Social Architecture and the Afrikaans Family Model

You'll be forgiven for thinking this is an article written by an Afrikaaner. But I'm not an Afrikaaner in any shape or form and what I want to articulate is about the value of family. In social architecture, the family is a unit of construction. Build strong families and you can build strong communities.

Centuries of slavery and decades of apartheid have contributed to the destruction of the African family unit. And it saddens me that there is very little effort to re-build it when it is clearly at the centre of our social issues. Gangsterism and crime is a symptom of the lack of a family structure and in particular lack of stronger male role models. The fact that so many women have become both the patriarchs and matriarchs in our extended families as single mothers and grandmothers should inform us that we need to focus on the family unit.

Yet post 1994, the South African government has placed greater emphasis on black economic empowerment (BEE) and gender equality as a solution. BEE and gender equity is important but these should be driven by an over-arching strategy on families as a basic unit. And this notion of family should not be limited to a father and mother with children but should include all forms. In fact, there should be a culture in our country where families are encouraged to reach out and welcome into their households other families and individuals that have less.

It is my belief, and I am just putting the idea out there, that racism was not the main driver for the social architecture of apartheid. I believe that the concept of family is what drove and continues to drive Afrikanerdom and that apartheid was a product of theology and fear for the destruction of the family. You can call it the "Kraal" mentality or refer to the Boer War and how the British put Afrikaans women and children in concentration camps.

What comes to mind for me is the Goshenites. They were an Afrikaans community living in what is now the North West Province of South Africa. At the time they lived in a patch of land that was sandwiched between Bechuanaland or the Tswanas and the Transvaal. They called the land Goshen after a strip of land between Egypt and the promised land occupied by Canaanites. I think if you placed them anywhere in the world, they would have regarded everyone around them as Canaanites.

The apartheid government used their powers to secure all major sectors of the economy by establishing state owned enterprises or major companies in the hands of Afrikaaners. Telkom ran telecommunications, Eskom the energy sector, Transnet the transport, Naspers, Sanlam, etc - they all served one common purpose under apartheid. By ensuring that every white male could have a job, even in the post office or railways, every Afrikaans family had a bread winner and even the weakest family in the Afrikaans society was still better off than the families of the larger majority groups.

By limiting the options and using black Africans to provide the labour force in industries such as mining, the system worked both ends. Black workers had little or no option but to live in "homelands" and migrate into cities and towns hundreds of kilometres away. The system displaced families, creating weak household units. When you consider how well structured this system was in supporting strong minority families, it seems inconceivable that we have not established a strong national program on family post 1994.

So called "Coloured" communities in the Western Cape are torn by drug abuse, alcoholism, crime and gangsterism. There is a perpetual cycle of young men dying and of little boys being raised without fathers. This cycle of family breakdown occurs across South Africa in townships and rural areas. We have generations of young men ill equipped with social skills not just technical skills or knowledge. They are ill prepared for raising families and are hardly able to care for their own well being. They become frustrated and violent and perpetrate acts against those around them. There is no strong program to address this issue directly and as such no preventative and reformative education. There are no guidelines, infrastructure, resources other than general social and security agencies. Non-governmental organizations and social workers have for years been pointing this out but there has been no action.

I really am not qualified to speak about this topic, after all I don't look remotely White, Black, Coloured or Indian. What on earth am I even doing here? My parents were Filipino and my mom was of Chinese descent. They were missionary doctors who believed their medical profession was a divine calling. They loved Africa and died here. On the day, I closed my mom's clinic so I could take her with me to spend her final months fighting cancer with her family, she still was seeing HIV/AIDS patients. We were not exactly a typical family and my notions of family came from experiences of other families.

It was my mom's Chinese background that allowed me to go to school in a white-only boys boarding school. At the time, South Africa started trading with Taiwan and so I was considered an "honorary white". It was a unique privelege because it allowed me to interact with families from all backgrounds and to travel across apartheid South Africa, experiencing the incredible resilience of its people.

There are many things I love about South African families. The large muslim families eating together in a small kitchen. Kraals being swept spotlessly clean, then sitting on drums in the sand and people smiling and laughing all around you. Dancing all night in places your mother and father only read about in newspapers when someone gets killed.

It took a longer time for me to settle into the Afrikaans families but my experiences in Namibia or what was then South West Africa and under South African control helped me to change some of my pre-conceptions. The warmth and hospitality was no different from other families I had met but over the years I've grown to admire the Afrikaaner sense of family.

I've particularly enjoyed the way physical activities, hobbies and sports, are used as a centre of interaction in the family. I can understand why sports men and women are used as role models and why sports is becoming the last bastion of Afrikanerdom. Afrikaans families are breeding athletes and there is even a growing surplus that we are exporting some of South Africa's sporting talents. There are more than 80 South African players in the premier European rugby tournaments.

South Africans in their diversity are beautiful people - inside and out - they can be truly radiant. I always knew that I would end up dating or courting someone that was not of my own cultural background - whatever that was. I've been fortunate enough to go out with girls from almost every background in South Africa (in other words, I've had a high rate of rejection). But its allowed me to gain a very diverse cultural experience. I was so fond of one Afrikaans girl that I actually went to a Bless Bridges concert with her (not my proudest moment). There are worse things than Bless Bridges handing out roses or being the only guy in the room who understands that the words of the song he is singing to his wife is about another woman he loves more.

Yeah nie, I have seen some pretty nasty stuff. I spent some time in Owamboland on the northern border of Namibia with Angola at the height of the war. I still have images in my head of dead bodies tied to the side of Caspers.

In Owamboland, war divided families. There Owambo men fought on both sides - with the Cubans and Portuguese speaking Angolans north of the border and with South Africans south of the border. The Koevoets were a South African guerilla force. Each unit consisted of two white men who led a group of about 40 Owambo men. I once asked how they could fight together and was told that when an RPG rocket blows the head of someone next to you, you bond like brothers and race does not matter.

I was 21 then and not a day went by when I didn't ask myself what on earth I was doing there. My parents decided to work there and I decided to go with them to make sure they would be ok. I was studying part time, trying to make money and teaching people about the Bible. To do bible lessons, I needed to learn the local language. But I first needed to learn to speak Afrikaans just to talk to people who could translate for me.

I also helped children of some of the Portuguese speaking families I met to learn English. There was a very bright little girl who spoke fluent Afrikaans and she often translated for me. Many years later I would see her again. I'm with my two sons trying to teach them how to play basketball at the courts at the University of the Western Cape where I was lecturing. A woman walks across to greet me and she fills me in on whats been going on in her life. Its kind of surreal as I'm watching my sons play in the background but as she talks about her daughter my mind suddenly realizes how amazing this all is - that this is THAT little girl, now grown up, in her last year of study.

We are resilient and things work out. Having experienced the death of my parents, I'm constantly trying to keep my mind focused on the present and future. It is often painful to connect moments in the past and I often forget how truly priveleged I have been to experience such diversity of life in South Africa. My experiences have changed and opened up my own belief systems. I have no religion and am not selling a solution, I am just hopeful.

As South Africans we love to complain. We harp on so many things that fuel our own insecurities, anger and hate. If we don't move on, we may never really appreciate how wonderful time heals and how life intertwines such seemingly unconnected moments - the lessons of which we can't even express in words. Hating people is such a waste of time when in the last seconds of our lives and through a lifetime of confusing images, the one image we want to hold on to is of those whom we love.

South Africa can be confusing and filled with contradictions. The only thing I really know for sure is that family is important to all of us and its time to make family the main national and social agenda.

Architecture Intensive Disciplines in the 21st Century – Learning from the Past

There is continuing discussions on the value and application of architecture intensive disciplines such as Software Architecture and Enterprise Architecture. The contention of the value of architecture comes largely from the conflict between the need to meet immediate and short term demands and the longer term consequences. There is this dilemma of being a consumer or a patron of architecture where the former sees architecture as an artefact or a blue print and the latter, a philosophy and vision.

Even when proclaiming the importance and value of architecture to an endeavour, we often fail to convince those around us as to what this entails and how it is applied. Architecture when seen as an artefact or blueprint that is produced becomes problematic in that it is seen as the deliverable of a process – something that can be produced as a work product or deliverable of a project. It is an input or output rather than being something of much greater value to the entire initiative as a whole.

The past century of modernism, machines and manufacturing has led us to become reliant on the process-centric model where design represented a phase preceding some phase of production or construction. This works particularly well when the work is a predictable set of tasks. But when faced with constant trade-off decisions typical of a human centric endeavour, it is important to have a set of guiding values and principles that inform the practice.

As a philosophy, it represents the essence of what people do. It is the thinking and knowledge that continues to fuel any human endeavour. That ongoing learning process and knowledge is what architecture represents. As a dynamic form that embodies ongoing systems thinking, architecture ensures that any human endeavour has a means of overcoming impediments through solutions and trade-off decisions that keeps the initiative progressing forward irrespective of the complexity. It also ensures a flow of creative thinking that elevates design which in turn elevates construction. It ensures integrity between the conceptual, logical and physical elements of an endeavour so that there is alignment between the high level concept and the low level implementation.

If architecture is a knowledge process based on human abstraction and/or natural patterns, it is then constantly evolving as a discipline. Hence in the 21st century architecture intensive disciplines will learn from the past century of modernism. What are the architecture intensive disciplines that will shape the 21st century and what lessons will can we hope to learn from our past history?

Systems Architecture

Overall, systems architecture will continue to evolve as a holistic discipline. It will be the over-arching discipline that unifies all architecture intensive disciplines. Systems will not be confined to technological systems but will represent broader systems that include man made social and political systems as well as natural and environmental systems.

It took us centuries to develop our approach to dealing with complexity by breaking things down into parts. This way of thinking culminated in the unprecedented and rapid progress of the last century and the age of modernism and the machine. But we have spent the last decades of the 20th century waking up to the reality that we and our planet are paying a price that may lead to our own destruction. A global social consciousness is growing that will define a new value system based on a holistic perspective. This will be the underlying influence for how societies will make decisions, even if these decisions are driven by self-interest, the reality of survival will be the force that will ground us for better or for worse.

Technology and Software Architecture

Technology and software in the 21st century replaces arts and building architecture of the 20th century as the main influence on our way of life. The computing era was born out of the age of machines in the mid 20th century and is a product of modernist thinking and innovation. In the latter part of the last century, there has been a gradual shift in emphasis from hardware to software intensive systems. The internet is evolving beyond a hardware network infrastructure to a platform that is increasingly reliant on advancing software innovation and human social interaction. Designers will flourish in information technology over engineers. It is easier for a designer to become an engineer or to understand engineering than an engineer to become a designer.

Style and form is increasingly influenced by technology with the internet being the converged communication, information, media and entertainment platform on which businesses and households become reliant upon as a utility and service. It is shaping the media, what we read and how we pre-occupy ourselves and will continue to influence our living spaces to re-define the form and function of our furnishings, appliances and devices that we interact with on a daily basis.

Short of chipsets integrated into our brains, wireless data is realizing the dream of living with human telepathy – information directly from one mind to another. Information flow will become increasingly designed into our activities and pre-activity or our thoughts, motivations and inclinations. We will still decide for ourselves but our perceptions will continue to be influenced by the information channels we choose and are surrounded by. Where visual stimulation was a key element of marketing in the 20th century, managing our own choices will become more of a challenge where information and data becomes pervasive and intrusive.

As in the past, there will likely be an ongoing battle between producers. There will be entrenched thinking in software and technology architecture as a philosophy representing the traditional past and emerging future. This will continue into the middle century until a broader philosophy emerges from retrospectively studying the history of software intensive systems – their achievements and failings.

Innovators who adopt patterns from nature to provide sustainable designs will likely flourish. Modernists will realize that manufacturing methods of the past century are not well suited to human endeavours like software development. There will continue to be a demand for rapid production and consumption of software in shorter life-cycles but this will also lead to an over-supply where the economy of integration and re-use becomes more economically viable.

We will be able to retrospectively admire those software intensive systems that have survived and have been re-invented or re-factored to meet the changing times. The software and technology industry will produce the majority of intellectual capital in academic institutions by the third quarter of the 21st century and will re-shape academic thinking and research methods. The gap between academic curriculum and industry practice in computing and informatics will continue to increase and the current computing curriculum will evolve into a foundation course for other multi-disciplinary programs.

Building Architecture

Cities will evolve to increasingly harmonize with nature. Homes will become urban gardens and the movement towards green living spaces and human harmony with our natural environment will dominate 21st century architecture. Postmodernism in building architecture will evolve into natural and organic architectural styles. In the last century, we moved away from integrating nature in our designs. Minimalism became a dominant influence in design over the past century – from “less is more" to "ornamentation should be eliminated from all useful objects." Modern design focused on human abstractions of life in balance with machines rather life in balance with nature.

Designs incorporating vines and leafs intertwined with staircases and facades were replaced by basic geometric shapes and clean spaces. Much of modernist styles will be retained and the desire for clean geometric lines will continue. But we will incorporate more wood and stone into our glass and steel. More importantly, poor communities will re-evaluate their perception of indigenous materials as being cheap or of inferior quality. The challenge for poor communities continues to be inferior work; poor skills and a lack of education systems and resources.

The challenge exists to provide broader access to information systems and technology. Access to information and education along with the sense of connection to a global society through the evolving internet will change the way communities see and empower themselves. Better use of our natural resources will revolutionize spaces in poor slums and create a new aesthetic perspective in densely populated areas or informal settlements.

Social Architecture

Cities and the arts will continue to be a cultural innovator in the 21st century that will help unify an emerging global society. Citizens of the world, those without a single nationality will become legally recognized. In the past century, the western world became a global cultural (and financial) force through the entertainment industry. World music, cinema and arts will end the monopoly and dominance of western entertainment and media. It will create a movement towards realizing a common shared global consciousness. This convergence of culture will be driven and owned by a global community rather than a western dominated centre such as Hollywood. Entertainment will become a tool for social education and will increasingly be an enabling platform for the aspirations of the poor. It will continue to awaken new generations to the potential of a broader global community which in turn will drive a desire for a common world view rather than separate national states.

Social architecture will evolve as a professional discipline. There will be an increasing number of engaged individuals who will work with a variety of tools and mediums to build networks of influence and will become strategic advisors in public and private sector enterprises. Social media will enable the establishment of human networks as organizational structures spanning across countries, industries and companies. Powerful networks of individuals will share their resources and collaborate to compete against established structures. They will form loosely coupled, organized and mobile social and economic groups that will shape the new social corporations of the 21st century. They will be unified by common shared values and staffed by individuals who operate as entrepreneurs. This will change the system of employment where the model of the past century will be judged by historians as a form of modern slavery.

There will be a greater acceptance of the extended nature of the family structure but in some areas, there will be a return towards a nuclear family unit. Emphasis on a nuclear family structure will be driven by governments to help reduce what they regard as extremist belief systems. More governments will turn to social research and try to understand patterns for stable societies and communities.

Enterprise Architecture

The last century saw emphasis being placed on production processes. The modern enterprise as we know it will undergo radical changes in the next century. Legislation will increasingly support human rights and the climate of legislative compliance and governance will make it increasingly difficult for organizations to operate on profit alone. The model of Social Enterprise and the triple bottom line of profit, social responsibility and preservation of the environment will be the basis for economic organizations.

The shift towards a knowledge economy will transform manufacturing industries. Innovation rather production will drive the economy of the 21st century. Social innovation will enable access to free and lower costing products and services. There will be increasing focus on human and intellectual capital. This will shift human resource policies and governance from a set of policies, procedures and standards that support processes to value, principles and practices that enable people.

Controls will increasingly shift from centralization to federation and autonomy. Centralized systems and processes will be applied in balance with federation and autonomy rather than be seen as the best practice. Data and information architecture will focus on context of real time transactions and activities rather than in centralized storage. Knowing about the changes in customer contacts and addresses will be more relevant in decision making than having customer information and contacts stored in a single place.

Change as a Pattern

Are these predictions? Some are already happening and are simply indications of the patterns of change. Some may be utopian predictions based on an overactive optimism about the future. There will be disruptors such as individuals and countries who will go to war for scarce resources under the guise of a more noble pursuit. Each generation will discover old knowledge and reclaim them as new knowledge. We would certainly be more enlightened if we could accumulate the experience and understanding of a life lived over several thousand years. For now, we must learn from the records of the past. We may come to different conclusions but we should all consider the past hundred years when we think of the potential of the 21st century.

PMBOK, RUP, XP, SCRUM, Kanban or Do Whatever/Nothing

Firstly, this writing is a result of Kevin Thompson's LinkedIn Discussion on "Kanban versus Scrum". He advised me to do a blog so I added it as a topic. Maybe we can have a Cafe Conversation on this. It stems from a comment I posted inspired from Henrik Kniberg's brilliant document on http://www.crisp.se/henrik.kniberg/Kanban-vs-Scrum.pdf

I particularly liked Henrik's diagram showing the RUP, XP, SCRUM, Kanban and Do Whatever from "Prescriptive" to "Adaptive" comparing the steps involved in each approach in terms of software development and project process perspective. So I added the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) framework from the Project Management Institute (PMI) as a reference. It consists of a matrix of 5 process groups and 12 knowledge areas in which there are 59 processes (as of 2004, now in its 4th edition with changes).

I've put my comment (as posted) into a table format below comparing PMBOK, RUP, XP, SCRUM and Kanban ...

Program/Project Management Intensive	PMBOK and specifically portfolio management	for multiple projects in a program spanning business units and operations such as radical business process changes over a period of time.
Software Architecture Intensive	RUP, controlled iteration	for projects over a longer period, establishing new platforms and assets in a complex or hybrid environment such as EA and SOA initiatives.
Software Engineering Intensive	XP, Values, Principles, Practice for SE Teams	for products that are software engineering and test intensive with lots of interdependencies, example object orientated software components as libraries or engines used to deliver and support functional work.
Product Management Intensive	SCRUM, Time-box, functional/feature focus	for establishing, evolving and maturing assets with good platform foundations and tools where focus is on the functional product, for example web 2.0 technologies with mature back end infrastructure.
Workflow Intensive	Kanban, Workflows, application maintenance and configuration management	for higher levels of automation, administration and managed change for configurable processes.

It is not simply about waterfall versus iterative life cycles. Also not just about prescriptive versus adaptive as this can be associated with the way the enterprise and teams approach trade-off decisions. It has to do with the nature of the project, organization, scope and scale. Bureaucracy versus agile is also a factor in terms of center of control, hence the balance also between central, federated and autonomous controls.

More About Nothing or Do Whatever

Indulge me for a moment as I explore the "Nothing" option. It does not necessarily mean "nothing" or a less interventionist approach. One thing about making a strategic, political, business or technical decision involving a trade-off is to visualize a series of events and to first contemplate what would happen if you simply did nothing (let nature take its course). Is there a "natural" process of software development? Just as everything has an architecture whether or not it is explicitly defined, there must be a pattern for a social or human organizational endeavor or pre-occupation - which is what software development is ultimately about. Software development processes can be automated but ultimately it is about people. And people have a natural way of working - a natural enterprise process.

In comparing software architecture with building architecture history, I've noticed a pattern in the story of building architecture that demonstrates a pattern of natural social pre-occupation. Over a period of a few thousand years of civilization, our social pre-occupation has evolved in a way that can be articulated across 4 phases.

We initiated architecture by building naturally and organically, using patterns from nature or our environment and surrounds. Nature was our first reference or model of quality - "what is beautiful" or "what is good". Through the classical period which I think of as a more advanced learning period, we started to discover qualities of raw materials. This coincided with urbanization and in dealing with limited space, we turned to mathematics and geometry. Over time our sense of quality, standards, aesthetics or beauty became defined through symmetry. A study of artifacts and in particular the contrast between African art and crafts with other parts of the world and western civilization over the years demonstrates the difference in systems thinking.

The industrial and post industrial period was an intensive period focused on the production process of construction and manufacturing. This heralded the era of machines and modernism was born from the social impact of trying to balance life between man and machine. But over the last century, we have become aware of the dangers and impact to our natural environment. We have reviewed our own social belief systems in the western world and how we have based our beliefs on science from absolute morality and Newton's law to relativism and Einstein's theory of relativity. Postmodernism is an era of openness and transformation.

Interestingly, this process that has taken thousands or years with phases spanning hundreds of years is similar to the Rational Unified Process (RUP) 4 phases of Initiation, Elaboration, Construction and Transformation. In software development projects, you may see this pattern happening in a matter of months and over weeks. A small team initiates a project and develops organically, learning from the business environment. As they decompose the system, they develop a better understanding of the layers and sub systems of the architecture and design. But as the timelines loom towards the quarter or half way mark, management concerns begin and the process seems chaotic and unmanaged. More intensive construction and processes are put in place. More resources and a factory is carved out of the initial design work. If all goes well, there is a transition towards realization and to produce the production release.

While I believe that smaller iterations and agile approaches such as agile and SCRUM can influence the sub phases and iterative cycles, it seems more natural that overall a software intensive system takes a period of time to mature irrespective of the approach. There may be many ways to abstract this period and to make it more successful dependent on whether the meaning of "success" is based on financial/budgetary constraints, quality, time or other indicators and metrics. But there does seem to be a "natural" process that takes place.

It will take more research but I would also like to explore this association with natural patterns. Specifically, I am thinking of fractals which you can find extensive material on as well as on the topic of Chaos Theory. A Fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," from the "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" (Mandelbrot, 1982). Also consider "Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos" by John Briggs, 1994.