By Bob Ivkovic
Life Architecture is an adaptation of Enterprise Architecture and refers to the architecture of an individual’s life processes. Life Architecture is aligned with an individual’s personal goals, capabilities, and desires. It provides a structured approach for rationalizing an individual’s current life processes and translating a current state to a desired future state Life Blueprint. Life Architecture encompasses a set of principles, self-assessment behavioral techniques, process decomposition modeling, results and value chain modeling, and a deployment plan. Life Architecture represents a methodology to define, design, and transform an individual’s current life processes to a future state process understanding.
When it comes to the discipline of life and improving our lives, we need a Life Architecture methodology to achieve a desired life. Life Architecture must be governed by a set of guidelines, practices, principles, concepts, conventions, assumptions, and rules – similar to an Enterprise Architecture methodology used by organizations – as we architect our lives. These Enterprise Architecture constructs have evolved over several decades as organizations have strived for prestige and dominance in the corporate world. We have now transformed Enterprise Architecture into Life Architecture by providing a framework to develop and optimize life processes.
Life Architecture has been formalized as a structured, measured approach geared to improve our lives and afford us the best possible life in a chosen environment, regardless whether it’s at home or at work. A good Life Architecture starts with a conscientious assessment of our life today and transforms it into a life that we have deliberately mapped out for ourselves. In business, we refer to Enterprise Architecture as an approach to improve an organization’s current situation, or specifically the business capabilities, mapped out by its management team and business visionaries. We use the word “enterprise” because we consider all of an organization’s capabilities (processes, work activities, people, systems, and data) across all functional areas (Sales, Production, Accounting, etc.) and optimize these capabilities and their relationships. In terms of our personal life, Life Architecture guides us in improving various life capabilities as we define all the things that we do and add value to our lives. Life Architecture allows us to understand the benefits and value we add to our lives.
The following five constructs constituting a Life Architecture are the building blocks to a better future.
Figure 1: Five Constructs of Life Architecture
How do the five constructs fit together? To answer that, let’s consider all the terms next to the five constructs of Life Architecture. A Current Life Blueprint maps out our current situation, which is transformed into a Future Life Blueprint representing the life we desire. However, we’re not always sure what that desired life is or what it looks like. This is why we identify the Life Rules that have held us back and come up with a new set of life rules for the future. We also develop a Personal Behavioral Assessment Matrix to capture our innermost needs and desires. This might be a good time to understand the value of our lives and perform a litmus test to see where our value proposition sits on a Life Value Chain. If we have a Current Life Blueprint representing our current life and a Future Life Blueprint representing our future life, we need to develop a Life Roadmap to take us from where we are today to where we want to go in the future. A Life Roadmap can be a large undertaking and we may need to break it down into several Life Results Chains, which represent different aspects of our lives. And to make sure we get to our desired life, we need to schedule all the actions in our Life Roadmap on a Life Web to ensure we get there in a reasonable timeframe. The deliverables pertaining to each construct are described below.
Figure 2: Life Architecture Deliverables
Life Architecture provides a structured approach to rationalize the current state of an individual’s life processes, and translates a current state process mapping to a desired future state Life Blueprint. The goal of Life Architecture is to articulate a future life value proposition as a basis for the development of future life processes. A Life Architectural methodology applies a structured and rigid approach and includes architectural principles, methods, practices, governance, and deliverables.
Bob Ivkovic is an enterprise architect by trade and a life architect by design. Mr. Ivkovic is a management consultant and founder of IT Architects (www.itarchitects.ca), a consulting firm specializing
in the business architecture of organizations. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Management Information Systems and a Master of Business Administration with a specialization in Management of Financial Resources from the University of Calgary. Mr. Ivkovic is the author of Design Your Desired Life, a book about Life Architecture available on www.amazon.com as an eBook, softcover, and hardcover. It can also be found on www.ArchitectingYourLife.com.