”Don’t confuse movement for progress”
I saw this recently and it’s definitely worth keeping in mind. I’m sure it’s also worth repeating over and over in these uncertain times, because sometimes a company’s strategy execution process simply isn’t equipped to distinguish between these two terms 😊
”There is no ‘secret sauce’ – if it works, do more of it and if it doesn’t work then try something else instead”
Someone’s answer on Linkedin recently to a question about what the “secret sauce” of something successful was. Yes, sometimes the world is indeed this straightforward 😊
I’m sure that we all (in some way) know the difference between these two terms, but do we also think about the consequences? This article – which I was sent recently by former colleague – definitely gives some food for thought.
While the difference between complex and complicated is normally relatively well-understood in most organisations, the differences in approach and the varying consequences of facing either one or the other definitely isn’t always understood.
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing left to take away.“
Substitute “designer” for “architect” and I think it still makes a lot of sense. Maybe not as an ultimate goal, but as a philosophy that should be used as a guideline for ones work…
”The reason business and IT need to collaborate on digital transformation is that if the business does everything it’s never going to be good and if IT does everything it’s never going to be finished!””
Saw someone quoted for this recently and while it is of course more or less equally offensive to both “sides”, it is probably also closer to the truth than most people care to admit…
”Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”
The great paradox really…
“Often a weakness is really an overused strength”
Saw this a few days ago and it’s sort of stuck in my mind. Granted, sometimes a weakness is genuinely a weakness but this perspective has more than a grain of truth in it I think.
“Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”
Substitute “engineering” for “architecture” and I’d argue that it still holds true 😉
There is a (half-)joke that most companies could actually manage quite well using just two systems – PowerPoint and Excel. That might well be true and practical evidence of this is fairly abundant if you look around, however there is still a good and a bad way to do it:
A good company would use Excel to make decisions and PowerPoint to communicate decisions, whereas a bad company would do it the other way around!
”Weeks of work can save literally hours of planning!”
Needed to remind a colleague of this recently 😉
businessandarchitecture 