Perspective in Depth

As the systems thinking pioneer Gregory Bateson pointed out, there is an important difference between seeing with one eye and seeing with two. With monocular vision even the much prized Big Picture can be merely a flat and featureless panorama. Binocular vision affords a sense of depth and contour, and enhances the view.

When I wrote recently about the "What the Business Wants" viewpoint, Nick Gall challenged me to state whether I was referring to nominal purpose or defacto purpose (POSIWID). My answer was that the "What the Business Wants" viewpoint gave us a vantage point from which we could view both nominal purposes and defacto purposes at the same time, and appreciate the rich dependencies and contradictions between them.

So what happens when I apply the same thinking to the other five viewpoints? Each viewpoint has a monocular version (simple, linear) and a binocular version (rich, multi-dimensional). Here are a few key differences.

		Flat	Rounded	Links
Strategic View	What the Business Wants	Nominal purpose Nominal strategy	Defacto purpose Emergent strategy	Enterprise POSIWID
Capability View	How the Business Does	Operational capability Hard dependencies Top-down leadership	Sociotechnical capability and competency Soft dependencies Edge leadership
Activity View	What the Business Does	Linear synchronous process (value chain)	Asynchronous collaboration (value network)	Changing Conceptions of Business Process
Knowledge View	What the Business Knows	Formal information systems	Informal information systems Sensemaking Appreciative systems
Management View	How the Business Thinks	Goal-directed behaviour Management by objectives Single loop learning First order cybernetics (VSM)	Second-order cybernetics (Bateson/Maturana) Double-loop and deutero learning	Organizations as Brains
Organization View	What the Business Is	Enterprise	Business-as-a-Platform Ecosystem

But how should I label the two columns? Should I succumb to the temptation to label the first column "traditional"? Any suggestions?