Organizations as Systems – “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown”

  One of the benefits of having a (very) wide range of interests is that every so often a flash of insight gets dropped into my lap. In this case, it was a matter of “We must recognise that single events have multiple causes” showing up as a suggested read from Aeon on the same […]

Technology-adoption, Wardley-maps and Bimodal-IT

By now, most people in enterprise-architecture will know Gartner’s beloved ‘Bimodal IT’ as ‘the gift that goes on giving’ – giving of wry laughter, that is, as the Gartner consultants seemingly each queue up, one after another, to make ever-more-futile

Skating to Where the Puck Will Be

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. Wayne Gretzky   Business people have a thing for sports metaphors, and this one in particular is a favorite. So much so, that Jason Kirby in “Why businesspeople won’t stop using that Gretzky quote” observed: Its popularity has much to […]

Learning to Deal with the Inevitable

  My last post, “Barriers to Innovation”, began with a question. Is innovation inevitable? By the end of the post, that question had changed. Is innovation inevitable for your organization? Tom Cagley left a comment suggesting another change: Think about changing the question again. “Is innovation inevitable?” might be better stated as “Is change inevitable?” […]

What’s Innovation Worth?

What does an old World War II tank have to do with innovation? I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating – one of benefits of having a blog is the ability to interact with and learn from people all over the world. For example, Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading blog posts on […]

Twitter, Timelines, and the Open/Closed Principle

Consider this Tweet for a moment. I’ll be coming back to it at the end. In my last post, I brought up Twitter’s rumored changes to the timeline feature as a poor example of customer awareness in connection with an attempt to innovate. The initial rumor set off a storm of protest that brought out […]

Form Follows Function on SPaMCast 377

This week’s episode of Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast, number 377, features Tom’s essay on empathy, Kim Pries talking about the application of David Allen’s concepts for Getting Things Done, and the first Form Follows Function installment for 2016 on organizations and innovation. Tom and I discuss my post “Changing Organizations Without […]

Changing Organizations Without Changing People

Prof Bo Molander once pointed out to me and the other students in the class that when you try to change people, you go up against billions of years of evolution, “good luck with that” and when you try to change groups, you go up against millions of years of evolutions, “good luck with that […]

Organizations and Innovation – Swim or Die!

One of the few downsides to being a Great White shark is that they must continually move, even while sleeping, in order to keep water moving over their gills. If they stay still too long, they die. Likewise, organizations must remain in motion, changing and adapting to their ecosystem, or risk dying out as well. […]

Let’s Talk Value (Who Needs Architects?)

Value is a term that’s heard often these days, but I wonder how well it’s understood. Too often, it seems, value is taken to mean raw benefit rather than its actual meaning, benefit after cost (i.e. “bang for the buck”). An even better understanding of the concept can be had from Tom Cagley’s “Breaking Down […]

The Idea Card

Whatever business you are in innovation is the name of the game. Today it’s even more important than ever that you innovate fast and somewhat accurate. This little card is designed to help you go fast by staying small and keeping it nimble. When you should use this Whenever you need to innovate When you […]

The Entity Card

Whatever business you are in, information is the most important raw material there is and it should be understood by many. Using tools like the entity card is one way of communicating on relatively stable information structures, there are other ways. People may say this is hard and takes a lot of time todo. To them […]