Link: http://socialea.chickenbrain.de/2012/10/epic-scan-in-glue.html
From Social Enterprise Architecture
In my last post Don’t Panic i touched upon complexity, a topic which seems to be pretty hot at the moment by looking at various twitter messages and fairly recent blog posts. Richard Veryard has touched the topic in a quite interesting way in his post On The Causes of Business Complexity. What I particular liked in his post was his four causes of complexity:
- Emergent Complexity – consequence of many small and unrelated decisions and actions.
- Perverse Complexity – consequence of clumsy attempts to reduce complexity.
- Contrived Complexity – consequence of deliberately creation to benefit some stakeholders.
- Irreducible Complexity – consequence of real complexity of the demand environment.
I like to reorder that slightly without really changing the context, because working in complexity is epic.
- Emergent Complexity
- Perverse Complexity
- Irreducible Complexity
- Contrived Complexity
To tackle the EPIC Complexity I can now use the SCAN Framework. and by that create sense, aim for decisions and look for the right skill and mindset. A topic which is also tackled by Shawn Callahan in his post When Should We Collaborate, where he also refers to Cynefin and links a way of working to complexity:
- coordination for Simple Problems
- cooperation for Complicated Problems
- collaboration for Complex Problems
- Any method for Chaos to shift to one of the other three complexity domains
I agree with his judgement of the first three levels of complexity but I am more willing to follow Tom Graves approach in the fourth domain. In his post Sensemaking – Modes And Disciplines he sees working and acting as an Artist (inner value) as the answer to Chaos. In this one I full agree, because I believe the other three working models (and roles in Toms post) will only find unknown areas of their own domain in the unexplored space of Chaos.
So I call that now the EPIC SCAN.
So how do I link this knowledge to GLUE. First of all I look into optimizing or fixing the flows in the GLUE Space. Here applying the right approach to way of working and finding the right skill and mindset is in most cases more important than finding the perfect answer. The people will find the right answer inevitable if their skills and mindset fit to the complexity domain. If the fit is not given then they will try to shift the complexity into another domain or start being frustrated. A typical statement here is: “If X would just understand me”.
And unfortunately there is no Silver Bullet to it. Not even Ken Schwaber markets the methodology SCRUM that way. In a recent post he clearly links SCRUM to the complex domain (where the unknown is greater than the known). In spaces where the known is greater than the unknown SCRUM creates more waste than needed and other methods (if applied correctly) will produce results in a less wastefull way. The challenge is to find the right method to maximize Value Add. And for those who are still unsure: the complexity area where I love the Domain Enterprise Architecture most is in the Chaos, no matter where in GLUE.
