SCAN and Causal Layered Analysis
How do we make sense of story – the stories and narratives and anecdotes that people tell each other and themselves about their world? How can we link between the layers of story to help us make sense of some…
Sense Making
Cynefin and the Chaotic domain – a (non)-review
This is the ‘review’ follow-on to the previous post ‘Cynefin and the Chaotic domain – an update‘. Back in that post I pointed to a report by Dave Snowden that he’s posted an update on ‘Cynefin subdomains in the Chaotic’,…
Cynefin and the Chaotic domain – an update
The first part of this is just a ‘public-service announcement’ service for Cynefin aficionados: Dave Snowden has announced that his current process of updating Cynefin has now extended to include a rethink of the Chaotic domain: RT @snowded: 2 months…
Enterprise Canvas ebook is now available
Following on from the SCAN ebook, the next in the new series of ‘Tetradian Weblogs’ ebooks now hits the virtual streets – a selection of blog-posts on the Enterprise Canvas notation and model-type: Enterprise Canvas: the Tetradian weblogs Recommended price…
On working with uncertainty
Yes, I know I tend to write long; some others, though, tend to write such short Twitter-length phrases that there’s a real risk that what they say may be lost in the noise. Here’s a real example of something that…
SCAN ebook is now available
For quite some time now I’d promised to make some of my blog-posts here available in ebook format, as a more focussed and accessible means to help people make use of my material on enterprise-architecture and the like. So, as…
Why I write long posts
In case you hadn’t noticed, yes, I do tend to write long posts. Sorry… There are folks around who are real masters of succinct writing. Seth Godin, for example. And I’ll have to admit I’m not good at writing succinct summaries.…
Sensemaking – modes and disciplines
How do we make sense of a context? How can we make sense in a disciplined way, without the discipline itself getting in the way? This is a follow-up to the previous post ‘Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor‘, to provide a bit…
Sensemaking and the swamp-metaphor
One of the core tasks in enterprise-architecture is sensemaking – making sense of what’s going on within some context. And one of the key methods we can use for this is to make some kind of mental-map of what seems to…
On learning enterprise-architecture
A few days ago Pradeep (I don’t know his surname, unfortunately) wrote a comment to one of my previous posts, asking for advice on learning enterprise-architecture: I aspire to become a enterprise architect. Not sure if you have written on a…
Order, unorder and effectiveness
A quick follow-on from the previous post on ‘Complex, complicated and Einstein’s dice‘, in relation to effectiveness in enterprise-architecture. There’s a common phrasing in business and elsewhere that places efficiency and effectiveness as kind-of opposites: efficiency, we’re told, is doing things…
Checklists and complexity
Re-reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, to write a book-review for the current edition of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, it struck me that the SCAN frame provides a useful means to understand and describe the relationship between checklists and…