Complement Zang Jing Ge with Míngzhì de

In one of his articles (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/zang-jing-ge-way-architect-david-knott/), HSBC Group Chief Architect David Knott defined Zang Jing Ge as the way of the architect.

David identified three main traits of highly effective architects:

• Leadership Power. The ability to lead people to follow one's idea without referring to position, titles or power. Leadership also means empowering one's team by letting them come up with solutions to problems, yielding the leadership to whoever knows best at a particular point in time.
• Technical Excellence. As architects are technology leaders, they should show a willingness and a passion to get to grips with leading technology trends and opportunities. They should also demonstrate experience in actually delivering technology solutions in a way that reconciles the often conflicting demands of delivering at speed and doing the right thing.
• Communication Mastery. One of the most important traits of highly effective architects is the ability to communicate sometime ambiguous, often complex concepts in simple terms for others to understand. Especially for architects that look at the organisation as a whole, there's the frequent need to explain complex concepts to (sometimes) non-technical people in a way that they can digest - in order for them to release of funds to invest in IT deliveries.

There's no doubt that the three traits above are key for anyone wanting to be an effective architect. I'd like to suggest a fourth trait in addition...

Meet Míngzhì de (明智的)

The fourth trait, I'd suggest, that is key for high performing architects is mastery of negotiation skills. I chose the concept 'Míngzhì de' which means "wise" in Chinese, because to me, being a great negotiator, means being wise.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we all are negotiators. We negotiate when we buy our houses or cars, when we find a new job, when we try to sell new ideas, when we ask someone in our family to do something for us.

As we all know, there are various approaches to negotiations:

• Win-Win. In this kind of negotiations, everybody wins. 1+1 might result in 2, 4, 10, 100,000. Win-Win is what creates synergy between the negotiating parties. Everybody gets what they want and everybody is happy.
• Win-Lose. This is the old-fashioned way of negotiating, based on power or title. It's the "dog-eats-dog" mentality. "Somebody's gotta loose. Better you than me". This is, actually, a zero-sum game, because for every winner there's a looser.
• Lose-Win. This is the other side of the Win-Lose coin. With this approach, somebody gives up to let somebody win. "OK, I'll let you have it your way this time, hopefully I'll get my way the next time." or "He's so good. I'll let him win this time, he deserves it. I'm not good enough, I'm not as good as him".
• Lose-Lose. This is possibly the worst of the negotiating scenarios, where those involved in the negotiation, having realised they're not winning, focus on bringing the other party down. "If I go down, they'll go down too", "It's not fair, why do I have to be the only one who loses? Perhaps if they loose too, I won't be such a loser". In this scenario, 1+1 results in 0. Everybody loses.
• No Deal. Sometimes a negotiation might end up with nothing being decided and one or both parties walking away. When underpinned by integrity (conforming reality to our worlds), this is the best alternative to Win-Win.
• Compromise. This happens when two parties, being respectful of each other, agree to give something up in order to gain something. Here, 1+1 = 1/2. This is the third best outcome of a negotiation. Everyone gets something, although not what they originally wanted.

High performing architects must be master negotiators because very often their job entails selling ideas and solutions to people in order to address complex problems.

A typical scenario happens when we look at the delivery of technology solutions. Here we can mediate two competing and opposing forces:

• The delivery team wants to release something to production as soon as possible to realise value
• The operations team wants to make sure that the solution protects the organisation from operational risk, adheres to best practices, is the right thing to do, is operationally sound and reuses as much as possible of existing solutions.

We can take security as an example. Developers would like to behave as if there were no hackers in the world: security is hard, why should they spend precious time in engineering complex secure solutions? The operations team knows that hackers are out there trying to steal data and money, and they want to protect their organisation from cyber attacks.

Often, architects find themselves in the middle of such conflicting arguments. In the example above, architects would be required to provide security patterns to protect applications as they go live. If they proceed with a top-down approach, mandating a solution conceived in isolation, they are ignoring the leadership aspect of Zang Jing Ge. It's very unlikely that they will be listened no.

How often do we hear this familiar refrain from delivery teams: "Oh, they are architecture, they don't know what it means being on the ground writing actual code, they live in an ivory tower. Just tell them 'yes' to make them happy...In the end we will do what we want, we know better."?

This is where mastering the art of negotiation really helps. Architects should listen to all sides with the intent of really understand what's important for delivery, operations and any other stakeholder group. For example, we know that for developers speed is essential to unlock business value. We also know that for operations protecting their organisation from operational risk is important. They like security, stability, adherence to standards and best practices.

What if, as architects, we were able to suggest options to achieve operational soundness at pace? What if we were able to suggest Twelve Factor like approaches to security (e.g. security by configuration, applied at runtime), automated checks to make sure solutions deployed to production adhered to global standards and best practices? Isn't this the vision behind DevOps, i.e. removing the barrier between developers and operations in a way that developers take operations into consideration when writing code and operations apply more of a software development approach to operations (Google SRE anyone?).

So to conclude, I believe that high performing Architects should excel at all of the following:

• Leadership
• Technology
• Communication
• Negotiations

Please let me know what you think?