Competence, non-competence and incompetence

One of the key reasons why I’m so vehemently against any-centrism and suchlike revolves around the question of competence – or, more usually, the lack of it. Competence is where someone knows what they’re doing, and does it. And, oddly, often don’t bother to say that they’re competent – perhaps because they don’t need to […]

Efficiency, effectiveness and co-creativity

This one is a pick-up from a Tweet by Bert van Lamoen: transarchitect: The priority shift we make is from efficiency to effectiveness to co-creativity. #complexity Of course. Yes. That’s obvious, the moment I look at it. Except that I’d completely missed before now. Oops… I’ve long since drawn a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. […]

More on identity and Mask

Who or what is ‘I’? How does our experience of ‘I’ change as we interact with our world? Yes, I do know that those questions might seem to fit more in philosophy or psychology. But as per the previous post, they also have huge ramifications in user-experience and user-interface design, in product-design, in sensemaking and […]

Identifier, identity, persona and Mask

Who or what is ‘I’? How do others recognise that ‘I’? How does that ‘I’ express itself? – with what voice does that ‘I’ speak? And how do others recognise that voice? Yeah, I know, sounds like philosophy and stuff – woefully abstract, deep and pointless. Yawn. But those ‘pointless’ questions are the core – the […]

Using recursion in sensemaking

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’ […]

More on principles and decision-time

Seems that that Twitter-conversation about principles and decision-making just keeps on rollin’ on. Stijn Viaene kicked the ball rolling again with the following Tweet: destivia: @ebuise @tetradian @richardveryard Never forget a ‘model’ is always only a preliminary version of how we see or want to see reality. After which, yes, the whole happy ‘passel o’ […]

How useful are principles in enterprise-architecture?

Not quite sure where this one started: probably from this Tweet a few days back by Anna Mar (@simplicableanna): simplicableanna: 7 Reasons You Need Architecture Principles http://bit.ly/xqzDkl #entarch Gerold Kathan retweeted it, and I passed it on again as what I thought of as a useful summary. Nothing unusual there. But then one of my […]

Decision-making – linking intent and action [4]

How is it that what we do doesn’t necessarily match up with what we plan to do? How can we best ‘keep to the plan’? Or, alternatively, how do we know how to adapt ‘the plan’ to a changing context? What governance do we need for this? How do we keep everything on-track to intent […]

Decision-making – linking intent and action [3]

How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect our enterprise-architectures? What we’ve been looking at in this series of posts is […]

Decision-making – linking intent and action [2]

How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, to ’keep to the plan’? And how does this affect our enterprise-architectures? This is Part 2 of this exploration: the first part is […]

Cycles within cycles

It’s customary at this time of year to do some kind of review: what’s happened in the past annual cycle, hopes and intentions for the next. [Sometimes these reviews can be a bit too predictable in their over-focus on prediction? As Forrester enterprise-architect Brian Hopkins put it in a nicely ironic Tweet this morning, “I predict […]

Decision-making – linking intent and action [1]

How is it that what we actually do in the heat of the action can differ so much from the intentions and decisions we set beforehand? How can we bring them into better alignment, so that we do ‘keep to the plan’, at the individual level, and across the enterprise? And once again, what implications does […]