complicated

9 years, 9 months ago

Fragility of Markets and Architecture Failure

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As the NASDAQ exchange came to a grinding halt this past week, I, as well as many of you perhaps thought about system failure and what was the series of events and initial conditions that preceded the shutdown. Did a human did something strange that set a series of events in motion that jeopardized the…

10 years, 2 months ago

Control, complex, chaotic

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What exactly is ‘the chaotic’ in enterprise-architectures? How do we work with it, design for it rather than ‘against’ it? Yeah, I know this is a theme I’ve visited often here, but to me it’s a challenge that’s right at the core of…

11 years, 6 months ago

Real-time sensemaking with SCAN

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What do we do when we don’t know what to do? – and how do we ensure that whatever we do is the right thing to do? How do we make sense fast, at business-speed? I’ve been tussling with this one for quite a while, most recently culminating with a simple sensemaking framework called SCAN: The horizontal green-line […]

11 years, 6 months ago

Domains and dimensions in SCAN

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What are the sensemaking-domains in SCAN? What are the boundaries between those domains? A great challenge in an earlier comment from Roger Sessions, where he asked me for the mathematical basis for those domains and boundaries. I think he was a bit shocked when I said there wasn’t one – but in fact there is […]

11 years, 6 months ago

Ensuring that the Simple stays simple

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What happens when the simple definitions of Simple and Complex become complex? Do they become so Complicated that they can collapse into the Chaotic? And if so, what can we do about it? This one’s triggered in part by a swathe of complaints from various enterprise-architecture folks about a certain ‘standard definition’ of Complex, and […]

11 years, 7 months ago

Standing up for the value of our work

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How do we prove the value of our work? How we defend that value against unprincipled attack? These are real questions that we all need to face, especially in inherently-’unprovable’ disciplines such as enterprise-architecture. So let’s put these questions into practice. Several people have asked me for a detailed worked-example of the sensemaking-technique of context-space mapping […]

11 years, 7 months ago

SCCC: Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic

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Folks, we have an important issue on terminology that we need to address. In two comments to my previous post, Dave Snowden has made it clear that he objects to any reference to the term ‘Cynefin‘ that does not conform exactly to his specification for that term. This includes any usage of the term ‘Cynefin-categorization’, […]

12 years, 3 months ago

When effort estimations feel like buying showroom kitchens

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Purchasing a showroom kitchen can be an unpleasant experience, especially if you’re not sure of the value of what you are buying. Kitchen showrooms tend to have the atmosphere of a prestigious car dealership, perhaps because the price tag of a well-designed kitchen is similar to a mid-sized car. If you happen to linger at […]