3/4/10 Abundance in a Time of Scarcity

Oh dear, I've been so busy I neglected to mention--Grady Booch's Part II of "Software Abundance in the Face of Economic Scarcity" is wonderful! Grady has such a talent for capturing the essential with deft brevity yet conveying with such vividness!

(I should learn from him, huh?! Oh yeah, right, every other question you treat as rhetorical, but this you're prepared to tell me you agree with. Hmmpf!)

3/5/10 Architecture, Integrity and Leadership

In childhood development, most children progress from playing alone, to playing independently but side-by-side, to playing fully co-operative games. In software, we tend to regress. :-)  I tease, mostly myself. But it is something to think about. One approach to "collaborating" is to do some serial and parallel work and cobble it together. And another approach is to enter more fully into the undoing of collaborating, that making something entirely different possible because the stasis of our own thinking patterns has been disrupted by the astonishing others we get to work with. Bumping into other minds in a trusting, respectful way, puts us on a different trajectory. The new connections that are the very essence of innovation are made possible by the surprising new insights we ourselves have, once we allow others to bump the dust off our sights and blend what they now see with what we now see. (This sounds very "rose colored lenses" and one can devil's advocate any interesting proposition! So it is worth remembering: Context is king, while diversity is queen. And out of their marriage, innovation is born.)

At the same time, the system will have distinguishing design integrity only if this is what someone pays attention to, and that someone has to be the architect.  What we build in ourselves is what enables us to build in the world. While this is a nice little idea for all of humanity, it is especially important for the architect. This is because the demands on the architect are so multi-dimensional, but most importantly the architect must have a finely tuned individual aesthetic and be able to move that into design excellence that is a curious kind of excellence for it is at once highly compromised and not--which is to say that it is pragmatic without being mediocre, not even close! Alternatively put, the circle of excellence is clear and the vectors of good-enough are just that, and no less. Now a purely technical architect can strive for technical greatness, but will fall short because design is not only a technical matter. Yes, designs are killed with shoddy structure, but great designs do more than stand up to stresses and strains. There is art in achieving design congruence and balance, simplicity, elegance and understandability, and more. Further, in the words of Rob Forbes (TED, 2006),

"The first job of good design is to serve a social purpose." 

That is, it must serve people--users, developers, the business, and other stakeholders in the value network. Rob Forbes looks at urban spaces for design principles to apply to the design of things we use, and I highly recommend watching that TED talk (on ways of seeing). I mean literally--he travels around the world looking at and taking photos of urban spaces. He integrates that personal journey, that questing, through other dimensions of the world into himself, into how he sees and experiences the world, and that influences his designs, informs them and gives them a unique stamp of individuality and excellence. Now, a lot of what he learns from this applies very directly to our technical design process (the role of patterns, of emergence and happy accident and of intent and governance, to touch on just a few--leaving the joy of discovery in that talk to you), but it also applies to how we see and create value--the composite of capabilities and their qualities that make the system and its architecture.  Remembering that architecture is, yes, about decomposition and relationships, but it is fundamentally about making possible the unique and integrated likeness of being, that "quality with no name" quality of the system (referring, of course, to Christopher Alexander's Timeless Way of Building). The likeness of being that is about simplicity and internal harmony and balance as well as unity, congruence, self-consistency.

A person of integrity is a person who shows up as being good, but also internally aligned. There is no incongruity between the external person we honor and their internal value structure--for misalignment tends to show through. We do have to work hard on ourselves to maintain this internal and internal-external alignment since we're not all Mother Theresa's--not even close. Likewise, design integrity is not just about the skin, nor just about the guts, but also about the congruence between a promise of goodness and internal structures, mechanisms and collaborations that deliver this goodness.

3/5/10 The Curious Thing About Curiosity

In this Conceptual Age (or--if you'll suffer the self-indulgence--this Innovation Age), curiosity is next to imagination and before knowledge, though schools reverse this tuple. Knowledge is important and takes huge work to amass to the point of world-class expertise, I'll grant. And yet it takes imagination to conceive of what is not, and curiosity to explore what is--to ask "why?" and "what if?" and "why not?"--to allow our imagination to begin to invent, to conceive of, what is not. So these are all important to innovation, but imagination and curiosity are what give focus to the discovery and application of knowledge to make something new in the world. Of course, nothing is created in the world without action.

We can build too much in ourselves, and nothing in the world; we can so focus on action, that our actions become meaningless and uninformed--haphazard experiments; and we can try to apply Howard Behar's "Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."

I liked Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind, but I also think tradeoffs are our friends, too. We just have to know, to get clear about, where we will strive for excellence, and where good enough will be just that. Looking for "the integrative solution" is a good discipline, but it is also worthwhile remembering that "doing/having it all" is unlikely to be a good thing for anyone. Striking a balance is important, because it makes us aware of where we are stretching. Where we stretch and strive for excellence takes focus--focus that will be taken away from other things that are also on our slate of concern.

3/6/10 Pinnacles in the Landscape of our Time

Natalie Merchant and Peter Gabriel have set out, in their separate ways, to create albums that let poetry and music delight and rouse us! Leave Your Sleep indeed! Natalie Merchant set out to celebrate childhood, but in doing so produced something that is at once delightful and a deep exploration of music and meaning--thankfully we can preview videos and audio, even though we still have to wait for the album... That is one amazing woman, and she has drawn on collaborations with a world of musicians.

Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back album is out in the US now! I've been too busy to remember that until this moment! I'll have to see if it lives up to the promise of the pre-release material.

3/7/10 Delta Humor

Ok, if you've been "with me" for a while, you've watched Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, and so you know his delta on "if a tree falls in the forest and no-one hears it, did it make a sound?" Well, in case you need reminding, it is "If a man speaks his mind and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" Ok, so here's my delta: "If an architect speaks her mind and no developer hears her, is she still wrong?" As I've told you, that talk is just ripe for parlaying into software terms!

3/7/10 Competing on a Circle of Excellence

I'm suggesting "Competing on a Circle of Excellence: Differentiating where it matters" as a title for a talk I've been invited to do. The "differentiating where is matters" leverages the double entendre--figuring out where excellence matters, and differentiating (competitively) on what matters. Oh, right, the primary audience is product managers, but I think it should be relevant to architects too.