Business Value Compass

Down the Rabbit Hole

"Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." Here's what most readers miss about the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland: she thrived in absolute chaos. A cook hurling pepper into everything. A baby transforming into a pig. A Cheshire Cat grinning from the hearth. Complete dysfunction by any measure. Yet the Duchess navigated it all with strange serenity, extracting morals from every interaction, finding meaning where others saw only madness.

Your February Guide Through the Strategic Architecture Constellations

Your guide, the Duchess, has profound wisdom about finding meaning in chaos to share.

Most enterprise architects watch their digital transformations produce pigs instead of progress. Business stakeholders speak one language; technologists speak another. Strategic initiatives launch without clear technical pathways. Technical implementations deliver without connecting to business outcomes. They've built kitchens where the cook throws pepper into every dish because no one explained what meal they're preparing.

The Duchess understands something from managing her impossible household: you cannot eliminate organizational chaos. You can only find the moral within it. The organizations that synthesize business intent with technical possibility don't just survive complexity—they thrive in it.

What you'll discover in this month's constellation guide:

🍳 The Kitchen Model — Recipe (business intent) + Ingredients (technical capabilities) = Meal (customer value). A whiteboard-ready framework for synthesis.

💡 The Sense/Sounds Principle — "Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves." Why meaning precedes mechanics.

🏦 Financial Services in Action — NVIDIA's 2026 data reveals 89% of institutions seeing AI boost both revenue AND costs. The secret? Making sense of data to make cents from it.

🪜 The Ontology Ladder — Five levels from team fluency to cognitive orchestration, each expanding the circle of co-creation.

🛣️ The Composable Highway — Five patterns that create "morals that execute themselves"—where business intent flows directly into production.

Ready to stop throwing pepper into everything?

Next month, the King of Hearts explores Autonomous Governance Design, revealing how to transform governance from bottleneck to accelerator. But for now, remember the Duchess's gift: everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

🔗 Explore the BTABoK Business Model Canvas​

Where does business intent lose fidelity on its way to your technical teams? Hit reply and share your synthesis challenges. I read every response, and the Duchess remains morally interested.

Everything's got a moral,

Shawn McCarthy

Chief Archeologist

P.S. The Duchess would appreciate this wordplay from the financial services data: institutions succeeding with AI discovered that making sense of their data is precisely how they make cents from it. Yet 40% still cite data scattered across disparate locations as their greatest challenge. The pepper is everywhere, and no one wrote the recipe. What's the one moral—the one connection between technical capability and business value—you could make visible this week?