Organizing Complexity: How Architects Collaborate To Build The World Around Us
I’ve spent my career to-date building operations teams at early-stage companies, and have always been fascinated by the question: how do groups get things done? Organizing Complexity is a series of articles where I’ll be unpacking the structures and systems developed in various contexts, from software engineering to foraging ants, that enable groups of individuals to solve collective problems. The goal of this series is not to reach a forgone conclusion about what is the best system, but instead to shed some light on the process of work.
In the last article in this series, I used the process of building a house as a metaphor to illustrate how Scrum teams work. Naturally, that exercise sparked my curiosity around how homes are actually built. It startled me to realize that even though every building I’ve ever stepped foot in is the result of a design and a plan, I had no idea how those decisions are actually made.
Architecture is a practice that involves both artistic intuition and creative problem solving, all organized by a series of steps and milestones. We’ll look into their process and analyze the role of constraints and stakeholder collaboration in this field of work.
