Diagrams
Southbeach Notation was developed by pinpointing the features inherent to many different business and engineering diagrams, as they relate to innovation and problem solving.
Draw conceptual, functional, subject-verb-object or process maps of the 'big picture' without getting lost in detail.
Southbeach Modeller does not recreate the look and feel of commonly used and well known diagrams. In fact, the majority of Southbeach models won't look like anything you have seen before. Rather, Southbeach provides a unified notation and creativity engine that is semantically equivalent to those diagrams.
For example, a force-field diagram divides the page into 'driving' and 'restraining' forces. In Southbeach, the equivalent are increasing and decreasing effects, creating a contradiction between a useful or harmful function, goal or risk, issue, choice or action.
Similarly, many analytical diagrams divide the page into panels, for example SWOT charts, consulting 2x2s, 9Boxes. The literature is full of such diagrams. However, precisely what each means is defined only by human convention.
A drawing tool, for example, does not know whether a 'strength' is useful, and a 'weakness' harmful.
An EA tool can describe an architecture in immense detail sufficient for its implementation, but cannot capture how the architecture, and its parts, are both useful and harmful, and how these interact to limit the overall effectiveness of the architecture.
Similarly, an organizational chart can set out the hierarchical reporting structures and roles in a complex enterprise, but cannot show how they interact to increase or decrease the effectiveness of the business.
Do I need Southbeach?
If you want the best drawing software to recreate high-fidelity diagrams in a specific style with which you are already familiar, you won't find that in Southbeach. If however, you want a common tool to work with many creative and problem solving methods, across a range of visual analytic styles, then Southbeach is for you.
