2. Explaining and Judging Practice
What is a Practice?
Four Causes
(Aristotle)
Three Prong Method
(MoZi)
Four Prong Method
(Veryard)
Explaining Judging
3. What is a Practice?
Community
There are individuals and organizations
who are associated with the practice.
(Medicine is associated with doctors and
clinics.)
Instrumental (Functional)
It should perform some function.
(Medicine is associated with keeping
people healthy and fighting disease.)
Conceptual (Discursive)
It should offer a language for reasoning
and talking about things.
(Doctors can communicate with one
another, and with other practitioners such
as pharmacists.)
Knowledge-based
There is some body of knowledge that is
available to practitioners.
(In the case of medicine, this includes
anatomy, physiology and biochemistry.)
Service
There is a way in which practitioners
engage with the subject.
(There are established ways for patients
to visit doctors, and for doctors to be
paid.)
What is EA?
When people talk about Enterprise
Architecture, they may mean any or all of
the above.
4. Which Practice?
An individual or team customizes a
framework for a specific project or
organization.
The project or organization deviates from
the official framework in various ways.
Adding and subtracting activities
Simpler or more complicated pathways
Links to other frameworks
Use of available tools
A project may be retrospectively massaged
to comply with an official framework.
The participants may be more or less
aware of any deviations and their
consequences.
Official
• What the
book says
Emergent
• What the
community
does
Espoused
• What the
team thinks
it is doing
In-Use
• What the
team
actually
does
5. Four Causes (Aristotle)
Final Cause
What's the purpose, for
whom? Outcomes.
Material Cause
What is the stuff that is
being worked on?
What things are being
attended to?
Efficient Cause
Who does it, and how?
Process.
Formal Cause
What's the conceptual
framework?
Methodological Emphasis?
Over-emphasis on the Formal Cause in
books and training materials?
6. Three Prong Method (MoZi)
Origin
“the sage kings of antiquity”
Validity
reference to the evidence
"the eyes and ears of the
people”
Applicability
whether it brings benefit to
the enterprise and the people
7. Who are the sage kings?
(How many can you recognize?)
8. Four Prong Method (Veryard)
Effective
There is some evidence that it works
and delivers value.
Grounded
There is some explanation why it
works. The explanation is often
expressed as some form of theory.
Coherent
Not just random collections of ideas
and tools, but having a meaningful
identity
Progressive
Capable of learning systematically
from experience, and adapting itself
to new situations.
Don’t take results at face value
Don’t take participants’
theories at face value
2x Caution
9. Avoid Magical Thinking
Birds have feathers. Birds fly
We want arrow to fly. Arrow
must have feathers to be like
bird.
Ironically, putting feathers
on arrows actually works,
but not for the reason that
our ancestors thought.
10. More …
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