Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets #37

4 things every Enterprise Architect should do

The Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets is open!

Extended Absence

After a prolonged absence, I suppose I should share where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to.

On December 22, 2023 my wife gave birth to our son, Jackson Brian Chambers. We have a 3-generation tradition in our family where the first boy has taken dad’s first name as middle name, so I am happy to continue that into the next generation. He came a little early, but thankfully were back home on the 23rd and enjoyed the Christmas and New Year holidays at home together. Jackson is healthy, happy, and sleeping great. I have been learning about life as a new dad and polishing my dad joke skills (obviously the most important thing). Beyond that, I’ve been keeping busy with active and outdoors activities like mountain bike rides with friends and family, trail runs and races, archery (3D targets with a compound bow), and of course CrossFit (who did Murph over Memorial Day weekend?). The year is off to a great start for me and I hope yours is too!

Turning to our topic for today… this post is a written version of a conversation I had on the Chief Architect Network LIVE podcast with my co-host, Grant Ecker. You can watch the entire conversation here and hear our dialogue and Grant’s four ideas.

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Four things that could level up your leadership

If you are an Enterprise Architect, Chief Architect, or a technology leader of any sort, there are certain repeatable strategies and behaviors you can employ to take your leadership, influence, and success reaching outcomes to the next level. Driving change in an organization — while delivering cohesion instead of chaos — is a big challenge.

I am reluctant to use the word “should”… let’s consider these opportunities you could take advantage of. In my experience, they work when applied with consistency over time.

Think fast, think slow

Borrowing from the excellent book “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman (recommend), the first thing to do is ensure you understand your thought model.

Kahneman breaks down two key systems that our brains use.

• System 1: The fast, intuitive, and emotional system. It operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. It helps us make quick judgments and decisions but can be prone to biases and systematic errors.

• System 2: The slow, deliberate, and logical system. It allocates attention to effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

As an Enterprise Architect (in particular), it is critical to be able to employ System 1 (hereafter “fast”) thinking. We often need to think on our feet, help people get unstuck, or make a judgement when asked to answer a question by another leader. I tend to find that mastery of one’s domain makes this system 1 thinking fairly easy for a lot of architecture leaders. Of course, we must remember that these thoughts are subject to our biases, gut feelings, and the like. I think of this type of thinking taking place in meetings, forums, and leadership presentations where things are quick and snappy. We use fast thinking all the time, and it’s a good thing. We need it.

Then there is System 2 (hereafter “slow”) thinking. This type of thinking requires carving out quiet time to think deeply. This slow thinking is where some very important things happen: strategies form, first-principles are considered, ideas are distilled to their simplest form, deliverables are crafted, presentations are rehearsed, feedback is developed.

Scrolling social media, news, LinkedIn has made it very challenging to be a slow thinker — our brains are changing and we seem to struggle more and more with things that take dedicated time. But hear me on this: you can’t be successful long term if you do not make time for slow thinking.

Brain 🧠 Tip #1: New to Chamber of Tech Secrets are Brain Tips. I often get my name - Brian - misspelled as “Brain” in solicitations, internal emails, and even once on a credit card! Let’s go with it and have some fun. This week’s brain tip is to fix this problem now before it starts to catch up with you. Go as many weeks into the future on your calendar as you must and find a time that you like for slow thinking. Block. Your. Calendar. You have my permission. Treat that time as sacred and don’t give it up for meetings or other easy-to-do instant gratification activities, ever if you can help it but at least not easily. I have what I call “heads down Wednesday” blocked from 12-5pm every week for the next 15 years.

Build Scalable, Shareable Mental Models

Enterprises have a lot going on across one to many businesses. Departments, teams, and other structures we create employ people who tend to focus on whatever outcomes they own and charge after them relentlessly. This is good — we want a world where teams can push the proverbial gas pedal and the car accelerates. We want a world where they can be decoupled from everyone else and focus on their work. At the time time, if a subset of teams are crushing it but ignoring everyone else around them completely, those other teams are likely to suffer. Then the company doesn’t win… and when the company doesn’t win, it doesn’t matter which sub-teams did.

We have a challenging goal as Enterprise Architects. We need to keep things loosely coupled, decentralized, and autonomous as much as possible (at least that’s my goal) AND we need to make sure that one team’s success doesn’t come at the expense of other teams and ultimately cause the company to lose.

Central to this is having a “shared context”, and we want to make sure that our teams have “just enough” of it. Just enough context means understanding the landscape around you so that you can act like a lego block in the larger organization while not having to understand all the things that make up the other blocks.

Building scalable, shareable mental models is how I attempt to navigate this challenge. These are things that others can “think on top of”. What is such a model? Let me give you two examples.

First is Business Capability Models, which are a Business Architecture technique for building shared context about what an organization does and how it is supported by people, process, technology, and data. In Business Architecture, we use industry standard models as much as possible and avoid making the model a copy of the organizational chart. The model reflects what things the company does, not how it is currently structured. We can use this model to layer in systems, people, vendors, financial spend, technical components, operational criticality tiering, risk considerations, and more. When we create these types of models we build shared context. On top of that, we allow others to extend our model for their needs. For example, we are currently discussing tracking our progress on each capability across the spectrum of Manual, System-enabled, Automated, AI-Enabled. Those may not be the end-state words we use, but you get the idea.

Second is one of my favorite things: Principles. Principles are hard to do well, but when you get them right they can be a powerful mechanism for creating a scalable and shareable mental model. Principles encapsulate things we want everyone to put at the bottom of their pyramid as they think about solving a business problem. Your culture, operating model, and many other factors will determine what you want to put in this wonderful layer, but I highly recommend having a strong set of principles that you can share in text form and conversationally. For the latter, you have to take time to internalize them… and I recommend doing that while you write them so you get it right. Remember to start from a least common denominator of organizational understanding, whatever that is.

I have written about our EA principles on the Chick-fil-A Tech Blog extensively if you want to learn more.

Brain 🧠 Tip #2: To share context, we need to have context… so this all starts with listening.

Write

Writing is a fantastic way to force yourself to crystalize your thoughts. Writing forces context-building, idea cohesion, and conciseness in communication. This is probably why some highly effective companies like Amazon have used it over slides in meetings to build appropriate context for decision making.

Writing publicly can take your thinking to the next level. If you can explain an idea to those who don’t have the same shared context as you, how much more effectively will you be able to communicate your ideas internally to people who share more context? How much better will you understand all of the intricacies of the topic if you explore it in writing, which forces you to face your own limitations in understanding?

I have written about writing before, so I’ll leave it at that.

I encourage every Chief Architect, Enterprise Architect and… well… human to start writing today. The benefits are incredible and the cost is simply making time (think System 2, slow thinking).

Brain 🧠 Tip #3: WRITE!

Be macro focused, not micro

It is easy to get focused on the little details of every project and if they are on or off the rails. There is a time and place for that, but as Enterprise Architects, we need to look at the bigger picture. Is the organization developing its capabilities in the right areas to succeed and win in the marketplace? Are we researching and exploring new and emerging technologies that can help our business? Are we making the right investments? Do we have good architecture? Not perfect architecture… that will never happen. Are we winning?

Focus on these things and you’ll likely be more effective, less stressed, and happier.

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Thanks for reading. I hope the 6+ month wait between posts was worth it. Have a great week!