Teams should be encouraged to take ownership of architectural decisions, but only if there is a shared understanding of what architecture means within the organization.

If you want teams to own architectural decisions responsibly, start by creating coherency around what architecture means in your organisation. Don't copy a definition from a textbook. Work together to define it for your teams, your systems, your context. Make it empirical. Because you can't take ownership of something nobody can agree on the meaning of.

Right now, many organisations want teams to take ownership of their own architectural decisions. That's a good ambition. But if we haven't created a shared understanding of what architecture means in our context, we're setting teams up to fail. They might think they're making architectural decisions when they're really just making technology choices without considering the trade-offs that actually make it architecture. >>>