Most of the time (especially in big companies), analysts of all kinds will soon or later talk about “processes”. Personally, I never found it completely satisfying. And I think there are many reasons for this. Thinking process puts a solution before defining the problem. Real life is not made of processes, especially human are not scriptable machines. It’s a “if-then-else” vision of the world. It creates “blind spots” (everything that was not planned by the process but still arise).
I think I should make an article some day about “process thinking” and be more explicit and show at what moment and in what situation processes are still useful.
Another way to think, that in my view is more in line with reality, is to think about “events”. Event storming is a great tool to make that happen! People in a room discuss and share knowledge in a brainstorming mode first. It can be used for teaching, analyzing and sharing knowledge and is often the first step away from the waterfall, single headed, analysis document that falsely pretend to cover everyone’s need.
Alberto Brandolini has been very active in structuring and communicating this technique, though I don’t think the most important is to follow a strict recipe, but rather to have a good understanding of what “events” mean in the context of the analysis. (More articles to come, surely!). But we couldn’t pass next to the opportunity to relate Alberto Brandolini to his famous quote: the “brandolini law”:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.
Even if it is not mathematically true (there are few cases in which it’s not the case), it does resonate very often in every day life… Consequence of the Dunning-Kruger effect?