half-face mask: the difference is more in how it’s used, not just as a costume-prop but as an active persona or literal ‘per-sona’ – an active filter on ’that through which I sound’.

[There's also another set of techniques that work with full-face Masks, or Tragic Masks, but I won't go into any of that here.]

The context in the book is improvisational theatre, of course – not enterprise-architecture. Yet there are a few themes that are extremely relevant for us.

One is that it’s a real and intensive research-environment. True, it’s subjective-research rather than objective-research, but in essence the principles of of investigation are the same, and certainly the level of discipline required is much the same if they’re to get usable results. So don’t dismiss it out of hand because it’s not IT…

Given that, note what is probably the key theme there: that there’s some kind of interaction that goes on between actor and Mask. It’s not as simple as a one-way ‘I am wearing this prop’: wearing a Mask has definite impacts on the actor, and it seems there’s even some continuity between different people wearing the same Mask:

Another Mask was called Mr Parks. This one used to laugh, and stare into the air, and sit on the extreme edge of chairs and fall off sideways. Shay Gorman created the character. I took the Mask to a course I gave in Hampshire. The students were entering from behind a screen and suddenly I heard Mr Parks’ laughter. It entered with the same posture Shay Gorman had adopted, and looked up as if something was very amusing about the ceiling, and then it kept sitting on the extreme edge of a chair as if it wanted to fall off. Fortunately it didn’t, because the wearer wasn’t very athletic. It really makes no sense that a Mask should be able to transmit that information to its wearer.

I’ll very carefully make no comment here as to how that kind of information could pass from one actor to another, just through the medium of the respective Mask: just note that it is so, under those types of technical conditions.

Also explained in the book is that the whole thing depends on some quite specific psychological or psychosocial conditions. To translate it into the terms I’ve been using with the SCAN framework, it’s all happening in the real-time space, and it just does not work on the Belief (‘control’) side of the decision-modality spectrum. It only works either on the Faith-side of the decision-spectrum – where conscious choice of some kind is available, though primarily as a kind of ‘intentional surrender’ – or when there’s no conscious thought at all – which also means no conscious choice.

The fundamental point in Mask work is that there is a sense not so much of loss of ‘I’, as a kind of negotiation with the Mask as to what that surface-’I’ will be. And the Mask can impose some fairly severe constraints on what it can allow, its ‘repertoire’ and suchlike: for example, it can be very difficult to do any kind of predefined script whilst doing Mask-work. If there’s no awareness of that negotiation with the Mask, there are two likely outcomes: either the student will attempt to’take control’, which results in poor outcomes and sometimes literally ‘wooden’ performances; or the student will fail to notice the impacts of the Mask, and in effect believe that the results are their own choice of ‘I’, rather than the default sort-of-choices imposed by the Mask. Which might well not be a good idea…

So what on earth has any of this to do with enterprise-architecture?

The answer is this: anything can be a Mask in this sense. Anything.

To be slightly more specific, anything that can act as a surface-level filter or persona – a ‘that through which I sound’ – can act as a Mask in this sense. Whether or not we are consciously aware of it doing so.

And anything that can act as a filter on ‘I’, also in effect changes the surface experience of ‘I’, of how others experience that ‘I’, and also the actions and choices of that ‘I’.

A couple of really simple everyday examples:

– Someone may be the most mild-mannered person face to face, but suddenly an absolute demon behind the wheel of a car.

– Conversations in Twitter often seem artificial, terse, mechanical – the Mask of the 140-character constraint.

Consider all the ‘professional props’ of just about every trade and tradition: the doctor’s stethoscope, the barrister’s wig, the consultant’s clipboard. All of them are Masks: the person’s behaviour, demeanour, stance and language will all change the moment they pick up that prop.

Consider a business uniform, a brand, a shop layout, a user-interface layout: they’re all Masks in this sense too – an active filter for a persona, as ‘that through which I sound’, impacting on and constraining the choices and actions of the respective ‘I’.

Every role is a Mask. Every digital-identity or digital-persona is a Mask. (Think for a moment about the impact of that on the ways that people interact with digital systems – especially when multiple personae intersect.)

Layer upon layer upon layer of Masks, changing continuously throughout every day.

And, if we’re not conscious of those impacts and constraints on ‘I’, will find our ‘I’ seeming to change with each change of Mask, yet not knowing how or why.

In short, the sense of identity may – and probably will – become fluid in the context of a Mask.

And almost anything may act as a Mask.

Often in unpredictable and/or emergent ways.

Affecting interaction with just about everything else.

Hence, also in short, a definitely non-trivial concern for security, privacy, user-experience design, process-design, branding and a whole host of other themes in enterprise-architecture and elsewhere.

Identity and Mask might perhaps seem somewhat abstract at first. A bit less abstract by now, I hope?

Over to you for comment, anyway.

Yeah, I know, sounds like philosophy and stuff – woefully abstract, deep and pointless. Yawn.

But those ‘pointless’ questions are the core – the heart – of a lot of really important everyday concerns for enterprise-architecture: privacy, security, sales and marketing, just to name a few. The core of ‘enterprise’ itself. Abstract, yes; yet also just about as pragmatic as it gets. Hmm…

Where this got started was a post by Brian Hopkins, on his Forrester blog:

• practicingEA: 2012 Predictions – Technology Will Shape Who We Are As People And Businesses

The post itself is a quick summary of some key themes happening in the IT side of enterprise-architecture at the moment: the fading of ‘Big IT’, a new focus on data, the convergence of social, mobile and local, and the ongoing hype around cloud. Fair enough: interesting to IT-oriented folks, certainly. The comments, though, focussed in on questions about identity in that space – and that’s where things got really interesting…

In essence, we ended up with those questions above. There’s a lot in those comments on Brian’s post, and I won’t repeat it all here: go look at it in the original, it’s well worth the read, especially the notes by Stephen Wilson on on digital-identity. What I’d like to pick up on briefly here are four of those themes:

• identity is simple, complicated, complex, ambiguous, unknowable – all at the same time
• identifier and identity are not the same
• identity and persona are not the same
• identity is filtered through many layers of persona

Identity is complex – that’s the shorthand version, anyway. It’s fluid, it stays the same: we can recognise friends after thirty years’ absence, we barely recognise our own face in the mirror each morning. For me, it changes with the clothes I wear, both in my own sense of identity, and how others seem to see and interact with me. I am my car, my house, my phone, my ideas, my memories: I think I possess them, but they also possess me.

Identity is like a hologram: blurry, muddled, indistinct – until the light shines on it in just the right way. For a brief instant, identity is certain, crystal-clear – and then vanishes again. Until the light shines on it from another direction, showing a different facet, a different face – yet of what is still the same hologram of identity.

Identity is multi-faceted, bewildering, chaotic. There’s one sense I have of ‘I’ when I’m at home, another in the office, another when I’m on stage at a conference, yet another with friends or colleagues in the cafe, and different again when chatting online, or chatting with the ‘checkout chick’ at the market or the mall. On the surface, and from the ‘the inside’, those can be very different people: so which one is me? Which one is real? Which is the myth? And when two or more of those myths collide – meeting work-colleagues at home, for example – there’s a kind of ‘mythquake‘, where for a brief panicked moment nothing seems real at all. Is everything just an act, a mask? Is there anything real behind all of those masks? And yet there is a single unitary ‘I’ in there somewhere, the one voice behind all of those different voices – otherwise we couldn’t recognise it as ‘I’. To quote the Cluetrain Manifesto:

…These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Yet Cluetrain is also about another kind of identity-clash: the distinction between individual and collective, the identity of ‘I’ versus the identity of ‘We’. When I’m part of ‘We’, where is ‘I’? Which one is real? Which one is the mask, the myth?

Confusing, to say the least. And if that’s at the core of so much of enterprise-architecture, it’s no wonder that that’s complex too. Too complex: hence no surprise that so many people try to make it out to be simpler than it is – and that’s where things get messy…

Identifier and identity are not the same - an identifier is not identity, it’s a proxy for identity, for when we don’t have other means to recognise identity. An identifier is just information - and information about something is not the same as the thing itself. It seems this should be obvious, yet evidently it isn’t –  especially to many of those who work on Digital Identity and suchlike, designing IT-systems that seemingly assume they are the same.

We talk about ‘identity-theft’, yet in most cases – perhaps all? – it’s theft of identifier, not identity. An identifier links not to identity, but to a persona associated with that identity – the identity as a role, a set of rights, responsibilities, authorities, tasks. In a possession-based culture, an identifier provides ‘rights’ of access to resources, ‘the right to know’, the right to use: if the identifier is hijacked, those ‘rights’ are hijacked too. That’s what all the worry is about: loss of access to resources, loss of control, loss of concealment for key information. That matters, obviously. But it’s identifier-theft, not identity-theft: the distinction is important.

Going the other way, identity is not identifier. I may put on a company-uniform to identify myself to others as a member of the company; my business-card carries both my own name (a personal identifier) and the company-name (a collective identifier); but that doesn’t mean that I am the company, or that the company ‘is’ me. I use the company-identifier as a persona, and others may recognise me via that persona: yet it isn’t who I am. That distinction is important, too.

[A side-note here: in terms of asset-dimensions, relational-assets link to identity, whereas aspirational-assets mostly to the persona - concrete versus abstract. For more on this, see the post 'Relational-assets are not 'possessions' '.]

Identity and persona are not the same – a persona is an overlay of identity, in exactly the same sense that my clothes are an overlay on myself. A persona is literally ‘that through which I sound’ – a filter, a mask. Online, we have many different personas – not just as represented by distinct avatars and the like, but every online account is in a sense a persona, a ‘that through which I sound’ to or with the respective application.

And the same the other way: the application presents a different persona – a different interface – for us depending on whether we’ve logged in or not, and in some cases (such as the Amazon website) may even adapt itself over time to match the changing history of the relationship. Note the ‘identity-confusion’ that can occur when we present a mismatched persona – such as entering the wrong username / password combination, or using the same avatar in different social contexts.

So too in the offline world. Almost everything is or can be used as a persona: clothes, props, language, body-stance, the way we may drive differently in a rental-car compared to a car we consider ‘ours’. And it’s not just one-way, from us outward: we feel different in different clothes, in different cars, in different climates. There’s an interaction between people and place, and the place has choices too – certainly in a metaphoric sense, perhaps in a literal sense as well.

Identity is filtered through many layers of persona. Persona is ‘that through which I sound’ – a Mask. Each of us has layer upon layer of Masks, some of them seemingly our choice, others less conscious, and yet others sort-of imposed by culture, by context, by the impacts of advertising and the like. It’s complicated… complex…

[One of the best sources to get a sense of of all of this is in impro-theatre: for example, see Keith Johnstone's classic 'Impro: improvisation and the theatre' - particularly the later section on Masks.]

In enterprise-architecture, one of the more useful concerns is provide conditions under which the distinctions between identity and persona become more visible – are ‘surfaced’, to use the psychology-jargon. When people become aware of those distinctions, they also become aware that they can choose the extent to which they identify themselves with a persona – and can let it go and choose an alternative that is a better fit to a changing context. Often we might intentionally set up some kind of ‘ritual’ to mark the boundary: for example, donning a safety-helmet on a building site also triggers a more safety-aware persona.

There’s a lot more to explore here, of course – anyone interested in taking it further?

For many people, it’s ‘the ‘Holiday Season’, or Christmas, or New Year, or something like that. A calendrical marker-point, anyway. Something to celebrate, perhaps.

The culture I come from is nominally Christian, hence ‘Christmas’ and suchlike, so that’s the label others around me tend to use. (Though it doesn’t quite have the same sense for me, I’ll admit: in religious terms, my family-background is in the Quaker tradition, which historically regards Christmas as ‘just another day’.)

[These days 'Christmas' in this country seems barely Christian anyway: it's much more about families - which sadly doesn't have much relevance for me - and, even more, about the real 'state-religion', the Church of Conspicuous Consumption, which I try to avoid as much as possible...]

As a perennial Outsider, my real colleagues are scattered around the globe: I have stronger connections with people in the Netherlands, Australia,Guatemala, Brazil or the US, for example, than with just about anyone in this town. Those friends and families and colleagues all follow different faiths, different traditions, different worldviews: even the Christians amongst them will celebrate their Christmas on different dates, from 1st December right through to 6th January (‘Twelfth Night’, also known in England as ‘Old Christmas’). And even a nominally-secular marker such as ‘New Year’ can be almost as problematic: there seem to be dozens of different definitions of ‘New Year’, few of which make much sense to anyone else.

So it’s kinda tricky knowing what to ‘celebrate’, or know which date-marker to use. For purely pragmatic reasons, I tend to focus on astronomical markers such as solstices and equinoxes, because they’re probably the ‘safest’ in social terms. Hence today, being the solstice closest to the most-acknowledged festival in these parts, and also closest to the New-Year point for this culture.

Even so, which solstice? It’s winter-solstice here, but summer-solstice for my friends down south; and solstices don’t mean much anyway to my friends in the tropical-regions, whose ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ and the like align with other real-world markers. Hmm… see what I mean by ‘kinda tricky’?

So what can a not-particularly-social not-particularly-anchored-anywhere soft-of-digital-native do or say these days, in terms of others’ societal celebrations?

I guess the best I can offer is that however, whatever and whenever you choose your celebrations to be, have fun, and Have A Happy Whatever!

Enjoy! – and thanks again for sharing this journey with me over the passing year.

If ever you want an all-too-real example of this problem in practice, go to almost any public event, and note the huge queues outside the women’s toilets – queues that you’re unlikely to see outside the men’s.

Those queues don’t happen because “it’s just the women are all putting their lippy on”, as one sarcastic male colleague put it. It’s actually a fairly serious service-design failure – and it’s the kind of failure that happens whenever anyone fails to understand that identical is not always the same as equal.

By ‘identical’, I mean that the same service is provided, usually occupying the same physical or virtual space – typically the physical or virtual dimensions, in terms of the asset-tetradian.

By ‘equal’, I mean that the service is experienced as leading to the same or equivalent outcome – typically the relational and aspirational dimensions of the asset-tetradian.

To illustrate the point, let’s explore that specific example of service-provision: toilet-space in public places.

[This is solely about service-design: nothing else. It happens to be a particularly clear example of this kind of design-flaw, that's all.]

Many cultures – most ‘Western’ cultures at least – provide separate toilet-spaces for males and females.

[We'll ignore the cultural drivers for this - they're not particularly relevant for this example. All we need to note is that this is so.]

Toilet-spaces typically include one or more of three distinct forms: individual cubicles, individual urinals, and collective urinal. Individual cubicles take up the most space, collective urinals the least.

For reasons of simple anatomy and – dependent on culture – clothing-design, in general only males will be able to use urinals.

Again dependent on culture and clothing-design, usage of cubicles will often usually involve partial removal of clothing – especially for females. Again for social reasons, this means that in most cases some form of privacy would be expected, typically requiring the cubicle to be large enough to incorporate a closable door.

A typical truck-transportable ‘portakabin’-type toilet – such as used at many event-venues – would be able only to accommodate a single row of perhaps ten cubicles, compared to a double-sided collective-urinal that could accommodate at least a dozen people either side.

A simple time-and-motion study [pun not intended!] indicates that usage of a cubicle takes some two to three times as long as using a urinal.

If we put all of these factors together, we’ll recognise that women will probably need more than twice as many toilet-units as men, occupying around five times as much space as that for men, in order to achieve an equal outcome – same numbers of relieved customers in the same time – from the same nominal service-provision.

Conversely, if we provide the same amount of space – as is still all too common in, say, a theatre-design – then the same usage of service-provision overall is going to take around five times as long for women as for men. Hence those inordinate queues…

The all-too-literally painful lesson here? – Identical is not the same as equal.

In most societies now, structural-inequality is pretty unpopular. In most businesses, inequality of outcomes can create not just loss of future business, but increased risk of serious anti-client problems. In short, it’s not a good idea.

Hence it’s not a good idea to allow our service-designs to create that kind of unequal-outcome by default, through carelessness on our part in the service-design process.

Which means that we need to be careful to distinguish between the service-provision itself, and the outcomes of that service-provision – and design counter-mechanisms to cope with contexts where the circumstances themselves would tend to create unintended inequalities.

Just another not-so-unimportant point to ponder, perhaps?

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?

That distinction can sometimes seem subtle – yet it’s very important indeed…

On the surface, it always seems a lot easier to be ‘against’ something. Many NGOs define themselves this way; quite a few businesses will do so, too. Whatever it is that we’re against, it already exists – otherwise we wouldn’t be against it, would we? (In some cases what we’ll say we’re against is the risk of whatever-it-is occurring – in other words, it ‘exists’ only in imaginary form – but as we’ll see, this comes down to much the same in the end.) We want it to stop existing, or not exist: that’s the whole point. It’s real, definite, and wrong – because since we’re against it, it must be wrong. Which means in turn that, by definition, we must be right, we’re ‘in the right’. That’s a good feeling to have: certainty, righteousness, righting the wrongs of the world. Which creates a lot of emotion, a lot of drive. The kind of energy we definitely need in an enterprise-vision and the like.

But…

It’s all too easy for it to be subtly dishonest: we point the finger at others, blame others, show them up as ‘the bad guys’ – which means that, conveniently, there’s no attention placed on us, on how we also support that whatever-it-is that we say we’re ‘against’. (In fact, as Jung warns in his concept of the ‘Shadow‘, we may actually be the worst offenders here, using ‘Other-blame’ as a mechanism to avoid facing our own actions. For examples of this, look at the behaviour espoused or demanded by almost any ‘activist’-group that says it’s ‘against’ something, and compare that with the actual behaviour of that group in action…) Which also means that the only aspects of that which we’re ‘against’ is the parts that others do – not the parts that we do. After all, by definition, we’re ‘the good guys’, we couldn’t be doing anything wrong, could we?

Oops…

If we define ourselves as ‘against’ something, we then need that something to continue to exist, in order to be against it - otherwise we would have no apparent reason to exist. The more we succeed in being against it, the more we’ll find ourselves needing to re-create it, in order to still have something be against. Which, over time, leads us into the inevitable vapidity of the Shirky Principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution“.

Oops…

In short, defining ourselves as ‘against’ something will feel strong, powerful, ‘good’; but it may well be subtly dishonest, and unfortunately it’s all but guaranteed to make things worse.

Not such a good idea, then…

Defining ourselves as ‘for’ something is usually a lot harder. For a start, it probably doesn’t exist as yet – in fact our aim would usually be to create it, to bring it into existence. But because it doesn’t exist, it’s not tangible, it’s often a bit amorphous, a bit blurry, uncertain. Because it doesn’t exist, we first have to imagine the possibility of its existence: and by definition, that can be a somewhat conceptual, abstract exercise. Which means that to make the intent emotive – which it needs to be – we first have to imagine the whatever-it-is, and then convert that imagination into emotion: which can be quite hard to do.

Tricky… definitely. But if we can do it, we can create something new, something valued, something we’re for – all literally ‘real-ised’ from nothing. It didn’t exist; yet when we succeed, it now does exist. That’s pretty impressive, when you stop to think about it.

So defining ourselves as ‘against’ something always seems the easier way: but it doesn’t work. Whereas being ‘for’ something may seem a whole lot harder, but it does work.

So whenever we define a vision or the the like, we need always to do so in terms of ‘for’, not ‘against’.

No doubt, though, that it is easier to start from a ‘being-against’. So to make it work, we need to convert – or invert – that initial ‘against’-definition into a ‘for’-type format.

For this, let’s use the example of workplace-bullying.

It’s easy to be against bullying in the workplace: very easy to see it as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘wicked’, and all the rest. Very emotive, obviously.

Yet it’s also all too easy to point to ‘Them’, ‘the bullies’ – and fail to notice how we ourselves do exactly the same… And being ‘against’ bullying typically means that the more successful we are in ‘naming and shaming’ the bullies (which, by the way, is itself a form of bullying…), the more we’ll need to keep hunting harder to find even the slightest scrap of bullying-type behaviour in others. Which leads, in time, to that style of bullying so typical of any form of ‘political correctness’; and from there, all too easily, to the workplace-equivalent of the Inquisition. Being ‘against’ slowly pushes us towards where we preserve – in fact become – the ‘problem’ to which we purport to be ‘the solution’. And yes, that really is what happens, time after time after time.

So to make it work, we need to turn it round: for, not against.

For this example of workplace-bullying, one place to start is not so much the undesirable behaviour, as the consequences of that behaviour. This is described well, for example, by Bob Sutton in his book The No-Asshole Rule: “After encountering the person, people feel oppressed, humiliated or otherwise worse about themselves”. If we’re against workplace-bullying, we would be against these consequences too, because they’re symptoms of the occurrence of bullying in the workplace.

So we now turn it round: what does a workplace look like if bullying isn’t happening? – because that’s actually what we’re ‘for’. So, for example, we might look at key themes of intrinsic-motivation, as described in Daniel Pink’s Drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Or we might look at the ‘equality’ column in the gender-pronouns version or gender-neutral version of the extended-Duluth framework, for a broader range of desired behaviours and outcomes: this shows us emotive themes such as safety, trust, respect.

We can now apply to this to the three-part structure for enterprise-vision:

• a descriptor for the content or focus for this enterprise - the ‘things’ or themes that concern everyone in the shared-enterprise
• some kind of action on that content or focus - what is to be done to or with or in relation to those themes or ‘things’
• an emotive qualifier that validates and bridges between content and action - why this matters, why is this of importance and value

If we put all of that together, we’ll end up with something like “we are for creating workplaces where everyone feels safe, supported, valued and productive in their work”.

To achieve those outcomes, yes, we’ll have to address workplace-bullying and the like: but to do so we keep the focus on the desirable outcomes, and behaviours that create those outcomes (the ‘for’), rather than the undesirable behaviours that work against those outcomes (the ‘against’). And by saying that these desirable outcomes apply to everyone, we’ve also avoided the ‘Other-blame’ trap – which makes it easier to engage everyone in creating those outcomes.

[Avoiding 'Other-blame' is especially important in this case, by the way, because one of the most common causes why people indulge in bullying behaviour is because they themselves have been bullied by someone else.]

So, the one-line summary:

always frame an enterprise-vision, or any other statement of intent, in terms of what you’re for – not what you’re ‘against’.

Hope you find this useful, anyway.

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?

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.)

The right emotions?

First, though, ask yourself this: why is it that that defence of ‘rights’ is, well, so visceral? Existential, almost, for something that’s actually just an idea? What’s going on there?

[By the way, there's an additional source of confusion here that may be specific to the English language: 'right' as in 'it's my right', versus 'right' as 'factually-correct', versus 'right' as 'proper', the socially-proper thing to do. When all those meanings get conflated together, life gets even more, uh, interesting...]

So try this, as not so much a thought-experiment as a feeling-experiment. Let’s play around with that headline a bit, and feel what happens:

• Women’s rights? – just say No!

If that statement makes your blood boil, notice that it does so. In which case, why? And how? – how can a simple statement reduce some people to paroxysms of rage? Notice how you might well want to lash out at me, silence me, all the rest of it – when in reality I’m just the messenger. Ne tirez le pianiste, s’il vous plait? And when you’ve calmed down a bit, notice that you could have read it an entirely different way: for example, that the most important part of ‘women’s rights’ is a woman’s right to say No… in which case, what’s wrong with saying that? Hmm… just what does that tell us about ‘rights’, then?

Anyway, let’s try another version of the headline with a different ‘right’, and see what happens here:

• Human rights? – just say No!

A bit bland, yes? A bit abstract? ‘Human rights’? – have to think about it, rather than feel it? And why would anyone object to that, anyway? – whatever that ‘it’ might be? Hmm…

Okay, try this one:

• Right to silence? – just say No!

That one could well feel a bit abstract too – unless you’ve somewhen found yourself on the wrong side of a so-called ‘justice’-system, in which case it won’t be abstract at all… Right, okay, here’s another one:

• Right to education? – just say No!

This gets a bit complicated, yes? Kind of muddled mixture of trying to think it out, then work out what that negation means, and then the emotions, and so on. But let’s have another one that might have a bit more impact:

• Right to party? – just say No!

Whatever the Beastie Boys might say, the idea of a ‘right to party’ is not as simple as it looks – especially in any real social context. Likewise this one:

• Right of way? – just say No!

That ‘right’ can get seriously complicated in a social context, out on the highway – yet notice too the enormous amount of emotion that can get tangled up with that ‘right’ as well? Odd, that… So let’s ratchet it up even more:

• Right to life? – just say No!
• Right to choose? – just say No!

Whichever way you’d take it, that one’s really tangled… kind of like there’s a huge emotive polarity there, yet can’t actually get a grip on it? – at least, perhaps not enough grip to work out what to throw at me for saying it, for which of those two phrases, and why? Which should definitely bring us back into ‘Hmm…’ territory, perhaps? Anyway, one final example, just to bring us back down to ground again:

• Right to high-speed broadband-internet – just say No!

Before you go ‘Huh???’, note that in Finland, access to broadband is a ‘right’ that’s enshrined in law. And in this case I would hope that the “just say No!” part might get you to see what’s really going on here.

The key point is this: rights are a fiction.

They’re a description of a desirable outcome, in an idealised world that may never exist in the real one. A map of an imagined territory.

That’s it.

Gosh…

Which means that all that emotion is a bit odd… but that’s something we can come back to later. First, let’s deal with this fact about fiction.

Rights are a fiction

‘Rights‘ are a fiction; responsibilities are real. The desired-outcome of each so-called ‘right’ can only arise when someone takes responsibility for enacting the conditions to create that outcome (a point that should be obvious when we think about ‘the right to high-speed broadband’). In a societal context, each ‘right’ is actually created by a complex interweaving of mutual responsibilities – so it’s actually the responsibilities that we need to pay attention to here, together with a solid understanding of those mutualities and interlocks, and the social checks and balances and other conditions that support them.

A ‘right’ is just a very simple shorthand way to describe a desirable outcome that arises only when someone – perhaps individually, more usually collectively – enacts a specific interplay of some very complex mutual interlocking responsibilities, under appropriate forms of governance. To ensure that those outcomes actually do occur, we need keep the focus always on the responsibilities, and the mutuality of those responsibilities – and not on the so-called ‘rights’. Given this, though, it’s easy to see that some serious problems are going to arise if anyone thinks that the ‘rights’ are somehow ‘real’ in their own right, and forgets about the existence or mutuality of those real responsibilities that make it all happen.

Part of the difficulty here, of course, is a straightforward map-versus-territory mistake. The ‘right’ is the over-simplified map; the responsibilities are the real-world territory. It’s easy to see that if anyone thinks that the map ‘is‘ the territory, yeah, it’s gonna get messy for a while… Oh well: common-enough kind of mistake for folks to make, anyway.

Yet where the heck does all that emotion come from? – because no-one would doubt that there’s often a lot of emotion there…

Rights and the ‘terrible twos’

Want to know where the emotion really comes from? Next time you hear yourself (or anyone else) talking about ‘my rights’, do you notice the inner two-year-old that’s actually saying those words? A very angry two-year-old, lost in a possessive temper-tantrum, demanding that the world be other than it is – declaiming that it’s everyone else’s fault that it’s not that way? And in its rage, claiming that it has the ‘right’ to punish those others for failing to deliver what it wants?

Oops…

A two-year-old wants the world to happen in the way that it wants: it has a very clear sense of a personal right to that desired condition of the world. There’s no concept of mutuality here: it sort-of understands the notion of Self, and of separation of Self relative to the world, yet still views everything ‘Other’ as a semi-autonomous extension of its will – everything not-Self as subject of Self. (Yep, we’ll see that word ‘subject’ coming back again later.) So when it wants an outcome that it cannot immediately grab for itself (i.e. Other-as-object), it asserts that it’s only others – the possessed not-Self, its ‘subjects’ – that are responsible for delivering that outcome. It has a ‘right’ to an absence of responsibility, an ‘anti-responsibility’; responsibility is always Somebody Else’s Problem.

So we’ll see an awful lot of declamation of ‘should‘ coming out of that two-year-old, often accompanied by an awful lot of tears and tantrums; and since there’s such an explicit denial of mutuality, such angry assertion of absence of responsibility, we’ll often see an awful lot of ‘should‘ coming back the other way, trying to reestablish the mutuality, reassert the responsibilities that any human of any age will have in any social context. That often-fraught, often-furious clash of shoulds is what every parent will know all too well as the dreaded ‘terrible twos’…

And that‘s what’s actually going on, underneath, in the background, in almost every aspect of the ‘rights-discourse. It’s not about responsibility: it’s about the evasion of responsibility, a desperate attempt to find some way to convert every difficult choice, every difficult action, into Somebody Else’s Problem.

Oops…

And evasion-of-responsibility – “any attempt to offload responsibility onto the Other without their engagement and consent” – is the formal definition for another all-too-well-known term: abuse. Evasion-of-responsibility is abuse. And when evasion-of-responsibility ends up somehow being enshrined in law – which it very often is, as we can see very quickly once we start looking with a mutual-responsibilities lens at most forms of law – what we have is not ‘rights’ at all, but full-on state-sponsored abuse, backed by all the societal force of law.

Oops…

Which just might be why things so often get into such a mess whenever someone introduces the idea of ‘rights’ into the picture…?

What’s actually going on here?

Whenever we come across the notion of rights, what we have in that context are the following:

1. A description and declaration of a desired social outcome (the purported ‘right’)
2. A complex set of mutual interlocking responsibilities (the means to deliver the purported ‘right’)
3. A set of societal checks and balances (to provide governance for the purported ‘right’ and the mutualities that underpin its continued delivery)
   but, all too often:
4. An evasion of responsibility and/or denial of mutuality, often expressed in practice as systematic Other-abuse.

The first three items are what make the ‘right’ happen; the last item is why it so often doesn’t happen.

And whenever we see a strong focus on the first item – ‘my rights!’ – that somehow fails to acknowledge the matching mutualities – ‘my responsibilities’ – then what we actually have there is not ‘rights’ at all, but active Other-abuse. Which pretty much guarantees that whatever-it-might-be is not going to work.

Ouch…

Yet extremely common. And, because it at first looks like it works, but actually doesn’t, is addictive. Very addictive.

Recognise this yet? In just about everything in our current culture, everywhere around you, at work, at home, everywhere else? And in your own behaviour too?

Ouch…

Yup. This is serious. If you want to understand why so many things are so disastrously wrong in so many aspects of our culture, all you need to do is look at all those so-called ‘rights’.

Sigh…

The subject of rights

Just one more step before we start to sort out the mess. This is around the notion of ‘Other-as-subject’ (which, as you’ll see, will also take us right back to the beginning here, and explain why, even for women, ‘Women’s rights’ is not such a good idea…).

For this we’ll use a Spiral Dynamics lens. (We’ll ignore that model’s theory of social development, which to be frank is just millennialist garbage. Oh well.) This gives us a set of colour-coded values-perspectives, within which we can see who supposedly has ‘the rights’, who doesn’t, and who is deemed to be the ‘subject’ of whom:

• Beige: ‘Survival’: Self only, no social context, hence neither ‘rights’ nor responsibilities, and no subject
• Purple: ‘Family/Tribe’: “Mother/Father is right” – all others are subjects of patriarch/matriarch
• Red: ‘Feudal’: “might is right” – monarch is peak of fealty-tree of overlord-rights (‘down’) versus subject-responsibilities (‘up’)
• Blue: ‘The Law’: “God/The Law is right” – the purported ‘agents of the Law’ have rights, all others are subjects of ‘the Law’
• Orange: ‘Democracy’: “individual rights” – all are sort-of-subjects of everyone else
• Green: ‘Collectivism’: “group rights” – all groups are sort-of-subjects of all other groups
• Gold/Turquoise/Coral: ‘Systems’: “only responsibilities are real” – no ‘rights’, no ‘subjects’

Although the only values-perspectives that are stable in this sense are the ‘Systems’ group, all of the other values-perspectives can work. In functional form, all of them represent an appropriate context-specific balance of mutual responsibilities: for example, parents will usually take on responsibilities on behalf of the children, and so on. There is, however, some tendency to drop into a ‘racket‘ or codependency in which each party can evade responsibility by blaming the other: those types of social-dysfunctions are all-too-common in all of the non-’Systems’ values-perspective types.

Yet as soon as the idea of ‘rights versus responsibilities’ comes into the picture – especially when accompanied by any notion that others are the ‘subjects’ of those with ‘rights’ – each structure rapidly becomes dysfunctional in its own way. ‘Rights’ are equated with ‘privilege’ – literally, ‘priority in the law’. Hence in a police-state or a rigid theocracy, for example (dysfunctional-Blue, in Spiral terms), the ‘agents of the Law’ are deemed to be ‘above the Law’: they have the purported ‘right’ to act as they wish, without any mutuality of responsibility to the ‘subject’-population – which gets to be seriously abusive, seriously-quickly, in almost every single case.

Most organisations are still run on what is essentially a feudal model – hence the dreaded org-chart and its ‘report-to’ relationships – with an often-thin overlay of ‘the Law’. Again, it can work: but because of the ‘rights versus responsibilities’ problem and the inherent tendency of a feudal structure to form codependent relationship-pairs (the ‘boss’ blames the ‘workers’, the ‘workers’ blame the ‘boss’, no-one takes actual responsibility for anything), most organisations seem to range between somewhat-dysfunctional to seriously-dysfunctional – a fact reflected in the painful prevalence of Dilbert cartoons…

A typical would-be ‘democratic’ or ‘collectivist’ model starts out with a commitment to full mutuality of responsibilities, which is what actually underpins any notions of ‘universal human rights’ and the like. Yet as described so well in Orwell’s Animal Farm, once the ‘rights’ dysfunction takes hold, this quickly deteriorates into a morass of “some animals are more equal than others”. In the ‘democratic’ model, the assertion is that “I have rights”, whilst in the ‘collectivist’ model it’s more often “we have rights”; and both models assert that only others have responsibility, and in general do not have rights (or at best, rights that are inherently subject to and of lower priority than those of ‘I’ or ‘we’).

Which brings us back to the notion of ‘Women’s rights’.

The wrongs of rights

The notion of ‘women’s rights’ is a very good example (one of many possible examples, I hasten to add) of a ‘collectivist’-model concept of ‘rights’. By definition, it’s exclusive: only women have these rights, they acquire these rights by fact of birth, the rights are not transferable, and, in principle at least, there is no way that anyone from the Other-class can acquire those rights.

[Note that there's nothing inherently 'wrong' with that kind of exclusive-category, of course - it's just a category. It's what happens next that gets, uh, interesting...]

In itself, the existence of the category does make sense: clearly there are a few concerns or experiences that are specific to women. Which means that we need to consider specific outcomes around those concerns. Most of the time, then, when people talk about ‘women’s rights’, what they actually means is the desirability of certain outcomes that are, by their nature, specific to women.

(And in case anyone’s still angry at me about the headline for this post, I perhaps ought to emphasise here that to me those outcomes are indeed desirable, for everyone’s benefit, and that achieving those outcomes is extremely important.)

[By the way, that list of items that are 'specific to women' does not include sexual assault or domestic assault. In many sub-types of those two categories, women are actually the majority of perpetrators - not victims. (And yes, I have done the meta-analysis on that, several times, as part of my professional work, so I do know what I'm talking about there.) Which means that any claim that women should have 'special rights' in those areas solely because they are women is, frankly, a flagrant attempt at yet another form of state-sponsored Other-abuse. Not a wise move, as we'll see shortly...]

To achieve those outcomes, we need to focus on the mutual responsibilities that make it all happen. But the ‘rights-discourse’ just gets in the way: especially that addictive return to arbitrary assertions of “I have rights, you have responsibilities”. Hence all too easily, all too often, instead of helping something happen, it all just dissolves into a chaotic mutual blame-game, with everyone eventually sidestepping their responsibilities, partly because the mutualities are not acknowledged or enacted, and partly because anyone who does take responsibility for anything will immediately get blamed for everything – which kinda acts as a fairly serious disincentive against doing anything at all.

[Note that this is not specific to 'women's rights' - I'm just using this as a worked-example because its inherent-exclusivity makes it easier to see what goes on in this type of 'wicked-problem' or 'mess'.]

As someone’s who’s worked professionally in that field from time to time, I can confirm that the whole gender-issues space is riddled with people – most of them women, as it happens, but by no means all – who are utterly addicted to Other-blame. They’ve literally built their careers on it. And it guarantees that things can’t and won’t work – which is then used to justify even more Other-blame, in an all-too-literally vicious cycle. Oops…

[I sometimes describe these people as 'cuckoos': "a parasite that lays its eggs in other birds' nests, that hatch out into monsters that destroy the hosts' own children". It's a bit unkind, perhaps, but it is a painfully-accurate metaphor...]

The tragedy, of course, is that the ‘subjects’ of that relentless Other-blame and Other-abuse will eventually crack – which is how a structurally-abusive version of ‘women’s rights’ in one era will create the conditions for an ever-more-abusive misogyny in the next. That’s why it’s called a ‘revolution’: it goes round in circles… And when everyone in the game is stuck in ‘toddler-mode’, endlessly demanding their ‘rights’ and trying to do so by trying to make everyone else lose, no-one is going win anything. And hence we don’t get the outcomes that we need. Which means that, in this example, ‘women’s rights’ all too easily becomes women’s tragedy – created by self-styled ‘women’s advocates’ themselves.

Ouch…

And because all of this is driven by addiction, there’s no rational way to resolve it. The only viable option is to bypass the whole miserable mess, and reject the entire concept of ‘rights’. Everywhere. Every possible form. Every possible so-called ‘right’. It’s a mistake: so don’t fall for the mistake. Simple as that.

Hence the second half of that headline here: whatever ‘right’ it may claim to be, Just Say No!

Which, of course, leaves the rather important question of what we do next…

Rights without rights

How do we tackle this problem of supporting the desired outcomes of ‘rights’, without resorting to ‘rights’ themselves? For enterprise-architects and others who are charged with designing what is, in effect, a social-architecture, within an organisation or a broader social context, this is a very real and very urgent problem.

So let’s turn the last part of this rather-too-long post into a straightforward how-to on exactly this point.

Jump back for a moment to the ‘What’s actually going on here? subhead. What we saw there was the following:

• definition – the description of the desired outcome (the ‘right’)
• means – the delivery-mechanisms, described in terms of interlocking mutual responsibilities
• governance – checks and balances to ensure it all works, especially over the longer term

And we have the known problem-areas, the symptoms that indicate that delivery of the outcome is at risk:

• risk-symptoms – evasion of responsibility, denial of mutuality, and/or arbitrary assertion of ‘priority’ or ‘privilege’

And if we phrase it like that – definition, means, governance, risk – it should be clear that it’s actually a straightforward design for service-delivery: little different from any other type of service-design. So let’s tackle it that way.

First, what are the desired outcomes?

We’ll notice straight away that there will be a lot of those in any context, quite a few of which will conflict with each other. Which means we’re going to need some means to help us evaluate priorities between outcomes.

Which is where whole-enterprise architecture comes into the picture, showing us how to identify and define the core Vision or ‘guiding-star’ and its concomitant values.

Once we have those, we then turn to specification, design and evaluation of service-delivery and service-governance.

Which again should be well-known territory for enterprise-architects and the like: it’s about specification, design, protocols, inter-dependencies, coordination, validation, management, and all the other things we need to do to evaluate and ensure service-viability over the longer term. And I won’t write anything more on that here, because it’s all in the books such as Doing Enterprise Architecture and The Service-Oriented Enterprise and Mapping the Enterprise, and in articles on this blog such as ‘Enterprise Canvas as service-viability checklist‘. No big deal, really: just the routine slog of “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”, that’s all.

Which leaves us with the risk-symptom – the tendency to misuse any notion of ‘rights’.

And there’s a really simple answer to that: Just Say No! Don’t allow it to exist, at all, anywhere in the architecture. As soon as anyone makes any mention of ‘rights’, move the discussion straight away to what actually needs to happen:

• What is the desired outcome? (The ‘right’ is a map of a territory: what’s the territory?)
• What are the responsibilities that are needed to achieve that outcome? (For enterprise-architects, we would probably phrase that as the services and business-processes that would make it happen.)
• What are the interlocks and mutualities of those responsibilities? (We would probably talk here about protocols and service-choreography and the like, plus a whole lot about checks-and-balances across the system.)
• What governance is needed to ensure that everything ‘stays fair’ for all stakeholders – because without it being seen as ‘fair’, it isn’t going work? (That’s what in Enterprise Canvas is the role of the ‘guidance-services‘ – particularly the validation-services – and also the Investor and Beneficiary relationships.)
• How does all of this link up with and remain aligned to the overall shared-enterprise Vision?

We’ll probably have to recurse or iterate many times through that loop, or parts of that loop – but it’s all straightforward enough, if we don’t allow ourselves to get distracted by the fiction of ‘rights’. Rights are a fiction, it’s only the responsibilities that are real: the only way to achieve what we think of as ‘rights’ is to not have ‘rights’.

So again, whenever anyone makes any mention of ‘rights’ – any so-called ‘right’ at all – Just Say No!

Because it really is the only way that works.

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?

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.