David McCoy

This is one of my favorite five-Euro words.  Weltanschauung (always capitalized, as German nouns prefer) means "worldview.’  I learned the word back in 1987.  I learned to spell it in 1989.  When I am using words like Weltanschauung, it is best to give me a little room. I am likely pontificating. 

I studied Weltanschauung under my old mentor, Trevor Wood-Harper.  Trevor was a pupil of Peter Checkland and the co-creator of the Multiview methodology, a manifestation of Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (SSM).  Multiview and SSM, both force us to think deep thoughts about our worldview: our Weltanschauung.  I liked Multiview in 1987, and I like it even more now that we are spending so much time on Business Process Management (BPM). 

By way of example, here is how Weltanschauung works.  Answer this question: Do you see the world as an ordered and systematic machine, or do you see it as a boiling soup – uncontrollable, densely complex, and ultimately unknowable?  Your perspective is your Weltanschauung.  And your Weltanschauung will color how you interact with the world. 

Weltanschauung one: The World as Machine.

If the world is a machine, then we are all just cogs and gears in the machine. We are parts and we have discrete functions.  We are interchangeable and our contributions are ultimately capable of being rendered by software, since software applications are really just alternative manifestations of our total contribution.  This is a reductionist perspective. This kind of thinking, if applied to BPM, is deadly.  Don’t do it. 

Weltanschauung two: The World as Chaotic Soup. 

If the world is a chaotic soup, then order and systematic behavior are only illusory manifestations and aberrations.  Human actors are unpredictable, capricious, random, and unreliable.  They do not always know the reasons for their actions, and they are not always consistent in their interactions.  Human actors and actions cannot be rendered by software in a 100% reliable fashion. Software applications can only approximate the reality that we call home.  This is a more ontologically rich view of the world. This kind of thinking, if applied to BPM, is jaded and distrustful of what our eyes and ears tell us. By all means, please take this approach.

Success by way of Weltanschauung: Your BPM Weltanschauung will determine your BPM success.  If you expect your BPM participants to behave like cogs and fit into your workflow map as one pieces together a puzzle, then you deserve what you get.  If, on the other hand, you adopt a Kaizen approach to BPM and assume that your first pass process flow is only a start, that your current understanding is only a rough approximation of reality, then you are on the right track.  BPM demands continuous improvement.  Why?  Because the world we live in is more like a soup than a machine. 

Do you live in a machine or a soup?  I live in a soup, and I will prefer soup to machines any day. I have developed my Weltanschauung.  I have had the same one since 1987.  What about you?  By the way, there are more than two Weltanschauungs.  These two are just the easiest ones to digest in a Saturday-evening posting, after an all-you-can-eat-rib-dinner and sweet, sweet iced-tea.  We folks in the South have a weltanschauung or two about iced-tea, you know.