Venn Diagram or Ball Pit?

This Venn diagram is probably familiar to anyone who worked in enterprise consulting in the information or knowledge space. The idea being communicated was that these were the three driving considerations for strategy planning for solution or application development and/or implementation. The messaging was that if you ignore or go out of balance on any one of these areas your project was doomed.

Today this diagram looks naively simple.

Working in real life on solutions for the enterprise, what I found is that you have to simultaneously meet the needs of multiple and diverse populations and roles; use technology stacks that shift and interact unpredictably (we no longer implement a single ‘technology’ to provide a solution) and business process models are not simply captured and done as they are changing all the time. Maintaining an even dynamic between these transformations would be impossible…

I’m thinking it’s more accurate to diagram these relationships nowadays as a ball pit - like one you might see at a kids’ park. Multiple forms and instances of each consideration are rubbing up against each other with constant change and tension between and among the same or different categories. Whatever solution you develop, the overriding consideration is that the relationships are more like networks in three dimensions and in addition to that, they are in constance change.

To work well in this environment, you’ve got to have the courage to jump in and begin. The job is not to wrestle it down to a flat and static landscape - your job is to create a rich and ever changing experience.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.