Architecting the Knowledge Infrastructure
Early in my career, I didn’t realize that most organizations want change, demand “transformation” like a new mapped direction … then steer that ship of change right into an iceberg.
Everyone was surprised when it sunk. Everyone blamed someone, something, else.
I didn’t know, but now I do, that the call is coming from inside the house.
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” — Deming
Sure, I’ve been part of organizations adopting ideas, trendy new lingo. Sometimes, it’s the same lingo I invented to describe the needed change.
Then watched well-meaning people redefine those words in ways that reinforced the same old problems. Often, the in ways that made the old problems worse.
If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Transforming rationality isn’t done with LLMs, Kubernetes, or Product Strategies.
Rationality isn’t a constructed framework or toolset that we apply to problems. Rationality is how we craft what we call “reality”, how we shape what we believe, what we “know”. And how we justify our choices, and how we choose to act — moment by moment.
The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Knowledge, as we’ll architect it is not facts.
It’s not winning at Jeopardy! Not found on Wikipedia, demonstrated on whiteboard tests, or proven with scientific theories — though all of those require architecting knowledge.
Knowledge is not something we own, store in a database, or retrieve via artificial intelligence.
Knowledge is the ongoing shaping of time, energy, and attention into meaning, insight, and action.
Knowledge is something we experience, practice and refine together, amidst uncertainty. When we practice this shaping, again and again, in different contexts … we generate the systems we live and work within.
Conway’s law is one man, stating the obvious:
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
At first, this really blew my mind: I can see the organization structure in every software system. Today, I know it in my bones. I can model the org or model the software system — it doesn’t matter, the two will look very similar.
I love this snarky rendition ….
The knowledge pathways, the communication and thinking structures, exist in the human and in the technology system. They are, for lack of a less-therapy word, codependent.
The flow of knowledge — or the absence of flow — designs every system we build.
When we change something “concrete” — a delivery processes or a decision - without changing the infrastructure over which knowledge flows across relationships — we produce the same outcomes again and again. The same factory.
Because …
If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins. — Ruth Malan
Software is the object of our attention, an implementation detail “out there” being pushed to production. It is a knowledge outcome, generated, continuously, by the organization’s knowledge infrastructure. Moment by moment. Decision by decision. Artifact by artifact.
Continuously.