I’ve been in enough boardrooms, war rooms, and “innovation labs” to know the truth: architects often get rewarded for sounding right, not for actually getting anything real done. Frameworks get polished, diagrams get drawn, people clap for the slide deck—and somewhere between the theater and the noise, the outcome we were hired to deliver slips away.
That’s why I’m talking about radical pragmatism.
Pragmatism isn’t about cutting corners. It’s not chaos or cowboy coding. It’s not “move fast, break everything.” It’s refusing to buy into the lie that our value lies in framework purity or methodology worship. Radical pragmatism is about courage: the courage to say I don’t care what TOGAF page 73 says, this is what gets value into the hands of the people who need it.
Why We Drift Into Abstraction
Architects, myself included, love big ideas. We’ll disappear into debates about lifecycles, frameworks, and which shiny new method is going to finally save us. We’ll sketch diagrams that look brilliant on a wall but crumble in delivery.
And I get it. Abstraction feels safe. It doesn’t upset the board. It doesn’t challenge the vendor. It lets everyone pretend the tough problems are already solved. But we all know they’re not.
The flip side? When we step out of abstraction, we step into our real power. We’re not just “diagram makers.” We’re leaders who turn strategy into working systems, who cut through theater and deliver real business outcomes. That’s where the joy of this job comes from—it’s not just about avoiding failure, it’s about being the reason things actually work.
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Our Real Contract
The real contract of architecture is simple. We exist to deliver the best possible technology decisions, fast enough to matter, in messy ecosystems, without losing our ethical compass.
Not to worship lifecycles. Not to write hundred-page blueprints no one reads. Not to be stage props for a vendor’s sales pitch. Our job is value—value that looks like a plane taking off on time, a customer getting their money when they expect it, or a system staying online during the outage that should have brought it down.
That’s the contract. And when we live up to it, people notice. They trust us. They want us at the table—not because we have the flashiest diagrams, but because we have the guts and the skills to make the right call.
Why It Feels Radical
Radical pragmatism makes clear where value is created—and where it isn’t. It uncovers waste, shines a light on hidden complexity, and pushes people toward accountability. But it’s not about tearing things down—it’s about building a stronger profession, a stronger practice, and stronger results for our companies and communities.
The Courage Bit
I’ve lived through outages. I’ve seen digital transformations that were smoke and mirrors. I’ve watched budgets evaporate into frameworks that looked great on paper and delivered nothing in practice. None of those failures were because we didn’t have enough process. They failed because nobody had the courage to just be radically pragmatic.
The courage is this: to step into the room as a professional, not a priest. To stop playing buzzword bingo and start delivering outcomes. To use our tools, our knowledge, and our voice to cut through the noise.
Radical pragmatism is messy, it’s uncomfortable, it’s not always polished. But it’s real. It’s professional. And if it makes vendors nervous or executives sweat, that’s a good sign. It means we’re doing our job.