Dotting the joins
Have we gone dotty? – all the way out to the level of the entire economy? And if we have, what can we usefully do about it? It’s a metaphorical question, of course – but perhaps not quite in the…
SCAN
SCAN as ‘decision-dartboard’
How to use SCAN as a ‘decision-dartboard’ in work-planning? That was probably the highlight in a great conversation outside the IRM-EAC conference in London earlier this week with Kai Schlüter, enterprise-architect at Danish engineering conglomerate Danfoss. Kai heads up a team…
A simpler SCAN
The SCAN frame provides a simple means to make sense of complexity and decision-making in almost any context. Yet is there perhaps an even simpler way to describe the principles and practice behind it? I’ve been nibbling at that question for quite…
Scalability and uniqueness
What actually do we mean by ‘scalability’ in enterprise-architecture? What can and can’t we scale within the architecture, or the process of architecture itself? These questions came up for me in thinking about a comment by Dave Duggal to the previous…
Control, complex, chaotic
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…
More keywords for SCAN
Some notes that came up for me almost a month back, on the SCAN framework for sensemaking and decision-making, and that I hadn’t gotten round to documenting until now. I was reminded that I hadn’t posted these notes when I saw…
The over-certainties of certification
A strange kind of annual ritual that they did there, that subtle ‘work-to-rule’, every year that I worked at that place. Each autumn, up would come the new crop of graduates, each with their shiny new graduation-certificate and their own…
Working with ‘I don’t know’
How do we work on something when we don’t know what to do? Where do we start? How do we start? How do we keep going? I had some useful first-hand experience with this earlier this week. Some while back, I’d…
More on reframing entropy in business
My previous post on ‘Reframing entropy in business‘ kinda triggered off a veritable storm of correspondence, both in the comments and offline – hence seems it’s worth summarising and revisiting those themes here. Perhaps the first point is that yes,…
Reframing entropy in business
What is entropy? What – if anything – is its relevance to business? And how does chaos come into the picture? The physics definition of entropy is straightforward enough: it’s a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics, the way in which energy flows…
Best practices – adapt, then adopt
Just how applicable are ‘best practices’? How certain can we be that they’ll be ‘best’ for each seemingly-equivalent context? I’ve been brewing on this for quite a while, when via serendipity up comes this retweet by software-architect Simon Brown: RT…
Control, complexity and chaos
Just how restricting – 0r even dangerous – is our seeming ‘need’ for certainty? Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been exploring links between the SCAN sensemaking / decision-making framework and Cynthia Kurtz’s more socially-oriented Confluence sensemaking-framework. I still…