Master Interweaving

An untangling exercise benefits from being well though-out and structured. This article outline the most important aspects to keep in mind while reading.

The starting point for the untangling series: The wonderfully convoluted worlds of Capabilities, Processes and Services

Btw: these articles aimed at experts, working behind the curtain. If you don't mind a mental exercise, then please continue with the article(s).

If you are looking for “simplicity” then I suggest to skip to the end of the series where I present a fusion of the essences of “capability”, “process”, and “service”.

Human centric, work oriented, and instrumental

At the center of untangling three principles are important. The approach I’m take is human centric, work oriented, and instrumental. These principles offer a focus on what is most important (salient). They provide advice on how the evaluate performance (how well). The instrumental and enabling use of capability, process, and service ideas and analysis techniques must be worthwhile to people in work they do with others. The focus is firmly set on generating benefits for people, their work, problems and questions, and not on technical qualities of work products or techniques. Qualities such as workable, beneficial, material, acceptable, and agreeable take precedence over product qualities.

In the Harvard Business Review article, “How to Build a Strategic Narrative”, Mark Bonchek inspired me to share how stories are fused into the practice of Interweaving. What caught my eye was he’s recognition of the connection between a good story and a company’s strategy. 

Interweaving embrace storytelling because it is a human centric and work oriented practice. I have touched the subject earlier and here I add another piece.

The new piece of Interweaving is that documention of structured knowledge and (point-of-)views, such as a strategy, business model or safety model, are accompanied by 3 kinds of stories (work to be done, narrative, logic).

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated”, by Confucius.

A recent flurry of articles and posts reminded me of how complicated simple ideas can be. This simple quote captures the state of the beautifully convoluted worlds of capability, process and service based analysis and planning. 

On the other hand, It is not surprising that these discussions consume a large bandwidth since organisations, strategies, and businesses have existed long before ideas such as capability become fashionable. ‘New kids on the block’ are the talk of the town until people can understand, accept and work with them.

It is easy to find discussions that go around and around and around with no end in sight. People argue for their ways of thinking and doing that fit their practice. The nature of discussions is often advocacy (to influence) and not inquiry (to understand). In many cases, experts claim their ways and practices are the right ways and the others are wrong and don’t understand. Not very inspirational, motivational or productive! Many of the convoluted debates seem to be persistent in the fields of business architecture, enterprise (IS/IT) architecture, service architecture, and information modelling.

In a series of articles, I intend to look behind the discussions and explore what is similar and different regarding the ideas of capability, process, and service. The approach I’m taking is human centric, work oriented, and instrumental. A use of capability, process, and service ideas and analysis techniques must be worthwhile to people in work they do with others.

I’m not going to fall into the trap of claiming others are wrong. I’m not going propose a new specific approach that competes with everyone else's. Instead, I’m aiming at providing you with insights and reasoning tools so you can create your own approach or practice, or evaluate and adapt others.

The idea of Space occupy a centre place in building architecture and other disciplines that work with larger structures that inhabits people. While it may seem, on the surface, that building architects primarily shape physical walls and produce blueprints, they are deeply concerned with defining Spaces, and spaces between Spaces.

Spaces are not only important for buildings and ships, they are also highly relevant to organisations, communities, cyber-technical things, enterprises, theories of the firm, and other Unit-of-Interests.

The Interweaving practice and the Framework for Interweaving and Architecting (FIA) is the first practice and framework to recognise, accept, and incorporate Space as a fundamental aspect also for organisations, communities, and other artifacts. 

The idea of Space is a fundamental part of the Forms Language. Introducing the Forms Language.

In the Space - At A Glance  article the idea of Space is introduced, examplified, and charaterised. 

In many peoples eyes the main focus and deliverables of architecting are blueprints, or specifications. A focus on blueprints can be found in Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture disciplines, practices, or frameworks, where architects deliver blueprints as result of an activity. It is often recommended to store and maintain the blueprint in repository as a single source of truth.

An example from the IIBA V3 BABOK “A guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge” and the The Business Architecture Perspective chapter.  

“Business architecture models the enterprise in order to show how strategic concerns of key stakeholders are met and to support to support ongoing business transformation efforts. Business architecture provides architectural descriptions and views, referred to as blueprints, to provide a common understanding of the organization for the purpose of aligning strategic objectives with tactical demands.” … “Business architecture provides a blueprint that management can use to plan and execute strategies from both information technology (IT) and non-IT perspectives.”

However, this is only a part of what is created and maintained during Interweaving and Architecting.

The Interweaving practice and the “Work Oriented and Interweaving approach to Architecting” embrace a shift from a focus on blueprints towards production of knowledge, specifically the knowledge that is the most important to people (salient).

At the start of an Interweaving project, an initial frame and scope must be created, based on informed and practical reasoning, as well as on cost, time, quality, and other constraints. During a project, as more knowledge is acquired, the frame should be revisited to right-size the effort and expected benefits.

There are many ways to frame what is worked with and on. One way is to follow a dictionary definition or an organisational single source of truth. Other ways involve being informed at physical things such as building or a car, or starting from theories such as Theory of the Firm or Systems Thinking, or be compliant with legal definitions such as Enterprise or Undertaking.

In the article Introduction to What are we Interweaving or Architecting?, we have collected various types of Objects of Interweaving or Architecting.

The Work Oriented and Interweaving Approach to Architecting advocates a pragmatic approach. It uses a neutral name, Unit of Interest, to indicate what is of interest. There are several reasons for not directly using a term such as Enterprise, Business, Solution, or Building. 

• In modern architecting, what is really interweaved or architected takes precedence over formal definitions. Boundaries have become fuzzy and are largely dependent on what clients desire. The combination of materials have a large influence on the frame of a Unit-of-Interest. Natural building materials  determine primary kind of architect, although modern houses are increasingly computerised and integrated with the Internet of Things.
• Terms such as “Enterprise” have many senses and experts are divided on which one to use. Theoretical definitions are preferred over legal definitions despite being the most authoritative.
• Discussions based on formal or theoretical definitions often becomes infected with hard positions being taken. Time and energy is often wasted in such debates, with a poor project climate as a consequence.
• It is tempting to use a formal definition created by one profession or discipline. However it is wise to remember that an organisation or project consists of many different disciplines. The idea that one profession can and should establish a single source of truth is fraught with personal, legal and technical intricacies and are overcharged with political and ideological significations and misunderstandings and, even, terminological confusions.

The Interweaving and Architecting practices are human centred and work oriented approaches that aim to empower people with powerful means, means that realise worthwhile benefits and contribute to the desired state of affairs over the life cycle up to horizon. In this approach, qualities such understandable, workable, acceptable, agreeable, beneficial, and material are as important as theoretical concerns.

• What is the difference between a program, project manager and an Architect or Interweaver? 
• If a business analyst and a business architect use the same techniques what is the difference?
• A designer design, a strategist formulate strategies, a business developer develops business models, what do an Architect or Interweaver do?

The Work Oriented and Interweaving approach to Architecting embrace a human centric and evolved practice. A practice where Architects or Interweavers can be seen as wearing manifold of hats. Each hat is worn with an interweaving lens, focusing on what is salient and what weaves people together. A lens that aims at delivering benefits to people and work they do with others. The architecting and interweaving services are complementary and supplementary.

In this section we present a collection of wearable hats. The identification and organisation have been influenced by the work of Cliff Moser, who is the author of. Architecture 3.0; the Disruptive Design Practice Handbook

The hat collection help explain to customers what an Architect and Interweaver do, and their needs for architecting and interweaving services 

The hat collection is maintained at FIA.

• Interweaver: An accommodator and helper that takes action to connect people, their work they do with others, motivation, creativity, aspirations, the possibilities of technology with the enterprise and its purpose; to make motivational, valuable, workable, acceptable, agreeable, feasible, suitable, and sustainable; to make fit, congruous, integrated, compatible, or consistent; to make agreement, in harmony, in alignment, in correspondence, or in conformance.
• Craftsman: A practical, skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable worker, on the professional and learning path from apprentice, to journeyman, through to master. 
• Artist and Storyteller: An imaginative storyteller that generates novelties, creative insights, and visions, through comprehensive synthesis.
• Scientist: A performer of systematic methods, inquiry, analysis, and synthesis based on measurable evidence, aimed at acquiring or adjusting knowledge. 
• Designer: An understander of human meaningfulness and needs that turns insight and the possibilities of technologies into innovative solutions, which are suitable, feasible, sustainable, motivational, valuable, workable, acceptable, and agreeable.
• Problem Solver:  A thinker that uses intuition, logic, and techniques to create a solution for circumstances or situations regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with, or questions raised for consideration.
• Manager, Leader: A director and controller of coordinated activities in programs, projects, or other endeavours. A person with a high control or influence over follower(s), and can focus their attention and allocation of effort in order to achieve missions and objectives.
• Assistant: An aid and enabler that supplements, complements, and contributes to both work and deliverables.
• Advisor:  A trusted suggester of practical, expert, and sound advice. A provider of information, guidance, recommendations, and answers to questions.
• Facilitator: A helper that makes something become easier for someone else, and that stimulates discussions, ideation, group engagement, learning, shared understanding, and the making of informed decisions and actions. 
• Analyst, Evaluator: A student of the constituent parts and their interrelationships within a whole. Sometimes, a synthesiser and a combiner of parts into new wholes. A judge of something's merits, worth, quality, or significance.
• Interpreter, Modeller: An observer that translates observations, signs, measurements, and thoughts into documents, illustrations, or models.
• Researcher & Developer: An explorer of new knowledge, tools, ways of working and thinking, and technologies to create new or improved capabilities, and to enable decision making and work.
• Paraprofessional: A trained worker who is not a member of a profession but who assists a professional.
• Empathiser, Arbitrator: An understanding and sensitive person that deals with project difficulties and problems, errors and omissions in work, and that settles differences or decide on disputes.
• Overseer: A supervisor that watches over and directs the work of others, as part of quality management, assurance, and control.
• Information Designer: An explainer, planner, and maintainer of information, data to a particular audience to meet specific objectives as part of knowledge and information management.
• Enabler: A helper that provides and manages tools, guidance, methods, frameworks, systems, data repositories, services, and other means to projects and managers.
• Methodologist: A designer, analyst, and evaluator of ways of working, work specifications, processes, manageable activities and tasks roles, and deliverables in highly coordinated, distributed, and networked projects.

The interweaving and architecting knowledge is specifically usable for collaborative actions and joint work, such as facilitation, dialogue, discussion, debate, consideration, negotiation, advocacy, harmonisation, and standardisation.

The focus on salience and the interweave provides a backbone for organisational knowledge management and corporate memory. Enterprise Knowledge and Information Management can be built around and on top of these structures.

Furthermore, this focus forms an outline of an interweaving and architecting practice that is supplementary to and complementary with existing professions, such as strategists, business developer, analysts, organisational developers, and designers.

This particular kind of knowledge has a wide range of uses. Equipped with it, we can:

• develop an intuition for how things (parts of the world) relate to and depend on each other;
• correlate people’s perspectives, attitudes, and work;
• observe and deal with complications and complexities;
• share important information about our ‘togetherness’;
• socialise to create shared mental models and contribute to the collective body of knowledge;
• externalise knowledge into to diagrams, documents, and models;
• answer meaningful questions in our inquiries;
• engage in practical reasoning;
• measure, analyse, synthesise, assess, evaluate, verify, and validate;
• solve problems and take advantage of opportunities;
• simulate and evaluate options;
• analyse gaps and how the map and the world align or conform;
• gain insights and turn them into workable. acceptable, and agreeable actions that change the world;
• empathise with our neighbouring workers and professionals;
• coordinate and align work across boundaries;
• support divergent and convergent thinking;
• create designs and specifications;
• enrich collaborative decision making;
• plan and prepare for joint action and change;
• realise worthwhile benefits over the life cycle unto the horizon, that contribute to goals;
• monitor progress and measure performance;
• learn individually or organizationally;
• adjust our beliefs, behaviours, and plans in the presence of new knowledge; and
• much more.

The interweaving and architecting practices are human centred and work oriented approaches that aim to empower people with powerful means, means that realise worthwhile benefits over the life cycle up to horizon. We can easily recognise that knowledge is an essential and instrumental means. By exploring the interweaving and its different strands, we can build a collective body of knowledge, insights, and experiences that help make sense of the total picture.

"The way Maffi tells the story, she was interviewing Tzeltal Mayan people waiting in line at a medical clinic in the village of Tenejapa when she met a man who had walked for hours, carrying his two-year-old daughter, who was suffering from diarrhea. It turned out that the man had only a dim memory of the “grasshopper leg herb” that was once well known as a perfectly effective diarrhea remedy in the Tzeltal ethnomedical pharmacopeia. Because he’d nearly forgotten the words for the herb, he’d lost almost any trace of the herb’s utility, or even of its existence.

This is when the full impact of current global trends dawned on her, Maffi recalls. It’s not just species or languages that are vanishing from the world. The world is losing knowledge, too, of the most useful and precious kinds. If the world was losing local knowledge, what else was slipping away?"

What does this mean for interweavers and architects?

First of all it suggests that spectrum of Uniformity-Diversity is something that must be considered, carefully thought of.

Secondly, this will generate a lot of questions: 

• Should we offer standardised products? 
• Does the people in our innovation, development teams come from the same background? 
• To what degree should we diversify our organisation and teams? 
• Are standardised better (best) practices something desirable? 
• What do we do with organisational knowledge and learning? 
• Can the organisation stand against time and chocks if analysis and decision making are made uniform?

• Do we need to separate out general knowledge from specific knowledge to avoid depleting our languages?

The Foundational Knowledge Base consists of a number of knowledge oriented languages and catalogues. One catalogue consists of Considerations (careful thoughts) that interweavers and architects should be aware of and use. Uniformity-Diversity is a bifocal consideration, Meaning, Symbolism, Balance, Trade offs are others.

Forms language

The forms language is a key language that consists of ways of thinking, examples, principles and rules for how interweaving and architectural elements (material) are arranged. It can be viewed as a pattern language based on the vocabulary and characteristics of relevant and available interweaving and architectural elements (material). The forms language provides a repertoire that can be used to interpret, represent, evaluate, design, combine, and build parts of the world.

In organisations we find forms such as feedback loops, life cycles, production logic, common product platforms, organisational arrangements, PDCA loops, routines, work spaces, etc. etc. These forms can be identified and described in a forms language and its catalogues. See examples of forms at the end of the article.

An interweaved or architected artifact, enterprise, or company is largely the result of a deliberate use of a specific forms language chosen by interweavers and architects. 

A Forms language can be designed to focus on …

• maximising inhabitants well-being, 
• functions, 
• use of space, 
• contribution to overall purpose or vision, 
• cost-cutting, operational excellence, 
• increasing shareholder values, or 
• the accommodation of any other set of interests chosen by interested parties, stockholders or architects. 

In many cases, a chosen forms language favour accommodation of the interests of either clients, banks and insurances companies, the society, architects or the inhabitants. Here we find significant differences in interests and desired ends. A client, developer, or owner may be motivated by market or brand appeal, costs or revenues, while inhabitants are interested in well-being, meaningful jobs, vocation, professions, rewards, or career opportunities.  

The Forbes article about the new professionals  - the Millennials, provides an excellent motivation for the modern approach to Interweaving and Architecting - the Work Oriented approach.

Forbes Article

Work Oriented Interweaving and Architecting is designed to care for humans, people, the inhabitants of organisations. Interweaving and Architecting is performed for their benefits as well as for owners, and customers.

These findings highlight the perils of relying to much on traditional experiences, ways of thinking and methods. As such the findings are highly relevant to Interweaving and Architecting that is an approach that focus on the fundamental, salient, important, material, essential, and enabling elements of an enterprise, which frequently constitute key elements of an M&A.

Interweaving and Architecting focus first and foremost what is salient (most important), material (what affects decision) and essentials in the situation at hand. The use of prepackaged methods and techniques are used if deemed beneficial in order to not to be complacent with what one know. 

Note: Interweaving and Architecting offers a modern, general, work oriented, and pragmatic approach to viewing and addressing an enterprise through interweaving and architecture lenses. This approach represents a step towards the many-fold of perspectives that exists in an organisation, and what they together considers as fundamental (Co-Creation). As such it differs from the sister discipline and approach of traditional Enterprise Architecture.

Survey: How to beat the transformation odds

“After years of McKinsey research on organizational transformations,1 the results from our latest McKinsey Global Survey on the topic confirm a long-standing trend: few executives say their companies’ transformations succeed.2 Today, just 26 percent of respondents say the transformations they’re most familiar with have been very or completely successful at both improving performance and equipping the organization to sustain improvements over time. In our 2012 survey, 20 percent of executives said the same.3

But some companies have beaten the odds. We asked respondents whether their organizations follow 24 specific actions that support five stages of a transformation.4 At organizations that took a rigorous, action-oriented approach and completed their transformations (that is, all of their initiatives have been fully implemented), executives report a 79 percent success rate—three times the average for all transformations. According to the results, no single action explains the difference; in fact, the more actions an organization takes, the more likely its transformation is to succeed. Still, the results suggest that some transformation practices correlate much more closely than others with success. These practices include communicating effectively, leading actively, empowering employees, and creating an environment of continuous improvement so organizations can keep their performance from stagnating (or even regressing) once a transformation’s goals are met.5 By implementing continuous-improvement activities that enable the organization to look regularly for new and better ways to work, respondents’ organizations double their chance of successfully sustaining improvements after the transformation.”

See List with actions organised by impact: Guidance: McKinsey Transformation Actions

The titel is taken from the Harvard Business Review article "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution" and has been changed to the field of interweaving and architecting. The article is interesting since it highlights a number of analogies to the modern Work Oriented approach to interweaving and architecting of enterprises.

"Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day by employees acting according to the information they have and their own self-interest"

"Trait #1 - Everyone has a good idea of the decisions and actions for which he or she is responsible."

These quotes highlight the importance of decision making, and that interweavers and architects should work with material aspects of an enterprise or organisation. In FIA, the FUNdamental Criterion guide interweaves architects to whats is important to consider during interweaving and architecting.

HBR summarise the article in their 'Management tip of the Day':

"Research has found that learning agility – the ability to grow and to use new strategies – is a good indicator of whether someone can be a high performer. Learning-agile employees are able to jettison skills and ideas that are no longer relevant and learn new ones that are. To cultivate learning agility in yourself, try:

• Innovating. Seek out new solutions. Repeatedly ask yourself “What else?” and “What are more ways I could approach this?”
• Performing. When faced with complex situations, look for similarities to your past projects. Practice calming techniques, and listen instead of simply reacting.
• Reflecting. Seek out input from others. Ask colleagues what you could have done better.
• Risking. Look for “stretch assignments” where success isn’t a given.
• Avoid defending. Acknowledge your failures and capture the lessons you’ve learned."

A few examples where learning come into play in FIA.

• Innovating: generating, exploring, and screening scenarios, alternatives are key activities of the Bare Bones Architecting Inquiry Process.
• Performing: looking at the past (the past-scenario) is a part of the general scenario map and recommended to address . Thinking about analogies, similarities is a key activity of BBAIP. Listening is a key green collaborative attitude, practice of BBAIP.
• Reflecting: another key reasoning pattern explicitly encouraged and practiced in BBAIP.
• Risking: thinking outside the box, stretching is an explicit part of, reasoning pattern in, BBAIP, in its Explore, Develop and Assess step.
• Avoid defending: in the Motivate and Define step of BBAIP, shared intentions and rules of engagement are established for the architecting effort, including preferable collaborative attitudes and practices such defending. Lessons learned is an explicit part of the Communicate & Learn step of BBAIP.

All in all - Work Oriented Architecting is well equipped to perform.

Naomi Stanford discuss, in the The Economist publication "Guide to Organisation Design - Creating high-performing and adaptable enterprise, 2nd edition", one aspect of organisation design that is essential - Organisation Structure. In Table 1.1 Naomi suggest that an organisation chart provides only some fundamental information needed by a professional organisational designer.

From an Interweaving Architecting point of view it is important to ensure that professional practitioners are allowed to use effective mental models, work products, tools, etc. that are needed for their work. An important question to address is if an interweaving or architecture framework support people in their profession?

The following table summarise Naomis's aspects:

In the Harvard Business Review articles; "Why Sustainability Is Now the Key Driver of Innovation", by Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R. Rangaswami, Sept 2009, and "The Sustainability Imperative", By David A. LubinDaniel C. Esty, May 2010, the authors analyse the effects of the mega-trend Sustainability on innovation and strategies.

The first article outline how most companies go through five stages on the path to becoming sustainable.

Stage 1: Viewing Compliance as Opportunity

Stage 2: Making Value Chains Sustainable

Stage 3: Designing Sustainable Products and Services

So, you work with architectures, but do you have an architects personality? According to David M. Keirsey and other authors there exists an Architect temperament or personality. Take a look, and see if you fit the characteristics.

"An Architect is an Abstract Utilitarian and Rationalist:

Rationals are abstract and objective. Seeking mastery and self-control, they are concerned with their own knowledge and competence. Their greatest strength is strategy. They excel in any kind of logical investigation such as engineering, conceptualizing, theorizing, and coordinating. The two roles are as follows:

What are Architecting and Enterprise Architecture bringing to an organisation that is essential, material, and value creating, that no other professions can deliver?

It is a subject that is current and most architects has spent time on it. In public forums such as LinkedIn one can find discussions such as "What are the various value propositions that EA offers to an enterprise?" covering the subject.

When browsing through various discussions one cannot help noticing a particular kind of architecting/architecture value statements. Here are two examples:

"Validate and prioritise new changes against current and future state needs. (improve investment decisions)."

"EA helps: Identify all of the elements necessary to achieve the vision and enterprise success."

I stumbled on an article by Jason Bloomberg, in Forbes magazine, from 2014 with the title "Is Enterprise Architecture Completely Broken?"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/07/11/is-enterprise-architecture-completely-broken/

Jason starts the article with a sad image of the life of enterprise architects.

Remember Milton, the red stapler guy from the movie Office Space? Useless to his company, he had been laid off years before, but due to an unexplained glitch, he was never informed and kept getting paid. So there’s Milton, showing up for work day after day, clueless about why he has nothing useful to do. Makes you wonder: are there any Miltons in your organization? Sadly, for some large enterprises, you need look no further than the Enterprise Architects.

Jason then continues...

The cost savings and responsiveness benefits that EA has purported to deliver have been few and far between. Stories of stalled or misdirected EA initiatives vastly outnumber bona fide examples of EA efforts leading to measurable business value.

and then with ..

In fact, just what an Enterprise Architect is actually supposed to do is curiously still up for debate, more than 25 years after EA’s invention.