About Architects, Abstracting and How to Practice the Art of Anti-Abundance

That’s a lot of A’s in this title! Maybe I was a little bit too abundant. But don’t blame me: abundance is quite normal if you work in ICT. More is good. Big is good. Expensive ecosystems give you status. Overdimensioned (eco)systems are very good (never know if you need abundant functions later). Overloaded functional features are good. Risk-averse built-to-last architectures are the way to go. (You don’t really think I mean this do you?) So far for Abundance, now for Abstracting, a task that architects typically need to be able to deal with in their day-to-day work. Look at the pictures below. Inspired by one of my collegues. You can see a model* of The World, Africa, The Desert and a handful of Desert Sand. We could even add more abstraction levels: the Universe, a single grain of sand, the atoms in the grain etc. So we sometimes need different levels of abstraction. The abstraction level depends on what you want to tell and to who you want to tell it. (IT) architects sometimes here people ask: do you have an overview picture of the complete architecture? The people asking think that such a picture exists (it should, shouldn’t it?) and that architects by all means should be able to reproduce that very quickly. That’s what they’re paid for, right?  Well, if that seems to be the case, we could get inspired by modelling our tiny ITC world just like Google Earth: it can zoom-in from the universe, to the world, to a country, to a city, a street and even more details lately, In ICT environments, this still is a very tedious and difficult job. So wWhen will the time come that IT architects can model the (virtual) world they are working in with zoom-in/zoom-out tools comparable to Google Earth??? Or to make things more SIMPEL: should ICT architects just not try to model the world they’re working in but instead limit themselves to modeling the essence of the questions they need to answer? Less is more approach???

* Any model isn’t representative because it allways leaves out certain details, but some models can be useful…

How Learning Organizations, Dalai Lama, Plato’s Cave and the Veil of Forgetfulness can Change Your Life

What do Learning Organizations, Plato’s Cave and the Veil of Forgetfulness have to do with eachother? Let me try to explain a little bit. Every person on this planet has to learn. You can do this roughly two ways: learning by the book (risc avoiding) or learning by making mistakes (risc seeking). If we project this onto Plato’s Case we can see basically two “types” of people in there (sorry for the categorization, just done here to explain the concepts). The ones who look at the illusions and thus only see reflections, they don’t see the real light outside. Maybe they even don’t want to see the real light. If that is the case, better leave them be where they are happy, don’t force them to learn things they don’t want to learn. They’re probably just happy where they are.  And then you have the other “types”  of people, those who want to discover, and who don’t want to live in illusions. These are the people that probably want to ascent to the (sun)light and are probably very open to share their knowledge with anyone.  What they should never forget is to apply the Universal Law of Free Will when trying to share their knowledge to those who are not really open for it. And then finally, there is the Veil of Forgetfulness. What the veil says is that if there is no misunderstanding there will also be no error. So if there is no error, there is no experience. And if there is no experience, there is no spiritual growth in the brain. So people definetely need chances to learn by making errors sometimes. This is what the veil is meant for. And now wrapping it all up: if you want to help an organization or group of people or a culture or a network become a learning organization, never forget to use the Law of Free Will to find people who want to learn from others. Also never forget the Veil of Forgetfulness to help find those people that want to learn by making mistakes. And apply Dalai Lama’s statement  “Life is too short to learn all things yourself by experience” to find those people that are open to learn from others.

Information Power to the People And How You Could Apply The New Filtering

Nowadays many people suffer from information overload. Modern IT technology has made it possible to produce many times more information than we ever are able to consume. So we need some clever filters. I call this The New Filtering. I believe there can never be a better filter than you yourself. So The New Filtering should be implemented from a Filter Your Own Information (FYOI) approach.

This leads to the following architecture principle:

Your information or information meant for you will be consumed by you where you want to consume it, when you want to consume it and how you want to consume it.

This approach helps giving (Information) Power to the People (or you could also call it “Data to the People”). So the filter freedom should be totally up to the information consumer. After all nobody knows better than you yourself what you want to know, right? And in the end, the only thing that really counts is what you don’t know, the rest is probably waste…

How Abstraction Errors Can Lead to Erroneous Distribution of Complexity and How to Avoid that

Ever seen a stereogram? Shown in the left there’s an example. It contains hidden (abstracted) visuals. Now try looking to your organization (which might very well be a complex social system) as if it were a stereogram. Now imagine that you are the architect that thinks remodeling or redesigning this organization is a fairly easy job, right? That’s because you abstracted out all social complexity (you didn’t see the real picture in the stereogram). What then remains is a cold, rational model of a lifeless organization. Now that’s very easy to remodel. After all, social aspects are not your problem to solve, right? Well, I don’t agree. Architects should model or design organizations built for human beings first, and not only for organizational models that are mathematically or economically correct. Architecture that was designed for human beings should after all  work the best of all. So if you in your architecture work are abstracting out a certain unavoidable complexity (for example social complexity, especially in larger organizations), chances are that your design will be lousy because you distributed complexity in a wrong area (abstracted it “away”) instead of coping with it in your design. By coping with it in your design, you leeave the design complexity to yourself instead of to your customers.

If Anything Should Be Common, It Is Sense and Why You Should be Careful When Trying to Centralize Something

One of the famous quotes of Voltaire (a French author, humanist, rationalist, and satirist who lived from 1694 – 1778) was: Common Sense is not so Common. Now what did he mean by that? And is there a relation with Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons? Possibly. The way I look at it is that we tend to simplify complex matters by first making them “common”. And then we say to each other that what we have simplified is just common sense, isn’t it? This is in fact an abstraction strategy which can be dangerous. By trying to abstract the dirty details to a level that they seem invisible or not relevant anymore, it’s easy to sell your change as if it were something common, and what we should change to is just common sense, right? So we have integrated some of the unwanted details into some kind of common concept by leaving them out (after all, it’s not our job to look at the details, right?) This is where change or transformational strategies sometimes go wrong, simply because the theoretical abstraction you have developed, is not at all that easy to realize. So we forgot to look at the impact of the details because we abstracted them out, leave the dirty details for later. To explain this line of thinking a little further, you might also read the post: Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast (and how to eat breakfast). So you see now, Common Sense is not so Common at all and you should be very careful by implementing Tragedy of the Commons concepts, strategies or architectures without a good analysis of the impact.

Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast (and how to eat breakfast)

Ofcourse you know everything about deliberate strategies or architectures (the ones you designed yourself).  And ofcourse you know everything about emergent strategy or architecture, the one that your organization realizes in reality. It’s all hidden in the golden word “real”.  So the real difference is that reality realizes real strategies, and that’s just exactly why culture eats strategy for breakfast. So next time you design a strategy (or architecture for that fact), first check with the realists in your company if it is realizable. This approach is also very good in line with Asby’s Law that states that the controlling system (“the strategy” in this example) must be equally complex or complexer than the controlled system (“the organization” in this example). So if you really want to eat breakfast next time, first ask the cooks how it should be prepared (they might give you some clues…).  Final quote: if your realists say it’s realizable then reality realizes real strategies.

About the Declaration of (In)dependence, Tightly Coupled Architectures and When not to use Swiss-Army-Knives

Who doesn’t know about the famous Declaration of Independence? Stolen by Nicolas Cage in the movie National Treasure. What is the relation with this post? And why did I title it the declaration of (In)dependence? It’s because I want to make clear that traditional (ICT) architectural choices we still design nowadays in fact have very little to do with independence but everything with dependence! Many of these architectures are in fact tightly coupled which makes it very difficult for customers of these architectures to change them. There just are too much dependencies built in. Many of the architectures behave as if they were swiss-army-knives. Overloaded with tons of possible future features. Because they were designed to fit almost any (future) scenario they have become needlessly complex. The more complex, the more unstable such an architecture becomes over time. Because all of the swiss-army-knive individual components are “glued” together using a common backbone (platform infrastructure) you cannot easily get rid of it. It seems the only sensible way of overcoming this needless complexity, overprovisioning, inflexibility and overloading of features is by building partial, simpler, fit-for-purpose architectures around it.

Visualization tips

When was the last time you  tried to show something to your stakeholders and you visualized your message using boxes? Well, here’s a simple tip: next time you draw a box, try to leave away at least one or preferably two sides of the box. This gives the visual illusion of more freedom, while the theme you are trying to visualize might still be the same. For example, look at the lefthand figure below. It has a few characteristics: it’s dull (same colors, no outstanding things, it’s square and boxed, 4 boxes within a larger box, it doesn’t really appeal and it doesn’ tell a story). Now look at the same concept, but visualized in another way (the 2nd figure). It has been tilt from 2d to 3d, it has been made from black & white to colourful, it has left out two lines of the larger box (top and right) and left out the two interior lines, it shows texts that are larger meant to be more significant, it has replaced the bottom texts Employee and Enterprise which are kind of “anonymous” with personal looking texts You and Your Collegues and has added pictures to these texts to make them even more significant.

 

Inspirational Thoughts of Great and Good Thinkers, Thought Leaders, Trendwatchers, Futurists and Others Combined

There are a lot of great thinkers out there. You can tell by reading their books, studying their theories, looking at the articles they publish, seeing how their viewpoints find their way into our world etc. I wonder what would happen if one could combine, integrate or otherwise bring together the expressions and thoughts from these Great Thinkers, Thought Leaders, Trendwatchers, Futurists, Authors, Humanists, Rationalists, Satirists, Moralists, Essayists, Masters, Inspirators (just to name a few “categories”)? Here’s a trial overview with in alfabetical order their names, and in between brackets the statements, thoughts, expressions or ideas which for several reasons personally inspired me to combine them into this list. They represent thoughts or values or ideas or concepts I personally believe in very much. Ofcourse this list will never be complete, please feel free to tip me for additions. If time allows, maybe I’ll combine this list into some kind of integrated mindmap or other oversight viewpoint. This post is updated each time I find a new statement I think should be added to the list.

• Maya Angelou (1: I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel; 2: The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart; 3: If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities; 4: Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option)
• Jurgen Appelo (Agile Management, Management 3.0)
• Aristoteles (Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom)
• Chris Argyris (Defensive Routines, Double Loop Learning)
• William Rosh Ashby (The Law of Requisite Variety, The Darkness Principle)
• Martijn Aslander (Easycratie)
• Paul Baran† (Internet pioneer, mesh-designing the Internet with distributed topology style)
• Stafford Beer (Designing Freedom, Cybernetics)
• Edward de Bono (There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns)
• Charles Brower (Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions)
• Winston Churchill (The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty)
• Paulo Coelho (People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves)
• Leonard Cohen (Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in)
• Stephen Covey (The way we see the problem is the problem, 7 habits)
• Johan Cruyff (Je gaat het pas zien als je het door hebt – You won’t start seeing it before you understand it)
• W Edwards Deming (No one can enjoy learning if he must constantly be concerned about being graded for his performance)
• Steve Denning (The most important story is not the one we tell, it is the one we generate in the mind of the listener)
• Peter Drucker (Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast)
• Eric Duquette (Do not allow yourself or others to be defined by your limitations, but rather, abilities)
• Albert Einstein (1: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler; 2: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, 3: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant; 4: Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.  The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary; Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere)
• Doug Floyd (You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note)
• Benjamin Franklin (Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn)
• Gabor (If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission)
• Galileo Galilei (You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself)
• Luc Galoppin (If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, forget it!)
• Mahatma Gandhi (1: You must be the change you want to see in the world; 2: Freedom isn’t worth having if it doesn’t include the freedom to make mistakes)
• Antoni Gaudi (But man does not create…he discovers)
• William Gibson (The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet)
• Seth Godin (1: Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big. Don’t wait. Get small. Think big, 2:I wanna be the guy who fails the most)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister)
• Erving Goffman (Interaction Rituals)
• Dany Gokey (Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity)
• Josephine Green (Pancake Society)
• Garrett Hardin (Tragedy of the Commons)
• Samuel Ichiye Hawakaya (Ladder of Abstraction)
• Dee Hock (The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.)
• Eric Hoffer (Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature)
• Grace Hopper (It’s always been done that way)
• Victor Hugo (to love beauty is to see light)
• David K. Hurst (Renewal requires destruction)
• Steve Jobs (The art of leaving things out)
• Joseph Joubert (Never cut what you can untie, the mind can tell us what not to do or avoid, the heart can tell us what to do)
• Helen Keller (Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows)
• Kevin Kelly (Make customers as smart as you are, Connect customer to customers, All things being equal choose technology that connects, Imagine your customers as employees)
• John F. Kennedy (we go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s difficult)
• Thomas Kuhn (Ladder of Inference, You don’t see something until you have the right metafor to let you perceive it)
• Dalai Lama ( 1: If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito; 2: Don’t try to invent everything yourself, you just don’t have the time for it; 3: Strive for modesty but it’s ok if it can’t be reached)
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1: I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it, 2: It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved’3: Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking; 4: There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things)
• William L. McKnight (If you put fences around people, you get sheep)
• Margaret Mead (Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has)
• Robert Metcalfe (the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system)
• Geoffrey O. Moore (Dealing with Darwin, Universe of Innovation Types)
• Willie Nelson (Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results)
• Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (Give me courage to change things which must be changed;And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other)
• Joseph Chilton Pearce (To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong)
• Laurence J. Peter (The Peter Principle, “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”)
• Jaap Peters (Het Rijnland Boekje)
• Katasai Rakshasa (Those who fear the darkness have no idea what the light can do)
• Joshua Cooper Ramo (Conformity to old ideas is lethal; it is rebellion that is going to change the planet)
• Ayn Rand (The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me)
• Kurt A. Richardson (If each element ‘knew’ what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element)
• Jeremy Rifkin (Third Industrial Revolution and the 5 pillars that will support it’s success)
• Will Rogers (If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?)
• Eleanor Roosevelt (The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams)
• Jim Rohn (Unless you change how you are, you will always have what you’ve got)
• Betrand Russel (To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom)
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it)
• Adi Da Samray (Relax. Nothing is under control.)
• John Scully (The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious)
• Peter Senge (Learning Organization)
• George Bernard Shaw (1: Lack of money is the root of all evil, 2: You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?” 3:Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything)
• Clay Shirki (Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution)
• Herbert Simon (Bounded Rationality)
• Simon Sinek? (Real collaboration is when the idea can no longer be traced to one person. It is legitimately ours.)
• Ulbo De Sitter (founder of the sociotechnique in the Netherlands: “complex tasks in a simple organization instead of simple tasks in a complex organization”)
• Dave Snowden (Cynefin Sensemaking Framework)
• Henry David Thoreau (It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know)
• Mark Twain (Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain)
• Lao-Tzu (Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge)
• Leonardo da Vinci (Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication)
• Voltaire (Common Sense is not so Common)
• Mathieu Weggeman (The faster you get smarter, the sooner you will be dumber)
• Margaret Wheatley (It’s lonely to be in the future… first)
• Stuart Wilde (Everything is out there waiting for you. All you have to do is walk up and declare yourself in. No need for permission. You just need courage to say, “Include me”. Providing you have the energy to pull it off you can do what you like. And the Universal Law, being impartial, will be only too delighted to deliver.)
• Frank Zappa (Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible)

Finally, Albert Einstein once quoted: “great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds“. Given this quote, I sincerely hope this post will be read by others (be it great spirits/visionairs just like the ones listed here or anybody else) so that an even more combined vision can be created together with all of you who read this and like to extend the list.

Making Complex Things Simple by Making Simple Things Complex

We tend to make complex things simple by astracting (hiding!) the complexity into an area where we can easily “forget” about it so we can concentrate on the things we call our core competences. This however can often lead to popping up new or unforeseen complexity in other areas. So when you start abstracting a certain complexity never forget to investigate where the new complexity will pop up and how you’re going to handle that new redistribution of complexity. A typical example is outsourcing: by abstracting the complexity of let’s say commodity ICT technologies, you are distributing that complexity to other parties. But inevitably you will have to compensate for that “simplification” strategy by organizing something new, in this case: managing the party that you have given part of your controller functionality. It’s all in Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety: your own “complexity” as a “controller” must match the complexity of the system you want to control. Take the simple example of a traffic light: it has 3 states (Red, Orange, Green). You as a car driver heading towards the traffic light system are in this example the “controller”. As a controller you must understand the complexity of the system you want to “control”, which is the traffic light system. So your control complexity must be at least that of the controlled system: you have to understand the complexity of the 3 states Red, Orange, Green. If you “outsource” your controlling function to another party, you have to trust that they know the complexity of that system, so far nothing wrong with that if you can make clear to the outsourcer what the complexity of the system is that you’ve given control trust to. If you start moving complexity around just because you want to avoid it a any cost, you should start asking yourselve questions if this is still the right approach.  Ulbo De Sitter (founder of the sociotechnique in the Netherlands) has a vision on this that I really like: “complex tasks in a simple organization instead of simple tasks in a complex organization”. I wonder what kind of working environment we would achieve if we combined this sociotechnique vision with the following statement from the Diversity Demotivator®: “every person deserves an equal chance to prove their incompetence” and combine that also with avoiding organizing your company around the Peter Principle: “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence“.