Episode 2 of this season of Architecture Corner is out (I made a guest appearance in episode 1, “Good at Innovation”). In this installment, Chris the CEO is experiencing lust for new technology.
What happens when the CEO starts drooling over the latest shiny thing without a thought to whether it makes good business sense?
Convergence is an interesting thing. Greger Wiktrand and I have been trading posts back and forth on the subject of innovation for almost eighteen months now (forty posts in total). I’ve also been writing a lot on the concept of organizations as systems, (twenty-two posts over the last year, with some overlap with innovation). The need for architectural design (and make no mistake, social systems like organizations require as much architectural design over their lifetime as any software system) and the superiority, in my opinion, of intentional architecture versus accidental architecture are also themes of long standing on this site.
My last post, “Architecture Corner: Good at innovation – Seven Deadly Sins of IT”, linked to a YouTube video produced by and starring Greger and Casimir Artmann. It’s worth the watching, so I won’t give away the plot, but I will say that it demonstrates how these concepts interrelate.
Effectiveness requires reasoned intentional action. I’ve used this Tom Graves’ quote many times before, but it still applies: “things work better when they work together, on purpose”.
The word “purpose” is critical to that sentence. The difference between intentional rather than accidental activity is the difference between being goal-directed and flailing blindly (n.b. experimenting, done right, is the former, not the latter). An understanding of purpose can allow a goal to be reached, even when the initial route to that goal is closed off. Completing a required set of tasks lacks that flexibility. This appreciation of the utility of purpose-oriented direction over micro-management is an old one that the military periodically re-visits:
An understanding of the purpose aids the joint force in exercising disciplined initiative to facilitate the commander’s visualized end state. Moreover, the purpose itself not only drives why tasks must happen, but also how subordinate commanders choose to execute their assigned mission(s).
Purposes must be carefully crafted, nested, and organized not only to achieve unity of effort, but also the intended outcomes (selected tasks to execute, method of execution, and/or desired effects). They also must give subordinates the latitude to find better, innovative solutions to tactical and operational problems. Finally, the operational purpose must ultimately nest back to the strategic national interest in order to affect change in the human domain. Purposes for the subordinate operations must be well thought out, nested within the desired operational objectives, and be the correct purpose in order to achieve the desired operational end state. Therefore, it is incumbent upon commanders to develop purposes for subordinate operations first and subsequently build the tasks. The “why” trumps the “how” both in importance and in priority.
What to accomplish and why are more important than how to accomplish something. As the author of article above noted, communicating purpose “…enables subordinates to take advantage of emergent opportunities that arise by enabling shared understanding of the commander’s purpose and end state.” It should also force those providing direction to examine their rationale for what they’re asking for. “Why” is the most important question that can be asked. Activity that is not tailored to achieving a particular aim will be ineffective. This includes chasing the latest silver bullet. A recent article on International Business Times, “As a term of description, ‘digital’ is now an anachronism”, had this to say:
As a term of description, digital is an anachronism. It reflects an organisational mindset that views technological transformation itself as the aim. It’s a common mistake. At the height of the dotcom boom, suddenly everyone needed a website, but not everyone understood why.
Over the last few years, the drive to digitisation has intensified. Business models, brands, products and services, customer relationships and business processes are increasingly governed by digital elements such as data.
But much the same as building a website in 1999, it’s not a question of becoming “more digital”. It’s a question of what you want digital to do.
Confusing means and ends is both futile and expensive. No matter how many tools I buy, buying tools won’t make me a carpenter (though my bank balance will continue to shrink regardless of whether the purchase helped or not). Dropping tools and techniques into a culture that is not able or prepared to use them accomplishes nothing. Likewise, becoming more “digital” (or for that matter, more “agile”), will not help an organization if it’s heading in the wrong direction. Efficiency and effectiveness are two different things that may well not go hand in hand. Just as important to understand, efficiency must take a subordinate position to effectiveness. You cannot do the wrong thing efficiently enough to turn it into the right thing.
You need to understand what you want to do and what the constraints, if any, are. That understanding will allow you to figure out how you’re going to try to do it and determine why the tools and techniques will get you there or not. The alternative is delay (waiting for new instructions) caused by the bottleneck of over-centralized decision-making with a high probability of something getting lost in translation.
Work together purposefully so things work better.
The latest season of Architecture Corner is a series of episodes on the Seven Deadly Sins of IT. I had the pleasure of appearing on “Good at innovation” with Greger Wikstrand, Casimir Artmann, and many others. In this, the first episode of the series, we deal with the sin of pride.
What happens when the CEO thinks the company is more innovative than they really are?
This is the latest entry in the on-going conversation Greger and I have been having on the topic of innovation.
A new month brings a new appearance on Tom Cagley’s Software Process and Measurement (SPaMCast) podcast.
This week’s episode, number 442, features Tom’s excellent essay on capability teams (highly recommended!), followed by a Form Follows Function installment based on my post “Systems of Social Systems and the Software Systems They Create”. Kim Pries bats cleanup with a Software Sensei column, “Software Quality and the Art of Skateboard Maintenance”.
In this episode, Tom and I continue our discussion on the organizations as system concept and how systems must fit into their context and ecosystem. In my previous posts on the subject, I took more of a top down approach. With this post, I flipped things around to a bottom up view. Understanding how the social and software systems interact (including the social system involved in creating/maintaining the software system) is critical to avoid throwing sand in the gears.
You can find all my SPaMCast episodes using under the SPaMCast Appearances category on this blog. Enjoy!
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 the “plan as a tool” vs. “plan as a goal in itself” discussion isn’t deserving of a post of its own 🙂
Indeed it is, even if it did take me nearly four months to get to it.
The key concept to understand, is that the plan is not the goal, merely a stated intention of how to achieve the goal (if this causes you to suspect that the words “plan” and “design” could be substituted for each other without changing the point, move to the head of the class). Magritte’s painting stated that the picture is not the thing. The map is not the territory (and if that concept seems a bit self-evident, consider the fact that Wikipedia considers it significant enough to devote over 1700 words, not counting footnotes and links, to the topic).
Conflating plan and goal is a common problem. To illustrate the difference, consider undergoing an operation. Is it your desire that the surgeon perform the procedure as planned or that your problem gets fixed? In the former scenario, your survival is optional.
This is not, however, to say that planning (or design) is useless. The output of an effective planning/design process is critical. As Joanna Young noted in her “Four Signs of Readiness – Or Not”:
I’m all for consigning the traditional 50+ pages of adminis-trivia on scope, schedule, budget, risks that requires signing in blood to the dustbin. However no organization should forego the thoughtful and hard work on determining what needs to be done, why, how, by whom, for how much – and how this will all be governed and measured as it is proceeds through sprints and/or waterfalls to delivery.
The information derived from the process (not the form, not the presentation, but the information) is critical tool for moving forward intelligently. If you have no idea of what to do, how to do it, who can do it when and for how much, you are adrift. You’re starting a trip with no idea of whether the gas tank has anything in it. Conversely, attempting to achieve 100% certainty from the outset is a fool’s errand. For any endeavor, more will be known nearer the destination. Plans without “wiggle room” are of limited usefulness as you will drift outside the cone of uncertainty from the start and never get back inside.
Having a reasonable idea of what’s acceptable variance helps determine when it’s time to abandon the current plan and go with a revised one. Planning and design are processes, not events or even phases. It’s a matter of continually monitoring context and whether our intentions are still in accordance with reality. Where the differ, reality wins. Always.
Execution isn’t blindly marching forward according to plan. It’s surfing the wave of context.
Long-time readers know that I have a rather varied set of interests and that I’ve got a “thing” for history, particularly military history. Knowing that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was recently reading an article titled “Cyber is the fourth dimension of war” (ground, sea and air being the first three dimensions). It’s not a bad article, but it is mistaken. Cyberwar is the fifth dimension of war. The first dimension, today and for all of time past, is the human mind. Contests are won or lost, not on some field of battle, virtual or physical, but in the minds of the combatants. For example, if you believe you’ve lost, then you have.
The painting shown above illustrates this nicely. During the Napoleonic period, infantry that was charged by cavalry would form a square, presenting a hedge of bayonets to all sides. Horses, being intelligent creatures, will not impale themselves on pointy things, thus the formation provides protection to the infantry who were free to fire at the encircling cavalry. Charging disciplined, unbroken infantry was a losing proposition for the cavalry under almost all circumstances. Note the use of “almost”.
At the Battle of García Hernández, July 1812, something unusual happened. One French formation was late in firing, and a wounded horse ran blindly into the square, breaking it up. The attacking British (Hannoverian, to be precise) cavalry rode into the gap and forced the surrender of the French infantry that comprised it. This, of course, was simply a matter of physics. However, two further squares broke up when charged due to the effect of what happened to the first one on their morale. Believing they were beaten, they failed to maintain cohesion and their anticipated defeat became a reality.
So, what’s the point?
Greger Wikstrand and I have been trading posts on the topic of innovation since late 2015. Greger’s latest, “Spring clean your mind”, deals with the concepts of infowar and propaganda (aka “fake news”). This is another example of what Greger’s written about in the past, a concept he dubbed black hat innovation: “Whenever there is innovation or invention there is also misuse”.
Whether you call it black hat innovation or abuse cases (my term), it’s a concept we need to be aware of. It is a concept that affect us, not just as technologists, but as ordinary human beings. We need to be aware of the potential for active abuse. We also need to be aware of the potential for problems that caused by things that make our life more convenient or more pleasant:
This isn’t to say that Facebook is some evil empire, but that we need to bear some responsibility for not allowing ourselves to become trapped in an echo chamber:
It’s something we need to take responsibility for. We can’t hope for a technological deus ex machina to bail us out. As Tim Bass recently noted on his Cyberspace Event Processing Blog:
The big “AI” processing “pie in the sky” plan for cyber defense we all read about is not going to work “as advertised” because we cannot program machines to solve problems that we cannot solve ourselves. There is no substitute for the advancement and development of the human mind to solve complex problems. Delegating the task of “thinking” to machines is doomed to fail, and fail “big time”. It seems like humanity has, in a manner of speaking, “given up” on humans developing the intelligence to manage and defend cyberspace, so they have decided to turn it all over to machines.
Wrong approach!
The right approach, in my opinion, is to be intentional and active in learning. Consuming information should not be a matter of sitting back and shoveling it in, but one of filtering, testing, and appraising. How much time do you spend reading viewpoints you absolutely disagree with? How much time do you spend exploring information?
In 1645, as he was looking back at his long and successful career as a samurai, where a single loss often meant death, Miyamoto Musashi concluded that although rigorous sword practice was essential, it wasn’t enough. At the end of the first chapter of A Book of Five Rings, he also admonishes aspiring warriors to “Cultivate a wide variety of interests in the arts” and “Be knowledgable in a wide variety of occupations.”
Similarly, Boyd, who was was a keen student of Musashi, described his method as looking across a wide variety of fields — “domains” he called them — searching for underlying principles, “invariants.” He would then experiment with syntheses involving these principles until he evolved a solution to the problem he was working on. Because they involved bits and pieces from a variety of domains, he called these syntheses “snowmobiles” (skis, handlebar from a bicycle, etc.)
Perception is critical. We are made or unmade, less by our circumstances and more by our perception of them. Companies that have suffered disruptions have done so not because they were unable to respond, but because they either believed themselves invulnerable or believed themselves incapable. Likewise, as individuals, we have control over what information we expose ourselves to and how we manage that exposure.
Sense-making is a critical skill that requires active involvement. The passive get passed by.
[Painting of the battle of Garcia Hernandez by Adolf Northen, housed in the Landesmuseum Hannover. Photo by Michael Ritter via Wikimedia Commons]
Form Follows Function 