Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. In this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organisations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. Today, I’m really happy to be joined by Milan Guenther & Annika Klyver. Milan is the president of Intersection Group, co-founder of TeaMenu as a spin-off of his previous work at Enterprise Design Associates and one of the co-authors of Enterprise Design Patterns, besides being also one of the key curators behind EDGY, which is an open source tool set for collaborative enterprise design. Annika, who is also one of the authors of the Enterprise Design Patterns, is a senior business architect that previously worked at Scania, and now at Traton Group, who has also more than 15 years of experience in teaching, enterprise, architecture, enterprise design, information architecture, but as I would say as a consultant and educator, I would say with a focus on making really things happen in organisation, not just talking about it. Milan and Annika, welcome to the show.

 

Annika Klyver 

Thank you very much.

 

Milan Guenther

Thank you.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you for joining us. What brings us together today, I would say, is a conversation around the question that feels increasingly central in organisations, especially as AI is taking, let’s say, the stage, generative AI. What does it really mean to describe, visualise, conceptualise, and maybe eventually operationalise and run an organisation, right?

 

Because organisations are becoming more networked, more software defined, more event driven, and more dependent, I would say, on interoperability across teams, systems, and actors. So something that in the last maybe 15, 20 years was more of a topic for nerdy software developers. So the idea of modelling an enterprise is no longer just an analytical exercise, becoming like an organisational act in itself.

 

So today I love to explore with both of you not just how we map the enterprise, but how we move from mapping to sense making, shared direction. And eventually I would say to what it might mean to make the enterprise more machine-readable, more executable. So in previous conversations, we spoke about this transition from let’s say what you call enterprise design into what you call pressing play and executing the organisation.

 

But maybe as a starting point, maybe it’s good to leave you a little bit of time to, generally explain what has been your adventure for so many years into this space that led you to work together on what you call enterprise design. What is the difference between enterprise design and enterprise architecture, for example, and in general, let’s say, the stage for further conversations. So I leave it to you to maybe give a little overview of how you got there.

 

Milan Guenther 

All right, thank you. Yeah, I guess I can start with a little bit of, I mean, it’s nice that you said for so many years. It feels like, yeah, it’s been quite a ride. So the very simple starting point, yeah, about 20 years ago was that as experienced designers, service designers, we were noticing that a lot of our great visions of future customer experiences, employee user experiences, were not actually implemented. And we saw all sorts of reasons for that, technical reasons, bureaucratic reasons, political reasons, organisational reasons, social reasons. 

 

And so we got to a point where we said, okay, it’s not enough to just design a great product, design a great service, envision a great experience. It’s not enough to find out about the people you are designing for. You have to make the thing itself that is supposed to deliver subject to the design. And this is where we started exploring approaches to do so, and we stumbled as designers actually on this field of enterprise and business architecture, which is already two terms, right? So enterprise architecture, business architecture. 

 

And yeah, we found that there’s a, it’s a, at the time it was kind of a technocratic approach. I think it is largely, unfortunately still is for the parts that, that is not, we can thank people like Annika actually. 

 

But a lot of people asked me also like, is it the same as organisation design? Is it the same as business design? Is it the same as, I don’t know, service design? And the answer is always, well, in theory, yes, you have to design this whole thing in order to deliver. In practice, no, because each of these terms comes basically with a baggage, right? They come from different history, different backgrounds, like they are coming from engineering, from design, from organisation, science, development, from psychology from design thinking, from all sorts of things, and they are more or less formal, and they really don’t understand each other. And what you mentioned before is now becoming really relevant that organisations are becoming even more hybrid, not only in terms of the disciplines that are involved, but now you have also machines involved and new types of machines. And we kind of see that the more people and machines have a shared understanding of what the enterprise is for and what it’s supposed to do, the better the result. 

 

And so this is why we think enterprise design is an exercise in shared understanding and providing context is actually more relevant now rather than less.

 

Annika Klyver

Yeah, think sort of because I come from another angle. Like you said, I was also struggling in my environment as sort of being closer to business development, requirement, reading and those type of things. And then I moved into what is enterprise or business architecture. But it felt like the scope felt too narrow. 

 

But I didn’t know at the time what could an alternative be? Because this is what I was taught. This is how things always work. You started with a problem. You had a bit too few resources. You had too little time. And then you kind of did the best you could with the boundaries you had. And then after a bit of frustration, but also the taking side of architecture that had that I saw as a problem because I did not have a technical background. 

 

I have a business administration background, marketing, organisational design, those types of psychology and those types of topics and they were nowhere near architecture discussions. And then I ran into you at different circumstances, but sort of realizing that there were more aspects to it. 

 

This way of looking at the customer journey, the user aspect, the service design view, which to me at the time was really new. And I also saw that the thing with design or design approach allows you to take a few steps back and look at what if we would have another starting point? 

 

What if we would frame this in another way?

 

And that, even though I say it now, sounds a bit weird, but at the time I saw that the frames were so set. So the idea of challenging them were not in my book at least, which I mean, that’s something we can have another talk about. 

 

But this whole notion of moving back and allowing for a conversation of what would be a good approach. What would be a wanted result or a desired result or good result and make that wider than just on time, on budget and with not, you know, failing anyone miserable, but kind of everybody a bit. So this flip, that is what to me was the new thing with designing, where the richer language you could say, which is in the long run now what we call EDGY, where we are able to combine the different aspects of architecture, purpose and that whole world of values, stories and that sort of in the EDGY language we call purpose. And then of course you have the experience. 

 

Just entering it, what type of experience do we want to create for people? That is like an opening question to me that I did not have when we started to explore this together. So this is really throwing in another number of more things into the dialogue to make it richer and hopefully better and also more inclusive, allowing more people to sit around the table and having the ability to actually contribute because if you make it too narrow, too ticky, then you exclude a lot of people and then usually what you do is not as good as it could have been. So sort of a short thing.

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, it’s extremely interesting already for me, this type of conversation, because the picture I have of the field sometimes is that, especially if we look at large organisations where typically the enterprise architecture practice was born, sometimes it sounds like there is a large organisation which is extremely bureaucratic and somehow we use enterprise architecture to have this illusion that we have a control of the system and ends up in producing a lot of documents and visualizations. My experience is also that sometimes these descriptions pile over each other for ages and every reorganisation you make, sometimes the information you have in the enterprise architecture systems become old, overlapped. 

 

Is that your experience as well?

 

Annika Klyver 

Yeah, you’re just… That is also one of the challenges that I had because at the time there was a lot of discussion of what EI tools should you use? How should you do a comment? And the minute I came into this is like, what point in time are you trying to describe? Because one project could have this point in time and then you have the longer. It’s just an over map of overlay of different sort of viewpoints and stages that we’re trying to modeling these tools. 

 

And then I thought that I have had, and I still try to bring with me is what is the least we need to bring into something that we hold over time? Can we let go of all of these things and just keep these things? What would that be? And in my head, it is something around capabilities and the ability of what they’re able to offer. And if we can make that documentation as lean as possible and as easy to understand as possible, and then combine that with geography and an ability to harvest on our ability to read complex maps. 

 

If you were in a city, you were able to do a lot of reading from a very complex set of paper, or at least we were used to it. Now everybody uses their phones. I don’t know if you lost it. But we have the ability to really work in different layers and being able to, depending on the question, retrieve the answer you want rather than get everything or just what you need. So there is a mechanism there that I’ve been trying to make use of so that we can have a lean way of describing our enterprises and the important parts. It’s not just the architecture. We need to understand what is the purpose, what is the behaviour that we would like us to be able to perform in this section of our company or what is it that we want our customers to feel and how do we make sure that we make that happen given what we have available for our colleagues. Those type of dialogues are, to my experience at least, fairly rare when it comes to when you document architecture in the more traditional way.

 

Those are a few thoughts on my mind. I don’t know if you want to add something, Milan. We have been camping around this for quite a while.

 

Simone Cicero

No, but I mean, maybe I can pass you the ball just with a reflection, Milan, you can add on this. I was thinking that as Annika was talking, I particularly like this reference to the idea of capabilities and cities. You mentioned both of these things, right? And if I look at capabilities, so what is my thinking here? 

 

What we are seeing is that the power in organisations and in markets in general, is moving from the big conglomerate into the small. There is a powerful shift of power in the market towards the small because the small can achieve much more now. So you don’t really need a big organisation to achieve a big impact on the market. You can do it reasonably well with a small team or a small company that has very strong capabilities. And on the other hand, if you think about the city, there’s something that you also mentioned, which is a reference towards complex systems as cities. 

 

If you look at markets as complex systems. For me, I mean, if we think about the city or the economy – there is nobody going around in the economy saying this is the map of this value proposition we want to build. It’s just the market that figures it out. So the question for me now is we have a field which is enterprise design, enterprise architecture, which has had a hard time in being relevant in organisations so far. 

 

So even in big organisations, which actually kind of need the idea that somebody from the top can visualise everything, or we can visualise as a group of interactions that we want to generate value for this customer by, aligning the number of capabilities we have in the organisation. But now that the shift is coming, how can you make it? What is the new field of relevance for this practice, as capabilities become more important, the small teams become much more important.

 

And maybe we don’t really need to coordinate, let’s say, hierarchically an organisation to a certain value outcome because we should trust the more organic readaptability of small capabilities, even across organisations, not just inside one. 

 

So Milan, maybe this is a good starting point for your further reflection.

 

Milan Guenther

So there are a few things that you mentioned that come in. So the first is, guess, what is it that you’re building? Right. What is it that you want to do as an entrepreneurial project? And in EDGY, we define basically an enterprise as a group of people with a shared ambition. So the shared ambition is basically the enterprise. It’s not the same as the organisation, as a group of people.

 

And then enterprise designers are designing this enterprise, right? So it’s a bit of a shortcut, but it works quite well. So enterprise designers designing enterprises that already, you know, it’s like throwing that into the conversation helps sometimes to get beyond other definitions that might be a bit more distracting, you know, like in the end, we want to design this. Now, what is it that you want to design? You’re right that if you manage to take advantage of the

 

new mechanisms that are available in the market, you can achieve much more with much less resources and people and coordination and so on. But I would still say it really depends what you’re doing. And I feel like this is something that has been absent from, for example, MBA education. They say, you need HR, you need operations, you need marketing, you need, resources, you need this and that, but they never ask, what is it that you are doing? Are you a software startup? Are you an association like a not-for-profit or an NGO? You like in our example with EDGY, we use a railway company. you a railway company? And like, if you look at startup, like startup attempts to disrupt the train market, for example. 

 

So there have been quite a few attempts to run a night train in Europe like a startup. And it turned out to be incredibly difficult. Why? Because you’re not alone. You have the national operators that try to protect themselves. You have the states that try to protect the operators. You have the regulation.

 

It’s quite difficult compared to planes and because the capacity is blocked the whole night when you run a night train, you have this mix between hotel business and train business and so on and so on. So the complexity is still there. And the only way that we found to deal with this is to make the conversation about it possible, not top down, but in all directions.

 

And not so much about structure, which is the traditional way to think about these endeavours. So how can we structure it? Who does what? How can we decompose it even more? Have these clear, like reporting lines and so on. And what’s now happening is that people realize, no, it’s actually, you know, you see that when a, one of these new resources, if you have, if you try to replace some of the brains that you have with artificial brains now with AI agents or something.

 

And if they don’t have enough context, you won’t get good thinking. So what is this context?

 

Annika Klyver 

Yeah, and to me this is what kind of, what are the stories that we need to be able to tell so we know what good looks like? What would be a good choice in this situation? And if you’re dependent on a hierarchy where you only can get orders from the top and down or waiting for somebody to tell you that, then you’re very slow. 

 

But if we are able to have all of these conversations that you’re talking about, and be able to together see on all levels, what would a good choice be here? Because we are coherent on the target, the purpose of what we’re trying to achieve. Then the situation is totally different. And I think this is one of the big things for me moving into this is we’re building knowledge. We’re building awareness of what the space we’re in. Like you said, we’re not alone as a startup in the railway business. There are a lot of guys out there that we need to understand cooperate with, but then we need to be able to be really clear on what do we want to achieve so that we can let everybody have those conversations in a smooth manner and not have that sort of one point of failure or success that is the only one is allowed to talk. 

 

So there is a lot of layers here when it comes to knowledge, to what we want to achieve, to how we believe that this can be achieved once we have the knowledge, once we have the way of knowing what we want to do, then there is this design of an organisation where people are allowed to do these things on the levels that are suitable. So I think this, from an architecture point of view, this moves on from being documentation and being able to show, to being able to know what we know as a whole, and then be able to understand and make these judgments on every little decision guided by our shared direction or shared, like you said, Milan, the ambition of what we want to accomplish. 

 

And this open up the whole other vibrant sort of dimension or questions and things to pay attention to compared to if you think that you are documenting structures or trying to understand interactions between different capabilities or whatever. It’s another, it’s a flip, at least in my head.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you. I was thinking to a couple of things. So first thing that was coming to mind is that from what I perceive as the, let’s say, scenarios that we want to implement in the economy become more complex, but also as a the market is increasingly, let’s say, participated by smaller players which have more niche capabilities. I feel like a lot of the coordination problems you spoke about that used to be inside an organisation are now between organisations, right? So that’s one thing. 

 

The second thing is we also have agents which are essentially third, let’s say entities, not between us and the teams and the organisations we have. In my opinion and my perception, these both of these trends kind of suggest or require that we move from an informal and visual, let’s say, techniques of descriptions and design into more formal systems, something that can be more programmable, that can be more executable.

 

And probably this is a good segue into what we mentioned as your press play idea. So are you also seeing this? So in your experience, are you seeing, for example, EDGY or similar techniques being used between organisations? Has there been any, let’s say, tentative or initiative to make it executable in a way that it’s more formal, that can be used to formalize, for example, relationships between teams or units or organisations that do not work with each other on a daily basis but are more like into maybe a contractual relationship. 

 

So what is your experience in, let’s say, witnessing this progressive formalization, if any, of the languages we’re talking about?

 

Milan Guenther 

I think we are seeing two trends that are somehow pulling it into different directions, right? So one is, as we talked before, or what we talked about before was enterprise architecture being basically too technocratic and structure oriented in order to really capture the dynamics and also capture the attention and engage the organisation as a proper representation and maybe also too internally focused, internally looking. So we basically want things that are less formal, more visual, more collaborative, maybe also more pointing into the direction of your work, Simone, with platform thinking and moving the boundaries around. That’s what we basically do when we say, okay the enterprise might not be the same as the legal entity, as the organisation. Maybe it’s bigger.

 

So then we maybe model some things as internal that are legally actually not part of the same thing that we are, right? So this is where it gets interesting with platform models, with ecosystem mapping. So it gets more into ecosystem mapping. And you have to basically give up a lot of the structured and formal approaches of the past in order to deal with the fuzziness of this. 

 

But then at the same time, you have the opposite trend, which is in order for machines to understand each other, in order to make it executable, in order to not only press play in your head, but also actually make it happen in the real world, we have to become more formal. 

 

So we see now, with EDGY, we had one use case at our last conference in Brussels, where they implemented EDGY in OWL, right, in the ontology as a formal ontology and then used that to model how things are flowing and happening in a hospital. So we already see that it’s becoming less formal and at the same time more formal in order to make it readable, executable, and also to have dynamic models and make it understandable to neural networks and similar structures, right? So I find that quite curious how in the end we have to, we still have, know, in the book Visualizing Business Transformation, the authors basically said there are two communities, right? So there’s a technical community that needs formalisms and then there’s a creative community that needs non-formalism.

 

And we were like, okay, maybe EDGY will have bridged this, maybe it will disappear. But what we see now, no, it’s actually still there and it’s getting even more extreme.

 

Annika Klyver

But I also think that this trend with making all these AI tools more available for larger sort of portions of the businesses and also being able to interact with transaction systems in a way that I, at least I was a bit surprised that you can do this so fast without saying too much of what we’re doing in my organisation. But it’s really rapidly opening up opportunities to have another type of language when you interact with this type of information, which to me allows us to bring in those aspects that I was missing in the, when I began with in architecture because it was too tech, it was too logical, was too much of the structures and the, how should I put it, yeah, let’s just leave it at logic, too much logic, too little feelings. 

 

And now we can combine them and we can also open up these ways of working for people that are not that close to tech, but still are very close to the important topics of the company. How do we want to interact with the customers? What is important in this area? And allow that language to be used when interacting and getting a feedback loop of what could be. And the stories that I hear about people using agents and setting up teams that work with these things and you can bounce them and you can prompt them into, know, don’t embarrass me because I want, you that you can add so many different things. 

 

So this easy, sometimes people when they see EDGY, they think it’s like a playful language because the examples, they’re colourful and they’re they’re sort of explaining fairly simple cases just to make the point of what you can do. But they are so powerful when you combine them with the ability of these new tools that we’re moving into. So I am anticipating a huge shift in how we interact with, like you said, the structural part of the organisation and then this fuzziness, which is us, people, and everything that isn’t coded because there’s so much going on that is conversations and then that is, you know, I don’t know if power game is a good word, but that whole dynamic is there too. So I’m super excited of what’s gonna come.

 

Simone Cicero

I mean, I was reflecting to a couple of things. One is, mean, for example, let’s imagine that EDGY becomes a universal language for how we describe business scenario, enterprise scenario, would say, enterprise scenarios. 

 

And coordinate all the players or at least we visualise how a scenario could play out and essentially we are able to, we want to move into executing that scenario, right? Most likely there will be a set of capabilities we plan to leverage on set of customers for which we want to produce value, maybe brands that are involved and so on. 

 

And so I was thinking, imagine we’re moving to press play. What does it take for this to happen? And besides the language, of course, there’s a question of mobilizing these resources, paying for them, distributing revenues, whatever. So there’s a relevant element of contracting below that. So I visualise the scenario. I programmed this scenario. And then it needs to happen in the context.

 

So it needs to mobilise all these resources that ideally need to expose their contractual interface so that you can pick them, you can book them, you can use them, you can pay for them, and so on. So I think one insight that I had is really that we need a contractual system.

 

So it’s not enough to describe the resources. It’s not enough to describe what we want to achieve. But we actually need to mobilize. And if we believe that we are going in a direction where organisations are becoming smaller and more autonomous, let’s say, most likely we can imagine that these autonomous capability can expose their contractual interface and can be mobilized through some kind of programmable interfaces. So they need to have a product.

 

They need to have a service descriptor. They need to express, expose their catalogs and say, you can book it like this. You can use it like this. And this is how much does it cost for you. And this is our SLA. okay.

 

 Then, fascinatingly, I think that I was thinking about, we really need EDGY to become the universal language? Or an agent or AI can actually translate any language given that we understand the basics of contract, product, person, value, payments, that kind of stuff. So I don’t know if this makes sense for you, but – Would it be something that as we think about pressing play, what are the implications that we see in moving away from just describing the enterprise scenarios into executing them across organisations for an ecosystem of users? 

 

So is there something that brings you some reflections or maybe you can connect with something else?

 

Milan Guenther 

So, you mentioned capabilities, right? They are, like, we use them to simplify things, right? 

 

So a lot of people want to start with process mapping, organisation charts, maybe API definition, maybe application architectures, data architectures, data products.

 

Capabilities, even though they are not maybe the easiest concept to grasp for large communities in and around organisations. Once that coin flipped, once this understanding is there, they are really simplifying because they reduce everything down to the question: what do we need to be able to do? And maybe how well? And that’s it.

 

We don’t look into how we are doing it, but we also don’t look into why we are doing it really. In EDGY, that’s a different element. That’s this famous purpose that Annika already mentioned. And it’s also not really looking into what is coming out of this for someone else that we are maybe serving as a customer or in some other relationship to our enterprise. So already with these three elements, we create a lot of…

 

managed to create a lot of clarity just by proactively excluding the implementation details and many other details, many other questions from the conversation. And this is what EDGY is designed for. So it’s not supposed to replace all the other languages that you need for all the other questions. 

 

It’s mostly specifically designed to answer these questions and to keep everything else out, all the noise, so that then when we do have a model and we can press play, we see what this enterprise needs to do, why, and for whom.

 

Annika Klyver 

Yeah. And then, when you press play, things start to happen. The dynamic relationship between the different things that are in play suddenly get sort of are shown because in a fixed state, everything looks really neat, and it looks like you’re kind of I don’t know if the control is the right word. But when you press play and you say you send something to somebody or you want something or something happens, and you should act on something, then you can see that you run into maybe priority problems. So you run into a situation where this is not possible and how do you choose and so on. at least for me, this press play has to do with putting scenarios through your model and say, what if this happens? What if a premium customer enters this flow? What do we do then? And if a basic customer enter this flow and they interconnect.

 

And then of course, just by the name, so we know that we would of course prioritize the premium one. But how do we make sure that our systems and our people are able to distinguish? And how do we set up the organisation design, the teams, the trainings and everything so that that will happen at that given time? 

 

So what you said, Milan, this ability to really with few things and be able to set up something that you can run scenarios through and then ask: If we want this to happen, how do we make sure that this happens? And then you open up a whole new level of detail. I mean, do we need more IT support or do we need more training? Do we need other types of people in here? But this sort of ability to, in a structured way, work with scenarios and allow for different threads through the capabilities and the interactions and still not lose track of everything.

 

And my experience is that when, at least when I did this the first time, I had this overwhelming feeling, there’s going to be so much. How can we keep track of everything? This was in many years ago when I worked within the forestry industry in Sweden and we needed to come up with different scenarios. And it turned out that we needed three different scenarios because we could derive special cases from these three main scenarios. And then everybody knew the business. They were the experts. I was not.

 

They were, okay, but then if we are in this situation, then this will be a play, this sort of part of the scenario will play out like this. So with very little sort of core information, we were able to describe many different sorts of alternative ways through the same capabilities as the same, and you could say stakeholder map or if you sort of depending on how we define them. This was before the EDGY language was there, but it’s kind of appealed to the same aspects, but not as structured as we are able to do now with the EDGY one. So this getting things to move is really interesting. And I think that with the abilities of playing with, as I said, the AI tools that we have now, I think this, it open ups for a whole other way of playing and finding ways through these existing capabilities in larger organisations that we haven’t had before because it was just too heavy, it was too much information, but I don’t think we have that problem now. I think we need to understand what are the core questions, the core things we want to keep track of and then try to see what happens if we simulate things. Or actually do an A and B testing in real life even better, depending on how brave you are.

 

Simone Cicero

Very interesting. mean, you mentioned, Annika, especially lastly, you mentioned two things that I think for me are two very essential elements of this evolution towards press in play and that are also, I would say, the core to move away from this idea of nice designs and nice pictures that do not really enact any impact on the organisation, right? Because you said, when you imagine a chain of capabilities connecting to deliver customer value, how do you make sure that they don’t have other priorities, for example, right? Or how do you make sure that things happen, really? 

 

The commitments are, or at least the design you have in mind are really sustainable for the organisation. And I think in my understanding, there is no other way than, or at least there is a credible way, which is for me that of autonomy, considering that nodes can make commitments to each other. When I say nodes, I can think about the capability, essentially, an autonomous capability in an organisation. 

 

They can make commitments to each other, but they can also fail in these commitments, right? So I like to think about through the lenses of promise theory, this idea that anything that we deliver is a chain of promises. So nodes in this chain of promises are also responsible for creating alternative, let’s say, patterns. So alternatives depend on, especially if they have a single point of failure, to avoid it and make commitments to others, for example.

 

So I can see how in complex organisations, you can use this, modeling approach. You can visualise how you chain different capabilities to create a customer value. But then, if you don’t give the nodes these capabilities to be autonomous in negotiating their participation in certain outcome-oriented chains of dependencies, then the other option you have is a very top-down hierarchy. 

 

So you need to have somebody sitting there and say, this is how we make value. This is the budget for all of you. I’m going to measure everything as a computer and be sure that you have the right resources to respond at the right time. And I have to plan ahead for what’s coming from the market. And this is going to be, let’s say, an alternative to autonomy and contracting, top-down surveillance hierarchies organisations, which is a bit, I think it’s going to be a bit too brittle for the world that we believe. 

 

So for me, this conversation has reinforced the idea that if we really want to be able to design and to collectively design how we generate value for customers, for example, having multiple teams, socializing about this, creating a praxis of visualising customer value, connecting with each other. You also need an underlying capability to be, first of all, autonomous in the commitments you make to other nodes. Secondly, have contractual capabilities to negotiate with other nodes or also with AIs. 

 

Because another thing that I can see is that how agents can be architects of these value chains and help the organisation to capture emerging customer value and reorganize their capabilities internally. But the other option, I think, to have a centralized system that visualises everything and dictates and coordinates everything is going to be extremely coherent, but extremely brittle. 

 

So probably that’s a very dangerous direction where, similar to having the enterprise architecture function somewhere that makes these nice diagrams but never really manages to be relevant.

 

Annika Klyver 

I think this one, the autonomy, is a tricky one because depending on the knowledge that you have and the notion of what you’re autonomous within, you would run into a risk of having suboptimisation. Really, the world you see is the world that you kind of understand and you work within. 

 

If you are in a larger context where there are, you know, it’s not just a small startup and you have like 20 people or something, but you are in a huge, large organisation, then the sort of importance of having the purpose and the knowledge of what is good in the larger sense is so important because otherwise we run into building islands that are fantastic, but there are still islands and we have a number of islands that aren’t really working. And then you would have a challenge with the overarching value flow. 

 

So I think this is at least my experience is When you are in a larger organisation, there is an important part that needs to be clear on what is the overarching value that we are delivering and aiming for as the larger team. And then if you agree on that, then the autonomy can be within that alignment. 

 

Because if at least my experience is that when Agile came along and everybody said that every team is supposed to be autonomous and you can do everything in a team, which is a good thought. But if you are in a large complex network of capabilities working together and, you know, in my case, there is this, we have a lot of, you know, industrial networks, services, it is huge. 

 

And you need to be aware of in what context you are acting as a team or as a function or depending on the level of autonomy that you were talking about. I think that this is where the value of the purpose, the value of the stories that I told that Emilia spoke about, we can generate with the EDGY examples of different things. We can fairly quickly show what is important here. And then the teams with their expert knowledge can now get, given this frame this is a good solution for what we should do. But without this shared notion of what’s important and how do we want to design this as a whole, then we run a risk of having misalignment. But exactly as you said, we cannot do detailed designing on top and then expect everybody to follow because that’s not going to happen either. So there is a conversation that needs to be held in so many different spaces to understand and also to see maybe the idea of the value flow that we had from the beginning isn’t a good one. We need to take the knowledge from all the teams that are involved here and see how we can come up with a better view of what we’re aiming for as a whole. So I think this is, it’s tricky.

 

Simone Cicero 

I think one reflection that sparks to me and Milan, maybe you can jump in. We used to have organisations where capital was somewhere. So somebody was basically distributing the budget. And one of the activities in the organisation was somebody somewhere is going to figure out if this is good for the customer.

 

I think that what I’m hearing here, for example, when you say there is a danger in giving autonomy to capabilities, because that cannot, maybe they miss the big picture. I’m fine with that. But what I’m saying here is there needs to be someone in the organisation or multiple.

 

I would say that this idea of seeing the customer value should be as distributed as possible you should be able to say, I want to convince others to stack their capabilities in a vertical chain, in something that is very integrated, which is risky, because I see the customer value. And therefore, how do you do that? You do it by taking risk. And essentially, it means that you need to allocate capital for the other nodes to believe your promise of value, or at least you need to have everybody in this chain to share the same potential outcomes that you can see. 

 

So convince everybody that, okay, if we invest capital by ourselves in building this vertically integrated initiative that delivers customer value, we’re going to reap the benefits as a chain, as a group, as a network. So I think this is what we are seeing. We are seeing a fragmentation of the strategy and customer, let’s say, value, functions, there are no functions anymore. 

 

There really need to be distributed capabilities in the organisation and needs to go with a distributed capability to take risk to generate that customer value in the organisation. Of course, visualising enterprises’ designs, it’s an essential capability of this. Because if you do not visualise the enterprise design that generates the value, you cannot have a conversation about, okay, I’m going to put this, you’re going to put that, we’re going to collaborate because we want to generate the customer value.

 

Milan Guenther 

Exactly. And, you know, in classic architecture, you have this notion of a requirement and that’s kind of the opposite of the picture that you painted here. Right. So, so yeah, so we think this needs to be challenged. Sometimes it’s disguised in a newer word, like a user story, but it’s still a requirement. So make sure it’s actually a story, make sure there’s actually a user, not just the product owner, you know, and make sure there’s actually a product, not just something that someone calls a product in order to be an owner.

 

You know, you see a lot of this where there’s basically some kind of theater of a modern startup-like delivery of something, but behind it’s just the same old top-down world. And so what we have been working on, and I’m inclined to say, Annika, it’s a 15 plus here. I don’t want to know exactly how many, is combining the Milky Way map which Annika pioneered at one of her consultancy’s clients some time ago, which just shows not, like deliberately not shows the structure, but the dynamics, right? So in a way it’s still a boxes and arrows kind of diagram, but combined with EDGY, what you now have is the capabilities, how they contribute to each other in order to serve some kind of customer task and in order to implement some kind of shared purpose. 

 

And if you have clarity on these three things, which in EDGY are the three main colours, then the chances that your enterprise is actually delivering on the purpose and delivers some kind of value to someone are much higher than if anyone in this environment is waiting for requirements or is waiting for a budget allocation or you know exactly.

 

Annika Klyver 

Or optimising their own deliverables, and being super good in the middle, but super slow in the entire flow. 

 

But I’d like to chip in something else, because when we come to this, we also come to kind of organisational design and those type of questions. And I was very inspired by the book The Fractal Organization by Patrick Hoverstadt. 

 

I don’t remember, it is a couple of years ago many years ago since that one came, but it talks about the, the, doesn’t talk about capabilities. don’t know really what he talks about function or something, I think, but then he says, VSM exactly this viable system model with, and in my mind, I apply that to thinking around the capability and say that the capability needs to be able to do its task. I mean, efficiently perform whatever they’re, are they a pricing organisation or pricing capability then they do pricing well but they also need to have an idea on how do we want to evolve, how do we want to improve ourselves, and then look at what are the guiding principles that helps us when we are improving. And this is something that is fractal. 

 

So you can see that it’s for this little pricing team, but also move into the larger parts of the organisation in the Milky Way, thinking or the map. You could say the different sectors would have their own fractal organisations within them.

 

And then you would have the entire enterprise as the top note, so to say, with its ability to balance the deliverables and the value flow. So this is a way of thinking that is wider than just looking at capabilities to something that is executing something. You can start by thinking of them like that, but yes, but if you want to have a viable system over time, everybody needs to be able to improve themselves over time and take care of their daily tasks, but also the horizons ahead. Where do we want to be in six months? Where do we want to be in, I don’t know, two years when it comes to everything? So this is an aspect that is also kind of behind here that we haven’t been.

 

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, mean, this is very resonating with me because I think that VSM is a good approach to basically imagine that you decompose your organisation into cells, into smaller units. If you do not have a recomposing motion in the organisation, which is, for example, what the VSM can deliver, right? 

 

This idea to not just see the cell, but also see the organism. So you need to have the systems in place to see the future, adapt and measure and control and so on. The risk is that you become too much incoherent. And even if, for me, to be honest. Over the long term, I think that we need to lose coherence in organisation for one reason, because coherence has been the driver of industrial age. And the industrial age has created so many issues in society. We have been committing to things that didn’t really deliver any value to customers. We’ve built huge hierarchies to just deliver something that may create a lot of problems. 

 

So in general, I think making organisations less coherent and more adaptive, more, let’s say, networked and so on, is a good thing. But I can see the value in thinking as an organisation. So maybe we’re not ready yet to just let go of organisations and embrace a full distributed organising, which for me is where we’re heading in the post-industrial age. 

 

But still, VSM is a good candidate to bring, let’s say, clusters of coherence in organisations where you can have the different, let’s say, organs.

 

Annika Klyver 

Where it makes sense and then let go where it doesn’t. I mean, this is the balance, I think you can have one set of coherence in logic in one part of the organisation or enterprise and then you have another one, more distributed one and lose one in the other end of the organisation because they are performing different tasks and it’s not the value of them being exactly the same is very low. 

 

But just to be able to have those types of conversations, then we need to have a set of things to base them on. So we have a baseline. So we’re just talking.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, no, but the risk that I see, because I’ve seen it with my fresh eyes in companies, is that if you just do VSM and you don’t do the autonomous side, yeah, you end up in just having a hierarchy that speaks the language of systems thinking, which is just systems thinking theater, let’s say.

 

Annika Klyver 

Yeah, no, that’s all, I see everything can be, you know, don’t go too far.

 

Simone Cicero 

Which is funny, know, it’s something that I spot so many times.

 

Milan Guenther 

But it’s funny because also it’s one of the things I think that, or one of the approaches that are being misinterpreted as the answer to everything. You can find, I don’t know, microservices, you remember? Oh it’s the answer to everything! We need now to make everything little and small and have all these little APIs and contracts.

 

Annika Klyver 

They were a good, they are a good idea.

 

Milan Guenther 

Yeah, yeah, but you can find so many examples. Just look into startup blocks, like scaling startups, and you see how so many had tried it and then found that, no, it’s actually multiplying the dependencies and the bottlenecks and the problems of coordination times a thousand. So, no, let’s go back to the monolith because it’s actually not the right solution for us at this stage.

 

But maybe an architect came in and said, yeah, everyone is doing it. You need to do it.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, like in many other cases in life, the best is in the middle. You need to have both the coherence motion and the autonomous, let’s say, distribution and unbundled motion in organisations. Because otherwise, if you just have one, you don’t really fit with the reality of today. 

 

So we are approaching the end of the conversation. So maybe time for you to share with our listeners some of your breadcrumbs, right? So suggestions on something to read, to check, explore as they approach the future of their profession as enterprise designers, architects, and designers more in general.

 

Annika Klyver 

Well, I dropped one of mine, the Fractal organisation, with the sort of, I don’t know, caution remarks of not going too far. I have another one. As I said, was really, when I came into this enterprise design world, I was struck by the notion of having a design approach. 

 

And a book that I have been coming back to is The Design Way by Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman. And it came out in 2012. So it’s an old book, but it’s something that I found very valuable at the time and now and then go back to and read again to remember what is this approach and how can I find another aspect of what I’m doing. It’s a heavy book, though – But if you’re interested and want to dig into this and have time, then I think this is something that has been very valuable for me.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you.

 

Milan Guenther 

I have a feeling that Simone’s listeners are the right audience for these two books, actually. So I have one shameless plug, which is, as I said, we have been working together on a shared map and a shared language now for over 15 years. And right now, we published it in the EDGY Sandbox. So there’s the Milky Way EDGY combined tool as a draft and we are looking for reviewers and users. 

 

It would be great if you want to try it, if you have any thoughts on this, if you get in touch. I also have two other breadcrumbs that are kind of loosely connected to what we talked about. One is that we have in our network some EDGY practitioners who are coming from an organisation design development from your Italian compatriots from Peoplerise and Flavio Fabiani and Elena Crudo, they presented the approach of a biographical approach to enterprise design  at our Stockholm conference. And it’s one of the very rare tools that looks into the past, right? So it’s building on the past of the enterprise and the stories of the past.

 

Like what were the key events across different dimensions of psychology and sociology applied to the enterprise? And I think this is crucially missing from everything, everywhere that we are seeing in the design and architecture space. We are looking at the current state, maybe too much. We are looking at the future, a bit like projecting and not really well informed.

 

We’re not really looking, we’re not used to look at the past and find the source and the reasons for our thinking and our shared idea of where we are today and where we want to go together. We’re not used to that. So that’s one thing that I wanted to mention. 

 

And the other one is much more practical and has much more to do with the way you see future organisations, Simone, which is independent autonomous units that negotiate.

 

We have been talking to one of our partners, Qualiware from Denmark, who is implementing EDGY also together with AI for enterprise modeling. And they’re currently, they are starting a collaboration with Tappaas. So Tappaas is a kind of cloud replacement that you can just put into your basement and it has everything that you would get from the hyperscaler clouds, but it’s all open source and it can run on your local computer.

 

For any reason, there’s no internet or there’s no American cloud or there’s no, you still need some energy, but if you have some energy, can run whatever you need to run in your own environment with this. We find also with my little startup, we find that super interesting to make sure that there is enterprise resilience, which is a rather than a capability that we think we need to bake in more into what we are designing.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah, I mean, if anything, these days are telling us to think about those things much more than in the past. Min, thank you so much. It was a very interesting conversation. think we broke some new ground. And really, thank you for your time. I hope you also enjoyed the conversation, as I did.

 

Annika Klyver 

Really, thank you for having us and for making us scratch our brains again, and our heads a bit.

 

Milan Guenther 

Absolutely.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Thank you for your work at EDGY, both of you. I think this is important work. People should be really looking into what you guys are doing and for your commitment to sharing in the commons, which I believe is also important to restate, as we are a big believer of this. And for everybody that you have been listening to the conversation, please head to our website – Boundaryless.io/resources/podcast you will find the episode of today along with other episodes and in this one you will find the transcript of the links to the great things that Annika and Milan mentioned today. Thank you so much again for listening and until we speak again remember to think Boundaryless.