Another Christmas, another cold. I just don’t seem well adapted for English winter… Nor for families either, I guess. In England at least, Christmas is both a religious festival and family festival – yet even at best I’ve never felt more than…
Just how applicable are ‘best practices’? How certain can we be that they’ll be ‘best’ for each seemingly-equivalent context? I’ve been brewing on this for quite a while, when via serendipity up comes this retweet by software-architect Simon Brown: RT @simonbrown: RT @ntcoding:…
Quite a few times on this blog I’ve talked about kurtosis-risk (‘fat-tail’ risk), and why it’s a crucially important issue for enterprise-architecture. But what exactly is it? What does it look like in real-world practice? Why is it such a serious risk?…
What’s the point of gamification? Could it have useful applications in enterprise-architectures? I’ll admit straight off that I’ve never been one for most kinds of games, whether in school-days or anywhen since. I’ve never been able to see much point in competitive…
What would make something ‘anti-fragile’? And how could we support that in our enterprise-architectures? Over the past few months I’d noticed various references to Nassim Taleb‘s recent work on ‘antifragility‘, but had largely dismissed as just a made-up term for resilience. I…
Just how restricting – 0r even dangerous – is our seeming ‘need’ for certainty? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring links between the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework and Cynthia Kurtz’s more socially-oriented Confluence sensemaking-framework. I still have some…
What’s the trend? What’s going to be the New Normal, in business and elsewhere? Perhaps it’s just that time of year when people indulge in pointless ‘predictions’, but I’ve been seeing lots of articles recently that something-or-other either is or is going…
You can’t go wrong if you follow the rules, right? But what happens when you come across something where the ‘rules’ don’t make sense – and yet you still try to hold on to the certainty of ‘the rules’? Or, to put…
What is the role of principles in enterprise-architecture? What is a principle? For that matter, when is a principle not a principle? These were questions that came up in response to a post by Simplicable: ‘101 Principles of Enterprise-Architecture‘. Or rather, to…
What is collaboration? Why do people collaborate? Perhaps more to the point, why don’t they collaborate? How do we end up so often with what we’d have to call anticollaboration – the exact antithesis of collaboration? So I’m standing there in the toy-department,…
What can our business-capabilities do? As our business-needs and business-context change, what options do we have to re-purpose and re-use those capabilities? These questions came up for me from a brief yet excellent LinkedIn thread on affordances. To me that thread seems to…
What is chaos? What does that word mean, in practice? And how – if at all – can we use chaos in enterprise-architecture? I’ve been having a great email back-and-forth on this with Cynthia Kurtz, co-originator of Cynefin, and – probably more relevant here – originator of the Confluence sensemaking-framework (CSF). As…