change

This is not a project

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My apologies to René Magritte, as I appropriate his point, if not his iconic painting. After I posted “Storming on Design”, it sparked a discussion with theslowdiyer around context and change. In that discussion, theslowdiyer commented: ‘you don’t adhere to a plan for any longer than it makes sense to.’ Heh, agree. I wonder if […]

I Don’t Call Myself An Enterprise Architect

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… anymore.


A few people have asked why I call myself a Change Designer rather than an Enterprise Architect. The reason is simple: the EA label misrepresents what I do.


The popular understanding of  Enterprise Architect is:
  • attached to an I.T. view of the world – I’m not only focused on I.T.
  • often synonymous with large arcane frameworks like TOGAF – I dislike them
  • regarded as slow, top-down, big modelling up front etc – I prefer Dan Ward’s F.I.R.E. approach.


I use the title Change Designer because:
  • They are two simple words, that together, explain what I do – I Design Change (transformational or otherwise).
  • They don’t t limit me to only focus on I.T. – but, at the same time, they don’t exclude I.T.
  • Much of my thinking and toolset come from the world of “Design Thinking” (and Systems Thinking, Complexity Science etc.).


I guess I’m lucky in the sense I’m unemployable now, partly due to age but mostly due to temperament! 🙂 I’m more choosy about the things I work on where and when. All this means I don’t need to splash “Enterprise Architecture” and TOGAF all over my CV to find the next gig – and if I did, I’d probably not meet the client’s expectations!

Follow #foundindesign on Twitter to see what I’m up to these days.

Managing Fast and Slow

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People have a complicated relationship with the concept of cause and effect. In spite of the old saying about the insanity of doing the same old thing looking for a different result, we hope against hope that this time it will work. Sometimes we inject unnecessary complexity into what should be very simple tasks, other […]

Learning Organizations: When Wrens Take Down Wolfpacks

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What does the World War II naval campaign known as the Battle of the Atlantic have to do with learning and innovation? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Early in the war, Britain found itself in a precarious position. While being an island nation provided defensive advantages, it also came with logistical challenges. Food, […]

Amazon’s ‘Old is New Again’ Innovation

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Amazon’s unveiling Monday of its new brick and mortar venture, Amazon Go is, rightly so, generating a lot of interest: The full strategy, as reported on the Verge is for three types of stores in a range of sizes: Of the three varieties of stores Amazon is considering opening, the convenience store model is the […]

Strategic Tunnel Vision

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  Change and innovation are topics that have been prominent on this blog over the last year. In fact, Greger Wikstrand and I have traded a total of twenty-six posts (twenty-seven counting this one) on the subject. Greger’s last post, “Successful digitization requires focus on the entire customer experience – not just a neat app” […]

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 415

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This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 415, features Tom’s essay on recognizing risk and risk tolerance, Kim Pries on change models, a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “All Aboard the Innovation Band Wagon?”, and Jon Quigley on requirements management. Innovation is the topic of our […]

All Aboard the Innovation Band Wagon?

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  It seems like everyone wants to be an innovator nowadays. Being “digital” is in – never mind what it means, you’ve just got to be “digital”. Being innovative, however, is more than being buzzword-compliant. Being innovative, particularly in a digital sense, means solving problems (for customers, not yourself) in a new way with technology. […]

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 407

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This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 407, features Tom’s essay on Test Driven Development, Kim Pries on what makes software “good”, Steve Tendon on TameFlow, and a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Learning to Deal with the Inevitable”. Change is inevitable, dealing with it effectively […]

Technology-adoption and time-horizons

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This one’s a follow-up to a recent post, ‘Technology-adoption, Wardley-maps and Bimodal-IT‘, which adds the theme of time-horizons for strategy. The starting-point was a kind Tweet-comment by Ralph-Christian Ohr about that post of mine: RT @ralph_ohr Great post by @tetradian…

Technology-adoption, technology-evolution and lifecycle-management

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What’s the difference between technology-adoption, technology-evolution and lifecycle-management? That’s a question that’s come up recently for me, in part as a follow-up to my recent post ‘Technology-adoption, Wardley-maps and Bimodal-IT‘. The key point here is that, to explain the underlying…