Why Enterprise Architecture Must Create Urgency, Clarity, and Trust in a Disruptive World

When I joined the organisation as an Enterprise Architect, the expectation was clear and familiar. We would follow a disciplined, strategy-led approach aligned with TOGAF: start from vision and mission, understand business architecture, derive technology architecture, guide solutioning, and govern change through Architecture Development Method cycles. On paper, this approach creates coherence, traceability, and alignment between strategy and execution. In reality, what I observed was a set of deeply embedded organisational challenges that are far more cultural, structural, and behavioural than methodological.

One of the most fundamental issues is the absence of a shared sense of urgency. We are operating in a period of disruptive transformation—tokenisation of assets, real-time settlement, ecosystem-based platforms, and AI-driven operating models are no longer theoretical concepts but active forces reshaping industries. History has shown that organisations do not fail because they lack talent or resources, but because they fail to adapt in time. The stories of Nokia and Kodak are reminders that past success can become a liability when it breeds complacency. Urgency does not mean panic; it means a collective understanding that standing still is itself a strategic decision, and often the most dangerous one.

Instead of initiatives flowing from strategy to architecture and then to execution, many initiatives today originate from project or portfolio management channels and are passed directly to technical teams with a request to “find a solution.” Business objectives are often unclear, implicit, or reduced to a single dimension such as cost savings. Under tight timelines, teams default immediately to convergent thinking, searching for pragmatic, locally workable solutions rather than exploring the problem space. There is resistance to blue-sky thinking, scenario planning, or asking uncomfortable “what if” questions. Energy is spent refining final presentation slides rather than debating options, assumptions, or alternative futures. Design thinking may be referenced, but it is rarely practised meaningfully.

This way of working produces predictable outcomes. Solutions are optimised locally rather than globally. Short-term delivery is prioritised over long-term coherence. Architectural intent becomes reactive instead of intentional. When deadlines are driven by system end-of-life, regulatory pressure, or business launches, tactical fixes crowd out strategic solutions. Even when long-term visions are acknowledged as important, they are perpetually deferred because projects are bounded by fixed timelines and fixed resource allocations. Over time, technical and organisational debt accumulates—not because teams are careless, but because the system incentivises speed over alignment.

Another challenge is that strategy itself is often implicit. It lives in people’s heads rather than in clearly articulated, written, and shared artefacts. Long-tenured staff carry context about why decisions were made, what trade-offs were accepted, and which constraints were temporary. When those people move roles or leave the organisation, that knowledge leaves with them. What remains is a current state shaped by historical decisions and undocumented assumptions. Architects and teams are then forced to reverse-engineer intent from outcomes, a process that is inefficient, fragile, and prone to error.

Innovation is also too often assumed to be an internal activity. Large organisations tend to look inward and backward, reusing existing systems and defending sunk costs. Yet some of the most powerful signals for change come from customers. Their behaviours, frustrations, and workarounds provide direct insight into where operating models and platforms are no longer fit for purpose. When architecture and strategy are disconnected from real customer journeys, innovation becomes abstract rather than actionable.

The difficulty of first-principles thinking compounds these issues. Working-level teams rarely have a holistic view of the enterprise. They operate within functional, system, or domain boundaries and are incentivised to optimise locally. Constraints inherited from past decisions are treated as immutable truths rather than assumptions to be challenged. As a result, organisations repeatedly arrive at local optima while missing better global solutions. Enterprise Architecture exists to elevate thinking beyond these boundaries, but only if it is engaged early and given legitimacy.

Organisational hierarchy further reinforces this problem. Communication is often one-way, flowing downward, while feedback upward is filtered. People at the working level spend a disproportionate amount of time guessing the preferences of senior management rather than searching for the right answer. Risk aversion grows. Decisions are shaped by what feels politically safe rather than what is strategically sound. The organisation gets alignment on appearances, not on outcomes.

Change fatigue is another invisible but powerful force. After repeated rounds of cost cutting, restructures, and transformation programmes, staff become weary. Trust erodes when change feels constant but direction feels unclear. Without co-creating a change vision at the team level, people disengage or comply superficially. Buy-in becomes transactional, and transformation loses momentum before it delivers value.

Even the tools organisations rely on shape behaviour in unhelpful ways. PowerPoint decks and Excel spreadsheets dominate collaboration, fragmenting information across emails and versions. Context is lost, decisions are revisited, and alignment is shallow. Contrast this with the narrative-driven approach popularised by Jeff Bezos, where structured written documents force clear thinking, shared understanding, and meaningful discussion. Good tools do not merely store information; they shape how people think together.

Decision-making itself is often unclear. When choices span multiple teams and stakeholder groups, accountability blurs. Tough decisions stall or are endlessly escalated. Without clear decision rights, governance becomes slow and political. Empowerment and decentralised decision-making, supported by clear architectural principles and guardrails, enable speed without chaos.

Financial opacity further weakens strategic decision-making. Understanding total cost of ownership is surprisingly difficult. Procurement focuses on licence costs, while operational and support costs are fragmented across teams. In matrix organisations, FTE allocation is opaque, and different teams define run costs and change costs differently. Without a shared financial language, application rationalisation and investment decisions become debates about numbers rather than discussions about value.

Many organisations aspire to data-driven decision-making, yet data is often inaccessible, inconsistent, or mistrusted. Before decisions can be data-driven, data must be discoverable, well-defined, and usable by teams. Otherwise, “data-driven” remains a slogan rather than a capability.

Psychological safety is another casualty of prolonged cost pressure. After repeated reductions, people protect their own areas. Silos form as defensive mechanisms. Collaboration declines, and knowledge sharing slows. Architecture, which depends on surfacing risks and challenging assumptions, struggles to function in an environment where people fear being wrong.

Addressing these challenges requires more than refining processes or adopting new frameworks. It requires a re-anchoring of how organisations think about purpose, urgency, and alignment. Strategy must start with “why” and be explicitly articulated, not inferred. Urgency must be created without fear, linking disruptive forces such as tokenisation to real strategic choices and making the cost of inaction visible. Customer journeys should become a central organising construct, providing a shared reference point for prioritisation and investment. A frequently cited example is the digital transformation journey of DBS, highlighted by Harvard Business Review, where success was driven by strong platform foundations, partnership ecosystems, and clear ownership of end-to-end customer journeys.

Organisations must create space for divergent thinking early, before converging on solutions. Scenario planning, “what if” analysis, and option exploration should be treated as risk reduction, not overhead. Roles, decision rights, and engagement models across Enterprise Architects, Solution Architects, Data Architects, and Domain Architects need to be explicit. Financial transparency must be treated as a first-class architectural concern, with standardised definitions of run cost, change cost, and total cost of ownership. Governance should evolve from control to enablement, accelerating good decisions rather than merely preventing bad ones. Collaboration tools should privilege shared narratives and written thinking over slide decks. Data must be made available and trusted before demanding data-driven outcomes. Stakeholder engagement must be intentional, recognising that architecture succeeds through alignment, not mandate.

Enterprise Architecture is not about enforcing frameworks or producing artefacts. It is about creating clarity in complexity, continuity in change, and coherence over time. When urgency is missing, strategy fades. When trust is weak, architecture is sidelined. When purpose is shared and thinking is explicit, architecture becomes indispensable. In a world that will not wait, clarity is no longer optional—and neither is architecture.