Schism and doubt

On Friday 14th June, there was a public meeting of the EAST group, entitled Perspectives on Enterprise Architecture and Systems Thinking, kindly hosted by BT in its offices near St Paul's. Tom Graves has posted a detailed write-up on his blog At ‘EA and Systems-Thinking’ conference.

What is the purpose of dialogue between EA and ST? Putting aside the debate about what the labels "Enterprise Architecture" and "Systems Thinking" might mean, there is certainly a thought that the two (or more) communities can learn from each other. There are strengths and weaknesses on both sides - so we may be able to produce a critique of EA from an ST perspective, or a critique of ST from an EA perspective. For example, in his presentation, John Holland asserted that "EA is broken - How ST can help". (See Tom's blog for summary.)

This kind of material often arouses a certain kind of resistance. "He's not talking about me, he must be talking about someone else." Where are the EAs to whom such a criticism as John's might apply? Surely the fact that we are going to these meetings, or reading these blogs, or participating in these Linked-In discussions, puts us into the most sophisticated and reflective quartile? 

One of the fundamental questions underlying discussion of EA and ST is imagining some kind of landscape with more or less distinct zones: EA over here, ST over there, this or that school of EA, this or that school of ST, good EA versus bad EA, authentic ST versus fake ST, mainstream versus next practice.

I have written several pieces on the relationship between Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Systems Thinking (ST), on this blog and elsewhere, but such pieces are always open to challenge by those who disagree about the correct use of the labels.

• "That's not what real Enterprise Architects do."
• "That's not really Systems Thinking."

So it sometimes seems that we cannot even start talking about EA and ST, and about the relationship (if any) between them, until we can agree what these terms mean. The desire to name things properly is an ancient one, and can be found in the Analects of Confucius. (See my post on the Wisdom of Confucius). But the prevailing desire to impose one's own definitions leads to endless and mostly unproductive debate on Linked-In and elsewhere. For this meeting, we hoped for a more productive energy, and I like to think we largely succeeded.

Some of the speakers fell into a dialectic mode of presentation - on the one hand EA, on the other hand ST. This can be useful as a starting point, but if the distinction between EA and ST is taken too seriously it may drive a wedge between practitioners. As Tom commented, "there don’t seem to be any clear distinctions, any absolute boundaries that determine who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’ – all a bit blurry all round, really." For my part, instead of trying to avoid making any distinctions whatsoever, I put up a few slides with some provocative and playful distinctions, flagged with "possibly" and "tongue-in-cheek". But I haven't always been consistent about this, and (as someone pointed out to me) I probably need to be more careful when making a rhetorical contrast between "mainstream" and "next practice".

The EA/ST landscape may include Confucian and dialectic modes, but it should also include Daoist and dialogic modes. (For a brief explanation of the difference between dialectic and dialogic, see Wikipedia: Dialogic.) Robust debate between dogmatic EA and dogmatic ST may lead to schism, but even that is preferable to bland and empty speech. If we want to have a serious discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of current practice, then we must be prepared for robust critique, and we should not have to worry about over-sensitive practitioners taking everything personally.

One possible aspiration is to build a bridge between two communities, or perhaps even one single community. In their presentation, Patrick Hoverstadt and Lucy Loh presented some recent work of the EAST working group, showing how the concepts and techniques of EA and ST could be combined to address business challenges. This work is ongoing.

If we take the view that community building depend on affiliation (finding common beliefs and values), then any schism and doubt may seem to undermine this agenda. However, there is a more robust path to community building, based on alliance (accepting and overcoming difference for the sake of collaboration). For an eloquent defence of what she calls Deep Disagreement, see Margaret Heffernan's TED Talk Dare to Disagree.

Perhaps some people will think me perverse, but I look forward to plenty more friendly disagreement between EA and ST in future.

Perspectives on Enterprise Architecture and Systems Thinking from Richard Veryard

 

See also Towards Next Practice EA (May 2013), EA/ST Meeting Report (October 2014).

Some of this material is included in my (still unfinished) eBook Towards Next Practice Enterprise Architecture, available from LeanPub.

Towards Next Practice EA

A few weeks ago, @Cybersal and I met with @snowded to talk about enterprise architecture. He showed us a graph of the Complex Space, whose two dimensions were Evidence and Consensus. Dave has since posted a version of this graph on his blog.

Source: Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge April 2013
Used with permission

At present, I believe there are two main clusters of Enterprise Architecture practice:

Mainstream EA. This is where TOGAF and Zachman and all the other popular frameworks sit. These frameworks are largely based on a 1980s view of enterprise and IT, contain apparently inflexible classification schemes, and are strongly aligned to the commercial interests of the large software companies and system integrators (IBM, Cap-Gemini, and the rest). These frameworks sit in the top left corner of Snowden's chart, with a high level of consensus and a very weak evidence-base.

If we look at Mainstream EA in terms of Boisot's I-Space, I would suggest these frameworks appear as premature codifications of ungrounded abstractions. The attempted diffusion of these codified abstractions is then ineffectual, because these ungrounded categories lack any relevance to real business challenges. From time to time, practitioners may well be able to do some useful work, and they may even be persuaded that their success is a consequence of using these frameworks. But it is also possible that these occasional successes are despite the framework and not because of it.

Next Practice EA, with a smaller but growing number of practitioners and researchers proposing radical alternatives to Mainstream EA. This community includes some well-placed industry analysts (such as Nick Gall of Gartner) as well as a significant number of independent consultants. Many of these alternatives involve hybrids of EA with some other discipline, such as Systems Thinking or Design Thinking. However, the evidence base for these hybrids is if anything even weaker than for Mainstream EA frameworks, and there is no consensus whatsoever. Few if any of these hybrids have been tested in full, and sometimes they appear to consist of little more than a bricolage of ill-assorted concepts and techniques, which I call Methodological Syncretism.

What would it take for Next Practice EA to develop either sufficient evidence or sufficient consensus to represent a serious challenge to Mainstream EA? It seems to me that the answer lies at the Concrete, Undiffused, Uncodified corner of the I-Space cube. What I have found highly frustrating in many discussions with both enterprise architects and systems thinkers is an apparent belief in the absolute virtues of abstraction. So instead of discussing concrete business problems, we find ourselves discussing generic categories of business problem. Many of the discussants either don't appreciate the difference between "Cost Saving" and "Cost Saving at Smartchester College", or they think that discussing the general category is more intellectually respectable than discussing a specific case.

There is of course a reason why discussing specific cases is treated with disdain in some quarters, which has to do with the way cases are used in some business schools, notably Harvard Business School. There are two ways to explore a specific case. In the Harvard approach, as I understand it, students are presented with cases which they need to "solve", using a light sprinkling of theoretical concepts. You use the theory if it works; if it doesn't, you ignore it. This approach isn't designed to produce a deeper understanding either of the cases or the underlying theory. The alternative (which I prefer) is a much more reflective and reflexive approach, where you use the case as an instrument to understand and test and refine the underlying theory. The aim is to end up with a rich and specific narrative that is both empirically and theoretically grounded. Only when we have a sufficient number of these narratives do we begin, with great caution, to generalize from them. But that's a lot harder and more time-consuming than putting together a blog or presentation full of post-modern cleverness. (Okay, I can be as guilty of this as anyone else.)

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This is an extract from my draft eBook Towards Next Practice Enterprise Architecture, available from LeanPub.

These and related issues were discussed at a public meeting Perspectives on Enterprise Architecture and Systems Thinking, in Central London, June 14th 2013. For my own presentation slides, subsequent notes and links to reports by other participants, see Schism and Doubt (July 2013).