Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
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…
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,…
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…
How do we use sensemaking-models in enterprise-architecture? What’s different about this discipline that can so often cause such use to become problematic? I know I need to move on to more of that current series on power and politics in enterprise-architecture,…
This is the ‘review’ follow-on to the previous post ‘Cynefin and the Chaotic domain – an update‘. Back in that post I pointed to a report by Dave Snowden that he’s posted an update on ‘Cynefin subdomains in the Chaotic’,…
The first part of this is just a ‘public-service announcement’ service for Cynefin aficionados: Dave Snowden has announced that his current process of updating Cynefin has now extended to include a rethink of the Chaotic domain: RT @snowded: 2 months…
What’s the one phrase that enterprise-architects use time after time, and that drives almost everyone else crazy? Well, it depends… “It depends.” Yeah, we know it prob’ly depends, but just gimme the answer, willya? Frustration indeed… Going back to a…
How can we collaborate in chaos? Or, to put it the other way round, how can we use apparent chaos to drive decisions that guide towards some desired yet emergent aim? As you’ll see, this post itself is a kind of…
Yes, I know I tend to write long; some others, though, tend to write such short Twitter-length phrases that there’s a real risk that what they say may be lost in the noise. Here’s a real example of something that…
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…
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 (or lack of it), complexity, disruption and much, much more. Okay, first, the […]
This was such a good question from Paul Beckford, in one of his comments on the previous post, that I thought it was worthwhile bringing it out into more accessible form here: “I don’t understand the recursion you speak of and the real time nature of decision making and how that is different from ‘considered’ […]