Architecture leadership: the clarity pump

At HSBC, technology architects aim to achieve Zang Jing Ge: technical excellence, communication mastery and leadership power.

Most of us have a pretty good idea of what technical excellence looks like. We also have some idea of what communication mastery looks like, even if many of us are not as confident in our communication skills as we are in our technical skills.

But what does it mean for a technology architect to demonstrate leadership power?

It doesn’t mean that we have thousands of people working for us, or that we control large budgets. Many architects are individual contributors, and even those in leadership positions don’t usually have large teams (my team is the smallest function in the HSBC Technology organisation). You don’t normally find the architects by tracing the organisational hierarchy upwards or by following the money.

So how do we lead?

One obvious answer is that we lead by shaping people’s thinking. There are many ways of doing that. However, none of them are easy, and all of them require practice. I’d like to share one approach with you, which I think of as the clarity pump, and which can be captured in the mantra: internalise ambiguity; externalise clarity.

At one level, architects employ the clarity pump just by doing their jobs every day as decision makers and solution designers. We take broad needs and problems (‘We need to go faster but it’s too hard to connect to our legacy platforms.’), consider options and possibilities (‘Better APIs? Externalise the data to another repository? Rip out the whole thing and start again?’), make decisions (‘Of course we’re going to improve our APIs.’) and communicate them to people (‘Here are the five APIs which make the biggest difference to agility and how we’re going to change them.’) We start with a problem and end with a solution; we start with ambiguity and we end with clarity: this is what we do.

There is some leadership involved even in everyday design work such as this. All the way along, there will be confusion and uncertainty, there will be differences of opinion, there will be people who question why they should trust the architect’s point of view. Dealing with these challenges with patience, respect, firmness and confidence is the start of our development of leadership power.

In everyday design, though, we often work the clarity pump simply by deploying our technical expertise and experience. We know the answer because we have seen the problem many times before; perhaps we have even codified the solution as a pattern. We are confident because we know what to do. Our work involves application rather than invention.

However, as we grow in our roles as architects, we will face much bigger tests of our leadership skills, and will encounter problems which we have never faced before. And, as we help our companies get the best value from new technology, we will face problems nobody has ever faced before.

Our normal process of problem solving will come under extreme pressure. We will face unfamiliar needs and problems (‘We need to build partnerships with companies in completely new sectors,’ or, ‘We’re facing a competitive threat from a whole new type of business,’ or, ‘We want to get value from a technology which is so new that there are no standards and no products.’), will be uncertain of the options and possibilities, (‘Where do we even start? I’ve never done anything like this before.’), will be unsure of how to make decisions (‘I have no clue how to compare a product that doesn’t exist with the output of an engineering team that hasn’t been formed.’) and won’t know what to tell others (‘This is going to be hard to explain . . .’).

It would be tempting at this point to submit to confusion. After all, if nobody else has solved or even faced this problem before, why should we hope to be successful? If everyone else is confused, then why shouldn’t we be confused too?

But this is also the point where we need to demonstrate most architectural leadership. A big part of leadership is stepping forward when no-one else is stepping forward, so we cannot submit to confusion. If we don’t know how to design the solution, then we must figure out how to design the approach to get to the solution: we must build the intellectual scaffolding that will help us to build the building. And when we face genuine ambiguity, when we face choices that cannot be resolved through reasoning, we must make a choice anyway, even if we know that the choice may be wrong. We must face ambiguity, own it and internalise it, and present clarity to the people who are looking to us for clarity.

In these circumstances, working the clarity pump does not mean using established technical expertise to turn problems into solutions. It means using leadership skills to project confidence and clarity into the teams we work with, even when we are uncertain and unclear ourselves. It means giving people enough direction to get going, while we figure out what decisions we need to take the day after tomorrow. It does not mean that we should be patronising, or obscure, or hide the fact that there are big problems to solve, but it does mean that we should people reason to believe that they can trust us to lead them through the maze. It also means that we should be aware of the confusion we cause when we work the clarity pump in the wrong direction: we make situations more complicated, we undermine confidence, and we create chaos.

I am often asked by architects, particularly those setting out on their careers, why people should follow them if they don’t have control over people and don’t have control over the money. One answer lies in the clarity pump: people may obey managers because of hierarchy and budgets, but they follow leaders because they provide vision and direction. If architects provide that vision and direction, if they turn ambiguity into clarity, then people will follow them and they will achieve the leadership dimension of Zang Jing Ge.