Sydney, Australia
In Sydney, I learned the first of two apparently paradoxical lessons about architecture. If you get too close to the details, or the technologies, it’s impossible to see the architecture at all. But the apparent paradox - which I will come back to later - is that successful architecture is very much about the details.
As this was the first stop on my journey to create a repeatable process for EA as a strategic capability, I wasn’t sure whether to start at the end (“Apply”) and work backwards, or the beginning (“Establish”) and work forwards. How would someone be sure, without knowing how they would apply something in practice, what to establish in the first place? But I also wanted to avoid being constrained at the outset by knowing too much about how it would finally work.
Another lesson I first learned in Sydney, from exploring the history of the Opera House, was that innovations in architecture can mean figuring out some of...