Brain Therapy, Exercise 4: The Universal Model of Belief

The Brain Therapy Exercises, as seen, are multi-faceted with twin goals to therapeutically exercise the author’s brain while also exploring the concepts of Business Architecture. Therapeutic brain exercise is mandatory and ongoing in the author’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The challenges provided by the brain therapy exercises are intended to induce extensive periods of intense higher-level cognitive processing, deep concentration, and focus. Exercising the brain in this manner stimulates regeneration (neurogenesis) and plasticity thus increasing and reforming the brain’s physical matter. Thank you for indulging and helping me through a miraculous recovery.

The theme of Business Architecture arose out of a discussion between the author and a speech and language pathology (SLP) therapist, who, in the course of brain therapy, asked about the author’s background and experiences. The author chose Business Architecture as an example of prior professional pursuits, representative of work that semi-retired consultants might do. Starting with the addition of an exercise, to answer the question, “What can we do to make the world a better place,” into a brain therapy routine, we have reached into the consultant’s tool-kit to explore the current state of the world using a Business Architecture paradigm.

In Brain Therapy Exercise 1 we saw that the de facto operational business architecture for the world, consisting of a set of values over which the operating systems of the society have developed, is an Architecture of Fear. Ignorance, fear, greed, and similar moral corruptions are posited as underlying but prominent and dominating values that spawn operating principles and operating systems which lead to the outcomes we see in the world today: people are divided, spiritually exhausted, and living in a world where negativity prominently trumps positive potential and outcomes.

Brain Therapy Exercise 2 presents the Architecture of Abundance, proposed as an alternative to the Architecture of Fear. This framework considers the values, operating principles, and systems that would be required to change the outcomes seen in the current state of the world, such as conflict, wealth imbalance, and wasted human potential, to the desired outcomes of peace, abundance, and maximization of potential. We shall discuss the Architecture of Happiness, adjusting the framework’s title, and propose that if we change and align our values and priorities the resulting systems will produce dramatically different, and positive, outcomes.

Brain Therapy Exercise 3 reaches into the semi-retired consultant’s tool-kit to propose a generic framework of Enterprise Architecture (EA). The EA framework is used by businesses who understand the critical need to establish and maintain alignment between the non-technical resources (i.e., “the business people”) and the technical resources (i.e., “the technology people”) of the enterprise. An enterprise (e.g., business) where everyone understands the strategic, operational, and technical requirements of the business should expect innovations in its operations that improve cooperation and productivity.

Although the Enterprise Architecture framework specifies decomposition into Business and Technical architectures, it is important to note that creation of the unified framework is primarily the responsibility of the non-technical Business Architect. The Business Architect, therefore, must understand the strategy, operations, and technology required to support the operations so that they may implement the strategy, across all domains of a business, whether they are “technical” or not. This is not to say that the Business Architect will be a leading expert in technical matters but rather that the Business Architect must understand the scope and effort required in the technical domains, including many details, to support the non-technical domains. Business architecture, therefore, strives to express ideas such that every person, technical and non-technical, understands what needs to be done to achieve the enterprise architecture vision.

In this and ongoing exercises we take on the role of Business Architect, making adjustments to our hypotheses, approach, and definitions in time. We shall continue to incorporate feedback and updates in the current state while demonstrating and building on improvements in higher level cognitive functioning attained through previous brain therapy exercises, as well as identify brain development opportunities as therapy continues and future exercises are spawned.

The Business Architect

The Business Architect is an organizational leader who takes responsibility for helping people in the enterprise gain insight into the corporate strategy, develop their understanding of the organization, and improve their deployment and use of technology. This requires great leadership skills starting with interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences, with abilities to work collaboratively across domains, interact vertically through command structures, and effectively communicate with all stakeholders. This may be accomplished through many means and often requires any means necessary, within ethical bounds, to galvanize the leadership, resources, and power of the organization to develop innovative solutions which create competitive advantages and improve business performance.

The Blueprint

The core work product of architecture, through all of the Business Architect’s leadership concerns, nonetheless, is the blueprint. Blueprints are the primary artifacts created by the Business Architect. They communicate the strategic, functional, and operational specifications of the business and must be understood by a wide audience of business constituents. Blueprints simultaneously communicate the strategy and plans of the business while describing, in non-technical terms, the organization of people and technical resources required to achieve the strategy.

One key difference between blueprints from technical domains, such as civil architecture or computer architecture, and business is that the business architecture blueprint has the flexibility to take on any form that accomplishes its objective to universally communicate business requirements. This allows the Business Architect great flexibility in creating deliverables, borrowing examples from all domains to be considered and possibly incorporated as appropriate and creating artifacts unique to the business at hand.

The Art of Business Architecture

On the other hand, a disciplined approach to utilizing the tools and techniques of philosophy (managerial science), computer science, and civil architecture, upon which business architecture is based, has been proposed in various methodologies developed by businesses, governments, universities, and other institutions leading the discipline. Many tools and methodologies, as such, are available to the business architect. These tools help the business architect take a structured approach to developing blueprints and guide in leading the organization to success. Specific tools may be discussed on other forums.

As we discussed in Brain Therapy Exercise 3, not only is Business Architecture a science, it is also an art. As an art, therefore, the work hinges, beyond the availability of materials, on the inspiration of the artist and the interaction with the people. The Business Architect, therefore, must be of the mindset of an artist in the creation of artifacts that deliver the desired message. On this forum, therefore, we shall be less concerned with discovering specific tools than we are about discovering and delivering inspiration.

Let us proceed, now, in our role of Business Architect, as organizational leader and artist, to examine our progress in understanding what we might do to make our enterprise, the world, a better place.

Understanding Scope

A key challenge we face is the scope of the effort – our solution must address the World and every person on Earth is a constituent of the enterprise. We shall, therefore, keep in mind that our blueprints must be able to speak to all people. It is a daunting task that will require significant brain development.

The Business Architect, working at the Enterprise level, is often faced with situations which seem daunting, particularly as many businesses today are complex organizations. One key to success is the ability to decompose complex issues and organizations into manageable components and creatively address opportunities discovered in the process from there.

Developing a Model of Belief

Given the enterprise of the Earth and the scope of the effort, many Business Architects would wisely recruit shamans, magicians, energy healers, and religious leaders to the team as the effort would seem to require intervention on a cosmic, spiritual scale. The constituents, by Fate, the humans of Earth, are divine, spiritual beings, and that should prove to be our greatest advantage in achieving a vision of the scale implied. The Business Architect is thus informed of the importance of the consideration and integration of universal, cosmic, and natural spiritual principles as the solution develops. The brain therapists are likewise informed of the critical need to focus on techniques to help patients in the development of the spiritual-moral natural intelligence system in our brains (see Gardner, Frames of Mind and please note that in Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences view, spiritual-moral intelligence is proposed as “existential intelligence“).

If we are to make the world a better place, we must start believing that the world will be a better place. It is therefore imperative for the Business Architect to develop a model to explain how belief works. The audience for the model is all business constituents and, likewise, all people must be able to understand how belief works from analyzing the model.

The Universal Model of Belief is based on ancient and modern spiritual knowledge, in light of experience working with leading organizations in the private and public sectors, and analysis of data in the super secret database (aka, the business architecture repository). The model states that “Outcomes are the result of Actions taken by people based on their Beliefs.” The model is intended to be intuitive, so the first test is to ask people to read the model and provide their immediate assessment as to whether or not the model is correct. It is important for the Business Architect to communicate that what is sought is not the type of analysis usually undertaken by business and technical analysts, but rather the intuitive response from our naturally evolved intuitive decision making system. We shall therefore ask every person if they agree that “Outcomes are the result of Actions taken by people based on their Beliefs,” and to answer “without thinking.”

The explicit brain therapy exercise, in addition to cataloging the intuitive responses of people to the model, is to further and analytically contemplate the construct. Do we believe that our beliefs cause us to take actions that produce the outcomes we see in our lives? Although the model is intuitive and seems simple by its presentation, deep questions arise in the mind. The author, therefore, shall take time for a pause to consider the Universal Model of Belief and solicit feedback as we proceed to answer the question, “What can we do to make the world a better place?” This pause is also caused by a need to provide the brain another critical element in human healing - rest with plenty of sleep.

This entry was posted on 16 March 2011 at 13:57 and is filed under Architecture of Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.