Organizationsof interdependent people

working together

Mikkel H Brahm

Chief Enterprise Architect

Mikkel Haugsted Brahm

• 20+ years experience with change management involving IT• Special interest in Enterprise Architecture, Strategizing, Business Design

• Practical IT (Datamatiker & Datanom) from Business College 1993/’99• Wanted to help businesses develop by developing supporting IT for them

• Diploma (HD-O) from Copenhagen Business School 2007• Grappled with how a business actually controls the development of its IT

• Enrolled in Doctor of Managament (PhD) programme 2014-2017• Basis in Complex Responsive Processes of Relating and Narrative Inquiry• Emerging themes: Power, Domination, Expertise, Judgement, Materiality

So, what is my field of work then?

• Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes. • EA delivers value by presenting business and IT leaders with signature-ready

recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes that capitalize on relevant business disruptions.• EA is used to steer decision making toward the evolution of the future state

architecture.

Source: Gartner IT Glossary, 2014

My interpretation of what Gartner says EA is

• I have to find someone who knows the future and get him to spill his guts,so that I can get “desired business vision and outcomes” from that• Then I have to stand outside the organisation I am a part of

to find out where it is going “identifying and analyzing the execution of change”• Now I just have to dominate everybody

into changing direction to where I want them to go, using“signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects”• And to get help in dominating everyone else,

I should start by dominating top management, i.e.“steer decision making”

The Zachman Framework

• the Zachman Framework is a schema, not a methodology, and it does not imply anything about how you do EA…• The framework is like a

Periodic Table, it deals with the elementary composition of descriptive representations. In any science, you have to discover the elementary structure before anything becomes predictable and repeatable.

Source: A conversation with John Zachman in Journal of Enterprise Architecture, 2005, Volume 1, Number 1

Our roots in natural sciences

General Systems Theory

Strategic Choice and Systems Theory

• Both cybernetic and cognitivism … take the position of the objective observer who stands outside the system of interest and makes hypotheses about it. They build models of the system to guide behaviour. The emphasis is on the ability to control.

• We say, 'The wind is blowing', as if the wind were actually a thing at rest which, at a given point in time, begins to move and blow… Our language tend to place at the forefront of our attention … the character of things in a state of rest. Furthermore, they tend to express all change and action … as something additional rather than integral…• This constant process-reduction results in the changeless aspects of all

phenomena being interpreted as most real and significant.

Source: Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

Source: Norbert Elias, What is Sociology

Being reflective and reflexivetaking experience serious

• Empirical research in a reflective mode starts from a sceptical approach to what appear at a superficial glance as unproblematic replicas of the way reality functions, while at the same time maintaining the belief that the study of suitable (well thought out) excerpts from this reality can provide an important basis for a generation of knowledge that opens up rather than closes, and furnishes opportunities for understanding rather than establishes ‘truths’.• The idea that measurements, observations, the statements of interview

subjects… have an unequivocal or unproblematic relationship to anything outside the empirical material is rejected on principle.• Interpretation comes to the forefront of the research work… Reflection can, in

the context of empirical research, be defined as the interpretation of interpretation and the launching of a critical self-exploration of one’s own interpretations of empirical material (including its construction).

Source: Mats Alvesson and Kaj Sköldberg, Reflexive Methodology – New Vistas for Qualitative Research

Individual behaviour versus the Social Actmeaning emerges from gestures and responses

George Herbert Mead

Gesture and response processes

• Mead … thought of one body making a gesture to another body where the gesture calls out, or evokes, a response from that other body. That response is itself a gesture back to the first body which, in turn, evokes a further response. What we have, then, is ongoing responsive processes, which Mead called the conversation of gestures, where beginnings and endings are purely arbitrary.

• Gesture and response can never be separated - they are moments in one act• Consciousness => significant symbol => evoke similar responses in gesturer as in the

person gestured to• Gesture and response together constitute a social act in which meaning arises for both

so that knowing is a property of interaction, or relationship

Source: Ralph Stacey, Strategic Management and Orgnisational Dynamics,Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

George Herbert Mead

The I/me dialogue

The individualthe atomic unit of social?

Family

Sailing

Work

Norbert Elias

Relationships as the atomic unit of social

Child

FatherFather

Subordinate

MotherManager

SonDaughter

Subordinate

Instructor

Wife

Club secretary

Competitor

Colleague

Norbert Elias

Functional dependency => Power figuration

• Whether the power differentials are large or small, balances of power are always present wherever there is functional interdependence between people.

• We say that a person possesses great power, as if power were a thing he carried about in his pocket… Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by another; it is a structural characteristic of human relationships – of all human relationships.

• Concepts of balances are far more adequate for what can actually be observed in investigating the nexus of functions which interdependent human beings have for each other, than are concepts modelled on stationary objects.

• Function must be understood as a concept of relationship. We can only speak of social functions when referring to interdependencies which constrain people to a greater and lesser extend [and paradoxically simultaneously enables people].

Source: Norbert Elias, What is Sociology?

James C Scott

Public transcript and Hidden transcript• By controlling the public stage, the dominant can create an appearance that

approximates what, ideally, they would want subordinates to see. The deception – or propaganda – they devise may add padding to their stature but it will also hide whatever might detract from their grandeur and authority.• The point of [hierarchies] is simply that they assume that there are no horizontal

links among subordinates and that … the master represents the only link joining them… they are mere atoms with no social existence.• The hidden transcript is a social product and hence the result of power relations

among subordinates... [it] exists only to the extend it is practiced, articulated, enacted, and disseminated within these offstage social sites.• The social spaces where the hidden transcript grows are themselves an

achievement of resistance; they are won and defended in the teeth of power.Source: James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance – Hidden Transcripts

Different ways of knowing

• Novice > Advanced Beginner > Competent > Proficient > Expert• The novice adheres rigidly to rules and plans, shows no sensitivity to context and does

not exercise discretionary judgment.• Those who reach capacities of proficiency and expertise do not rely on rules at all, and

insisting that rules be followed amounts to the destruction of proficiency and expertise.

• Episteme (universal knowledge), Techne (craft or art) and Phronesis (practical judgement)• Phronetic knowledge is acquired through experience, and can only be understood by

taking a reflective stance in relation to that experience. Since that experience is always social, phronesis is essentially a social way of knowing.

• Phronetic knowledge is very difficult to articulate and cannot be reduced to rules, principles or propositions, which means that the tools and techniques of technical rationality cannot produce the kind of practical judgment required of an expert.

Source: [Aristotle in] Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

Source: Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Mind over Machine

Robert Jackall

Rehearsal and Judgement calls

• Rehearsals may prepare one principally for the ongoing internal organizational drama… rehearsals often focus on developing ”defensible” rationales for action.

• First, managers cast around a variety of perspectives in order to ”cover all the bases” and see the situation at hand from many angles of vision.

• … it becomes clear … that certain explanations rather than others should be the point of focus.

• … the decisive moment … comes when a managerial circle, or key members of it, decides that a certain rationale ”is the way to go”, one with which they ”feel comfortable.”.. The measure of that comfort becomes a confidence in the casuistry necessary to persuade others that one’s stories are plausible and one’s choices reasonable.

• Rehearsal also encourage the most subtle form of hype, namely convincing oneself of one’s own rectitude.

Source: Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes – the world of corporate managers

Hannah Arendt

Final Speech

• The trouble with a Nazi criminal like Eichmann was that he insisted on renouncing all personal qualities, as if there was nobody left to be either punished or forgiven. He protested time and again, contrary to the Prosecution's assertions, that he had never done anything out of his own initiative, that he had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, that he had only obeyed orders.• Since Socratis and Plato we usually call thinking to be engaged in that silent

dialogue between me and myself. In refusing to be a person Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality, that of being able to think. And consequently he was no longer capable of making moral judgements.• The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell

right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.

Complex Responsive Processes of Relatinga theory of social action

• Patterns of social interaction emerge across a population in myriad local interactions. • Local interactions are complex responsive processes of relating encompassing

communicative interaction, relations of power, and the desires, ambitions, intentions and choices of interdependent individuals which reflect values and norms, that is, ideologies.

• Patterns of communication, forms of power, norms and values all emerge through the interplay of individual and group choices in local interaction.

• Since the patterns are arising in local interactions, they cannot be designed or intended, as a whole.

• Whole patterns are dynamically reproduced from moment to moment in local habitual interactions, and it is in these local interactions that they also, at the same time, change.

Source: Ralph Stacey, Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

Being in command, but not in control

What is organisation or organising?… and how do you then participate in changes thereof?

• Whenever people do something together, they also organise the “doing together” of what they do – this is organising/organisation• Power arises from interdependency and is never equally distributed• Organisation and power figurations are always in flux (i.e. no “states”)• Meaning is negotiated in the Social Act of gesture/response• We can participate in organising and thus in change, but not control it• If we are perceptive and reflexive we can help to deepen the social

understanding of the changes we participate in• Expertise is not achieved by following prescriptive rules or

methodologies, but through reflecting on experience

What is Enterprise?… and how do you then architect it?

• Business transactions in which our organization is an involved party also involve other organisations• To mitigate lack of control dominating powers have emerged in the

civilising process such as “kings” and “judges” i.e. the “legal system”• Business parties/contracts are also legal entities/agreements• The market has the processes, information and technologies of the

enterprise(s) our organisation participates in• Thus enterprise architecture emerges in a wider market, is never in

any steady state and emerges without our direct control

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