A common characteristic of a successful modern organisation is that it uses software to operate. Not the biggest revelation, but true nonetheless. However, the software itself is not what creates the strength of a company or its success, and while there are many factors that contribute to this, it can be argued that architecture is one of the biggest. The architecture is essentially the blueprint for the structure and design of a system and the ways each part interacts and behaves, whether separately or together, to achieve certain goals. The way a system scales isn’t necessarily in the code beneath it, but the logic used to design it, and in the same way, the thing that will cause its fracturing is the logic.
While you could never ask an executive to understand syntax, design patterns, or technical implementation, you can teach them to think more like a systems architect. Understanding the relationships, constraints, long-term trade-offs, and the consequences of decisions that seem small in the moment is integral to successful leadership in a company.
Thinking like a systems architect is not only a technical skill. It’s more of a cognitive posture, a way of viewing the organisation as an interconnected ecosystem rather than a collection of independent units. It’s something that, just like any cognitive posture, can be put into practice through a few good mental exercises.
The first and most fundamental of these shifts is perceptual rather than technical. Before an executive can evaluate complexity, dependencies, or trade-offs, they must change how they see the organisation in the first place. Architecture begins not with diagrams or systems, but with perspective. What differentiates architectural thinking from conventional managerial thinking is not deeper technical knowledge, but a different way of observing how work, information, and decisions move through the business over time.
Seeing the Business as a System, not a Structure
The intuitive way to view a business is through its most obvious divisions: departments. However, architects view systems through flows: information, decisions, inputs, outputs, dependencies, and constraints.
For executives, adopting this perspective means shifting focus from who owns what to how things move. How does a customer request travel across teams? How does data originate, transform, and settle into reports? Where are the points of friction? Where does truth diverge?
This reframing is crucial. Most organisational inefficiencies are not caused by team performance but by system behaviour, breakdowns between steps, mismatches in process logic, and small disconnects that push people into workarounds. Generally, these issues are dealt with in the initial design of a system, but that cannot always be the case when systems already exist. In these situations, the solution comes from studying the flow of information and the points of tension in the system.
This is important for executives because it allows a shift from treating the symptoms of the problem to treating the problem itself.
Understanding Complexity Before Solving It
Complexity is not the enemy, but unmanaged, it will become one. The most common trap is oversimplifying the complexity: “Can’t we just integrate this?” “Let’s just automate the whole process,” or “Why don’t we just buy a tool?”
Architects take the opposite approach. Every system, integration, and process change carries ripple effects, and as a result, the most important step is to map out all the complexity before making decisions:
- Where does this process intersect with others?
- What data will flow in and out?
- What hidden dependencies already exist?
- What will break if this changes?
The discipline takes cognisance of the existing complexity instead of trying to paper over the cracks of integrating something new into an already precarious system.
This approach prevents the most common executive mistake in digital projects: making a decision that solves a local problem but destabilises the wider system. Thinking like an architect means acknowledging the weight of each decision across the whole architecture, the long-term cost, the future constraints, and the impact on the ecosystem as a whole.
Evaluating Trade-Offs Instead of Seeking Perfect Solutions
The allure of the ideal situation always seems to overcome the grounded concept of a balanced compromise. Every design decision involves trade-offs. Non-technical leaders often chase absolutes (“We need one system to do everything”) or silver bullets (“This new tool will fix the process”). Architects reject those illusions.
Instead, they evaluate:
- What are we optimising for: speed, scale, cost, risk, control?
- What trade-off are we willing to accept?
- What future freedom are we sacrificing by choosing this path?
This is where executive thinking and architectural thinking must converge. Strategy itself is a negotiation among constraints. The leaders who think like architects do not ask, “What is the best?” but “What is the best given our constraints and our future direction?”
It is this framing that prevents organisations from drifting into expensive software traps or layering incompatible systems in the hope that technology alone will solve deeper organisational problems.
Recognising That Integration Is Architecture, Not Plumbing
Integration is not a feature; it’s not a technical checkbox that determines whether tools can communicate. Seeing it as this leads to poor integration, introducing friction, delays, and duplicated work. Good integration, on the other hand, builds coherence, speed, and trust in the data presented. Integration defines how people collaborate, how decisions propagate, and how the processes of the company function throughout the existence of the company.
Executives who think like architects ask integration questions early, not late:
- Does this system reinforce our data model?
- Will it introduce new sources of truth?
- How will it communicate with what we already have?
- Will adding it make the architecture stronger or more fragile?
This mindset is what prevents the accumulation of integration debt: the invisible cost that grows when systems expand without a unifying architectural plan. CBOS, for instance, emphasises integration-first design precisely because it determines whether an organisation becomes faster or simply more complex over time.
Seeing Processes as Logic, not Labour
The foundation of this mental posture is logic. Trying to grasp an understanding of how fulfilling a task will affect the system as a whole is the most important step. Adopting this lens allows an understanding of when automation matters, where it’s harmful, and where process redesign is more important than digitisation. Executives no longer assume that digitising a bad process will fix anything. They recognise where systems are enforcing outdated behaviour, and where the logic itself requires restructuring.
This deeper understanding separates performative transformation from real transformation. It shifts the question from “How do we digitise this?” to “Why does this process look like this at all?” And that shift unlocks the potential for true redesign rather than incremental efficiency.
- Written and researched by Sean Veldboer, Consultant at CBOS.