Cay Hasselmann

When I started working in architecture, architects were often classified as project managers. The more technical were called technical project managers and the the more business orientated were classified as Business Analyst/Project Manager. one element that has remained from that time is that an architect is expected to be good at project planning. The problem … Continue reading Planning fallacy →

In psychology selective perceptive is the tendency not to notice and more quickly forget stimuli that causes emotional discomfort and contradicts our prior beliefs. We know that this tendency is very real and can be quantified since the mid 60’s however we tend only to use and notice it in relationship with branding and advertising. … Continue reading Selective Perception →

Sometimes we as humans have the tendency to stand on our own feed while trying to run and many of these mechanisms are well known in certain quarters and less well known in others.So this is why I was asked to describe them, even if some will know this. The first of those tendencies is … Continue reading Lengthening misery →

I am sure if you are familiar with Faraday’s dilemma. Faraday who was a great scientist observed that when you drop a piece of normal steel into concentrated nitric acid nothing happen, but if you drop it in diluted nitric acid or dilute the concentrated nitric acid tell will dissolve itself over time. The reason … Continue reading Information →

When you work as an architect in an enterprise there are some general unrealistic thought pattern present in any enterprise. The first thought pattern is that of being the chosen one. Often companies survive a downtime in the markets (or survive their start up phase with many similar companies failing)with no real explanation or when … Continue reading Enterprise Thinking →

While doing our jobs as architects we often need to compare various options with each other. The standard comparisons we do are on different tools, structure or techniques. This kind of comparison is part of our job, however it is important that architects do not use the same kind of comparing in comparing themselves to … Continue reading The crux of comparing →

Some architects may be familiar with Amdahl’s law that looks at the maximum improvement when only a part of the system can be optimised, as it is often used in parallel computing processing. The important part here of Amdahl’s law is to see that savings in part of a system usually will show that to … Continue reading Savings →

A lot of architecture such as with UML builds on an actor model. Also when we model and improve business processes a solid understanding of various attribution errors should be standard in the assessment. However I have usually not seen even the most common techniques of the actor observer asymmetry taken into account. Actually the … Continue reading Attribution error in architecture →

As architect we all constantly have to evaluate risk, but our risk assessment is mainly based on the awareness and worries on risk. So when we are worried we use extra safe seatbelt, preach on using condoms, install manual theft protection and highlight ant security concern to everyone. On the other hand when relaxing and … Continue reading Risk →

As architects were are usually highly consensus driven. This applies to all architects even those that work in a non commercial environment. The important point in this is what is called the false consensus effect in psychology whereby we overestimate the extend to which our belief and opinions are shared by others or even identical … Continue reading False consensus effect →

Properly most of us have heard about the Stockholm syndrome in hostage cases were the the victim develops positive feelings against their captor or tormentor, often even to the point that they will stop the police from capturing their tormentor. The point known to only a few is that the syndrome actually happens most often … Continue reading Enterprise Stockholm syndrome →

Most architects that I have met have a great belief in numbers as they claim that there is something stable on numbers and on logic. The really funny thing however is that most people that heavily rely on numbers are also subject to the base rate fallacy. The classical example of this is DNA testing … Continue reading Base rate fallacy →