Complexity / Structure

Four principles – 1: There are no rules

What rules do we need in enterprise-architecture? At the really big-picture scale? This is the second in a series of posts on principles for a sane society: Four principles for a sane society: Introduction Four principles: #1: There are no rules – only guidelines Four…

Four principles for a sane society

How do we make sense of the big-picture in enterprise-architecture? The really big-picture? Yep, it’s that time of year again: the lead-up to the annual Integrated EA conference, where they allow me to go somewhat off-the-wall and present the current ‘big-idea’ that I’m…

The over-certainties of certification

A strange kind of annual ritual that they did there, that subtle ‘work-to-rule’, every year that I worked at that place. Each autumn, up would come the new crop of graduates, each with their shiny new graduation-certificate and their own absolute certainty…

More on reframing entropy in business

My previous post on ‘Reframing entropy in business‘ kinda triggered off a veritable storm of correspondence, both in the comments and offline – hence seems it’s worth summarising and revisiting those themes here. Perhaps the first point is that yes, it’s confusing…

Enterprise-architecture and organisational health

My mother is a retired general-practitioner (family doctor), and still has the BMJ (British Medical Journal) delivered here each week. It’s always a useful contrast to my ‘day-job’ in enterprise-architecture, and every-now-and-then there’s a real jewel of an article there that reflects…

Sinan Si Alhir on antifragility

Sinan Si Alhir is one of the more prolific tweeters that I follow, and has a perhaps-unfortunate habit of sending out sudden Twitterstreams of valuable insight that really should not be lost to the evanescence of the internet. So, in the interests…

Reframing entropy in business

What is entropy? What – if anything – is its relevance to business? And how does chaos come into the picture? The physics definition of entropy is straightforward enough: it’s a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows from a…

Feelings are facts

(A brief note on enterprise-architecture and the like that came up over the Christmas break.) Emotions are facts. Feelings are facts. (Subjective facts, it’s true, yet facts nonetheless.) Assertions about emotions and feelings – in particular, about what Self or Other ‘should’…

Best practices – adapt, then adopt

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:…

What happens when kurtosis-risk eventuates

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?…

Antifragility and bullying

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…

Control, complexity and chaos

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…
3 of 16
1234567