October 13th, 2008
Everything is Connected
If there is one thing we have come to expect for society these days, its volatility. The ups and downs of the financial markets mirror the gyrations of corporate strategy that in turn are reflected in the uncertainty of our country, careers, even ourselves.
We’d all like to have a “rock”, a center of calm in the storm that rages around us. But, at least for me, I find myself having a harder and harder time just relaxing and tuning it all out.
It wasn’t always this way. Prior to 1865, the fastest way to get a message across the Atlantic Ocean was by ship. Finding out “what happened to the European markets” was nearly a month long endeavor.
Decision-making was a local sport. Your personal volatility was largely limited to the actions that you and your community could take. A hundred years ago, we simply didn’t have the insight of what was happening beyond our local frame of reference.
This, in turn meant that society was filled with lots of local optima. Across each family / community / business / industry, we created an optimal experience based on what we could control. It was incredibly inefficient from a big picture perspective, but it was also amazingly flexible and redundant. A bank failure in one small town wasn’t likely to affect one across the state. They weren’t connected.
So how did we evolve to our hyper-connected, hyper-volatile society of today?
Society has used the power of accelerating technology to drive an endless drumbeat of linkage-driven efficiency.
Today we have a spaghetti mess of interconnected architectures. Our personal lives are intertwined with our jobs and our companies and the markets and other cultures etc etc. We’ve reached the point where it is too much for our human brains to keep up with it, much less optimize it.
And this leads to massive scale volatility. Everything is designed to be globally optimal. The markets are super efficient and so are the supply chains and so too our individual spending habits. But unfortunately, when something goes wrong in the vast interconnectedness, it can almost bring society to a screeching halt.
So what is the answer?
Architecture and strategic planning. I’m not kidding! We’ve known for years that you can’t make good decisions without understanding what you have and how it is all connected. And as technology within the enterprise has gotten more complex, we have evolved processes and capabilities to track and manage it. The only problem is that the rest of society likes to execute, not plan. To shoot first, ask questions later.
The fall of 2008 presents an amazing inflection point for society. We are going to have to re-architect the financial markets, and are on the track to bring massive change to the political markets as well. I hope the new leaders who stand up to guide these endeavors can take a page out of the Enterprise Architecture playbook: Begin with the end in mind. Create a reference model that explains how things are connected. Document enough of the current state to be able to make sane decisions. Establish standards that make sense and stick to them. And always ask “what if” before you pull the trigger.