Agility and Agile are Brand Names!

In Enterprise Agility, an Attempt to Get to the Bone, I mentioned that agility and agile are not brand names although vendors would like the idea.  Apparently, I was wrong.  I admit the mistake!

When reading all that is being written about agility and agile I can only conclude that I was terribly wrong.  Seemingly the tsunami of marketing indoctrination by vendors and consultants has done its work: Agile and agility have become brand names!

Why am I writing all of this? Just a few (contradictory) statements that I have found:

• Agile is a method, a production method in fact, of course delivering agility.
• Agility is an attribute of an organisation or a business unit.
• Organizations don’t simply become agile. They’re either agile or not.

Once again,  for just a small moment, let’s return to the original meaning of both words:

Agility noun the ability of moving quickly and easily

Agile adjective marked by the ability of moving quickly and easily

As an act of freedom, I broaden “moving” by replacing “moving” with “changing”, as moving is changing and changing is moving, and that word is better suited for what I am interested in:

Agility noun the ability of changing quickly and easily

Agile adjective marked by the ability of changing quickly and easily

First of all,  agile is a marker, or better an attribute, in fact a “quality” attribute associated with and exhibited by “something”, the object being marked.

Agility is neither a binary “present” or “absent”, and agile neither “true” or “false”. It is however better or worse, and that only with a specific purpose in mind.

I don’t read anything of a method, neither a production method.  Consultants have seemingly made many believe that everything agile is about, is their method.  And seemingly that has worked.  Agile is about methods, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t!  Or better, not necessarily. If “something” is the method, or better the method is the object, agile can be an attribute associated with the method.  Can that method be agile?  It depends what the purpose is. For one purpose the method can be agile, for an other it may be not at all.  Enterprise agility is yet an other matter, it is about an other object, and probably an other purpose as well.

I’ll illustrate further with an example:

If someone – a human as object – is wandering across the savanna, to be suddenly surprised by leopards approaching and that someone is able to move quickly and easily so to escape and survive, that someone is agile (marked by the ability) for the purpose of escaping and surviving. The ability could be better or worse. There is a tipping point when worse becomes too bad. With a Land Rover nearby that (s)he could drive, having foreseen the future purpose, (s)he would have been in a superior state of agility than with no means at all.  But there may be even less risky states to be in.  What if (s)he could be beamed up? Wouldn’t that be even a better state to be in? Because, what if the leopards would be able to run faster as the Land Rover could progress?

The state of agility may be good or better aligned with the purpose of escaping leopards. If however the area is abruptly and majorly flooded, the Land Rover may not help at all, and (s)he may drown.  The state of agility may not be aligned with an other purpose, surviving a flood. The more advanced technology solution would still help. Technology doesn’t matter?

Object and purpose!  All that matters is object and purpose!  In fact agility is about the ready ability of an object to timely arrive at a purpose legitimate in a suddenly changing context, here the ability to survive.

With the enterprise as the object that enterprise architects apparently care about:  What is the purpose of the enterprise?

In Re-Creating the Corporation and in even greater detail in On purposeful Systems, Russell L. Ackoff has offered great explanation that systems – and for the purpose of illustration I just accept the abstraction of the enterprise as a system – come in 4 flavors:

System	Parts	Whole
Deterministic	Not purposeful	Not Purposeful
Animated	Not purposeful	Purposeful
Social	Purposeful	Purposeful
Ecological	Purposeful	Not purposeful

An IT system is deterministic, having no purpose of its own, neither its parts. A human is animated, having a purpose of his/her own, but for example his/her stomach, being a part, hasn’t. An enterprise is social, having a purpose of its own, and humans, being parts, having as well.

So what is an enterprise’s primary purpose?  Russel L. Ackoff goes to great lengths to explain that social systems have one  primary purpose and that is surprisingly enough survival.  Hence:

If for an enterprise survival matters, in an ever changing context, the ability of changing quickly and easily is essential because, one day, its state of agility may be too bad.

So next question is:  what are events that the enterprise wants to survive?  One cannot have it all.  Choices will need to be made. Next, getting the enterprise in an aligned state to survive, is what increasing enterprise agility is about.

I admit: the prime purpose of surviving may sound abstract in relation with the enterprise. Therefore I really recommend Russell L. Ackoff’s work.

What about this one?

• It solves world hunger too.

In fact, it may.  If that is the purpose!  Let’s think about the object!

Architecture and the Remainder of Design

In the one comment made to the earlier post Architecture in Context [Revision 1], different aspects are put forward that I also see as key elements in a defining story but in quite different ways as proposed.

One, on which I fundamentally differ in opinion, is about the interpretation of a quote by Grady Booch (@Grady_Booch), a well-known and widely accepted truth about architecture:

All architecture is design but not all design is architecture.

The deduction that I make is that architecture is a part of a whole called design which leaves another part, the remainder of design, resulting in following questions:

• Is there any primacy in these parts?
• Where does architecture end and the remainder of design begin?

In the comment referred to above, is stated that Grady Booch meant to differentiate otherwise, between objective/subjective aspects.   No doubt the objective versus subjective stand towards fit-for-purpose is an important element in a defining story – one that I will later come back to  – but I disagree that the concern is what differentiates design from architecture.  It plays a role but in an other way.

In fact, I cannot find any proof of Grady stating so. Moreover, there is a well-known addition to the quote by Grady Booch (original reference) that points in quite a different direction.

What followed is:

Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.

That more or less has always been my understanding and has a consequence.  It means that the part representing architecture is a relative notion.  Significant means “significant when compared to the cost of change of the whole”.

I’ll present an example taken from the tangible world, to clarify.  If urban architecture is your perspective, the architecture of one specific building is usually not significant. It is therefore part of the remainder of design, at least from that perspective.  If only the building is your perspective, architecture is made up by a part of a whole that in the former perspective completely ended up in the remainder of design.

Grady Booch refers to significant “cost of change” which seems to point to financial measure.  I believe that such an understanding is too restrictive.
Therefore I refer to significant “barriers to change” instead, thereby generalizing more specific barriers like:

• significant number of dependencies. In fact the remainder of design is secondary design as it depends on the architecture and thus will be seriously impacted by change to the architecture
• significant reach, level and/or period of non-operation due to change in progress
• the need for significant transition architecture(s) to overcome the previous
• significant financial cost to change in comparison with the financial cost of the whole, for sure
• significantly hard to gain empowerment needed to enact the change

The latter specific barrier is a reason why most cities have retained old structures over centuries but Paris is an exception.  Napoleon III had not only a considerable amount of power at his disposal but was also a good communicator, hence he succeeded in acquiring the necessary empowerment, to have realized what has been referred to as Haussmann’s renovation.

Hence significant in this context also means that such a change when started abruptly and incautiously is likely to cause anything close to destruction and subsequent recreation with the newly desired fundamental structure. In between old and new, the action would cause the whole to be significantly non-operational.

This all leads to following observation:

Architecture itself is that what is inherently not agile.

The remainder of design is on the other side of the barrier, thus:

The remainder of design is that what is inherently agile.

Thus this makes architecture about agility distribution, structures that can be changed easily and others that cannot:

That distribution may be a reality that we simply find or it may be something that can be influenced through the act of designing thereby turning architecture into an agility distribution instrument, in fact:

Although architecture is “the” prime enabler of agility, architecture itself is that what is inherently not agile.