Cynefin as place: a respectful enquiry

[A slightly risky post, this, given the unfortunate history between myself and Dave Snowden: but I want to emphasise that it is in good faith, as a genuine enquiry that I believe would be of real value to those of working in enterprise-architectures and to the broader Cynefin community.]
I’ve been delighted to see a useful […]

Companionship

Companionship.
A calm kind of word. Quiet. Friendly. Supportive, enfolding – those kinds of feelings.
A companion is literally “someone with whom we share bread”. Hence companionship is that state, condition, process, experience, whatever, of ’sharing bread’ with companions.
So it’s an interesting word – and an especially interesting metaphor for enterprise-architecture.
In your enterprise, in your work-context, or elsewhere, […]

Power, people and enterprise-architecture

We really can’t explore the theme of people in enterprise-architecture without addressing the theme – and problem – of power.
In principle, power should be straightforward. The physics definition – roughly speaking – is that power is the ability to do work. Wherever there’s work to be done – in whatever form that that ‘work’ might […]

Modelling people in enterprise-architecture

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the key characteristics of ‘crossing the chasm’ to a viable whole-of-enterprise architecture is the explicit inclusion of people. In short, we need to be able to model and map where people fit in relation to the architecture.
But there’s a catch. A big catch. People should not be […]

Models as decision-records (Enterprise Canvas)

This one is mainly about enterprise-architectures, but also applies to just about any other usage of models – visual, mathematical or whatever – in pretty much any other discipline.
There’s a common perception that a model represents some kind of reality, either in the present, the past, or some intended future.
To my mind, though, it more […]

People, assets, relationships and responsibility

A great meetup yesterday with Shawn Callahan (@unorder) and Kevin Bishop (@kevinbishop) of Australian consultancy Anecdote, and their upcoming launch of Zahmoo – a new web-based tool to manage stories and narrative-knowledge, for organisations, communities and families.
Over lunch the conversation wandered onto my work on enterprise-architecture and the Enterprise Canvas, and my latest book Mapping […]