complexity

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…

Why it is so hard for leaders to manage change?

From the Washington Post “I don’t think people resist change per se, but they resist the stress that change causes”. “is about helping people get in a growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset where people are trapped in the status…

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…

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:…

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…

Not the New Normal

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…

The cyclist-shopper’s tale

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…

Principles and checklists

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…

On chaos in enterprise-architecture

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…

Earthquakes and enterprise-architecture

What happens when other people take our cautious ‘It depends…‘ as an explicit Yes or No? What are the risks that we face as enterprise-architects when others force us to give a definite ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in relation to something that’s inherently uncertain?…
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