DEV Community: Victor Leung

The Secret to Success Is Not Working Harder, It Is Knowing Where You Create the Most Value

Victor Leung — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:09:57 +0000

Success is often portrayed as the reward for relentless effort, discipline, and perseverance. While these qualities undoubtedly matter, they are not the true differentiators. Many intelligent, hardworking professionals spend years climbing the wrong ladder, pursuing opportunities that do not align with who they are or where they create the greatest value. The real secret to sustained success is far simpler, and far more difficult: knowing yourself.

For Enterprise Architects, this lesson is especially relevant. We are expected to navigate complexity, influence executives, balance competing priorities, and shape the future of organizations. Yet the quality of the architectures we design is inseparable from the quality of the decisions we make. The quality of our decisions ultimately depends on how well we understand ourselves.

One of the greatest leadership blind spots is assuming that competence is transferable across every environment. It is not. Some people thrive in large, highly structured enterprises where governance, scale, and long-term planning are essential. Others flourish in startups where speed, experimentation, and ambiguity define success. Some derive energy from collaborating across diverse stakeholders, while others perform best as deep specialists solving difficult technical problems independently. None of these paths is inherently superior. Success comes from recognizing which environment allows your strengths to compound rather than constantly fighting against your natural disposition.

This kind of self-awareness is surprisingly rare. Many professionals can describe the latest technology trends in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, or cybersecurity in remarkable detail, yet struggle to answer much simpler questions about themselves. What motivates me? What drains my energy? What values will I never compromise? Am I most effective leading people, influencing decisions, designing systems, or solving technical challenges? What unique contribution can I make that few others can?

These questions are not philosophical luxuries. They are strategic questions. Just as organizations require strategic positioning to compete, individuals require personal positioning to maximize their impact.

History offers remarkable examples of people who understood this principle centuries before modern leadership theory existed. Leonardo da Vinci filled notebooks not only with inventions and scientific observations but also with continuous reflections on his own thinking, learning, and ambitions. His genius was not merely his intelligence. It was his relentless habit of examining his own mind.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart demonstrated similar discipline. Although history remembers him primarily as one of the greatest composers ever to live, he was also an extraordinary performer on both the piano and the violin. Yet Mozart recognized an uncomfortable truth that many modern professionals refuse to accept. Excellence requires trade-offs. Mastery demands time, and time is finite. Rather than attempting to become exceptional at everything, he deliberately chose where to concentrate his energy. His greatness was defined as much by what he declined to pursue as by what he embraced.

This may be the most overlooked leadership capability today: the ability to say no. Enterprise Architects experience this challenge every day. Every emerging technology appears promising. Every business unit has urgent priorities. Every transformation initiative claims to be critical. Without disciplined choices, architecture becomes an accumulation of disconnected projects rather than a coherent strategy. Likewise, careers become collections of impressive experiences that never translate into exceptional expertise.

The discipline that enabled thinkers such as Leonardo and Mozart is surprisingly accessible. Their secret was not hidden knowledge or extraordinary talent alone. It was the simple habit of writing things down and revisiting them.

Before making an important decision, record your expectations. Why are you making this choice? What outcome do you anticipate? What risks concern you? What assumptions are you making? Then, months later, return to those notes and compare expectations with reality.

This practice creates something invaluable: a personal feedback loop. Over time, patterns begin to emerge. You discover which judgments consistently prove accurate and which biases repeatedly mislead you. You identify the situations where your instincts are strongest and those where your confidence exceeds your competence. More importantly, you begin to understand where you consistently create exceptional value.

This process also reveals another truth that many professionals overlook. Our greatest strengths often feel ordinary because they come naturally to us. We tend to value abilities that required enormous effort while dismissing talents that seem effortless. Yet organizations reward outcomes, not difficulty. If you can simplify complexity, connect technology with business strategy, influence executives, or identify architectural risks that others consistently miss, those capabilities are valuable precisely because they appear effortless to you. What feels intuitive to you may be exceptionally rare to everyone else.

The same reflection also exposes our limitations. Not every capability can or should be mastered. While we usually recognize our obvious weaknesses, the more dangerous challenge lies in the broad middle ground, the activities where we are competent enough to continue but never exceptional enough to create disproportionate value. Spending years improving average capabilities often produces far less impact than investing deeply in genuine strengths.

As careers become longer and industries transform faster, self-knowledge is becoming a competitive advantage rather than merely a personal virtue. Over the coming decades, professionals will reinvent themselves multiple times as technologies, business models, and customer expectations evolve. Technical expertise will continue to depreciate as new innovations emerge. The one capability that appreciates with experience is understanding where you contribute most effectively.

Enterprise Architecture has always been about finding the right place for technology within an organization. Perhaps the greater challenge is finding the right place for ourselves. Architects carefully assess business capabilities, technology landscapes, organizational constraints, and strategic objectives before recommending change. We should apply the same rigor to our own careers.

The secret to success has never been chasing every opportunity or mastering every skill. It is developing the wisdom to understand who you are, the discipline to focus on where you create the greatest value, and the humility to learn continuously from every decision you make.

Write down your expectations. Review your outcomes. Discover your strengths. Then have the courage to build your career around them.

Because the most important architecture you will ever design is not your organization's. It is your own life.

The Answer Is Always with the Customer

Victor Leung — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:37:18 +0000

Enterprise Architecture has never had more influence over the future of organizations. Architects shape technology investments worth millions, design operating models that redefine how work is performed, and guide transformations that span years. Yet amid discussions about artificial intelligence, cloud modernization, platform engineering, and governance, one question is surprisingly easy to overlook:

Why do customers choose us?

The question appears deceptively simple. Most organizations answer it with confidence, pointing to product features, market share, technological superiority, or operational excellence. Yet in competitive markets, none of these explanations is sufficient. Customers have alternatives. They are free to choose competitors offering similar products, comparable technology, and often lower prices. Every purchase represents a deliberate decision that one organization has created more value than another.

For Enterprise Architects, this observation has profound implications. Architecture should not begin with technology. It should begin with understanding the source of customer value.

Consider a familiar consumer product such as soap. Supermarket shelves are filled with dozens of nearly indistinguishable brands. Their ingredients differ only marginally, their manufacturing processes are comparable, and their quality is consistently high. Yet consumers routinely reach for the same brand without hesitation. They rarely compare specifications or evaluate competing options. They simply know which one they trust.

The purchase is not driven by the product alone. It is driven by confidence, familiarity, reliability, and the accumulated experience associated with the brand. Customers are paying for an outcome that extends well beyond the physical product itself.

The same principle applies to enterprise technology. Customers do not purchase APIs, cloud infrastructure, event-driven architectures, or artificial intelligence. Those are implementation choices invisible to them. Customers pay for confidence that their financial assets are secure. They pay for convenience that saves time. They pay for experiences that reduce effort and uncertainty. Technology matters only because it enables these outcomes.

This distinction fundamentally changes the role of Enterprise Architecture. Too often, architects evaluate success by technical metrics: application rationalization, cloud adoption rates, platform standardization, or system availability. These measures are important, but they are intermediate outcomes rather than the ultimate objective. A technically elegant architecture that fails to improve customer outcomes is, in business terms, an incomplete success.

The most effective architects therefore begin not by asking, "What architecture should we build?" but rather, "What makes customers willing to choose us?" The architecture becomes a consequence of that answer rather than the starting point.

Finding the answer, however, requires more than data.

Organizations today collect unprecedented volumes of customer information. They monitor clickstreams, analyze purchasing behavior, measure satisfaction scores, and produce sophisticated dashboards. These capabilities provide valuable insights into customer behavior, but they often fail to explain customer motivation. Data reveals patterns. It rarely reveals meaning.

Some of the strongest customer insights emerge not from analytics platforms but from direct human interaction.

One retailer has built a dominant position in its market despite competing against significantly larger supermarket chains. The chief executive spends two days every week working in the stores alongside frontline employees. He serves customers, operates the checkout, stocks shelves, packs groceries, and helps customers carry purchases to their cars. From a purely operational perspective, this may appear to be an inefficient use of executive time.

Strategically, it is exactly the opposite.

Those hours provide something no management report can replicate: an unfiltered understanding of customer expectations, frustrations, and moments of delight. They reveal subtle patterns that rarely appear in surveys and often disappear when filtered through organizational hierarchies. They help leaders understand not simply what customers buy, but why they return.

Enterprise Architects can learn an important lesson from this example.

Architects spend much of their time with executive stakeholders, delivery teams, technology vendors, and governance forums. These conversations are necessary, but they represent only the internal perspective of the enterprise. The external perspective—the customer's experience—is often inferred rather than observed.

Perhaps Enterprise Architects should spend less time reviewing architecture diagrams and more time observing customer journeys firsthand. Visit branches. Listen to contact centre conversations. Sit with operations teams. Watch customers navigate digital channels. Experience the moments where systems create confidence and, equally important, where they create friction.

Architecture becomes remarkably different when viewed through the customer's eyes.

This perspective also reshapes how organizations think about core competencies. Many enterprises define their strengths in terms of proprietary platforms, technical capabilities, operational scale, or specialized expertise. Customers, however, rarely experience any of these directly. They experience responsiveness, trust, simplicity, consistency, and empathy. Competitive advantage is therefore created not by possessing superior technology, but by orchestrating technology in ways that consistently improve these human experiences.

That is precisely where Enterprise Architecture creates its greatest value. Its purpose is not merely to optimize systems but to ensure that every capability, process, application, and technology investment contributes to outcomes customers genuinely value.

Achieving this requires another shift in thinking. Before organizations can become customer-centric, their leaders must become self-aware. Every architect brings personal preferences, technical biases, and assumptions shaped by years of experience. Left unchallenged, these biases can lead organizations to optimize for architectural elegance rather than business impact.

The discipline of architecture therefore begins with the discipline of leadership. Great architects understand their own strengths, acknowledge the limits of their perspective, and deliberately seek viewpoints that challenge their assumptions. They create environments where business leaders, engineers, frontline employees, and customers all contribute to better decisions. In doing so, they transform architecture from an exercise in technical design into a process of organizational learning.

As artificial intelligence continues to automate analysis and technology platforms become increasingly standardized, the differentiator between organizations will not be who possesses the most advanced technology. It will be who understands their customers most deeply and translates that understanding into better decisions.

This is why Enterprise Architecture should never begin with a technology roadmap. It should begin with curiosity. Curiosity about why customers stay when competitors offer similar products. Curiosity about why seemingly minor experiences shape lifelong loyalty. Curiosity about what customers are truly paying for.

Because once architects understand that answer, the technology decisions become clearer, the investment priorities become more focused, and the enterprise becomes more resilient. In the end, the most valuable architecture artifact is not a capability map, a reference architecture, or a target-state blueprint.

It is a deep and continually evolving understanding of the customer. Everything else should be designed around it.

Beyond Binary Thinking

Victor Leung — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:19:16 +0000

Enterprise Architecture is often associated with technology roadmaps, reference architectures, and governance frameworks. Yet its greatest contribution to an organization lies elsewhere. At its core, Enterprise Architecture is the discipline of making high-quality decisions amid uncertainty. Every significant transformation—whether migrating to the cloud, modernizing legacy systems, adopting artificial intelligence, or redesigning business capabilities—is ultimately shaped by a series of choices. The quality of those choices determines whether an enterprise gains resilience and competitive advantage or accumulates technical debt and strategic regret.

Ironically, experience alone does not guarantee better decisions. The more accomplished we become, the easier it is to believe our judgment is immune to error. Behavioral science tells a different story. The Dunning–Kruger effect reminds us that people often overestimate the accuracy of their own knowledge, while normalcy bias encourages us to believe that because something has not gone wrong before, it is unlikely to go wrong in the future. Together, these biases create a dangerous illusion of certainty. For Enterprise Architects, whose recommendations influence investments worth millions of dollars and shape organizational direction for years, this false confidence can be far more damaging than a lack of technical expertise.

The first responsibility of an architecture leader, therefore, is not to appear certain but to recognize the limits of certainty. Accepting that our judgment is imperfect does not weaken leadership—it strengthens it. Humility creates space for curiosity, and curiosity creates space for better decisions. Organizations that consistently make superior strategic choices are rarely those with the smartest individuals; they are those with the most disciplined decision-making processes.

One of the most practical frameworks for improving decision quality comes from Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their book Decisive. Their WRAP framework offers four disciplines that help leaders overcome common cognitive biases: Widen Your Options, Reality-Test Your Assumptions, Attain Distance Before Deciding, and Prepare to Be Wrong. Although the framework was developed for general decision-making, it aligns remarkably well with the everyday challenges faced by Enterprise Architects.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson begins with expanding the range of possible options. Organizations frequently frame strategic decisions as binary choices. Should we migrate everything to the cloud or remain on-premises? Should we build a new platform or purchase a commercial product? Should we replace the legacy system or continue investing in it? These debates often consume executive meetings because everyone assumes the problem has only two possible answers. In reality, the framing itself is usually the greatest limitation.

Experienced Enterprise Architects understand that architecture is rarely about choosing between two alternatives. A phased migration may reduce operational risk while accelerating business value. A hybrid architecture may balance regulatory constraints with innovation. Incrementally modernizing business capabilities may produce better outcomes than replacing an entire platform in a single transformation program. By widening the range of options, architects shift conversations from defending positions to exploring possibilities. Innovation often begins not with a better answer, but with a better question.

Generating more options, however, is only valuable if those options are grounded in reality. Every architecture proposal carries assumptions about technology maturity, organizational readiness, vendor capabilities, implementation complexity, and future business priorities. Unfortunately, people naturally seek evidence that confirms what they already believe. Teams advocating for a particular cloud platform tend to focus on success stories while overlooking failed implementations. Vendors naturally showcase their strongest customer references, while organizations often underestimate the operational challenges that emerge after deployment.

Disciplined architects deliberately challenge these assumptions instead of reinforcing them. They seek out projects that struggled as well as those that succeeded. They study independent assessments rather than relying solely on marketing material. They build prototypes, conduct proof-of-concept exercises, validate performance under realistic workloads, and encourage constructive disagreement within architecture reviews. Confidence may inspire action, but evidence earns trust. The strongest architectural decisions are supported not by persuasive opinions but by observable facts.

Even when sufficient evidence exists, timing plays a surprisingly important role in decision quality. Many poor architectural decisions are not caused by a lack of information but by an unnecessary sense of urgency. Transformation programs frequently operate under intense delivery pressure, making it tempting to approve a solution simply to maintain momentum. Yet decisions made too quickly often become the ones that require the most expensive corrections later.

Exceptional Enterprise Architects recognize the value of deliberate distance. Before committing to a major architectural direction, they intentionally create a pause between analysis and commitment. A simple mental exercise can reveal hidden assumptions: If another organization's CIO presented this exact situation and asked for advice, would I recommend the same solution? Alternatively, if I joined this company today with no attachment to previous investments or political commitments, would I still make this recommendation? Creating psychological distance reduces emotional attachment to preferred solutions and enables more objective judgment. Sometimes the clearest perspective emerges only after stepping outside the decision itself.

Of course, no amount of analysis can eliminate uncertainty entirely. Markets evolve. Regulations change. Customer expectations shift. Emerging technologies mature faster than expected, while established technologies sometimes fail to deliver on their promises. The defining characteristic of modern Enterprise Architecture is not predicting the future perfectly but designing systems that remain resilient when predictions prove incomplete.

Preparing to be wrong is therefore not an admission of failure; it is a hallmark of mature architectural thinking. Before making a major investment, architects should ask what the best-case and worst-case outcomes might look like. What happens if adoption is slower than forecast? What if integration costs exceed estimates? What if regulatory requirements change halfway through implementation? What if the selected technology vendor changes strategic direction? Thinking through these scenarios encourages architectures that emphasize modularity, loose coupling, incremental delivery, observability, and rollback capabilities. Resilience is not created by making perfect decisions; it is created by ensuring imperfect decisions can be adapted without catastrophic consequences.

This perspective fundamentally changes the role of the Enterprise Architect. Rather than serving as the organization's chief technology expert, the architect becomes the steward of strategic decision quality. The objective is not merely to recommend technologies but to improve how the enterprise thinks about uncertainty, evaluates alternatives, and balances opportunity against risk. In an increasingly volatile business environment, the organizations that outperform their competitors will not necessarily possess the most advanced technologies. They will possess decision-making disciplines that consistently produce better strategic outcomes.

The WRAP framework offers a practical reminder that architecture is ultimately about choices, not diagrams. Every roadmap, capability model, platform strategy, and transformation initiative begins with a decision. The most effective Enterprise Architects distinguish themselves not by always having the right answer, but by ensuring the organization asks better questions before committing to an answer. They widen the options under consideration, rigorously test assumptions, create the distance needed for objective judgment, and prepare for a future in which even the best decisions may need to evolve.

In the end, architecture excellence is measured less by the elegance of the solution than by the quality of the thinking that produced it. Before asking which architecture is best, leaders should first ask whether they have explored enough possibilities, challenged enough assumptions, and prepared for enough uncertainty. Better architectures begin with better decisions, and better decisions begin with the discipline to look beyond the obvious choices.

Strategy Is the Courage to Choose

Victor Leung — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:27:38 +0000

Every organization talks about strategy. Boardrooms discuss it, executives present it, consultants document it, and employees are asked to align with it. Yet despite the attention strategy receives, surprisingly few organizations have one.

What many organizations call strategy is actually planning. They produce multi-year roadmaps, investment portfolios, transformation programmes, and ambitious vision statements. These activities are important, but they are not strategy. A plan tells people what the organization intends to do. Strategy explains why certain choices were made and why other opportunities were deliberately rejected.

This distinction matters because organizations do not fail from a lack of activity. They fail from a lack of focus.

The uncomfortable truth is that strategy is fundamentally about choice. It is the willingness to decide where an organization will compete, how it will create value, and what it will not pursue. It requires leaders to say no to good ideas so that great ideas can succeed. In a world that rewards optionality and flexibility, making such commitments can feel risky. Yet the greatest strategic risk is often refusing to choose at all.

As Enterprise Architects, we witness this challenge every day. Organizations frequently invest in new technologies, launch digital transformation initiatives, modernize platforms, and redesign operating models without first answering a simple question: What are we trying to win?

Without a clear answer, transformation becomes motion without direction. Teams become busy but not necessarily effective. Technology becomes more sophisticated, yet the business struggles to achieve meaningful differentiation. The result is an organization that appears to be moving quickly but is ultimately running in place.

The most successful organizations begin with a clear definition of winning. They understand that winning is not simply surviving, growing, or keeping pace with competitors. Winning means creating a distinctive position in the market that customers value and competitors struggle to replicate. It means making choices that allow the organization to create unique value rather than merely matching industry norms.

Consider the difference between organizations that lead industries and those that follow them. Industry leaders rarely succeed because they possess more resources or smarter people. More often, they succeed because they are exceptionally clear about what they stand for and what they are trying to achieve. Their investments, capabilities, culture, and operating models reinforce a coherent set of strategic choices. Everything works together because every decision serves a common purpose.

This is where strategy becomes more than an executive exercise. Strategy is not a document that sits on a shelf. It is a living system of choices that shape how an organization allocates resources, develops capabilities, serves customers, and responds to change. Every major decision either strengthens that system or weakens it.

One of the greatest obstacles to strategy is the desire to keep options open. Leaders often hesitate to make difficult choices because they fear missing future opportunities. They attempt to serve every customer segment, support every business model, enter every market, and adopt every emerging technology. While this approach appears flexible, it often produces the opposite result. The organization becomes increasingly complex, resources become diluted, and differentiation disappears.

The organizations that consistently outperform their competitors understand a simple principle: you cannot be exceptional at everything. They choose specific markets, specific customers, and specific value propositions. They invest disproportionately in the capabilities that matter most and accept that some opportunities will be left unexplored. Their strength comes not from breadth but from clarity.

This lesson is particularly relevant in an age of digital transformation. Technology has made it easier than ever to pursue new opportunities, but it has also made distraction easier than ever. Every week brings a new platform, a new innovation, or a new trend that promises competitive advantage. Organizations can quickly find themselves chasing technology rather than pursuing strategy.

Enterprise Architects play a critical role in preventing this outcome. The true value of architecture is not creating standards, reviewing designs, or governing projects. Its greatest value lies in connecting strategic intent with execution. Enterprise Architects help organizations understand whether technology investments reinforce the chosen path to victory or simply add complexity without creating meaningful value.

This requires a shift in perspective. Instead of asking whether a technology is innovative, leaders should ask whether it strengthens their ability to win. Instead of asking whether a capability is possible, they should ask whether it is strategically important. Instead of asking how quickly something can be implemented, they should ask whether it moves the organization closer to its desired future.

These questions appear simple, but they demand discipline. They force organizations to confront trade-offs. They require leaders to prioritize long-term advantage over short-term convenience. Most importantly, they ensure that strategy remains the driving force behind execution rather than becoming an afterthought.

Another common misunderstanding is the belief that strategy is a destination. In reality, strategy is a continuous process of learning, adapting, and refining choices. Markets change. Customer expectations evolve. New competitors emerge. Technologies disrupt entire industries. A winning strategy today may become irrelevant tomorrow.

The most resilient organizations recognize this reality. They do not treat strategy as an annual planning exercise. Instead, they view it as an ongoing leadership responsibility. They continuously evaluate whether their assumptions remain valid, whether their capabilities remain distinctive, and whether their chosen path still provides a sustainable advantage. They adapt before circumstances force them to.

This is where Enterprise Architecture becomes a strategic capability rather than a technical function. It provides leaders with visibility across the enterprise, helping them understand how business strategy, operating models, capabilities, data, processes, and technology interact. It enables organizations to evolve without losing coherence. It transforms change from a disruptive event into a managed capability.

Ultimately, strategy is not about predicting the future. No leader can accurately forecast every disruption, innovation, or market shift that lies ahead. Strategy is about making deliberate choices that position an organization to succeed regardless of uncertainty. It is about creating clarity when complexity is increasing and maintaining focus when distractions are everywhere.

The organizations that thrive in the coming decade will not necessarily be those with the largest budgets, the most advanced technologies, or the most ambitious transformation programmes. They will be the organizations whose leaders possess the courage to choose. They will understand what winning means, where they will compete, how they will create value, and what they are willing to leave behind.

In the end, strategy is not a plan. It is not a presentation. It is not a collection of initiatives.

Strategy is the courage to choose a future and the discipline to build an enterprise capable of achieving it.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset Every Enterprise Architect Needs

Victor Leung — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:54:25 +0000

Enterprise Architecture has never been about technology alone. At its core, it is about enabling organizations to solve meaningful business problems and create sustainable value. Yet many architecture teams spend far more time discussing cloud platforms, AI models, integration patterns, and application modernization than understanding the people and business challenges these technologies are meant to address. The most effective Enterprise Architects think less like technology specialists and more like entrepreneurs. They observe before they design, communicate before they convince, and solve problems before they showcase technology. This entrepreneurial mindset is captured in the simple but powerful framework of See, Solve, Scale, and it offers valuable lessons for every architect leading digital transformation.

The first responsibility of an Enterprise Architect is not designing systems but understanding reality. Too often, technology initiatives begin with questions such as, “How can we implement AI?” or “Should we migrate to the cloud?” These are technology questions, not business questions. Before any architecture blueprint is created, architects must first understand where the organization is experiencing friction. Where are customers becoming frustrated? Which business capabilities are limiting growth? Where are employees wasting valuable time because of inefficient processes? Where do operational risks continue to accumulate? Without answering these questions, even the most sophisticated architecture risks solving the wrong problem.

Steve Jobs once remarked that organizations should start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. That philosophy applies equally well to Enterprise Architecture. Rather than beginning with a preferred technology stack or a predetermined solution, architects should immerse themselves in the everyday experiences of customers, employees, and business stakeholders. This requires empathy rather than assumption. It means observing how work is actually performed instead of relying solely on documentation, governance meetings, or executive presentations. The most valuable architectural insights rarely emerge from conference rooms. They emerge from conversations, observation, and a genuine curiosity about how people experience the business.

This approach reflects what entrepreneurs often describe as bottom-up discovery. While reports, market analyses, and maturity assessments provide useful context, they rarely create competitive advantage because everyone has access to similar information. Competitive advantage comes from seeing what others overlook. Henry Ford famously observed that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Customers often describe solutions instead of articulating the underlying problem, and business stakeholders are no different. A request for AI may actually reflect poor knowledge management. A request for another workflow application may reveal unclear business ownership. A proposal for cloud migration may simply be masking deeper organizational bottlenecks that technology alone cannot resolve. Enterprise Architects create their greatest value when they move beyond stated requirements to uncover unmet needs.

Once the real problem has been identified, the focus must shift from technology to outcomes. Architects are naturally fascinated by emerging technologies such as generative AI, agentic systems, knowledge graphs, event-driven architecture, and digital twins. These innovations are exciting and intellectually rewarding, but organizations do not invest in technology because it is impressive. They invest because it helps them solve expensive problems, reduce risk, improve customer experiences, or create entirely new business capabilities. Apple has long understood this principle. Customers do not purchase a laptop because it contains a more advanced processor. They purchase it because it enables them to work more efficiently, create with greater confidence, and accomplish more in less time. Likewise, executives rarely become excited about microservices or vector databases. They become excited when architecture reduces operational costs, accelerates product delivery, strengthens compliance, or enables new revenue opportunities. The architecture itself is never the destination. Business value is.

One of the most overlooked skills in Enterprise Architecture is written communication. There is a story about a father enrolling his child in a science-focused school. When school officials explained that it was a science magnet school, the father replied that writing was still the most important subject because no matter how much chemistry, physics, or biology a student learned, none of it would matter if they could not communicate their discoveries. That lesson extends directly to Enterprise Architecture. Architects are often judged by the sophistication of their diagrams, but diagrams alone rarely influence executive decisions. The architects who create lasting impact are those who can clearly explain the problem they have identified, the reasoning behind their proposed solution, the trade-offs involved, and the long-term value the organization will receive. Clear writing creates understanding, understanding builds alignment, and alignment enables transformation.

Purpose is another principle that entrepreneurs understand exceptionally well, and it is equally important for Enterprise Architects. The Japanese concept of Ikigai describes purpose as the intersection of what we are good at, what we enjoy doing, what the world needs, and what creates sustainable value. Enterprise Architecture should aspire to the same balance. Technology without purpose becomes unnecessary complexity. Innovation without purpose becomes experimentation. AI without purpose becomes expensive automation. Architecture achieves its highest value when every decision is connected to a genuine business need and contributes to improving the experiences of customers, employees, and the broader organization. Purpose also provides resilience. Digital transformation is rarely straightforward, and architects frequently navigate competing priorities, changing strategies, and organizational resistance. A strong sense of purpose provides the clarity needed to remain focused on outcomes rather than becoming distracted by technology for its own sake.

The final stage of the entrepreneurial mindset is scale. Many architects immediately associate scaling with higher transaction volumes, global infrastructure, or system performance. These technical dimensions are certainly important, but true enterprise scale extends far beyond infrastructure. Scalable architecture enables organizations to continuously adapt as business conditions evolve. It creates reusable capabilities instead of isolated solutions. It reduces the cost of future innovation rather than increasing technical debt. Most importantly, it allows the business to respond to changing market conditions faster than its competitors. The ultimate measure of architecture is not how well today’s systems perform but how effectively tomorrow’s opportunities can be realized.

There are striking similarities between successful entrepreneurs and successful Enterprise Architects. Entrepreneurs identify unmet needs before building products, while architects identify capability gaps before designing solutions. Entrepreneurs focus relentlessly on customer value, while architects focus on business outcomes. Entrepreneurs communicate compelling visions that attract investment and support, while architects communicate strategic roadmaps that align stakeholders across the enterprise. Both operate in environments filled with uncertainty, complexity, and constant change. Both succeed not because they know the most technology but because they understand people, problems, and purpose better than others.

As artificial intelligence reshapes industries and technology evolves at an unprecedented pace, the future of Enterprise Architecture will not belong to those who simply master the newest platforms or frameworks. It will belong to those who develop the entrepreneurial mindset to see opportunities others overlook, solve the problems that truly matter, and scale solutions that create enduring value. In the end, the greatest Enterprise Architects are not remembered for the technologies they implemented. They are remembered for the meaningful change they enabled through empathy, clear communication, purposeful thinking, and an unwavering focus on solving real business problems.

An Enterprise Architect's Hidden Superpower

Victor Leung — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:22:23 +0000

When people think about Enterprise Architecture, they often imagine technology roadmaps, target-state architectures, governance committees, and transformation programs. Rarely do they think about negotiation. Yet after spending years working on large-scale transformations, vendor selections, platform modernizations, and organizational change initiatives, I have come to believe that negotiation is one of the most important skills an Enterprise Architect can develop.

The reality is that architecture is not merely the design of systems. It is the alignment of people, priorities, budgets, risks, and strategic objectives. Every major architecture decision involves stakeholders with competing interests. Technology teams want flexibility. Business leaders want speed. Risk and compliance teams want control. Vendors want larger contracts. Finance teams want lower costs. The Enterprise Architect sits at the center of these competing forces and must continuously negotiate trade-offs that move the organization forward.

When reflecting on the best negotiators I have encountered throughout my career, they rarely fit the stereotypical image of a tough dealmaker. They were not necessarily the loudest people in the room, nor were they the most aggressive. Instead, they shared three common characteristics. First, they prepared relentlessly. Before entering any discussion, they understood not only their own objectives but also the motivations, constraints, and alternatives available to the other party. Second, they focused on interests rather than positions. They looked beyond what people were asking for and sought to understand why they were asking for it. Third, they thought in terms of long-term relationships rather than short-term victories. They understood that today’s negotiation partner could easily become tomorrow’s strategic ally.

The foundation of every successful negotiation begins with situation analysis. This is where many negotiations are won or lost before the first meeting even takes place. A useful principle comes from Sun Tzu’s famous observation: know yourself and know your opponent. In negotiation, this means understanding both your position and theirs with equal rigor. Too often, organizations spend considerable effort analyzing their own requirements while investing very little time understanding the pressures, incentives, and objectives of the other side.

The first question to ask is straightforward: what do we actually want from the deal? This sounds obvious, but many negotiations become unnecessarily complicated because objectives are poorly defined. Are we seeking lower cost, faster delivery, reduced operational risk, greater flexibility, or strategic partnership? Without clarity on the desired outcome, negotiators often find themselves arguing over details without understanding what success truly looks like.

The second consideration is priorities. Not every requirement carries the same weight. Experienced negotiators distinguish between what is essential and what is merely desirable. Many negotiations stall because participants treat every issue as equally important. The strongest negotiators understand where they are willing to compromise and where compromise would undermine the entire purpose of the agreement.

The third consideration, and arguably the most important, is options. Options determine bargaining power. When a party has multiple viable alternatives, they possess freedom. When a party has only one path forward, they become vulnerable. This principle can be observed repeatedly in both business and geopolitics. Consider the negotiations between Disneyland and the Hong Kong government during the development of Hong Kong Disneyland.

Both sides wanted the project to succeed, but each had different strategic objectives and alternative options available. Disney sought expansion into Asia, while Hong Kong sought tourism growth and economic development. The final arrangement was shaped largely by the alternatives available to both parties rather than by the strength of their arguments.

A similar lesson can be observed in the relationship between Apple and Chinese telecommunications operators. Despite Apple’s global brand power, market access required collaboration with local stakeholders who also possessed significant leverage. The negotiation dynamics were not determined solely by product superiority but by the relative options available to each party. In both examples, the party with stronger alternatives possessed greater negotiating flexibility.

This leads to what I consider the golden egg of negotiation: BATNA, or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. BATNA represents the course of action available if the current negotiation fails. It is perhaps the single most important concept any Enterprise Architect can learn because it defines the true bottom line of a negotiation.

Imagine negotiating for an item in a flea market. If another seller offers a similar product at a better price, walking away becomes easy. The confidence to reject a poor deal comes not from persuasion skills but from having a credible alternative. In business, the same principle applies. If a vendor knows they are the only option available, they negotiate from a position of strength. If they know there are multiple competitors being considered, the balance of power changes immediately.

The strongest negotiators are constantly working to improve their BATNA. They understand their own alternatives and seek to understand the alternatives available to the other party. They actively create new options rather than accepting existing constraints. In enterprise environments, this may involve evaluating additional vendors, considering different implementation approaches, exploring internal capabilities, or adjusting project scope. The objective is not necessarily to pursue these alternatives but to ensure they exist.

Equally important is the ability to strengthen one’s own BATNA while weakening the BATNA of the other party. This does not mean manipulation. Rather, it involves demonstrating credible alternatives through parallel negotiations, competitive evaluations, and effective communication of available options. The most effective vendor negotiations often begin months before formal procurement discussions because the organization has already invested time creating competitive alternatives.

Before entering any significant negotiation, Enterprise Architects should ask themselves several questions. Have we artificially constrained our objectives? Do we clearly understand what matters most? Have we generated enough alternatives? Have we allowed sufficient time for preparation? These questions often reveal that the greatest source of bargaining power comes not from authority but from thoughtful preparation. The broader we think about possibilities, the stronger our position becomes.

Once the situation has been properly analyzed, attention shifts toward crafting the deal itself. One of the most common misconceptions about negotiation is that it is a competition. In reality, negotiation is fundamentally an exercise in trading value. The objective is not to defeat the other side but to create an outcome that both parties prefer over their available alternatives.

This distinction highlights the difference between distributive bargaining and integrative bargaining. Distributive bargaining assumes a fixed pie where every gain for one side represents a loss for the other. This mindset is common in price negotiations where participants focus exclusively on dividing existing value. Integrative bargaining, on the other hand, seeks to expand the pie before dividing it. Rather than focusing solely on what each side wants, it explores how differences in priorities can create additional value.

The most successful negotiations emerge from these differences. One party may prioritize speed while another prioritizes cost. One may value flexibility while another values long-term commitment. These differences create opportunities for exchange. Effective negotiators therefore spend less time thinking about what they want and more time understanding what the other party values. They ask themselves what they can offer before considering what they can request. They invest time understanding how the other side operates, how success is measured, and what pressures influence decision-making.

This is why the best negotiators avoid focusing exclusively on price. Price is often the easiest variable to discuss but the hardest way to create value. Creative negotiators explore contract duration, implementation sequencing, support models, risk-sharing arrangements, future opportunities, and strategic partnerships. By broadening the conversation, they create additional dimensions for agreement.

Many practical negotiation tactics emerge from this mindset. Establishing an anchor through an opening proposal can shape expectations. Reserving concessions for later stages can create opportunities for exchange. Using conditional responses such as “yes, provided that” preserves leverage while maintaining momentum. Strategic pauses can prevent rushed decisions and encourage deeper reflection. Even seemingly simple techniques such as allowing silence after a proposal can significantly influence outcomes. These tactics are useful, but they are only effective when supported by strong preparation and situational understanding.

Unfortunately, many negotiations fail because of three recurring mistakes. The first is lack of preparation. Teams frequently spend more time preparing presentation slides than preparing their negotiating strategy. The second is assuming a fixed pie. When negotiators focus exclusively on claiming value, they miss opportunities to create value. The third is failing to expand options. Organizations often become trapped because they accept constraints that could have been challenged through creative thinking.

Ultimately, strategic negotiation is not about winning an argument. It is not about securing the largest concession or proving that one side is smarter than the other. The most effective negotiators understand that success is measured over years rather than meetings. Trust compounds. Relationships compound. Reputation compounds. A negotiation that damages a relationship may produce a short-term gain but create long-term costs that far exceed the immediate benefit.

For Enterprise Architects, this lesson is particularly important. Architects rarely possess direct authority over the people they influence. Their effectiveness depends on their ability to align stakeholders around a common vision and guide difficult decisions through persuasion rather than command. In many ways, Enterprise Architecture is a continuous negotiation between competing priorities, limited resources, and strategic ambitions.

The architects who consistently create impact are not necessarily those with the deepest technical expertise. They are the ones who understand people, incentives, alternatives, and trade-offs. They know how to build strong BATNAs. They know how to create value before claiming value. Most importantly, they recognize that a successful negotiation is one where both parties walk away believing they achieved something worthwhile.

A good deal is often a matter of perception. A great deal creates the perception that everyone won.

And that outcome almost always begins with the same three words: preparation, preparation, preparation.

On Grief

Victor Leung — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:34:40 +0000

Recently, I’ve been carrying the quiet sadness of losing someone deeply important in life. Not the kind of sadness that announces itself loudly, but the kind that lingers beneath ordinary moments. It appears in silence, in familiar places, in routines that suddenly feel incomplete. Grief has a strange way of revealing how much of our lives are intertwined with the presence of another person. We think we understand how much someone matters to us while they are here, but often it is only through absence that we fully comprehend the weight of their existence in our lives.

What makes grief especially difficult is not simply emotional pain, but the confrontation with powerlessness. There are problems in life that can be solved with effort, intelligence, discipline, or resilience. Loss is not one of them. No amount of planning can reverse time. No amount of overthinking can rewrite reality. The mind desperately searches for leverage against fate, replaying memories, revisiting conversations, imagining alternative endings, as though somewhere within reflection there might still exist a hidden opportunity to regain control. Yet grief ultimately forces us to face one of the most uncomfortable truths of the human condition: there are limits to what we can command in life.

Modern culture quietly conditions us to believe otherwise. We are taught that with enough productivity, optimization, strategy, and self-improvement, we can shape life into whatever we desire. We approach careers this way, relationships this way, even happiness this way. But grief dismantles the illusion of total control almost instantly. It reminds us that human beings remain vulnerable to time, chance, illness, distance, mortality, and change. The Stoics understood this deeply thousands of years ago, which is perhaps why their philosophy feels remarkably relevant in moments of loss.

The core of Stoicism is often misunderstood. Many people assume Stoicism means suppressing emotion or becoming detached from humanity, as though wisdom requires emotional numbness. But reading thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, or Epictetus reveals something very different. Stoicism is not the denial of emotion; it is the discipline of perspective. It teaches that suffering intensifies when we demand reality conform to our desires instead of learning how to live wisely within reality as it is.

Ryan Holiday writes extensively in The Daily Stoic about the Stoic distinction between what is within our control and what is not. The principle sounds deceptively simple, but it becomes transformative when applied honestly. My thoughts, choices, values, and actions belong to me. Other people’s decisions do not. Time does not. Death does not. The past does not. Once grief enters life, this distinction becomes painfully clear.

Much of suffering comes not only from loss itself, but from resistance to loss. The mind keeps insisting: this should not have happened. Yet reality remains unmoved by our objections. The Stoics would argue that emotional pain becomes destructive when we fight reality rather than engage with it honestly. This does not mean we should not mourn. In fact, Stoicism leaves room for grief precisely because grief is evidence of love. Seneca himself wrote openly about mourning and warned against pretending to be invulnerable. Wisdom is not found in becoming incapable of sadness. Wisdom is found in learning how to endure sadness without allowing it to consume one’s character.

Lately, I have also reflected on the modern idea sometimes described as the “Let Them” theory. Beneath its contemporary language lies something profoundly ancient and Stoic. Let people make their choices. Let circumstances unfold. Let the world behave according to its own nature. Then focus on your response. There is an important difference between surrender and acceptance. Surrender feels passive, as though life has defeated you. Acceptance, however, is active. It is the refusal to waste one’s emotional energy fighting battles against reality itself.

This shift in perspective changes the nature of grief. Instead of asking, “Why did this happen to me?” the question slowly becomes, “Who will I choose to become because this happened?” Stoicism places enormous emphasis on response because response is where personal agency still exists. As Epictetus observed, external events may not belong to us, but our interpretation of them does. This is not motivational optimism; it is moral responsibility. Even amid loss, we retain ownership over how we treat others, how we carry ourselves, and whether suffering hardens us or deepens us.

One of the more uncomfortable realizations grief has taught me is how often human beings attempt to control discomfort rather than process it. We distract ourselves with work, noise, social media, ambition, or endless analysis because sitting quietly with pain feels unbearable. Yet avoiding grief often prolongs it. The Stoics practiced voluntary reflection on mortality not because they were pessimists, but because familiarity with impermanence cultivates gratitude and emotional resilience. When we deny mortality, every loss feels shocking and unfair. When we acknowledge impermanence as part of life, loss still hurts, but it no longer feels like a betrayal of reality itself.

There is also humility in grief. It strips away many illusions that normally occupy the ego. Status becomes irrelevant. Productivity becomes secondary. Comparison loses meaning. In moments of profound loss, one begins to see how much energy is wasted on trivial anxieties and external validation. The opinions of strangers matter less. Petty ambitions lose their urgency. What remains are the simple things that were always important but too often overlooked: presence, love, friendship, kindness, shared time. Grief clarifies priorities with brutal efficiency.

At the same time, Stoicism does not ask us to retreat from life after loss. Quite the opposite. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminded himself each morning that the responsibility of being human is to continue showing up for life with integrity and courage, regardless of circumstance. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of grief: the world continues moving. Emails still arrive. Meetings still happen. The sun still rises. Part of you wants time itself to pause in acknowledgment of what has been lost, but existence offers no such accommodation. Stoicism teaches us not to resent this reality, but to participate in life anyway. Not because the pain is gone, but because meaning is still possible despite the pain.

I think that is what I am slowly learning now. Healing is not forgetting. Strength is not emotional suppression. Acceptance is not indifference. Grief becomes bearable not when the loss disappears, but when we stop demanding that the past be different from what it was. Love and grief are intertwined because to love deeply is to become vulnerable to loss eventually. The price of meaningful connection has always been impermanence.

And yet, there is something strangely beautiful about that truth. The temporary nature of life is precisely what gives it value. If every conversation lasted forever, it would not matter. If every embrace were guaranteed endlessly, we would stop treasuring it. Mortality sharpens appreciation. Impermanence gives urgency to love.

So perhaps the Stoic response to grief is not to harden the heart against attachment, but to love more consciously while recognizing that nothing is guaranteed. To appreciate ordinary moments while they exist. To stop postponing affection, gratitude, forgiveness, and presence. To understand that control was always an illusion, but meaning never was.

I still feel the sadness. Some days it arrives unexpectedly and settles heavily over everything. But I no longer believe the goal is to eliminate grief entirely. The goal is to carry it with dignity, without allowing it to poison the soul. The Stoics often spoke of living in accordance with nature. Loss, painful as it is, remains part of that nature. What matters now is how I choose to respond to it.

And perhaps that is where peace quietly begins: not in controlling life, but in learning how to meet it with courage, clarity, and grace, even when it breaks your heart.

Will AI Replace Enterprise Architects?

Victor Leung — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:07:42 +0000

There are two kinds of Enterprise Architects. The first kind reads a chapter of an industry framework, finds a reference architecture on a vendor blog, redraws it in their tool of choice, and presents it as their own thinking. They are useful. They are also, on a long enough timeline, automatable. The second kind treats every engagement as a small piece of original research. They produce frameworks, not slides. They get paid for what only they could have written. I’ve been thinking a lot about which one I’m becoming, and a passage I read recently sharpened the question in a way I want to share.

The argument that started it runs like this: a part-timer is paid for time, but a professional is paid for capability, for the outcomes their ability creates. If your salary depends on the hours you sit at your desk, you’re a part-timer wearing a corporate badge. That stings, because for most of us in salaried architecture roles the truth is uncomfortable. We are technically paid by the hour even when the contract says otherwise. The senior architect who spends Friday afternoon in a stakeholder meeting that produces nothing has been paid the same as the one who spent it drafting a target-state model that will save their division eight figures over three years. The market eventually corrects this. The first architect’s role gets redefined as a coordination function, and coordination is exactly what AI is coming for first. The question for every architect is no longer what they deliver. It’s what they create that no one else could have.

Most people cluster around the mean. That has always been true. What’s new is that the value of clustering around the mean has collapsed. For an EA function, anyone-can-do-it work used to mean entry-level documentation. In 2026 it means drawing a context diagram from a transcript, mapping an application to a capability through the obvious keyword match, producing a current-state inventory from a CMDB extract, or writing a principles document by remixing the previous one. A junior with the right AI assistant does each of these in minutes. If your value proposition is that you can do this carefully and consistently, you’ve described a tool, not a person. The architects who keep getting the interesting problems share something else: they have a point of view that the AI doesn’t, and that point of view didn’t come from frameworks. It came from the friction of having seen things, written things, and reconciled things no one had quite reconciled before.

There is a metaphor I like for what senior architects actually have in their heads. Imagine each thing you know, a regulatory clause, a deployment pattern, a war story from a failed integration, a fund-flow diagram, as a Lego brick. Not a fact in a list, but a brick with studs on top and slots underneath, waiting to click onto something else. A junior architect has a pile of bricks. A senior architect has an interlocking structure, and the moment a new brick arrives, a new regulation, a new vendor pattern, a new failure mode, it finds its place inside the structure, and sometimes the whole structure reorganises around it. This is the difference between memorising frameworks and thinking architecturally. It is also the difference between an architect who panics when the rules change and one who quietly says, here is where this fits, and here is what now becomes irrelevant. The implication for how we learn is uncomfortable: collecting more bricks is not the goal. Wiring the bricks together is the goal, and you can only wire them together by writing, debating, and being wrong in public.

Here is where most ambitious architects, myself absolutely included, get stuck. We read a lot. We listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed. We bookmark analyst reports. We attend webinars. We feel productive. And then a year passes and we cannot point to a single new framework, model, or pattern that we produced. The reframe that helped me is simple: input is a means, not an end. The purpose of input is to sharpen your own questions and produce output. Reading a paper to stay current is consumption. Reading the same paper to answer a question you’ve already written down is research. The first leaves you slightly more informed and entirely replaceable. The second leaves you with a draft of something only you could have written. I’ve started keeping a literal list of questions I want to answer, and the next book or paper I read, I read against the list. Anything that doesn’t connect to a question gets skimmed and dropped.

A small confession: until recently, I rarely read academic papers. I read books, vendor whitepapers, consultancy PDFs, the occasional Substack. Then a line stuck with me: no amount of learning becomes research. The point is not snobbery. It is that books and analyst reports are second-hand knowledge, by the time they’re packaged for general consumption, the original insight is two or three years old and has been smoothed of all the interesting edges. Papers are knowledge direct from the producer, with the methodology visible and the limitations honestly stated. For an architect, that matters in two ways. You stop confusing popularity with truth, because a pattern everyone is talking about on LinkedIn is often three years downstream of a paper that already showed its limits. And you learn the structure of a real argument, since papers force claim, evidence, and limitation into the open. Most architecture documents would be dramatically better if they were forced through the same shape. If you have never tried it, Google Scholar and SSRN are reasonable starting points, and the working-paper sections of central banks and regulators are often surprisingly readable.

I will be candid: I am writing this partly to commit to it publicly. The pull toward consumption is enormous. There is always one more report to read, one more LinkedIn post to skim, one more course to enrol in. The pull toward production is harder, slower, and at first lower quality. It is the difference between feeling smart and being useful. But the architects whose work I respect, the ones I want to be like in ten years, share one trait. They write things down. They take a position. They are wrong in public sometimes. And over years, they accumulate a body of original work that compounds into something no framework certification can replicate. That is the bet I want to make.

If this resonates, don’t try to overhaul your reading habit, your career strategy, or your knowledge graph this weekend. Do one thing: write down five questions you wish someone would answer about your specific architecture domain, questions you haven’t seen answered well anywhere. Pick the one that scares you most. That is your first piece of research. Everything else, the reading, the structuring, the writing, follows from having a real question of your own.

What Corporate Finance Taught Me

Victor Leung — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:00:43 +0000

Corporate finance and enterprise architecture seem like entirely different disciplines. One deals with capital allocation and shareholder value; the other with systems, capabilities, and technology strategy. But peel back the surface, and they share the same underlying logic: how do you make good decisions when resources are scarce, uncertainty is high, and the people making decisions don't always have the same interests as the people bearing the consequences? Here are four ideas from corporate finance that I think every enterprise architect should internalise.

The first is the concept of the opportunity cost of capital. In corporate finance, this is the return shareholders forgo when they let the firm invest their money rather than taking it back. If a firm's investments can't beat that hurdle rate, the stock price falls. It's not enough to generate returns, you have to generate better returns than the next best alternative.

Enterprise architects face the same logic every time they evaluate a technology investment. The question isn't "does this system deliver value?" It's "does this system deliver more value than what we'd get if we spent that budget elsewhere?" A bespoke integration platform might work fine in isolation. But if the same investment could fund a commercial off-the-shelf capability that reduces operational risk and accelerates two other programmes, the bespoke build destroys value, even if it technically succeeds. We need hurdle rates in architecture. Not just TCO comparisons, but genuine opportunity cost thinking: what does this architecture decision preclude?

The second idea is the principal-agent problem. Shareholders delegate decisions to managers. When the agents' interests diverge from the principals', whether through misaligned incentives, information asymmetry, or simply self-interest, you get agency costs. Value leaks.

Enterprise architecture has its own principal-agent structure, and it's one we rarely name explicitly. The business delegates technology decisions to engineering and IT teams. Product managers optimise for their own delivery metrics. Infrastructure teams optimise for stability. Vendors optimise for contract renewal. Each is acting rationally from their own perspective, but the aggregate result can be an architecture that no one actually chose, a fragmented landscape of systems that each made local sense but collectively impose enormous integration cost and strategic risk. Architecture review boards, capability-based roadmaps, and fitness functions aren't bureaucratic overhead. They're mechanisms to reduce agency costs and align local decisions with enterprise value.

The third idea is that a safe dollar is worth more than a risky dollar. Investors demand a premium for bearing risk. A certain cash flow is worth more than an uncertain one of the same expected value. This is why discount rates go up with risk, and why optionality has value.

In architecture terms: a modular, replaceable system is worth more than a tightly coupled one of equivalent capability, even if the tightly coupled system is cheaper today. The modular system preserves optionality. It lets the firm adapt when vendor strategies shift, when regulatory requirements change, or when a better technology emerges. The monolith forecloses those options. The hidden cost of tight coupling is rarely captured in a business case, but it's very real. Every time I've seen a firm locked into a legacy platform beyond its useful life, the root cause is usually the same: an architecture decision made years earlier that looked locally optimal but didn't price in the cost of future inflexibility.

The fourth idea is that smart investment decisions create more value than smart financing decisions. The real value creation happens in what you invest in, not in how you fund it.

The enterprise architecture parallel is the distinction between architecture strategy and architecture execution. I've seen firms spend enormous energy on delivery optimisation, agile ceremonies, platform engineering, DevOps tooling, while the underlying investment thesis is weak. They're financing well but investing badly. If your architecture is evolving a capability the business no longer needs, no amount of execution excellence will recover that value. Conversely, a well-chosen architectural bet, the right platform, the right capability boundary, the right integration pattern, creates compounding returns even if the execution is imperfect. Before we optimise how we build and run systems, we need to be right about which capabilities actually matter.

Taken together, these four ideas point toward something larger. Enterprise architecture is ultimately a discipline of resource allocation under uncertainty, which puts it closer to corporate finance than most practitioners realise. The decisions we make about which capabilities to build, which platforms to standardise on, and which technical debts to carry have exactly the same structure as capital allocation decisions, with similarly irreversible consequences when we get them wrong.

The opportunity cost of a poor architecture decision isn't just the remediation cost. It's everything the firm could have built instead.

Five Years in the Lion City: Wherever the Heart Finds Peace, That Is Home

Victor Leung — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:27:22 +0000

New Asia Life Monthly Magazine, March 2026 Issue is published! 🎉

This issue features my contribution to the “Journey Around the Globe” column, sharing the daily life and reflections of alumni living abroad. Hope you’ll find a moment to read it 🙏

📖 Digital edition: https://online.fliphtml5.com/xhegu/sgku/#p=21

Leaving Hong Kong to work in Singapore, nearly five years have passed in the blink of an eye. Every time I return to Changi Airport and walk up to the automated immigration gate, two words appear on the screen: “Welcome Home.” Politics aside, let’s keep things light. As a Permanent Resident, this has become my second home. But the word “home” wasn’t always so certain.

In 2019, driven by pessimism about Hong Kong’s future, I decided to leave and venture out. When the offer from a Singapore company arrived, many friends looked at me with quiet understanding. It was a rare and unexpected opportunity, a rational, pragmatic choice. Yet fate always likes to set its tests: I departed just as COVID-19 broke out. On that four-hour flight, the cabin was nearly empty, the silence unsettling.

Upon arrival, I was sent straight to a hotel for fourteen days of mandatory quarantine. Confined to that room, stripped of freedom, I kept asking myself: why did I move to the tropics? Wasn’t it for a better life? Yet with the world locked down and borders sealed, that “better life” felt impossibly abstract. I hadn’t even breathed the city’s air yet, only gazing at this unfamiliar city through a glass window. Those days taught me that leaving is not a romantic adventure, but an act of courage that demands bearing loneliness and uncertainty.

New to the city and knowing no one, I was fortunate to find a few Hong Kong-in-Singapore Facebook groups. The saying “on the road, you rely on friends” rings especially true abroad. Every newcomer’s first priority is hunting for accommodation online. Compared to the subdivided flats I lived in back in Hong Kong, Singapore’s housing was relatively reasonable and spacious, at least some room to breathe. Rent wasn’t cheap, but that sense of space was the first step in settling down. Gradually, I began to find my footing in this city-state.

Friends who’ve visited Singapore as tourists often praise its cleanliness, brightness, and safety. I too wandered through museums and galleries on weekends. The Merlion, the Marina Bay Sands hotel, Sentosa, the casinos, the theme parks, all checkable in two or three days. The longer you live here, the less appeal these manufactured attractions hold. Tickets are steep, and they have little to do with daily life. For residents, these landmarks pale in comparison to the hawker centres tucked inside HDB housing estates.

Living in Singapore, one thing you simply cannot miss is the food. Tourists mostly know Hainanese chicken rice, but go a little deeper and a whole world opens up: wok-fired char kway teow, fried carrot cake, Hokkien mee, and the coconut-rich laksa, each a universe of its own. Fried tofu is a particular gem, crisp outside, tender within, dipped in sweet chilli sauce, endlessly memorable. Most of these treasures hide in hawker centres, always with long queues. When you finally reach the front, the uncle or auntie will fire off a brisk: “Eat? Takeaway?” That clipped vernacular, delivered in a local accent, sounds jarring at first, but in time, it becomes endearing.

You must also learn to order a kopi. The intensely sweet condensed milk paired with a slightly toasted coffee aroma has become my daily ritual for starting work. My most anticipated breakfast: kaya butter toast with two soft-boiled eggs, a splash of soy sauce, and a sip of hot coffee. The small joys of life are really nothing more than this. Finding familiar comfort within an unfamiliar culture, perhaps that is where the settling of body and mind truly begins.

Two festivals in Singapore left a particularly deep impression, both capable of making you feel the warmth of culture, even in a foreign land. At Chinese New Year, yusheng (raw fish salad tossing) is indispensable. The platter is neatly arranged with shredded carrots, crushed peanuts, and colourful garnishes, with fresh fish at its heart. First the dressing of orange juice and syrup, then everyone gathers around the table, chopsticks raised high, tossing and mixing the ingredients while calling out auspicious phrases: “Huat ah! Huat ah!”, “Prosper! Prosper!” The louder the tossing, the greater the fortune. Even as a first-timer, you’re quickly swept up in it, that distinctly Nanyang warmth and festivity.

As for Mid-Autumn Festival, the highlight every year is the joint mooncake dinner hosted by the Hong Kong universities’ alumni associations. That is the one night of the year I hear the most Cantonese. I am always struck by how many Chinese University and New Asia College alumni are here, many seniors who put down roots decades ago. Listening to them recount the details of their lives here, sharing the hardships and turning points of their early days, I always feel I’ve gained more than years of schooling could offer. To gather with fellow alumni thousands of miles from home, that kind of connection defies easy description, yet is deeply precious. In that moment, an unfamiliar city acquires a sense of belonging.

Life gradually settled, and I grew accustomed to the heat, returning to Hong Kong in winter, I now find it too cold. Just as I thought I might stay long-term, things took a turn. The British startup I worked for began facing layoff pressure; colleagues around me left one by one, some voluntarily, some not. I started worrying about my own position. In Singapore, your job and your visa are tightly linked, lose one, and everything unravels. Anyone who has spent time here knows that visa renewals and Permanent Residency applications are unavoidable realities, and I was no exception. With so many expats in my social circle, the topic surfaces naturally in almost any gathering. After much deliberation, I decided to apply for PR, and then came the long wait. What that waiting taught me was acceptance of uncertainty.

Meanwhile, despite a satisfying salary, I began reassessing my long-term career direction and sense of purpose. I enrolled in a master’s programme at NUS in my spare time, hoping to sharpen myself against an unpredictable environment. Returning to the classroom offered a different kind of perspective. I observed the ambition and drive of international students, and felt firsthand the fierce competition faced by local students. I made local friends, and through them came to understand the political culture, racial tensions, the pressure on young men from national service, the harsh realities of the job market, and the many contradictions and struggles within Singapore’s digital transformation journey. After years of living here, it becomes harder to pin any single label on what I see and feel. This city has its gleaming, polished face, and corners that are less modern, less orderly, less efficient than the brochure. The positive image and the complex reality coexist; no single phrase can capture it. Only by being immersed in it do you truly understand.

Over these years, the international landscape and geopolitics across Southeast Asia have shifted rapidly. What I did not anticipate was that more and more friends from Hong Kong have also found their way to Singapore, for one reason or another. What does this movement of people signify? How do overseas Hongkongers navigate turbulence? How do they find their footing in a foreign land? How do they carry themselves through an uncertain world? Perhaps these questions have no standard answers. Perhaps what matters more is cultivating clear-eyed awareness, listening more, observing more, thinking more, the most fundamental capacity for facing the world. I recall Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once saying that young Singaporeans should go out, see the world, and only then will they truly understand what kind of place Singapore is. The same wisdom applies to Hong Kong, and to fellow students of New Asia College. Sometimes you really do need to leave, to live somewhere else for a while, and only then, looking back, can you deeply understand what Hong Kong is, and who you truly are.

Five years is enough time for the unfamiliar to become familiar, and for a person to redefine what “home” means. Living abroad is not escape, but expansion; not severance, but extension. It has allowed me to move between different systems and cultures, and in the space between leaving and looking back, to find a more settled sense of self. Now, every time I return to Changi Airport and see those two words, my feelings are nothing like the apprehension of five years ago. Living and moving between two cities, I have come to deeply understand the meaning of that old verse:, wherever the heart finds peace, that is home. Singapore is no longer merely a place I landed. It is the place where a real life was lived.

Think Like a CEO

Victor Leung — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:28:17 +0000

Studying how the world’s top executives make decisions, you start to notice patterns that have very little to do with industry, company size, or technology stack. What stands out is the rigour they apply to their own decision-making, the same rigour most enterprise architects reserve exclusively for the systems they design. EA work sits at a strange intersection. We’re technical enough to understand the systems, commercial enough to translate them into business value, and senior enough to influence strategy, yet the craft of deciding well rarely gets the same attention as the craft of designing well. Here’s what we can borrow from the executives who’ve made it their discipline.

The best CEOs invest heavily in what might be called the “North Star”, a compelling answer to the question: what are we actually for? Not a mission statement crafted by committee, but a genuine narrative that reframes how success is measured, influences every resource decision, and gives people a reason to behave differently. Nelson Mandela and François Pienaar didn’t coach South Africa’s rugby team to win a World Cup. They gave them a reason to play that made winning feel secondary to something larger. The team played differently as a result.

Enterprise architects face a version of this problem every time we present a target state architecture. We often lead with the technology, the Kubernetes cluster, the event-driven backbone, the API gateway layer, and leave the “why this, why now, why should anyone care” for slide 14. That’s backwards. Before presenting any architecture proposal, write one paragraph, not a slide, that answers: what does success look like for the business in three years, and why does this architecture enable it specifically? If you can’t write that paragraph, the proposal isn’t ready.

The CEOs who build durable change do so because they connect the technical to the meaningful. They find the intersection between organisational capability and a future the organisation actually wants to inhabit. Our job, as architects, is to do the same: translate systems thinking into a story with genuine stakes.

DuPont’s CEO Ed Breen has a habit that every architect should steal. Before committing to any major decision, he asks one question obsessively: what does the downside look like, and can I live with it? Not the expected outcome. Not the best case. The downside. Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan goes further, describing decision-making as toppling dominoes, the first is easy to push, but you need to trace every subsequent one before you commit. If any downstream outcome is company-threatening, regardless of its probability, you choose a different path. Full stop.

This is, in essence, risk architecture applied to strategy. And it’s something we rarely do systematically in EA work. We model the happy path. We document the target state. We sometimes note risks in a RAID log. But we seldom sit down and ask: if this migration goes badly, which scenario would we actually be unable to recover from? And are we designing for that scenario, or just hoping it doesn’t happen? For every major architecture initiative, it’s worth running a “reverse architecture review”: map the failure modes first, not the capabilities. Define which failure mode is unacceptable, and make that the constraint your design must satisfy before you optimise for performance, scalability, or cost.

Adobe’s shift to cloud subscriptions is the canonical example of this discipline executed well. Shantanu Narayen’s team spent hours in the boardroom stress-testing pricing models, unit economics, and the rate at which perpetual license revenue would decline. They weren’t confident, they were prepared. There’s a significant difference, and it shows in the outcome.

Among the most underappreciated habits of elite executives is how they manage investment portfolios. They don’t release budgets on an annual calendar cycle. They release them against performance milestones: prior investment must produce demonstrable results before the next tranche is unlocked. This sounds obvious. In practice, it is routinely ignored in large technology programmes. Platform teams get multi-year budgets approved upfront. Workstreams are funded annually regardless of delivery evidence. Architecture decisions made in year one persist into year three because no one built in a formal checkpoint to ask: is this still the right call?

The discipline here is separating “continue” from “complete.” At each milestone, the question isn’t whether the programme is done, but whether it should continue. The bar is different, and it keeps teams honest about value delivery. DuPont reviews major programmes one year after completion, something EA teams almost never do. Without retrospectives, patterns of poor decision-making compound silently across initiatives.

Danaher’s Larry Culp offers the sharpest framing: he consistently asked what a new CEO with no emotional attachment to the portfolio would do. EAs should ask the same of their architecture. Is this still the right platform, or are we maintaining it because we built it? Thinking like an outside investor, rather than an internal custodian with sunk costs to defend, is one of the harder mental shifts in the discipline, and one of the most valuable.

Research consistently shows that only one in three strategies is successfully implemented, and that 72% of the obstacles are human and cultural, not technical. Peter Drucker put it plainly: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Enterprise architects tend to believe that if the architecture is sound, adoption will follow. It won’t. The most technically elegant architecture I’ve seen fail did so not because of a bad design choice, but because the teams on the receiving end didn’t trust the process, didn’t understand the rationale, and didn’t feel ownership over the outcome.

Satya Nadella’s transformation of Microsoft is instructive here. He didn’t lead with the technology strategy. He led with a cultural reframe, “Growth Mindset,” rooted in Carol Dweck’s research, which gave the organisation a way to think about failure, learning, and collaboration that made the technical changes feel coherent rather than imposed. The cultural shift was designed before the technical one was deployed, not as an afterthought.

For EAs, this means the real deliverable of any major architecture initiative isn’t the target state diagram. It’s the shared understanding, across engineering, product, operations, and leadership, of why the architecture makes sense and what it enables. Culture put in place through genuine consultation, not broadcast from above, is what makes technical transformation durable. If that shared understanding doesn’t exist, no amount of documentation will substitute for it.

The most effective executives share a consistent discipline: tracking technological and market shifts early enough to invest before they become conventional wisdom. DSM’s Feike Sijbesma describes a practice of reading across disciplines, including subjects apparently unrelated to his industry, and building networks across business, science, and society, specifically to surface insight that siloed thinking would miss. Netflix’s trajectory makes the same point structurally. The DVD-by-mail service was never the end state; it was the cash-generating beachhead that funded the bet on streaming. Reed Hastings didn’t wait for streaming to be proven. He invested into uncertainty, absorbed the short-term criticism, and held the position.

Enterprise architects are increasingly expected to play this role, not just designing for current requirements, but anticipating the architectural implications of AI adoption, regulatory change, data sovereignty shifts, and the ongoing fragmentation of the vendor landscape. The temptation is to anchor too close to present-state thinking: what does the organisation need today? That question is necessary but not sufficient. A better question is: what is becoming true in the industry that our architecture is not yet positioned for?

The goal isn’t prediction, it’s positioning. An architecture that can absorb an AI-native workflow, a new data residency requirement, or a major vendor consolidation without requiring a full re-platform is one that has done this work. Building a deliberate horizon-scanning practice into your working rhythm doesn’t require a formal framework. It requires the discipline of reading outside your stack, maintaining networks outside your organisation, and setting aside time each quarter to surface what’s changing before it becomes obvious.

The thread connecting all of these behaviours is a single disposition: acting like an owner. It means making decisions as though you are the full proprietor of the enterprise, unbounded by political constraints, undistracted by short-term optics, accountable to the long-term value of the whole. Enterprise architects rarely think of themselves this way. We think of ourselves as advisors, as enablers, as the people who make the technical trains run on time. That framing keeps us safe, but it also keeps us peripheral. The executives who drive lasting change refuse to be peripheral to their own organisations.

The architecture function is most powerful when it occupies the same posture: opinionated about outcomes, not just about designs. Willing to say “this is the wrong direction” and defend it with evidence. Accountable for what gets built, not just for the blueprint that preceded it. The lesson from the best executives isn’t a set of techniques, it’s a stance. And it’s one worth consciously adopting.

Beyond Buy vs. Build, Your AI Sourcing Strategy Needs a Third Option

Victor Leung — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:23:11 +0000

The "should we build or buy?" question has haunted technology leaders for decades. But in the age of AI, that binary framing is dangerously inadequate. With organisations now pursuing an average of ten AI initiatives simultaneously, and 43% running between five and ten at any given time, the stakes of getting your sourcing strategy wrong have never been higher.

Having spent years as a solution architect working across core banking platforms, cloud-native infrastructure, and now portfolio architecture, I've watched organisations struggle with this exact tension. The reality is that most enterprises don't need to pick a lane. They need a spectrum. The "buy, build, and blend" framework goes beyond the old dichotomy and offers the clearest mental model I've seen for how architects should be thinking about this problem.

The traditional buy-vs-build framing implies a clean boundary: either you purchase commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, or you write it yourself. In practice, that boundary barely exists anymore. Between pure configuration of a COTS product and building a custom application from scratch, there's an entire spectrum of options: extending vendor products via marketplace add-ons, building custom integrations with low-code or pro-code, creating automations and connectors between related apps, and, increasingly, building AI agents and custom UIs on top of purchased platforms. This "blend zone" is where most real enterprise work happens today, and it maps neatly onto a spectrum from undifferentiated to differentiated business capabilities. The architectural implication is straightforward: reserve your engineering capacity for capabilities that genuinely set you apart, and lean on vendor ecosystems for everything else.

Before diving into AI-specific considerations, it's worth anchoring on five factors that should drive all application sourcing decisions, because they apply with even greater force in the AI context. The first is criticality and business value, is the technology your core value proposition, or is it a tool to solve a business problem? If AI is central to your product offering, the calculus shifts heavily toward build. If it's an operational improvement, buying or blending likely makes more sense. The second is risk and internal competencies, which forces an honest assessment of your IP exposure and vendor lock-in risk alongside a candid look at whether your organisation actually has the skills to build and maintain what it's contemplating. In AI, this question cuts especially deep, the talent market is ferociously competitive, and the gap between having a few data scientists and having production-grade ML engineering capability is vast.

The third factor, total cost of ownership, is where organisations most frequently deceive themselves. TCO for any application stretches across four phases: go-live costs (design, development, testing, initial licenses), current annual costs (both recurring operations/support and nonrecurring maintenance), future costs (operating cost variations, predictable upgrades, potential enhancements), and decommissioning costs (particularly data retention). I've seen too many build decisions justified by comparing initial development cost against multi-year licence fees, while conveniently ignoring the ongoing maintenance, adaptive maintenance, and eventual decommissioning burden. The fourth factor is partners' abilities, their capacity to execute and the completeness of their vision, which matters enormously in a market where AI vendors range from research-stage startups to hyperscaler platforms. The fifth is opportunities: whether you're deploying your internal capacity on the highest-value work, or burning cycles on problems that vendors have already solved at scale.

If the framework tilts toward buying for undifferentiated capabilities, it's worth understanding why organisations still hesitate. Survey data on COTS challenges tells a revealing story. The top three concerns, vendor lock-in (15%), integration issues (14%), and limited customisation (13%), are fundamentally about control and flexibility. The next tier, hidden costs, lack of control over updates, and security concerns, reinforces the same theme. For architects, this is a familiar pattern. The promise of COTS is speed and reduced engineering burden. The reality is that you're trading one set of problems (building and maintaining software) for another (integration complexity, vendor dependency, and reduced agility). The question isn't which set of problems is smaller, it's which set your organisation is better equipped to manage.

When it comes to AI specifically, the decision framework gets richer. There are nine influential factors that CIOs must weigh when choosing between buy, blend, and build. The first three are strategic: external differentiation (will this AI capability set you apart from competitors?), compliance (can the solution meet regulatory requirements?), and security (what are the risk implications?). The next three are ecosystem-related: vendor ecosystem maturity, data origin and its influence on model accuracy, and available skills. The final three are economic and operational: short-term implementation costs, long-term maintenance costs, and impact on workers. What makes this framework powerful is the recognition that these factors carry different weight depending on your strategic intent, and this is where the defend/extend/upend categorisation becomes genuinely useful.

The most actionable insight from this framework is the three-way categorisation of AI use cases by strategic intent. "Defend" use cases aim to maintain competitive parity, think augmenting individual productivity with tools your competitors are also adopting. For these, the bias should be heavily toward buying from incumbent vendors with embedded AI, because the goal is commodity capability delivered quickly and reliably. The decision here is essentially a series of "yes/no" questions about whether your incumbent vendor can handle the use case, and in most cases, the answer should favour the incumbent. Minimise customisation, leverage existing vendor relationships, and move on to higher-value problems.

"Extend" use cases aim to differentiate, transforming processes or teams to create competitive advantage. Here, the buy/blend/build decision gets genuinely complex. Questions like "does this offer more than minor differentiation?" and "is the upfront cost of building justified by freedom from future vendor price hikes?" don't have easy answers. The presence of "yes, but..." responses throughout the framework is telling. It acknowledges that extend decisions are inherently contextual and require careful judgment rather than formulaic answers.

"Upend" use cases aim to disrupt, creating new propositions, products, or markets. For these, the framework tilts toward blend or build, but with important caveats. Speed to market may still justify buying as a temporary measure, vendor access to data you can't replicate may make blending essential, and compliance and security requirements in unfamiliar geographies may demand vendor partnerships. The key insight is that even for disruptive AI initiatives, pure build is rarely optimal.

One of the most compelling ways to visualise the enterprise AI stack is as a layered sandwich. The bottom layers, your centralised data and custom-built AI, are within your control. The top layers, external data and embedded AI from vendor products, are outside your control. Trust, risk, and security management and bring-your-own-AI sit in the middle, mediating between what you own and what you consume. For enterprise architects, this translates into a practical design principle: invest in strong foundations (data infrastructure and governance), build protective layers, and be intentional about which AI capabilities you build versus consume. The organisations that get the layering right will be the ones that can absorb the rapid pace of AI innovation without constantly re-architecting their stack.

There's an interesting maturity dimension to all of this. High-maturity organisations are three times more likely than low-maturity ones to adopt a hybrid vendor management strategy (33% vs 11%). Low-maturity organisations overwhelmingly default to centralised approaches (61%), while high-maturity ones are more evenly distributed across centralised (41%), decentralised (26%), and hybrid (33%) models. This suggests that as organisations mature in AI, they naturally evolve away from one-size-fits-all vendor strategies toward more nuanced, context-dependent approaches. This tracks with what I've observed in practice: early AI adoption benefits from central coordination, but scaling AI across the enterprise requires giving business units more autonomy while maintaining guardrails.

There's also a procurement reality that architects need to confront. Ninety percent of recent software purchases included GenAI capabilities, but only 25% of respondents felt they achieved high-quality deals on those purchases. This gap reveals the current market dynamic, GenAI is being bundled into almost everything, but buyers are struggling to assess value and negotiate effectively. For architects advising on procurement, this means applying extra scrutiny to the GenAI components of vendor pitches. Are the AI features genuinely useful for your use cases, or are they checkbox additions designed to justify premium pricing? Does the vendor's AI actually leverage your data to deliver differentiated outcomes, or is it generic capability that any competitor could also access?

If I were to distil all of this into practical guidance for fellow architects, it would be this. Start by classifying every AI initiative as defend, extend, or upend. This single step will dramatically simplify your sourcing discussions by establishing the right default bias for each initiative. For defend initiatives, fight the urge to over-engineer. Your incumbent vendors will almost certainly add the capability you need, and the integration cost of a new vendor rarely justifies the marginal improvement. For extend initiatives, invest in the "blend" capabilities, low-code customisation, API integration, and connector architecture, that let you combine vendor platforms with proprietary logic. This is where your architecture practice adds the most value. For upend initiatives, be ruthlessly honest about your organisation's readiness. The data, skills, compliance, and security requirements for disruptive AI are substantial, and underestimating them is the fastest path to an expensive failure. And for all three categories, model the full TCO, including decommissioning costs and data retention, before committing to a path. The most expensive decision is the one you have to reverse.