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 […]

On strategy and design

This one started a couple days ago, with a straightforward Tweet-query from Dave Gray: davegray: “Strategy is design.” Agree or disagree? Why? What followed was, for me, one of the best back-and-forth Twitter-conversations in recent weeks: nickmalik: @davegray design is a method.  Strategy is a result.  Fair to say good strategy may result from design, […]

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 […]

Relational-assets are not ‘possessions’

What happens when someone gets confused about the nature of different types of assets? Short answer: they try to treat everything as ‘possessions’ – and that’s when the lawyers have a field-day… A great example of this is described in a BBC article (pointed to by LinkedIn), ‘Man sued for keeping company Twitter followers‘ (27-dec-2011). […]

Knowledge-base wiki for whole-enterprise architecture

A kind of announcement, really: a knowledge-base wiki for whole-enterprise architecture is now available and ready for content and use. I’ve given it a temporary home on my Sidewise server: http://ea.sidewise.biz No doubt it should have a proper domain of its own, but that’ll do for now to get us started. [By the way, this […]

Decision-making – belief, fact, theory and practice

In what ways do ideology and experience inform decision-making in real-time practice? How do we bridge between the intentions we make before and after action, with the decisions we make at the point of action itself? And what implications does this have for our enterprise-architectures? This extends the previous post on real-time decision-making, ‘Belief and […]