The architecture was way too often a top down approach: architects were pushing their designs to delivery teams and then moving on the next project. We need to revisit this approach.

There will always be an intentional architecture: we know what we want to do given the constraints we have and the environment in which we’re evolving. But it must high level enough to allow delivery teams to effectively adapt the intentional part to their specific context.

We also have to consider the emergent design: teams developing products master them and have something to say about its design. They can influence and correct the intentional architecture and also feeds the future with new ideas. On the other hand, emergent design alone is not sufficient when developing large systems as it can cause excessive rework at some point.

So we need to have the intentional architecture meeting the emergent design: that’s the meet in the middle we mentioned above. The zone where they meet is called the dialog zone. It must be opened enough to have the challenge it deserved. And of course, this zone is different from one product to the other.