How will the market model for the energy market develop? How can the youth wellbeing in all its complexity be managed in the Netherlands?

As information architects we aim to arriving somehow at a stable set of principles, domain models or business requirements. But with the above shown type of questions active in the business or organizational architecture, stability is hard to get. And as we are conceptualizers more and more of these questions will hit us hard. We have to be able to define and get hold of these kinds of complex worlds. How do we cope with this?

This weekend I have tried to find new fibers to an answer. My starting point this time: Karl Weick. I happen to have a copy of his book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity unread on my bookshelf. That should give me some leads.

And it did. It lead me to differentiation between routine problems and complex problems with ambiguous issues, weak signals and poorly defined problems. It lead me to the Cynefin framework, which illustrates this fine. And it renewed my interest for the complex adaptive system domain, especially the application of this to organizations.

Besides a better insight, it also brought me on the trail to practical solutions for handling these complex situations. In the form of methods labeled contextualizing / multi-ontology and sense-making. These methods formalize what we already are doing: we bring actors with different points of view together to interact and to give meaning to the situation. But in this case using stories and annecdotes.

Maybe my experience in telling fairy tales to my children will come in handy afterall.

Rijk van Vulpen is enterprise architect at Caerleon.

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