Posts by: Ruth Malan

Context Mapping, by Example

I will demonstrate a technique for Context Mapping that leverages David Sibbet/The Grove’s work on Context Maps. We will build up the map incrementally, using the comments on this post to gather input to the Context Map which I will create iteratively…

Assumptions

The following passage is drawn from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderful book, sort of to design and systems thinking what The Goal is to process and stochastics (making it accessable in lay manager terms).…

Assumptions

The following passage is drawn from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderful book, sort of to design and systems thinking what The Goal is to process and stochastics (making it accessable in lay manager terms). At any…

The Monk and the Mountain

Let’s do a fun problem. Consider the following problem stated by Rudolf Arnheim (I’ll give the full reference later): One morning, exactly at 8 A.M., a monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a foot or…

Visual Thinking

Here is another of my favorite Richard Feynman stories (and fitting to honor the memory of Feynman today, for it is 25 years since the day he died): “When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker.…

Connections

James Burke (Connections, 2007), commenting on the Gutenberg printing press, observed “the easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens.” And “faster change” characterizes our experience of the times we’re in! The “rising tide that lifts all boats” is readily associated…

By Thinking!

Still on the theme of mastery, and further exploring attention and perception, here is another story I like to tell alongside the Master Butcher and the Agassiz fish tales. It is one of Richard Feynman’s stories from his childhood: One job was really…

Learning to See

As we start to navigate our way into this topic of mastery, I’d like to explore attention and perception further. Louis Agassiz became known well beyond his own field for teaching observation, and many of his students relay similar stories of how he imbued this lesson in…

Mastery and Architecting

To launch this series of posts, I thought it would be useful to convene a discussion of the role of the architect and mastery. Talking about Conceptual Architecture several years ago, Dana Bredemeyer relayed the story of the Master Butcher. It struck…

Introducing the Requisite Variety Blog

Playing with a “learning chemistry” metaphor: Essentially the idea for this blog is to create an architect’s learning lab of sorts, where we create new insight compounds by tossing a starter into this learning crucible for discussion, so that we can all add various insights…

Visual Architecting

The Visual Architecting Process (VAP) supports the architect in leading architectural decision making and the exploration of options, the iterative resolving of critical uncertainties and challenges, and the evolution of the system. The process is illustrated here and here, emphasizing the visual…

Conceptual Architecture: How

How: Some Comments on Creating and Evolving the Conceptual Architecture During early system conceptualization, we start to envision the form or shape of the system, its boundaries and interactions, its primary elements and their interactions. The sketchy shapes of these elements, expressed…
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