Welcome to a new episode where we share stories from the field. For the first time, we're thrilled to welcome guests to the show!

This week, we're joined by Elena Stojmilova, Technical Lead at Open GI, and Peter Hunter, Technical Architect at Open GI, alongside our Hosts Andrea Magnorsky and Kenny (baas) Schwegler. Elena shares her personal journey and lessons learned from implementing a decentralised decision-making process within her team at Open GI, including the shift to autonomous teams and the introduction of Architectural Decision Records (ADRs).

Elena provides a candid look at the challenges and triumphs of moving from a software engineering focus to taking on full architectural decision-making authority.

• Decentralised Decision-Making: The necessary move to create independent, autonomous teams and empower Technical Leads to make architectural decisions.
• The Mindset Shift: Moving from a coding focus to considering the broader impact of decisions, including cost and system-wide effects.
• The Power of Support: The crucial importance of technical and soft skills guidance when transitioning into a new leadership role.
• Architectural Decision Records (ADRs): The process introduced to formalise decisions, helping guide the team and ensuring accountability.
• Navigating the Advisory Forum: The challenge of managing many strong opinions initially, and the evolution toward receiving more constructive advice.
• Facilitating Advice: The techniques used to manage opinionated discussions, including asking questions to uncover the reasoning behind feedback.
• Cultural Change: How the process promoted a culture of knowledge sharing between teams and the need for architects to adapt their role from "broadcasting" to facilitating.

The episode explores the tension between necessary on-the-spot decision-making during a software incident and subsequent organizational governance. Andrea’s story sets the scene: a colleague makes a critical, correct decision under pressure, only to have a later, higher-level investigation reverse it without adequately addressing the systemic issue that caused the incident, leading to frustration and burnout. We then further discuss how organizations—whether centralized or decentralized—often struggle with decision paralysis and the human consequences of chronic underinvestment in long-term fixes. The conversation emphasizes that true decentralized architecture requires not only empowering individuals to act but also leadership allyship and robust, non-weaponized processes to support and record their actions.

The core of the governance solution lies in documenting decisions effectively and creating a culture of learning over blame. To avoid "decision paralysis" and preserve the historical context, the hosts advocate for recording critical choices using Architectural Decision Records (ADRs). A key principle is that these records should be immutable; any subsequent change must be documented as a new, superseding decision rather than reopening the original. Furthermore, decision-making health can be assessed both quantitatively (by measuring flow and reversal rates) and qualitatively, by including sense-making questions about team readiness and feelings toward the decision, drawing on insights from practitioners like Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. This approach transforms governance from a bureaucratic bottleneck into a feedback loop that highlights deeper systemic failures.

• Immutable Decisions: Decisions recorded in ADRs must be treated as read-only history. Reversals or changes should always be documented as new, superseding decisions to prevent "decision paralysis."
• Leadership Allyship: Managers should use their political capital to support and empower the team's expert decisions, acting as facilitators and advocates rather than simply taking over.
• Systemic Focus: Governance must move beyond validating individual actions to addressing the root causes of repeated incidents and failures to prevent team burnout.
• Decision Metrics: Measure the health of the decision-making process both quantitatively (number of decisions, time to decide, rate of reversals) and qualitatively (team's emotional readiness/frustration).

In this episode Andrew Harmel-Law, Kenny (Baas) Schwegler, and Andrea Magnorsky discussed the difficulties of facilitating software architecture decisions, particularly when teams are hesitant to take responsibility. Kenny shared his experience at a growing company that needed to choose a new front-end framework (Vue or React) to scale from 8 to 115 developers. His goal was to empower the team to make a democratic decision, but they were mostly junior to mid-level developers who were uncomfortable with the accountability of a major choice.

The discussion highlighted several methods for navigating this kind of indecision:

• Ask for consent: When the team felt too uncomfortable to decide, Kenny asked for their consent to make the decision himself. This approach still involved them in the process, and he ultimately chose React.
• Support the decision: After making the decision, Kenny asked the team what they needed to get on board with it. The developers requested training, which was then arranged. This practice, also known as "disagree and commit," ensures that even if people don't agree with a decision, they are given the necessary resources to follow through with it.
• Create a safe environment: People are often afraid to make decisions because of the potential for future negative consequences. Andrew pointed out that an architect can act as a "proxy" for the team, taking on the accountability to protect them.
• Understand Governance and Accountability: Andrea emphasized the importance of clarifying who is responsible for a decision. A good governance framework provides checks and balances to prevent bad decisions

In this episode, Andrew Harmel-Law, joined by Andrea Magnorsky and Kenny (Baas) Schwegler, discusses "ghost decisions," which are fundamental architectural choices that are often undocumented, implicit, or even forgotten. These decisions can cast a long shadow, influencing everything from technology choices to team structures.

• Implicit Decisions: Andrew shares his experience with projects where he found that the most fundamental architectural decisions had already been made, often implicitly or as a result of legacy choices. These are often not explicitly architectural decisions, but rather things like the product being built or the team structure, which have a significant architectural impact.
• Reverse-Engineering ADRs: To address these "ghost decisions," one team Andrew worked with began reverse-engineering Architecture Decision Records (ADRs). They documented historical decisions, including the three different options they selected and the reasons why they were rejected at the time. This provided clarity on the original constraints and allowed the team to revisit decisions when the context had changed, such as a startup growing into a large scale-up.
• Documenting Disagreements: The episode also touches on the challenge of documenting the human factors behind decisions, such as conflicts and power imbalances. Andrew suggests using phrases like "
• adopted despite" or "rejected despite" in ADRs to acknowledge opposing viewpoints and ensure all perspectives are represented in the official documentation. This approach can help people feel acknowledged and provides valuable context for new team members.
• The "Telephone Game": Kenny highlights the dangers of relying on undocumented decisions, which can lead to a "telephone game" where information is distorted or lost as people join and leave the team. Without a clear record, it becomes difficult to understand why certain choices were made, making it harder to evolve the codebase.

In this episode, Kenny and Andrea discuss how to move from a blocking, "ivory tower" or hands-on architect role to a more facilitating one. They explore the importance of transparency as a first step in improving an organisation's approach to software architecture and design. The goal is to shift decision-making to the people who have the most information—the ones actually writing the software.

• Transparency is Key: It’s a great way to start improving things in any organisation. Documenting the decision-making process helps everyone understand why confident choices were made.
• The Problem with After-the-Fact Decisions: Writing down decisions only after they've been made is like writing unit tests after the code is finished. It’s more effective to document the process as it happens.
• Start Small with ADRs: Begin by writing Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) as a team or even with just one other person. You can start with a simple question like, "Should we use ADRs?".

Benefits of ADRs:

• Shared Mental Model: ADRs provide a clear, shared understanding of what was said and decided, reducing confusion and "hallway conversations".
• More Focused Meetings: Reviewing ADRs ensures everyone is on the same page, leading to more productive and less repetitive meetings.
• Explicit Decisions: ADRs make it clear who is responsible for a decision and its potential side effects.

Find a partner and begin writing ADRs for tough decisions in your project. Do it out in the open so others can see the benefits of the practice. This small, disciplined start can encourage others to follow suit, leading to broader adoption across the organisation.

In this episode, Kenny and Andrea dive deep into some really interesting problems we're seeing in software architecture & design right now. You know, how some people are still working in those "ivory towers," or even the "hands-on" folks are running into issues? We're trying to figure out some different ways to build better systems.