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Richard Veryard #entarch
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One of the topics discussed at yesterday’s EA Forum was the question of architectural rigour. This was stimulated by a rich picture of the oil industry, presented by Mesbah Khan, which I intend to cover in a separate post….
At @TheKingsFund today for a workshop on implementing healthcare reforms, with particular focus on the introduction of Health and Well-Being Boards. In this blogpost, I want to pick up the topic of Co-Production, which may appear at three logical levels:
There are various versions of Co-Production in the literature, in Healthcare and in other domains, but there are several related themes.
Coproduction provides a very interesting example of what I call organizational intelligence, involving a connected set of information gathering, feedback and learning loops. Paying attention to these collective intelligence loops helps us see how effective patient participation and coproduction should contribute to the quality and productivity of healthcare delivery, healthcare planning and healthcare strategy.
@BenP1972 tweeted that this sounded like a job for @patientopinion … “must b other existing models where feedback and user experience transformed service offering”. Meanwhile @PatientVoicesUK quoted Donald Schön (1988) “Storytelling is the mode of description best suited to transformation in new situations of action.”
Storytelling and sensemaking are vital elements of organizational intelligence. Professionals are trained to see the world according to a fairly prescribed set of narratives. These narratives give them considerable expertise and power, but they may also constrain thinking. For example, so-called “evidence-based medicine” may be dominated by professionally approved modes of evidence (double blind or triple blind studies) and it may be hard to accommodate the patient experience in this process. Interaction between different professional disciplines, together with the interjection of the (lay) patient voice, potentially brings in a much richer diversity of narratives.
But this diversity in turn calls for greater organizational intelligence – the collective ability to create a meaningful synthesis. What are the (organizational, political, cultural) conditions for successfully and flexibly integrating patient thinking with professional thinking?
Sources
Becky Malby, Involving service users in design: Four steps to co-production (Guardian, Aug 2012)
John Owens, Conflict in medical co-production: The challenge of combining professional and lay perspectives (Centre for Public Policy Research)
Alba Realpe and Louise M Wallace, What is co-production? (Health Foundation, 2010)
Wikipedia: Coproduction (public services)
Richard Veryard, Organizational Intelligence Primer (LeanPub, 2012)
There is a curious ambiguity about the word “iteration”. Sometimes it means doing exactly the same thing, over and over again; sometimes it means doing something slightly different each time.
When a process is drawn as a loop, we need to understand wh…
#entarch In my post Where were the architects at RBS? (June 2012), I quoted a banking sofware expert comparing banking systems to the game of Jenga. I now want to expand upon the Jenga analogy.
Casual observers looking at a large and complex human activity system can easily convince themselves that there is a lot of inefficiency and waste.
So it looks as if we can save huge amounts of money simply by taking out all the unnecessary pieces.
But this is a bit like a game of Jenga. If you try to remove pieces without understanding the overall structure, you are likely to cause the whole thing to collapse in a heap. This seems like a pretty good reason for doing some kind of business or systems architecture.
However, complex human activity systems generally don’t just stop working. The people in the systems usually find a way to keep things running, although with a lot of hidden costs, including personal stress.
This has a lot of bad implications. Firstly, it is bad for the people and the working environment; among other things, excessive stress is damaging for people and their working relationships. It is bad for the architecture, because it results in a lot of additional structure (props and supports and workarounds) to keep the systems up and running. These props and supports and workarounds often end up costing far more than the original system, so it can be pretty counter-productive in terms of the cost-saving objectives. And finally, it is bad for the decision-makers, because the full consequences of their decisions are often unclear, and they may go on to repeat the same pattern.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t eliminate inefficiency and waste – but in order to do it properly and safely, it helps if we have a proper understanding of the overall structure and behaviour of the system – in other words, an architectural view.
#bizarch #entarch @hspplease Following my post on the Resistance to Architecture within the National Health Service, I came across this cynical remark by Tony Riley of the Health Solutions Partnership.
“We really don’t know why the term ‘healthcare c…
#orgintelligence I found an interesting chart on Gillian Stamp’s blog.
The chart illustrates two observations
“Organizational well-being depends on the interplay between challenges
and decision-making capabilities.”
“Where challenges exceed …
#entarch Following a series of blogposts from @tetradian under the general heading “No Jobs for Generalists”, @ruthmalan chips in to ask whether the labels “generalist” and “specialist” represent useful stereotypes, or whether they merely reflect anoth…
@tdegennaro of @Forrester spotted an interesting correlation in his company’s 2009 survey. “Survey respondents who reported a high degree of business and IT
process standardization also reported that EA was more effective and
more influential within …
#entarch #bizarch September 2012 kicks off with a free webinar, which provides a taster for my 2-day Business Architecture Bootcamp.
By popular demand, I have slightly restructured the Bootcamp so that it can be taken in two separate one-day installme…
#entarch #bizarch #viewpoints In a previous post, I looked at the five viewpoints of business architecture according to the OMG. In this post, I shall look at the architectural modelling viewpoints indicated in TOGAF 9.1. (Section 8.2). In TOGAF, these…
A few weeks ago, I was at a meeting to discuss the UK National Health Service reforms. One of the speakers, a senior NHS administrator, used the word “architecture” in her presentation. Twice. Clearly referring to business/organizational architecture r…
#orgintelligence @larryhirschhorn has produced a very detailed analysis of Barclays Bank, Robert Diamond and the LIBOR scandal (July 2012). He asks why Marcus Agius (Barclays Chair) and Bob Diamond (Barclays CEO) were stunned at the Bank of England’s demand for Diamond’s resignation, and suggests it was because they lacked something he calls a “political imagination”.
There is a lot of interesting material in Larry’s blog from the perspective of organizational psychology, and I don’t want to reproduce it all here. What I do want to explore is whether what Larry calls “political imagination” is an aspect of what I call organizational intelligence.
Central to Larry’s narrative is a cryptic note, written by Bob Diamond after a telephone conversation with Paul Tucker, the Bank of England’s executive director for markets. This note appears to have been interpreted by one of Diamond’s subordinates as an coded instruction from the Bank of England to lower its LIBOR submissions. However, Diamond later denied that this was the meaning of the note. As Larry points out, this kind of deniability is all too common in and between organizations.
What is more complicated is the decision by Barclays to include this note in its published account of the LIBOR affair. Why was this note relevant to the LIBOR affair, if it didn’t mean what it appeared to mean? Diamond’s self-justification and repudiation looks like what Freud called Kettle Logic – “we didn’t fix the LIBOR rate … and anyway you hinted we should fix it … and anyway it wasn’t a hint”.
The Bank of England was undoubtedly sensitive to the allegation that it had been complicit in the LIBOR affair, and seems to have reacted angrily to the publication of this note. Diamond and his colleagues may have decided to include the note as a coded message to other banks, but failed to anticipate the reaction of the Bank of England. And as one of the highest paid bankers in London, Diamond may also have failed to appreciate the extent to which the Bank of England disapproved of overpaid London bankers.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there were differences of opinion within Barclays as to whether it was a good idea to include this note in its report, and there were some who worried about the reaction. However, the decision was taken to include it. At the time, this might have seemed like a fairly small detail, but such details can sometimes have very significant consequences.
(Of course, we cannot know for sure that it was this detail that triggered the Bank of England’s demand for Diamond’s resignation, but it is a highly plausible interpretation of events.)
One of the most common limitations of organizational intelligence is that all decisions are taken within a fixed frame of reference – which I regard as a failure of sensemaking. Larry suggests that Bob Diamond was operating within a frame of reference based on “technical rationality”, within which the publication of the controversial note seemed perfectly reasonable, and that he lacked the imagination to move outside this frame of reference. Larry also indicates some of the organizational mechanisms that may have helped to reinforce Diamond’s limited worldview, including his experience of being protected by his subordinates.
In that regard, there are some strong parallels with the Murdoch empire and its recent troubles. When Diamond said (speaking to the House of Commons Treasury Committee), “When I read the e-mails from those traders I got physically ill” (BBC News, 4 July 2012), I was convinced I had heard either Rupert or James Murdoch saying much the same thing a few weeks earlier. They are obviously using the same scriptwriter.
Doubtless there will be a stage play at the Royal Court before long, showing us the tragic fall of these doomed heros.