The 1825 Moment: How Enterprise Anatomy Will Transform Business Like Medical Anatomy Transformed Medicine.

If you think about it, Enterprise Engineering today is exactly where medical science was in 1825.

In 1825, the world had roughly one billion people. Average life expectancy in the United States was around 40 years. Medicine was a craft built on experience. Every doctor relied on self-learning, intuition, and “best practices.”

Most believed that because every human looked different on the outside, each must have a different anatomy inside.

No X-rays. No imaging. No shared proof. Just the conviction that healing depended on the doctor’s judgment.

Then, around the mid-1800s, Marc Gray and his contemporaries changed everything. They proved that one billion people shared one anatomy. That single discovery turned medicine from intuition into science.Once structure became visible, diagnosis became faster, surgery safer, and medicine repeatable.

By 1925, the global population had inched up to 1.1 billion, but average life expectancy in the US had barely reached 44 years.

By 2025, the planet holds more than 8 billion people, and US life expectancy is roughly 84 years. In just 100 years, humanity grew eightfold — and doubled its lifespan.

Not because doctors worked faster, but because they finally worked structurally right.

That’s the power of understanding anatomy. Once the structure is known, speed and precision can finally coexist.

Enterprise Engineering Today

Enterprises in 2025 are where medicine stood in 1825.

They are guided by experience, intuition, and best practices. Leaders make decisions through patterns that worked for them before. Every organization seems unique — because we still can’t see its anatomy.

We think “different industry, different structure,” just as 19th-century doctors thought “different patient, different body.”

It isn’t wrong — it’s just early. We are still in the pre-Anatomy stage of enterprise engineering.

The Emergence of Enterprise Anatomy

The Enterprise Anatomy lens begins to make that structure visible:

• P1 → P6 – how Strategy connects through to Operations.

• D1 → D15 – how departments (Finance, HR, Risk, IT, Sales, Marketing, Operations, etc.) interlock as one living system.
  

When you can see these layers and how they align, the enterprise stops being a black box. It becomes a diagnosable, improvable organism — just as the human body did once anatomy was mapped.

As this structure becomes visible, enterprise practice will move the same way medicine did:

• from self-learning to science, from “best practice” to structured practice,

• from believing “every enterprise is different” to understanding every enterprise shares one anatomy.

The Transition Ahead

It’s not that enterprises are doing anything wrong. We’re simply at our 1825 moment.

Frameworks, models, and management best practices today are like the early surgical manuals — brave, necessary, but not yet anatomy-aware.

Once enterprise anatomy is visible, there will be no need to choose between speed and structure, or between agility and discipline. Medicine didn’t slow down when it learned anatomy — it accelerated safely. Enterprises will too.

From Intuition to Science

Humanity didn’t double life expectancy by moving faster. It did it by understanding the system it was changing. The next leap in enterprise maturity will come from the same shift: from believing every organization is different, to realizing they all share one structure.

That’s what the Enterprise Anatomy lens reveals. We’re not reinventing enterprises — we’re finally seeing them. And once you can see the structure, you can build, heal, and scale it — without breaking it.

This isn’t the end of Enterprise Architecture. It’s the moment where the science of enterprise finally begins.