Both are also convinced that life can emerge from created objects.  Kauffman considers humankind to be co-creators (along with all other living things) of a universe that is itself in a constant state of renewal and re-creation.   For him, the biosphere is the evolutionary source of life, agency, meaning, and values.  As part of the biosphere, we are enhancing it through our own emergent, self-organizing behavior.    As such, the biosphere evolves from its present state into the adjacent possible.  The adjacent possible depends on the state of the biosphere we inhabit when we act.  The conditions that constrain the adjacent possible start to sound familiar once you’ve looked at Peter Csermely’s Weak Links, James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, or even Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.  Things like diversity, organizational laws beyond those of physics (e.g., small worlds, scale-free distributions, nesting, etc.), emergence, self-organization, and criticality all matter in the unfolding from the current state into the adjacent possible.  Unfortunately, we can’t predict how unfolding will work because we don’t know the preadaptations or variables that will be selected by the environment as we move into the future.  We only develop insights retrospectively – as he says, “We do, in fact, live forward into mystery.”  As we move forward, though, we create new “salients” or centers in Alexander’s vocabulary, which are preadaptations for the next creative move; i.e., they bias the course that evolution will take through the Adjacent Possible.  (Maybe that’s why McLuhan was right when he said, “The Medium is the Message.” )  For Kauffman, the “Sacred” is the creative power of the universe in which we all share — what many, including perhaps Alexander, would call “God.”

While Kauffman finds God in the universe’s continual re-creation, Alexander views human creation as a vehicle through which to perceive the “I” or “self” that abides both within each one of us and throughout the universe.  He talks about wholeness as a kind of light that transcends structure, and he says that light is actually a glimpse of the Luminous Ground, in which all are related to each other and to the life in the world.  To attain the light in one’s creation, he says, requires humility and egolessless.  In acting as a midwife to the creativity of that particular set of centers, the architect allows the forces to resolve themselves just as they might have on their own if they had had the power.  According to Alexander, the goal of the artist or architect is to offer their efforts to God in such a way that no attention is drawn to themselves.  When they are successful, his 15 characteristics of life should be visible in the creation.  As discussed in my 2008 PLoP paper, I believe these characteristics are visible because the artist / architect / developer has followed the same rules that nature follows in the stabilization of complex systems.

Alexander’s view of unfolding seems more top-down or singular than Kauffman’s because he believes that there is only one perfect resolution of the forces that should be called forth from the centers and their forces.  Kauffman allows for an energy landscape that predisposes certain creative paths without specifying exactly which one will be selected.  Their views seem consistent with their views of theism — Kauffman believes there is no reason to assume a Creator God is or ever was at work in our universe, while Alexander believes that we create best when we dedicate our efforts to allowing that Creator God to shine through our work.  Both believe that life and values are different than the physical structures from which they emerge, and both believe that reductionist science will need to accommodate spirituality to be relevant to our ever more complex world.

I had no analog for the site itself — that place where the designer confronts the limitations of the current world and the possibilities of its future.  It occurred to me that every organization has processes (both IT and business), though they may or may not be effective, efficient, or valuable.  Walking the site to find those places that are beautiful and inspiring might rely on the building of Geertz’s thick description as advocated by people like Dave West.  Plumbing the depths of that thick description might bring previously unsuspected aspects of the organization to light.  Building on the strengths of the people, methods, and tools discovered during the study might involve appreciative inquiry and the imaginations of all the participants affected by the organization’s processes as they engage in exercises aimed at understanding their organization, themselves, and their shared future.

Designing the pedestrian path to encourage person-to-person or person-to-system engagement and positive experiences in the domain, application, and quality of service spaces would become an exercise in shared theory-building.  Alexander talks about the luminosity of certain colors and visceral resonance of certain spatial configurations.  Reaching these lofty goals within the wiki design in a way such that it gives voice to the systems, users, customers, and system maintainers through the process of theory building would require major changes to the way we build software today.

I think the question posed when a new problem or opportunity is identified would have to change from “What processes or applications should we build to support this?” to “What prevents us from doing this now?”  Here, we get into the area of weak links, where reconfiguring existing nodes might be enough to support the desired solution, but if we don’t have access to the current state of the total organizational system, we can never tell whether that is a possible solution or not.  This is the reason I want to build a system like the one described in Invite Your System to the Party.  We started the process at one client, but never had the opportunity to see it grow and develop the social processes that might deliberately reverse the direction of Conway’s Law by architecting a unifying solution to improve the organization’s communication processes.

That’s my hope for the wiki pedestrian path — that it becomes a unifying force supporting a common vision of a mutually accommodating future.

Thoughts?

This distribution comes close to his stated ideal of equal parts of the site being dedicated to each of these four purposes, as opposed to the current distribution being primarily dedicated to roads.  In trying to draw analogies to software, I thought about how I would apply this idea to what I do every day.  At  a recent client, I felt that we needed a place for both people and systems in the organization to come together.  To support this goal, we built a wiki that I believe is analogous to the yellow pedestrian path. The wiki was meant to be a place for people to capture their thoughts about their business language, their processes and the systems they were using,  and it was also a place for system and process metadata to expose itself so that it could be connected to those thoughts.  In addition, it was meant to be a place that inspires conversations as business concepts evolve and new systems are built to extend support for internal business processes or integrate with external systems.  I described a pattern language framework for this wiki in a PLoP 2009 submission based on this client’s situation where business analysts were constantly scrambling to describe the system before each project began.  Our solution was to invite them to act as gardeners for the neighborhood, thus refocusing their efforts on promoting conversations and continually documenting the results so that each new project could just unfold from the current state of the system as captured in the wiki.

From the wiki pedestrian path, there is a natural progression into each of the system applications, which in my mental model correspond to the gray buildings housing workshops and residences along the pedestrian path.  In these application buildings, particular services are offered to the business, and people who frequent these buildings move in and out of the wiki space, sharing what they found inside with others on the wiki path.

The green garden areas feel like they reflect business services dedicated to making the business processes more comfortable, robust and adaptable.  The garden areas used by the applications mentioned above are private gardens because they correspond to services accessed by a particular application, while the public gardens along the pedestrian path are available to any application in the business – generally associated with enterprise services.  These gardens are natural extensions of the original domain as it was encountered before rebuilding began.

Finally, the red roads which connect the neighborhood to both residents and outsiders feel like the hardware and platform infrastructure on which the system runs.  These are relegated to the periphery so that they don’t interfere with delivering support for the business, but they are positioned close to the wiki path to facilitate reaching it and its adjacent amenities.

Giving each of these four concerns (wiki pedestrian path, application buildings,  service gardens, and network infrastructure) approximately one fourth of the total effort would likely result in a very different development methodology and budgeting process from what we traditionally see in industry.  Understanding when one area should be emphasized more or less, and what that emphasis implies would then become a new competency that is currently unavailable either in schools or in the workplace.  Maybe that’s a direction we need to be heading.

Thoughts?

Immediately after heat stress, when proteins have a tendency to refold very quickly, chaperones are almost the only proteins synthesized because their critical healing functionality is so desperately needed to prevent the misfolded proteins from causing harm to the host organism.  Once the damage is handled, the chaperones return to their normal state of many low-affinity relationships with each other and the local proteins.  When they are in this weakly linked state, they help relaxation when the local system is perturbed, and they increase system integrity by buffering noise and variation. That means, even if a nasty mutation did happen, as long as there are chaperones functioning, the organism didn’t have to worry.  When nasty mutations happened in the absence of chaperones, affected Drosophila offspring suffered missing, misplaced, and misshapen eyes, wings, and legs — not something you want to encounter on a dark night.  Some mutations aren’t nasty; they’re essential if conditions change later on, but they would be bad news if released under current conditions, so chaperones buffer these, leaving them available for later use.

When I read Tom DeMarco’s Slack, I couldn’t help associating middle managers with the role of chaperones.  I always think of their role as  gatekeepers (letting the right information into the team) and firewalls (keeping the pests away).  They’re the ones who should insulate and protect the team, but as a result of downsizing, right-sizing, layoffs, and firings, organizations have flattened their hierarchies, often by removing the very chaperones who could give teams a chance to heal and become productive again when they make mistakes.  So, if there’s a mutation/mistake now, it may turn up later on some dark night in a hideous form that no one will want to encounter.   And the team likely won’t have time to pocket the lesson learned from that mistake for when it becomes applicable down the road a bit.

If middle management isn’t there to protect teams, there’s no one charged specifically to reflect on whether what we’re doing is what we should be doing, whether we’re doing it as well as we need to, and whether we need to help somebody else with what they’re doing.  I guess that mean’s we’re all charged with those responsibilities if we want to prevent future monster encounters.

That’s one reason I’m writing this blog.  The other is: I took an assessment today (from this site) that said I was a unifying Inquirer and needed to work on taking action instead of collecting information forever.  At first, I was miffed — after all, people at work count on me to take action, but then I remembered all the papers I’m supposed to be writing.  I’m always trying to collect more information before making a commitment on paper, but I can never capture it all, so I’m asking for your comments to save me from having to read every book there is.

I’ll introduce a definition for weak links tonight and expound more later.  Weak links are those links that could be removed from a system without affecting its normal behavior — your spare tire is probably a weak link because you could remove it and still drive your car around.  Where weak links really shine is when the strong links we count on break.  That’s why weak links are stabilizers — they cost us energy to maintain, so we often ignore them, but we do so at our own peril.

Tom Demarco calls these weak links Slack – the middle managers who keep out the churn but facilitate helpful relationships with people, information and skills across the company (like ScrumMasters who are doing a good job).  Slack is also the downtime where we can let off steam and give the stresses we’ve accumulated have a chance to dissipate.  Or the time we give ourselves to consider “Does this decision still make sense in light of what we’ve just learned?”  If we don’t have slack, we are probably relying just on strong links, and our process may well be susceptible to perturbations that might destroy it.

I wrote a paper for PLoP 2008 on weak links where I compared the weak link stabilization for different methodologies, but I’d be interested to hear from you.   So, tell me, what kinds of weak links do you incorporate into your process to keep it from falling apart?