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The Shape It Falls Into
Photo by Fr. Daniel Ciucci on Unsplash Before a stone arch can support its own weight, something else has to hold it up. Imagine a bridge under construction, somewhere along a river whose current has been cutting through the landscape for longer than anyone remembers. Its foundations have been laid on either bank, and above…
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Known Weaknesses
Photo by FlyD on Unsplash Author’s Note: The workplace examples in this piece are generalized from requests I have reviewed and stories shared by friends, colleagues, and community members over the past several years. Details have been altered, and none describes a specific person, team, or project. ~Dom The Bug Wasn’t Where They Were Looking…
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Second Place
Photo by Riho Kitagawa on Unsplash The report had been running longer than anyone currently responsible for it. It wasn’t sophisticated: a few pages, a handful of filters, and a set of numbers that a team opened every week to track progress against a defined target. Nobody thought of it as architecture. People thought of…
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Drawing Dead | An Architect’s Perspective on the Enterprise AI Bet
Photo by Julian Gojani on Unsplash You know what you are holding. Two cards, face down, and you have looked at them enough times to stop looking. You know the rules of the game, which hands beat which, and roughly how often the deck cooperates. You know how many chips are on your side of…
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The Board Is Not Flat
Photo by Elena Popova on Unsplash Yes, I know that’s Go. That’s partly the point. ~Dom I don’t particularly like chess. I am reasonably decent at it, although I have never played enough to earn a rating, and I recognize most of the reasons people admire the game. Chess teaches patience and sacrifice, and it…
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Custody
Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash There is a particular sentence that appears in incident reviews, architecture meetings, postmortems, and inherited projects with remarkable consistency. “That predates me.” And usually, it is true. The person saying it did not make the decision. They were not in the room when the architecture was chosen, the exception…
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Cultivating Revenue
Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash Author’s Note: This week’s article deliberately steps a little outside the usual language of boardrooms, business schools, and technical architecture. The metaphor that follows comes instead from the fiction I read and the games I play. That is intentional. An idea’s origin tells us something about its context, but…
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The Implied Zero
Photo by Frank R on Unsplash Author’s Note: The opening example is a composite, paraphrased from several professional conversations over many years. Details have been generalized, and no specific organization, analysis, or business decision is being described. The concern examined here is the analytical pattern itself. ~Dom The conversation that removed it probably took about…
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Letters to Versailles
Photo by Jessica Kantak Bailey on Unsplash There is something almost unfair about seeing Versailles for the first time. We arrive knowing how the story ends. We know about bread and debt, revolution and executions. We know the monarchy will fall, just as we know the palace will eventually become something closer to a monument…
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The Decision Inside the Delay
Photo by James Peacock on Unsplash Most of my recent writing has made some version of the same argument. Organizations repeatedly pay for things they declined to define once. An undocumented exception becomes maintenance work for everyone who inherits it. A policy outlives the conditions that made it correct because the rule was preserved and…
