Cambium
Every enterprise architecture tool draws what an organization has. This one draws what it costs to move through it.
The name
The cambium is the thin living layer just under a tree's bark. It carries sap from roots to canopy, and it is the layer girdling cuts. Sever it and the tree stays green from the road for weeks while it dies standing up.
Anyone who has read the ten-minute version will recognize the image, because it opens the paper. The tool inherits its whole thesis from it: circulation is the thing worth watching, it cannot be seen from outside, and by the time the canopy tells you, it has been dead for a season.
What it does
It puts capabilities, organization and competence on one canvas with semantic zoom — the same map read at five distances, rather than five diagrams that drift apart the week after the workshop.
Then it computes friction from the structure alone, before anyone has measured anything. A capability with three claimed owners. A competence that lives in one person's head. A flow that never returns to whoever made the decision. None of that needs an interview to find; it is already implied by the model, and a tool that knows the vocabulary can say so out loud.
Decision gates are drawn as first-class objects, with the waiting-to-deliberation ratio and the bypass rate on the face of them — a gate that is routed around half the time is a fact about the organization, and it should be visible without opening a report. A photograph of a whiteboard can be imported and turned into a proposed model, for review, never committed on its own. And the whole thing exports to PlantUML as a projection of what is on screen, because the model on disk is already text.
What it refuses to do
It will never grow an approval queue.
A tool built to find friction that acquires a submit-for-review button has become the thing it was built to find. That sits in the specification as a constraint rather than a preference, because it is the one that will be under pressure from the first customer who asks for it.
Coming soon
Right now Cambium is a specification and a canvas that draws one fictional insurer carrying every problem the tool is meant to catch. There is no date, no beta and no waiting list, and I would rather say that than invent a quarter.
When there is something worth putting in front of someone, it turns up here. If you would like to be told when it does, or you have opinions about what it should refuse to do,write to me — the second kind of message is more useful than the first.
The vocabulary it is built on — capability, structural friction, the four indicators, the interface ladder, the tollbooth — comes from Organizational Flow, which argues that architecture's real job is reducing structural friction rather than designing technology or org charts. This is what a tool that took that seriously would look like.