Sense Making

Why I write long posts

In case you hadn’t noticed, yes, I do tend to write long posts. Sorry… There are folks around who are real masters of succinct writing. Seth Godin, for example. And I’ll have to admit I’m not good at writing succinct summaries. There’s a…

Sensemaking – modes and disciplines

How do we make sense of a context? How can we make sense in a disciplined way, without the discipline itself getting in the way? This is a follow-up to the previous post ‘Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor‘, to provide a bit more detail…

Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor

One of the core tasks in enterprise-architecture is sensemaking – making sense of what’s going on within some context. And one of the key methods we can use for this is to make some kind of mental-map of what seems to be going…

On learning enterprise-architecture

A few days ago Pradeep (I don’t know his surname, unfortunately) wrote a comment to one of my previous posts, asking for advice on learning enterprise-architecture: I aspire to become a enterprise architect. Not sure if you have written on a topic how…

Order, unorder and effectiveness

A quick follow-on from the previous post on ‘Complex, complicated and Einstein’s dice‘, in relation to effectiveness in enterprise-architecture. There’s a common phrasing in business and elsewhere that places efficiency and effectiveness as kind-of opposites: efficiency, we’re told, is doing things right, whereas…

Checklists and complexity

Re-reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, to write a book-review for the current edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, it struck me that the SCAN frame provides a useful means to understand and describe the relationship between checklists and complexity. At…

Framework versus body-of-knowledge

What’s the difference between a framework and a body-of-knowledge? A colleague asked me to write some notes on this, and it seems worthwhile doing so in more generally-available form – in other words, a blog-post. To me this is much like the…

Rules, principles, belief and faith

Following on from the previous post ‘Rules, principles and the Inverse-Einstein Test‘, there’s an important corollary about real-time sensemaking and and decision-making – it was in my notes for the post, but I forgot to include it, so I’ll do it as…

Requisite-variety and stormy weather

Just how much of a law is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety? Our answers to that question – and likely there’ll be many of them – are fundamental to how we handle key architectural concepts or requirements such as management, control, certainty…

Just Enough Detail

The real art of enterprise-architecture, and perhaps its hardest challenge, is in presenting the right level of detail. Not too little, not too much, but just enough. Just Enough Detail. To which people will, of course, immediately ask, “Okay, but how much…

There’s no short-cut to experience

At least he was open about it, I guess. “Tell you what I’ll do”, he says to my colleague here in Guatemala, “I’ll find you a client, then I’ll sit in, learn everything you do, and then I’ll apply it in my…

Once more, from the top…?

Still going round my all-too-usual loop: what the heck am I doing here? (In a business sense, of course… ) This is a follow-on to my previous post ‘Don’t start with How‘ – about how I’ve been needing an urgent rethink of…
3 of 6
123456