Take a trip in your architect’s time machine

I have claimed in the past that technology architects have superpowers, particularly x-ray vision and, even more importantly, the ability to figure out how things work. But if you are lucky enough to work with a technology architect, you should make the most of another one of their special abilities: time travel.

You have probably already realised that architects can travel to the future. After all, they spend a lot of their time talking about the fantastic advantages that new technology will bring us, and how great our lives will be one we have built their vision. They also spend a lot of their time giving us dire predictions of how things will be if we make the wrong choices in the present. They may even talk about future state architectures (although this is not a phrase I am a fan of - I will explain more in an upcoming article but will just say for now that attempting to define a single fixed ‘state’ for anything which changes as rapidly as technology architecture feels like a mistake).

You may be inclined to dismiss this talk of the future as fanciful, and to drag your architects back to the challenges you face today. But, before you do that, you should give them a chance to show you some possible futures, so that you can remember why you are trying to solve those challenges today.

You should also pay attention to your architects when they turn their time machines in the other direction, and travel to the past. If you have an architect working directly in your team, they are probably one of your most experienced people, and, if they are like most architects, they have lived through mistakes and epiphanies, triumphs and disasters, and have been responsible for at least a few of them. Part of their job is to look back into the past, see what went wrong and what went right, and to figure what led to each outcome. Indeed, many of the tools in the architect’s toolbox - the standards, patterns, policies and principles which you sometimes follow and sometimes chafe against - are no more than crystallised experience, packages of the past intended to help you and the team repeat successes and avoid failures.

And, whether you are traveling with your architect to the future or to the past, you should take advantage of the time traveler’s perspective. One of the roles of the architect is to take the long view, to remember all that we have built and all that we intend to build. In the day to day stresses of delivery it is easy to forget this perspective, to let our horizons shrink. That focus can be important, but if is our only focus, we run the risk of being trapped in an eternal present, and never delivering profound or transformational change.

Finally, just as in all time travel stories, it is important to know the rules. Can we change the past? Can we change the future? What happens if I step on a butterfly? What happens if I meet myself?

The architect’s time machine is not a real time machine: it is made of imagination and curiosity, experience and memory, and it follows their rules. We cannot change the past, and we should not try to do so: rather, we should try to understand it, whether we got things right or wrong. But we can change the future: indeed, that is why we come to work every day. Whether the architect’s imagination shows us apocalypse or paradise, those futures are ours to create.

To make the most of the architects in your time, spot the times when they have that far away look which tells you that they are traveling to the past or the future, and ask them to tell what they have seen: you will always learn something and you may be able to change something.