Sometimes we have to make decisions for our architecture when we feel stressed. There is no option; we need to make decisions. The act of not deciding is itself a form of decision. These decisions will have potentially long-lasting implications for the socio-technical systems we are evolving. The architecture decisions we make today might impact human safety, ethics, regulator standards, company profitability, or people’s careers and livelihoods. They might create or destroy business opportunities. As decision-makers in 2021 we currently don’t have the luxury to even be in the same room and look each other in the eye when we make these decisions. Our stress is real; how we respond to that stress is a choice. We can manage how we approach making decisions, individually and in groups, even under conditions of stress and duress. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) is a style of decision making that focuses on how people make decisions in high stress, high stakes situations. This workshop focuses on utilising NDM in architecture decision making in the context of high-stakes software-intensive systems.

This workshop equips you to be more intentional in your approaches to decision making. We will show you how to apply decision strategies and models to support decision making throughout different stages of your architecture’s evolution. We will help you develop options for taking action in different contexts based on those decisions. You will learn how to leverage and develop different levels of expertise in group decisions.You will see how to cultivate agility as an outcome of better architecture evolution, even under conditions of stress and volatility. And, finally, we will help you to frame the role of architect as a decision maker and influencer of our organization’s culture, and that we have a very practical role to play in how our organizations’ approach to decision making in different contexts.