Getting the Big Picture

A discussion about enterprise architecture on Twitter exposed an interesting difference of opinion about this topic. In response to the question whether people felt threatened by enterprise architecture, @pauljansen replied "yes and rightfully so. An EA often sees the bigger picture 'they' cannot."

Paul's comment raises several interesting questions.

1. What does "seeing the bigger picture" really mean?
2. What is the ability to "see the bigger picture" dependent on - is it inborn talent or something else?
3. What is (or should be) the relationship between people who "see the bigger picture" and those who don't (for whatever reason)?
   

Exactly the same questions arise for "systems thinking" (whatever that means), but since this particular debate was between enterprise architects, I shall stick to that specialism for the purposes of this post.

Firstly, let's acknowledge that enterprise architecture (as commonly practised) mandates a particular set of lenses for viewing the enterprise - based on a set of abstract structural models - and these lenses frame what enterprise architects mean by "seeing the bigger picture".


More generally, seeing the bigger picture entails an understanding of how things join up. EA models are supposed to document this understanding. For some people, "seeing the bigger picture" is equivalent to "strategic thinking", and the two terms were used interchangeably in the discussion.

Does "seeing the bigger picture" call for some special ability or mindset?

@jpmorgenthal said that "strategic is a skill that cannot be learned", adding "it's genetic", and in answer to @aleksb6, who asked "if all behaviors are both nature and nurture, why is strategic thinking unique in your opinion?", @jpmorgenthal answered "strategic thought is not a behavior, it's an attribute like eye color".

@pauljansen took the view that it was both nature and nurture. "Some had 'the right eye color' but never used / recognised / cultivated it." @pauljansen "Short: left brain versus whole brain; those in certain positions came there because their rational focus, by talent or nurtured."

This sounds like enterprise architects have some special power to understand complex problems, which distinguishes them from the rest of the management team. To my mind, the trouble with this belief is that it encourages a kind of them-and-us attitude, which perhaps reinforces the feelings of threat and frustration on both sides.

The idea that some people have a superior ability to see the bigger picture resembles an earlier belief that some people had a superior ability to take a long-term view. Elliott Jaques based his theory of requisite organization on the principle that each level in the management hierarchy should be associated with a different time horizon, and it was this that justified higher remuneration for people in senior management positions.

In contrast with this view, @aleksb6 thought that many people would be capable of seeing the bigger picture if they wanted to. "They can, but not incented to see!" In other words, not seeing the bigger picture is often a question of perspective and motivation, not intrinsic ability. I agree with this.

I also partially agree with @enectoux 's comment that "Not everyone is able to see the big picture. Take an expert in any area... Not the right mindset." as long as it is understood that mindset changes with perspective and motivation. If someone goes to work for a large software vendor, or a technical person moves into a sales role, she will need to adopt a mindset that is appropriate for the new role.

And it is not hard to see how the "bigger picture" mindset conflicts with the mindset needed for certain activities, as @pauljansen acknowledges. "Alas, for many clients it is a disability, be it 'unlearned' in favor of focus (convergence)."

Perspective and mindset, motivation and interest - these are all important factors that influence which pictures we see. I recently came across a great example of the importance of perspective. Here's a pretty rural cottage for sale ...




... and here's a bigger picture ...



Source: Daily Mail, 29 October 2009

The Daily Mail bills the second picture as "Reality" - but of course it is only one reality, and there are many other big pictures. If you take the photograph from the other side, you can see miles of uninhabited landscape surrounding the cottage [BBC News, 28 October 2009, Daily Telegraph, 29 October 2009]. How you take the picture depends on what outcome you want. Bigger isn't necessarily better, if you are standing in the wrong place.



@pauljansen perspective is a nonrational rightbrain ability, and there4 it matters indeed @sboray perspective is a notion not logically deduced
@sboray what meets the eye and what meets the mind r different
@jpmorgenthal re: pictures, a strategic person would not look at each in isolation, but in relation to each other


In my next post Selling the Big Picture, I shall discuss (with further quotes from the Twitter debate) how pictures great and small, simple and complex, can be used to help or hinder the relationship between those who think they "get" the big picture, and those who apparently "don't get it".


For another example, see Big Picture Again (June 2011) See also Special Powers of the Architect - Getting The Big Picture (December 2010)

Every Picture Tells A Story

@ashalynd Two green parrots are sitting on the tree just outside of our window (it's December and it's Amsterdam). If only my mobile had a good camera!

@richardveryard Why not "if only my camera had better mobility" ? How did we all get persuaded to rely on the phone for this kinda functionality?

@j4ngis Hmm...evolution. Phones are more fit than cameras - attracting more functions etc. Dominating

@richardveryard "Quick-snap-to-share-with-friends-and-post-onto-internet" dominates over "Artfully-composed-picture-to-print-and-keep".

@HotFusionMan "Worse is better." Emotion / social psychology over reason. As it ever was.

@richardveryard Where does the value judgement come from? Why is one purpose superior to another? How has tech produced this particular shift?

@j4ngis We also have (with new tech) more pics and far more photographers. Maybe the sum of "art-value" is constant?

@j4ngis Thinking: Quality of television is constant over time. But now spread over more channels and networks.

@HotFusionMan I don't think a value judgment's being made, just an observation. For "worse is better" here's a citation: The Rise of "Worse is Better" (By Richard Gabriel)

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One of the interesting questions that this brief Twitter discussion brings out is what exactly triggered a change in the way we think about photography?

Clearly there is a whole lot of technology change here as well as technologically-led business change (these are not the same thing). My list would include the introduction of digital cameras, the growth of the internet, the ability to send photos by email, the ability to post photos onto websites like Flickr, the appearance of tiny lens cameras on personal devices such as mobile phones, phone networks wanting to sell picture messaging.

But there are many other technological opportunities that have not taken off in quite this fashion, so the other half of the explanation needs to look at the emotional and social drivers for this particular change. It's interesting to see how an older obsession with a certain notion of quality (perfect pictures, perfect sound) has been supplanted with a desire for convenience. In the past, people who could afford it would spend considerable amounts of money on expensive hi-fi equipment in order to escape from scratchy record-players and hissy radios, as well as large cameras with fancy lenses; their children and grandchildren now cheerfully consume low-fi music and video via phones and internet. One is only better than the other if you accept an apparently outdated obsession with perfection. This would be my take on the "worse is better" narrative.

Meanwhile, professional or serious hobby photographers will always use whatever tools are available to them. For example, in the days before digital cameras, professional photographers used Polaroid to get an instant preview of a shot, before adjusting the lighting for the "real" photograph. Thus perhaps the "art-value" remains constant, as @j4ngis suggests. Or at least quasi-stable.

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@ashalynd tells me she doesn't have a camera now (not a working one, at least :) ) Obviously she isn't the only one. The distribution of camera-power has changed, in a way that nobody could have predicted. Technology has certainly changed the landscape, but it is people who have chosen to follow certain paths rather than others. That's what I find fascinating.

Social Media and Political Action

Politicians are fascinated by social media, for several reasons. They are impressed by the apparent contribution of social media to the electoral success of Barack Obama (coordinating local initiative as well as fund-raising), and they are also attracted by the possibility of communicating directly with their supporters.

So I was interested to see the latest Conservative Party experiment in crowdsourcing. The Party has obtained a leaked copy of a government report on public sector IT, and has published it on a website called Make IT Better, with the following statement.

"We want to throw open the process and allow people to contribute their ideas on how policy should be designed. In the post-bureaucratic age, we believe that crowdsourcing and collaborative design can help us to make better policies."

As it happens, I do have some reactions to the leaked government report, which I may cover elsewhere, but what I want to cover here is not what the next government's IT policy should be, but the much more fundamental question "how policy should be designed".

The production of policy is an inescapably political process. In several recent cases, we can see how ministers attempt to steer an uncomfortable path between public opinion on the one hand and expert advice on the other.

• Bank bonuses. Banking experts insist that large bonuses are required to keep the banks operating effectively, but popular opinion is largely hostile to this proposition. 
  

• Drug classification. Scientists argue that drug classification should be based on the evidence of harm caused by each drug, but politicians fear that this would be politically dangerous and would "send the wrong message". 
  

• ID cards, databases and so on. At first, public opinion largely supported such schemes, in the belief that these security mechanisms would provide reliable protection against a range of social ills including illegal immigration and terrorism. However, several highly respected security experts have pointed out the flaws in the government schemes, and have indicated a strong likelihood that the costs will be far higher than the official estimates. Public opinion now seems to be shifting against these schemes.

It would be crazy to say either that public opinion should always trump expert opinion, or that expert opinion should always trump public opinion. And of course "public opinion" and "expert opinion" are not two separate worlds, but there are strong links between them. Thus opinion is rarely simple and consistent, but may contain vigorous disagreement. However, that cannot be an excuse to ignore opinion. Politicians cannot and must not abdicate from this arena.

What's the relevance of social media to this process?  There are two important points here.

Firstly, social media provide platforms for self-appointed experts of all kinds to share and attempt to mobilize their opinions. Sometimes these opinions can strike a chord with a broader audience, and feeds into a movement that subverts the established policy - whether by fostering popular suspicion about scientific issues (such as GM crops and mass vaccination), or by mobilizing local opposition to some central funding decision (such as closing a well-loved hospital).


Secondly, governments have traditionally received expert advice from a relatively small elite of professional scientists and businessmen. This has the result of pushing policy in certain directions, often to suit the vested interests of powerful lobbies. But these vested interests are increasingly hard to conceal from the public gaze (thanks in part to social media - think Trafigura), and public opinion can sometimes be roused against these vested interests (as we have seen in the case of bank bonuses). So some kind of crowdsourcing might conceivably offer alternative sources of advice.

There is an important trust issue here as well. Governments are not trusted to spend large amounts of money on IT; anyone who reads the IT press (Computer Weekly, The Register) will be able to quote lots of reasons for this lack of trust. This isn't just an IT issue of course: as Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's economics editor, puts it, "We all believe the savings are there to be had. We just don't trust the government to find them." (Efficiency Trap, 7 December 2009)

Crowdsourcing perhaps offers the possibility of forging a different kind of trust. So the challenge is not to find a better way of generating input for a traditional strategy report, but to find a better way of doing strategy. Politicians may wish to regard certain areas of policy as being purely technological (and not political at all, hem hem), and therefore be willing to delegate these policy areas to "friendly" technocrats, but this is essentially a Faustian pact in which the technocrats (generally senior representatives of the major IT firms) promise to solve all the technical problems in return for a shed-load of cash. Some politicians may have gone along with this kind of deal in the past, but there is an increasingly blatent history of project failure and cost over-runs. (Today it was announced that the NHS IT System is being "scaled back" [BBC News, 6 December 2009].) So there is a major strategic risk here that can no longer be swept under the carpet.

The political challenge for politicians in these situations is to forge a constituency that will support productive action. Not a small club of powerful players, but a broad range of stakeholders with varying levels of power, proximity and interest - and also a wide range of social ties to the people who will vote in the next election. That's the lesson of social media that politicians should learn from Barack Obama: use of the Internet not as a one-sided fund-raising mechanism but as a way to build a new kind of constituency.

And that's where I think the Conservative experiment in crowdsourcing should go - not just collecting negative comments from which to score debating points against the Government, but developing an entirely new way of producing policy out of a genuine conversation with well-informed public opinion. Not easy by any means, but (given the present situation) it has to be worth trying.

The Power of Self-Knowledge

@jonerp asked if there was a better/more challenging business philosophy than "If you build it, they will come?"

So I tweeted the first decent philosophical saying I could think of that was short enough to Tweet, namely Socrates' slogan "Know Thyself".

Jon replied: "I like that one though I do have friends who have very good self-knowledge who are not good at biz."

Of course, the point isn't that self-knowledge will guarantee business success, any more than regular exercise will turn you into a top athlete, but that self-knowledge together with other factors might enhance business success. I'd include collective self-knowledge here as well as personal self-knowledge.

But is that necessarily true? A contrary view of business success is that it is sometimes associated with a single-minded obsession, which too much self-knowledge might conceivably undermine. And as Jon pointed out, "self-knowledge might dictate a need for more 'balance' in life vs. the grind/obsession of biz success". Jon went on to propose the following formula "self-knowledge ~ biz goals aligned with values ~ visibility in your field ~ intimate dialogue with customers ~ market relevance ~ success"

Jon's formula calls out for a VPEC-T analysis. Self-knowledge is a Policy that aligns Events and Content with Values. And to get the intimate dialogue with customers (Trust), we need a particular kind of self-knowledge, sometimes referred to as authenticity. That's quite the opposite of single-minded obsession.

A Job Description for Systems Thinking

Michael Zang asked how to distill the essence of Systems Thinking into a job description?

Michael's question starts with the challenge of "selling" the idea of a Systems Director to an organization with little experience in this area. The job description therefore contributes to at least four different objectives.

1. To create vision and confidence that there is a job worth doing here (in other words selling).
2. To help select a suitable candidate for the job, without unduly narrowing the field.
3. To help determine a reasonable remuneration for the job.
4. To provide guidance and support to the job-holder, without unduly constraining initiative and innovation.

One of the challenges of a "job description" for systems thinking is that the traditional job description represents a fixed decomposition of responsibilities within the organization. The job-holder is required to carry out such-and-such specified activities, and produce such-and-such specified outcomes. This kind of job description comes out of a reductionist view of the organization. (This remains true even if the description is analysed in terms of systems-friendly "behavioural competences". Absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of reductionism, of course, as long as you don't imagine it's the whole story.)

Whereas a System Director will be working on the whole enterprise-as-a-system and the outcomes may be hard to define in advance. Maybe that's why there aren't many of them.

If you are going to have a System Director, that person will be a leader of systems thinking across the organization, not just going into a darkened room to "do systems thinking" with a small bunch of like-minded chums. In fact, you may follow her around the office and not see any activity that corresponds to a text-book description of what systems thinking is supposed to look like, but things just start to shift in interesting and positive ways.

So one way to explore the role of a System Director would be using the VPEC-T systems thinking framework. The "Content" of the job is presumably about system thinking and transformation, but the other elements (especially "Values" and "Trust") are perhaps more about Leadership.

A typical way of running an organization is that there is collective leadership exercised by all the directors together (notwithstanding the obvious fact that some directors will have more power than others) and in addition each director provides leadership in one specialist area. The role of Systems Director implies that one director is a specialist in systems thinking and systems practice, and brings this specialism (the Content in VPEC-T terms) to the general role of leadership.

Simply by opening up a discussion about the nature of leadership roles within an organization, and using a system-thinking lens like VPEC-T to provide a light structure to the discussion, could be a really good way of edging the organization into new ways of tackling complex problems.

The question of Trust is clearly a major issue for any organization. The System Director will draw a decent salary (presumably commensurate with her status in the organization), consume other resources, demand time and attention from her peers, push people out of their comfort zones, and so on, all for the sake of some uncertain and unquantifiable benefits to the organization. There is a much greater commitment here than employing an external consultant, so a considerable degree of trust is required.

But "selling" is not just getting an organization to accept the idea of "Systems Director". What's more important is for the organization to be able to trust the person occupying this role.

And in many unreflective organizations, people are trusted if and only if they fit the organization's stereotype of what people should be like. And yet someone who fits this stereotype may be unable to perform the role. So there is a critical tension to be confronted here.

For me then, what's most interesting about the job description is not the contents of the finished document (competences, outcomes, and so on) but the process of negotiating it - so that it provides a focus for critical discussions between stakeholders and their advisers that will help set appropriate expectations about the role, and start to build the trust that will be required.

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Afterword

When this question was put to the Linked-In Systems Thinking group, some of the discussants went to some slightly unproductive places, perhaps responding in advance to positions they imagined others might take. For example, arguing which of the many available schools of systems thinking should be written into the job description. (My own opinion is that it would be better to keep the job description as neutral as possible rather than writing it in the language of any one school in particular.) There was also some (in my view wholly unnecessary) deprecation of people who don't share The Vision, dismissing them as left-brained Cartesians, with a special dig at accountants. One of the enemies of the systems approach (as identified by Churchman) is politics. Even in a Systems Thinking discussion group (which a naive person might imagine would know better) we can see how easily how schism emerges and the debate gets unnecessarily politicized.

Pick a Number

#systemsthinking #deming @dpjoyce asks "Anyone know where exactly Deming's 95% came from? Was is actual data? Vanguard also quote this, what did they study?"

Deming and his followers use a figure of 95% in at least two different contexts. 

• 95% of problems are system-related (whatever that means)
  
• 95% of the so-called improvement initiatives are futile because people don’t know the profound knowledge or competency

Vanguard repeats the first claim. For example "They found that 95% of the answers were down to a problem with the system rather than the worker." (via David Joyce). But this only makes sense if you draw the boundaries of the system to exclude the worker, which many systems thinkers would find puzzling or perverse.

I have found two sources that credit the second observation to Peter Scholtes.

• Nomination for the Deming medal (Peter Scholtes website)
• Pareto Distribution: Deming, Juran and Simon’s Rule and Worlds of Knowledge (Hanching Seminars and Consulting, 1998/11)

I tend to read this kind of claim as more rhetorical than scientific. Not only is it hard to find any empirical study that might support this kind of claim, it is difficult to see what kind of evidence might be adduced.

As I pointed out in my paper Reasoning about Systems and their Properties, to decide that one intervention is successful and another is futile is an act of interpretation, and assumes we know which system we are talking about, from whose perspective, with what timescale, and so on. In order to have any credible basis for dismissing an intervention as "futile" or "meddling" or "tampering", you actually have to do a full systems analysis on the case, and the results could still be disputed. You can't jump to conclusions - "Oh, this didn't work, so the people who attempted it obviously didn't know what they were doing" - because success and failure and their causes are extremely complex, and well-chosen interventions based on a deep and thorough systems analysis may also sometimes fail.

If this 95% were both meaningful and true, what would be the consequences for action, and what would be a reasonable target for improvement? Writing books and articles complaining about a general lack of management profundity, or the folly of "The Regime", looks suspiciously like an ineffectual meddle rather than a well-chosen intervention with a well-designed outcome. Will Deming's followers take their own medicine? See my post Easier Seddon Done.

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See also Paul Hebert on Deming and Systems in Today's Business World - No Answers Just Questions, pondering whether the 95% still applies to knowledge/software or whether a 50%/50% split would fit better (via @baob)

Consultancy as Diplomacy

In The Rules of the Game (TLS, 28 Oct 2009),  Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former ambassador to the United Nations, has written a review in praise of Satow's Diplomatic Practice, described as an "internationally acknowledged authority on the practice of diplomacy" and first published in 1917.

Is this elderly tome still relevant? Greenstock argues that it is, saying "we need to know what constitutes good practice." So I was intrigued to compare some of these snippets of best practice in diplomacy with what might be regarded as best practice in consultancy.

"To adhere to a standard formula, often during a tense situation, has a reassuringly businesslike quality to it. As with legal language, it sounds strange but it is effective."

"Listen more than you talk; stay calm in every circumstance; don’t show off that you are privy to secrets."

"A diplomat carries few weapons, but the most important of them is his or her own credibility, both with the government at home and with colleagues and sparring partners out in the field. Words have to be wisely chosen, of course; and a radical openness, while engaging, is a tactical risk. But straightforward deceit rarely pays."

Why are diplomats needed at all, in these days of modern communication and summit meetings? Greenstock is clearly convinced that professional diplomacy is an important complement to the political rough-and-tumble. "What could be more sensible and efficient than direct business between the experts concerned conducted in plain language? Someone, however, has to pull the threads together and take a strategic view." In Greenstock's opinion, that person is the professional diplomat. I know consultants who have a similarly high opinion of the consultant's unique ability to take the strategic view.

There is always the possibility of tension between diplomats and their political masters, and Greenstock gives some interesting examples where he and his peers took the initiative and went beyond their official brief. The ability to take such initiatives may be partly justified by his observation that "Experienced diplomats swimming with the flow of global events have as good a chance as anyone of spotting something better than a zero-sum game". In the same edition of TLS, there is a short article on Margaret Thatcher's German War, which reveals a mismatch between Thatcher's largely anti-German values and policy and the rather more conciliatory diplomatic activity of her officials. (Perhaps an opportunity for a VPEC-T analysis?)

Clearly consultants have something to learn from diplomacy, but is best practice enough? Comments please?