Tag: Accountability
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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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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…
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The Half-Life of Judgment
Photo by Nicolas Lafargue on Unsplash The morning the first iPhone 3G launched, the queue filled with a problem the queue had never seen. I was working in contact centers then, on the floor, hearing the beep of a new call arriving as soon as the previous one ended, watching the flood roll over us…
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The Way Becomes the Obstacle
Photo by Matt Jones on Unsplash “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Five You have seen this quote. It hangs framed in offices, opens keynotes, and anchors one of the best-selling leadership books of the past decade. Marcus Aurelius wrote it nearly…
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Illumination
Photo by Roma Kaiuk🇺🇦 on Unsplash The joke is old because it keeps working. One person’s résumé says:Single-handedly managed the successful upgrade and deployment of a new environmental illumination system with zero cost overruns and zero safety incidents. Someone watching the work says:He changed a light bulb. We laugh because we recognize the move. A…
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The Cost of Ownership
Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash Author’s Note This piece may come across sharper than most. Perhaps that’s intentional—but the intent is not unkind. The goal here is not to condemn managers, critique peers, or cast blame on systems that evolved in the absence of reflection. Rather, it’s to illuminate a pattern that often remains invisible until it’s…
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Inside the Lines, Outside the Truth
Photo by Joyce Romero on Unsplash Author’s Note The opening story in this piece is fictional—but it’s not invented. It draws from publicly available reporting, court documents, and personal accounts related to the Purdue Pharma case and the wider opioid crisis. The names, moments, and characters have been fictionalized, but the architecture of the story—how…
