Diagnostics
Methods to analyze systemic causes in architecture and organization.
Guiding question: Which structural hypothesis is best supported by the evidence?
Assumption Mapping
A diagnostic tool for ruthlessly exposing, categorizing, and deliberately testing unspoken assumptions in architecture design.
Behaviour over Time Charts
A visualization tool that reveals how system variables such as metrics, debt, or productivity change over time.
Boundary Critique
A method for exposing brutal blind spots by questioning what, and who, was actively excluded from an architecture decision.
CATWOE Analysis
A checklist tool from Soft Systems Methodology for decoding the competing worldviews and interests behind a conflict situation.
Causal Loop Diagrams
Visual maps that clarify complex architecture problems by making circular cause-and-effect structures explicit.
Critical Systems Heuristics
A philosophical diagnostic tool that asks which actors gain power from a software architecture and who is disempowered by it.
Dependency Mapping
A visualization of technical and organizational entanglements that exposes bottlenecks and dangerous coupling.
Iceberg Model
An analysis tool for diving below surface-level IT incidents into the deeper mental models and architectural structures beneath them.
Policy Structure Mapping
A diagnostic method for exposing hidden decision rules that govern the behavior of an entire software organization.
Rich Picture Mapping
A highly visual, almost comic-like tool from Soft Systems Methodology for capturing unspoken tensions, culture, and toxic silos in architecture.
Root Definition Analysis
An SSM tool for turning extremely vague IT project mission statements into measurable, precise transformation statements.
Scenario Analysis
A stress test for architectures in which the system design must survive radically different but still plausible future worlds.
Social Network Analysis
SNA exposes the real invisible architecture of organizational cliques by measuring who actually talks to whom and who remains isolated.
Soft Systems Methodology
A seven-stage framework for structuring highly soft, ambiguous architecture problems where nobody even agrees on what the problem is.
Stakeholder Mapping
A tool for locating organizational power and potential veto power around architecture decisions.
Stock and Flow Mapping
The precise quantitative map of systems thinking. It visualizes architecture as a network of stocks that fill and drain through rates.
Strategic Options Development and Analysis
A facilitation method, SODA, for synthesizing a shared architecture strategy from the hardened subjective opinions found in stakeholders' cognitive maps.
Systems Clues in Everyday Language
A forensic tool for analyzing stock phrases, excuses, and us-versus-them language in IT meetings in order to uncover hidden architectural sins.
Viability Audit with VSM
An audit tool that ruthlessly tests whether software teams and architectures are biologically viable or structurally destined to collapse.
Viable System Model
A masterpiece of organizational cybernetics that describes the mathematical and fractal structure every software company needs in order to stay alive under intense market pressure.