If we've ever worked together, you know that I ask a lot of questions. Drives some people nuts, but it is what it is. I am trying to get to both a core set of truths and a common vocabulary for us to work from. And if we haven't worked together in a while - sorry to say, this has only gotten worse over time. ;)
I ask even more questions than I ever have, because what I am doing is piecing together a picture, or visual image, for all involved to be able to "see" and anchor to in their minds as we find alignment on the what, why, and how of things.
And selfishly, I ask a lot of questions so that I can understand things as widely and deeply as I possibly can, so that when this newly captured understanding is synthesized with existing, structured knowledge, it can enable new thoughts and new potential paths to explore.
Where Do I Even Start?
What I'm observing - and documenting here in this article - is my own natural process for making sense of a number of ideas that have emerged in my head and that I have captured over the past several years.
I am trying to find my footing with a "coherent stream-of-consciousness" flow in my writing, which I have finally found my purpose and motivation for. What I am trying to do is externalize my internal thoughts in a way that demonstrates a process or framework that you may be able to apply to your own thinking or workflows.
And for my own purposes, I am applying my own meta-cognitive systems and methods for capturing, categorizing, understanding, storing, retrieving, and applying knowledge and information to problem solving and complex systems design.
Let's see how this goes.
Begin With No End In Mind
I know that in order to be a highly successful people you have to follow seven habits, with one of them being "Begin With the End In Mind."
Steven Covey may roll over when I say this, but in the case of essentially developing nothing (an idea) into something (a value-creating implementation or application of that idea), the last thing you want to do is limit the potential of the idea by trapping it in preconceived notions or desired outcomes.
I do not have a plan. I do not want to have a plan. Or at least, not yet. I am choosing to intentionally "Begin With No End In Mind."
There is a plan out there somewhere, and we will find it, but it doesn't make sense to dive into planning anything this early in the process, when we haven't even had a chance to figure out what problem it is we're solving for, let alone formulate a vision for something we don't yet understand ourselves.
And yes, I am aware that this level of ambiguity and uncertainty makes brains explode. But true creativity and innovation live in liminal spaces that we do not control and cannot simply conjure up.
So we have to keep making sense of what we know right now, knowing that it will lead to something that is only knowable in the future.
The path forward makes itself visible when it's ready to emerge - and no sooner.
The End Has No End
Now for the truly brain-explody part - some things last a long time. In fact, they may outlast you. Hell, they may even last forever as far as we'll ever know.
This runs counter to how we think our modern world operates - messy, loud, and ephemeral. Built to spill, not built to last.
So we have to wrap our minds around a concept that is core to my foundational design principles - unless we are explicitly building something intended to be temporary or short-lived, we are building something that will outlive us. Hopefully outlive us by a long, long time.
We are building resilient systems that will not only hold up to, but be adaptable to, future conditions and challenges.
We are designing, implementing, and maintaining architectures - whatever the hell they end up looking like or even being - that outlive the politics and power structures that may have enabled them to be in the first place.
We have to think beyond the now, and think in a way that always scans the horizon for, and eventually anticipates, future opportunities to pursue and risks to mitigate.
We have to design systems that aren't built and deployed in single, Herculean efforts that leave humans, teams, and organizations burnt to a crisp.
We have to design systems that create the conditions for new ideas to develop and emerge, free from legacy thinking and structural or institutional constraints.
We have to design systems for a future that we can't possibly see in advance, but we know will be absolutely bonkers.
This Is the End
The tangible output of this thinking led me to a treasure trove of problems to be addressed, and maybe even solved one day.
You can see that it's not the easiest thing in the world to articulate big thoughts, and I think for the sake of our collective attention spans I'll land the plane on these thoughts and think through what comes next.
This note represents my attempt to brain dump what I saw were some of the underlying, fundamental challenges I am trying to solve for, in this case specifically commercial enterprises.
What enterprise problems are we trying to solve for?
I'm finding myself straddling this in-between space that separates the highly conceptual and abstract from the concrete (and generally known).
I'm also finding that every time I write, it's generating a metric sh*t-ton of new ideas that I've been capturing and will eventually build on, which is creating both new opportunities and challenges in itself.
So to attempt the graceful dismount for this article, let's wrap it up with this:
- This note was the output of the question I posed to myself - "What problems am I solving for?"
- After stirring up that hornets nest in my head and pacing back and forth on the porch about 16,000 times, this brain dump emerged.
- I didn't know where this would go when I started it, and now that I have completed the brain dump exercise, I will reflect on this output to begin the process of organizing the thoughts into a more logical and coherent structure,
What's Next?
I kinda-sorta see this breaking down into the next 3 article concepts:
- Articulating the problem space in terms of strategic business or organizational objectives and challenges - for example, where I have "FIREFIGHTING" with "LIFO PROBLEM" underneath, that could be an entire article (or even series) in itself, but how do we apply that to the design of a potential system or commercial application in a way that addresses the problem space in a meaningful way?
- Articulating the technical architecture challenges enterprises face - and that we will be solving for articulated in terms of the common and widely understood "MVC" architectural pattern. You'll notice that I have sections for "Enterprise Applications," "Enterprise UX," and "Enterprise Data" - my thought here is that by anchoring abstract concepts to known constructs and frameworks, we can get to a meeting of the minds faster.
- Articulating the opportunity space in terms of rethinking existing technology stacks and preparing for emerging technologies - on the note, the big concept that everything ties back to - and still the elephant in the room at this point in the Generative / Agentic AI hype cycles - is how can AI add significant value in the enterprise? I also believe that the entire concept of enterprise knowledge management needs to be completely blown up and realigned to the mechanical realities of how information and knowledge flow, and how that knowledge can be nurtured and cultivated in future applications.
What do you think?
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