How To Augment Your Mind's Immunity Vol II: A Practical Perspective, #2

Part Four Coming Home

Figure 1 - Part Four map of topics.

Introduction to Volume 2

The book How To Augment Your Mind's Immunity has been divided in two volumes for practical reasons (the electronic file or physical book would have been too large for a reader's convenience).

Volume One contains Part One (the problem), Part Two (the toolset good enough to build a solution) and Part Three (the solution).

This volume includes Part Four (examples of instantiation of the cultivating living well methodology) in the various roles this self-help methodology applies, and Part Five (Terminology and Bibliography) information that allows the reader to customize her/his approach in personalizing the methodology.

Introduction to Part Four

In part four of the book, we have put together several case studies or stories that share the perspective of our methodology of cultivating living well in the many roles a life lived fully might entail (individual, couple, family, community, organization, nation, species, biome).

The conceptual role of mind in the life of a lifoid, from person to biome and from couple to supra-national economies, is the same – governance of action in cultivating living well as per the hosting context. What works for the individual, does the job for families, communities, nations, species, and even the whole biome.

While the concepts of lifoid and mind are abstracted, anthropomorphized, extrapolated, and instantiated widely, they validate themselves as useful tools in handling complicated life challenges like wellness, family, parenting, entrepreneurship, social engagement, work, citizenship, belonging and identity at multiple levels.

The following case studies share a common perspective, based on our assembled toolbox of knowledge for cultivating living well, with the hope that differentiated examples will help us understand and address challenges better and faster.

Enjoy and please get engaged by providing feedback while becoming your own hero.

There is a pattern of approach that we will do our best to respect in each of these case studies. This pattern combines the lifoid concept with the attributes that make a cooperative enterprise successful, combined within a typical pattern of case study.

Case study patterns - lifoids, cooperative enterprises and study.

Chapter 31 Generic Architecture

Quotations on Architecture:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s the same, but you leave ‘em all over everything you do. - Elvis Presley

Architecture should speak of its time and place but yearn for timelessness - Frank Gehry.

It is the sea that designs the best canoe - indigenous saying

Introduction

I fell in love with architecture and some passionate architects I met along the way. Their work enabled authentic better living of few and many others. From this perspective, good architects go on the list of actors with high societal utility like good emergence facilitators and educators (including parents and true friends), psychology counselors, medical doctors, and leaders (including entrepreneurs).

Figure 2 - The very initial sketch of our latest home

In part two of the book, we looked at how architecture and more specifically enterprise architecture serves as a model for the motivation powering enterprises and the associated methodology that enables understanding a motivation’s footprint in anything one does in life including living.

Architecture, understood though this perspective, will help you determine how best to achieve living well at all levels of your living. When cultivating living well, you are the architect of your life, a life that facilitates wellness of life as per your authentic values.

Let me explain.

As per our definition, architecture provides clarification to and understanding of what motivates and triggers us to act on a specific knowledge unity, what determines us to launch, sustain, deprecate, or end a specific enterprise. To recall the cultivating living well methodology, architecture elicits, defines, and documents the authenticity behind an enterprise, be that related to a lifoid's personal life or business endeavor.

Architecture is anchored in that enterprise’s stakeholders and documented in physical, symbolic, rhetoric, and visual representations [1].

To successfully mitigate life’s challenges, three steps must keep repeating: understand, build, and use (Figure 3).

Architecture helps in building an understanding of the motivation one has behind the enterprise of dealing with a challenge. It is the central tool in implementing the first step. It further provides coherence throughout the next steps and the metric of action effectiveness to the end of it.

Figure 3 - Sequence of enterprises in addressing a challenge

This understanding of architecture might seem peculiar at a first glance, unless you had the experience of doing it well, watching and/or working with successful architects over thousands of projects. Good architects, not unlike good psychoanalysts, mine for a stakeholder’s motivation (individual, couple, group), eliciting it from the known and, even more so, from the unknown.

The rest of an architect’s traditional work (drawings, plans, and models at scale of buildings) is usually preliminary design, the form in which an architect’s understanding of motivation guides the enterprise of satisfying customers (Frederick, 2007) by responding to their present and future needs. This practice of packaging architecture and preliminary design under the label of architecture happens currently in construction, in IT enterprises.

Let me stress this narrow-scope definition by saying what an architect enables through his/her work is a stakeholder’s life unfolding in a way that satisfies that stakeholder’s needs (motivations) by specifically changing the context to best respond to them. The stakeholder may be an individual, a couple, a family, a business, a community, or whatever form of lifoid[2] the architect works with. The architect is frequently also a stakeholder (as in the case of self-improvement and cultivating living well).

Understanding motivations (architecture) is central to success in many of our life-defining activities like education, family living, professional engagements, civic engagements, governance.

As a case study, I can take the simple story of our experience with our latest house. It was the first custom house we have built, the first intentionally built facilitation tool for our lives. And it worked and still works quite well.

Architecture Getting Personal

More than a decade ago, we bought a 100-year-old house in a funky neighborhood, close to downtown (the workplace at that time), within a multi-cultural, creative, and socially tight community.

The house was small (800 square foot) and picturesque, situated on a local-traffic street where kids and dogs played outside unsupervised, reminding us of friendly European villages.

In 2013, nature decided to release one of those once-in-a-hundred-years major floods that broke the house literally into two halves. Repairs would have been a third of the construction price of a new, larger, and personalized house. So, we bit the bite.

All houses we lived in until 2015 have been impersonal utilitarian houses: placed in good neighborhoods, close to schools, with good transportation access to workplaces, and architected, designed, and executed by somebodies we never really met. They were built for an average family living an average lifestyle. Their purpose was, right or wrong, habitation- and work-oriented. Mathematically, the tighter you define the average, the less entities in that set match it. This goes for the architecture behind the design of prebuilt homes too.

The 2015 house was going to be different as our family context changed: kids were grown, moved out, and visiting a few times per year. Our social life was mildly active with a few visits from friends per year. This was going to be a house for us—our lives, a place of physical and psychological wellbeing. We knew our authentic selves as individuals and as a couple and the house was going to support living in authenticity.

Thanks to Google, I collected Christopher Alexander’s book on modular architecture (Alexander, 1977) and Pinterest examples, while my better half researched hundreds of show-homes and open-house events, and tons of Home Renovation magazines. We kept looking for things with meaning to each and both of us. Figure 4 shows the first sketch we prepared:

Figure 4 - Sketch laying out flow and social trust zones at the house’s main level; emotional and rational motivations.

When I think of a good architect with good facilitation skills, I’m reminded of that sketch I used in Part Two of the book where many stakeholders, many terminologies, and some magic meld forces to integrate the information and knowledge streaming from all into a harmonious whole.

All stakeholders and the architect cooperate in the architecture phase to define, harmonize, and share what motivates each of them, with the respective activation and repression conditions.[see footnote 3] Many specialists cooperate when designing an enterprise by integrating their perspectives in one coherent model and their specializations in one coherent composite ability. What unites them is the shared understanding of motivations, the architecture of their cooperative enterprise.

Figure 5 - An architectural perspective of cooperation between differentiated stakeholders (roles and perspectives).

Coming back to the 2015 house, we had worked with several architects until we found one we could communicate well with. John, the actual first name of our architect, is also an excellent facilitator.

We are intellectuals and love our freedom, hence mind space, light, nature, and reading had to fit in the resulting design. I am an ENFJ (intuitive and with an appreciation for the emotive side) while my partner is an ISTJ (verified facts and causal thinking). To be short on what that means I will just say that we each need the ability to retreat in our own space, to recharge in our own ways.

The lot we had available was very narrow, hence, the house had to emerge vertically.

This is the following sketch I did once we had an idea of the height.

Figure 6 - Second sketch, dividing states of mind throughout the vertical layers of our narrow future house.

It is interesting to point out that effectiveness, the metric of reaching a desired result efficiently (with the least amount of investment), is measured at the motivation level. In other words, the effectiveness of an enterprise measures how well the enterprise responds to its activating motivations. An effective enterprise leads to a repression of its motivations.

Figure 7 - The Architecture and Enterprise cycle that points to architecture's role in providing coherence to action (enterprise) and a metric of success (response to triggering motivation)

As per the quotations in the chapter’s opening, architecture is all about understanding why.

Combining the notions of enterprise and architecture leads me to revisit the IT-borne enterprise architecture concept.

Figure 8 - The enterprise cycle - changes activate knowledge that is executed by an able actor (base case and knowledge making up the enterprise), addressing the activating change, shifting motivations towards repression.

Although I’ve been an active participant in online talks and conferences on this topic for the last decade, this is still a personal perspective to the practice of enterprise architecture for several reasons:

1) What I am presenting here is different than the common understanding of enterprise architecture in the IT/Business field.

2) The significant value of good architecture is tied to the models we have looked at for knowledge, enterprise, and the actor/base case dyad who is able to bring the knowledge into being.

3) In my opinion, the IT/Business enterprise architecture body of knowledge is still evolving, hence a shaky foundation for additional confabulations (smiley face).

Back to Procedural and Declarative Knowledge

From our discussion of knowledge models in Part Two of the book, our minds have two kinds of knowledge: procedural and declarative.

Procedural knowledge helped our phylogenetic ancestors survive for billions of years and is the strongest driver of enterprises through the powerful mechanisms of emotions, intuition, and instincts. Between emotions and so-called rational thinking, emotions always win over the definition of our behavior. We rationalize things we do much more frequently than being rational when deciding to do.

Understanding someone else’s motivations is the core ability a good architect must have. Motivations are mostly emotion-driven and therefore part of the deeper levels of procedural knowledge, a class of knowledge difficult to communicate with or mine for. From this perspective, being a good architect shows the highest use of one’s emotional, intellectual, cognitive, and societal prowess. Combined, these abilities impact the quality of life of many over a long period of time.

While architecting is, in its essence, a conceptual activity, it has its roots in physical implementation[4]. And, as in many other areas where life builds knowledge, the source of knowledge is physical interaction with one’s context. Hence a complete architect assists the specializations of designer, developer, and operator to take the conceptual model of motivations and materialize them into physical change.[5] In other words, architecting serves as a bridge between procedural knowledge (the frequently unspoken motivations of stakeholders) and declarative knowledge (the shared knowledge of the enterprise responding to motivations and geared for success).

Figure 9 - Architecture focus on understanding motivations before acting and providing coherence while acting.

Using the book’s perspective on architecture we notice that:

Architecture is a modality of modeling and documenting a story about an agent’s needs for authentic behaving/performing.[6]

While the digital documentation does not read as a story, the views and viewpoints can and, when combined, can make a difference in understanding and its contribution to the instantiation process.[7]

The enterprise architect (the actor who produces an enterprise architecture model) is part facilitator and part knowledge miner and documenter whose central motivation is to maximize coherence in assembling and experiencing the shared story.

The resulting shared story identifies any gaps and deviations and builds a foundation for rational prioritization of investments (time and money).

Enterprise architecture is a methodology, assisted by tools and based on a knowledge framework (models), central to multi-stakeholder governance. Traditional civil architects use it with less formality, and the IT and business architects of the last two-three decades, while having better tools, show less understanding of the socio-emotional aspects of it. I know because I’ve continued to emphasize the importance of architecture within that sector for decades.

Enterprise Architecture in IT

The notion of enterprise architecture is relatively new with its roots starting with Zachman’s 1987 work and publications. It has generated tens (even hundreds) of offspring frameworks since then, with some of the better-known being TOGAF (1995) and DODAF (2003).

Enterprise Architecture methodology Serves Any Enterprise

Although we talk mostly about an organization’s enterprise, EA actually captures the information patterns and knowledge in creating a systemic model of an aspect of reality that benefits any enterprise. This requires the consideration of other agents involved in the process:

The observer is the agent/architect who builds the model as per the stakeholder’s values and determined needs. The observer is the one creating the boundaries and deciding what is inside of those boundaries and what is outside of them. A good observer knows herself best and corrects any information that is based on personal distortions.

The motivations are based on the context change that is sensed through the stakeholder(s)’ value system as their perception.

The enterprise (the final goal of modeling) is the action that would answer the stakeholder’s need the observer assists in being detected.

Understanding the stakeholder’s environment as the context in which the enterprise occurs is relevant in managing its effectiveness of satisfying its defining motivations ( (Ackoff, 1987).

Conclusion

We have re-examined the concept and methodology of architecture. We have used the equivalent notion of architecture of the enterprise (EA) to stress the fact that EA relates to modeling motivations behind action, not to the more common usage associated with IT asset integration.

Architecture is a systemic model that becomes a foundational layer in the grander model behind the enterprise itself.

Motivation is a part of the passive and declarative structure of knowledge, with architecture making passive and declarative structures coherent.

Motivation, activation and/or repression patterns live at the interface between context and enterprise. They change as the enterprise unfolds, placing specific requirements on the speed of the enterprise’s progress and its architectural management[8].

After years of involvement in thousands of projects/enterprises per year, I’ve learned that the better the architecture, the more effective the enterprise.

As you most likely identified, your authenticity defines the architecture of your life when lived well. As in our generic examples, it is yourself and your context that will define it.

In a changing context, living well is a dynamic process of changing designs to match architecture and context.

Related to motivations, the various aspects of living have differentiated priorities, matching our personal stack of values. Life exhibits this way one of its defining signatures, the power law distribution of functional contributions of its components. This distribution is also personal, where some of us will choose entrepreneurship while others will chose the comfort of steady work, some will chose travel to find themselves better while others will chose improving their homestead, in mixes of ingredients that make each life unique.

Now, let’s take a look at how we might steer this reliable tool’s use toward an understanding of all the different ways that you relate to the world and people around you in all the roles you inhabit in life. By doing so, we’ll be able to tap into the deep motivations and script inside each of us to build an understanding of what living well means to our own authentic self.

Chapter 32 Lifoids

Quotations

I guess I've had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question. Francisco Varela

The most exciting breakthroughs of the twenty-first century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. John Naisbitt

Introduction

We learn faster and easier about who we are in the world when we use our empathetic perspective to understand the behavior of other agents in our life; pets, nature, friends, community, work, politics and economics. For example, an economy will seem to