Nested Is The Word To Describe Our World...

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This post is part of a series on enterprise longevity and good product architecture. 

At TEDxBoston, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen said, “The world is, in many ways, organized in a nested system. So we have nations, within those we have industries, within industries we have corporations, within those we have business units, within those we have teams, within the teams we have people, and within the people we have brains.” (TedxTalks, 2012)

To ensure enterprise longevity, we need to recognize that the world we are living in is nested. Almost everything (if not everything) is part of a nested system. The company product must be seen as part of a larger system. Defining the boundaries of the product is crucial, because it determines the exact deliverables of the enterprise. Next is to identify the other objects in the nested system. Emergence is a property of nested systems, where the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The product will be dysfunctional if it operates alone. 

Almost certainly, one of the objects in the supporting system will be the operator, who is the intelligent agent. Both the product and supporting systems have boundaries. Everything that crosses these boundaries needs to be coordinated and facilitated by interfaces. More importantly, holistic comprehension of the whole product system lays the foundation for further downstream tasks.

Why do we see more gasoline cars than electric cars? Think of the coordination and interfaces between the boundaries (see below). Which is better? Electric or gasoline?

Nest, Nests, Nested. 

Thanks very much for reading. 

Credit

TedxTalks. (2012, July 17). (TedxBoston, Producer) Retrieved December 9, 2012, from You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvos4nORf_Y