Sacred Cows: Why Organisations Choose Sacrifice Over Design

Chapter 4

If clarity is so obviously valuable, a reasonable question follows.

Why don't organisations choose it?

By this point, no one can claim ignorance. The mechanisms are simple. The costs of ambiguity are well understood. The alternatives are proven. And yet, the same patterns repeat: overloaded teams, bloated artefacts, late decisions, and heroic sacrifice presented as virtue.

Organisations do not fail to design better systems because they lack knowledge. They fail because they protect beliefs that make poor systems feel necessary.

These beliefs are not written down. They are rarely challenged. And they are defended fiercely, even when the damage is obvious.

They are sacred cows.

The first is the belief that effort equals progress.

When systems are unclear, organisations respond by asking people to work harder. Longer hours. Faster delivery. More resilience. More commitment. This response feels moral. It rewards visible struggle. It frames exhaustion as dedication and sacrifice as leadership.

But effort does not compensate for poor design.

In fact, sacrifice often hides design failure. When people absorb ambiguity through personal effort, the system receives no signal that something is wrong. Work continues. Delivery limps forward. Leadership feels reassured. The cost is paid quietly by the people closest to the work.

This is not noble. It is wasteful.

And it creates a perverse incentive: fixing the system becomes less urgent precisely because people keep compensating for it.

The second sacred cow is ambiguity itself.

Ambiguity feels uncomfortable to delivery teams, but it is often protective to leadership. Vague direction allows multiple interpretations. Unclear decisions allow responsibility to float. When outcomes disappoint, no single choice can be blamed.

Monolithic documents thrive in this environment because they allow contradictions to coexist. Everyone can point to a paragraph that supports their position. Alignment becomes performative rather than real.

Clarity, by contrast, is dangerous.

Clarity names trade-offs. Clarity creates winners and losers. Clarity makes accountability unavoidable. Which is why it is resisted.

Organisations do not avoid clarity because it is hard. They avoid it because it removes cover.

The third sacred cow is governance as performance.

Most organisations believe they have strong governance because they have reviews, checkpoints, templates, sign-offs, and forums. But governance without decision authority is not governance. It is ceremony.

Architecture reviews become rituals where documents are presented, questions are asked, and nothing truly changes. Risks are noted. Assumptions are accepted. Actions are taken offline. The appearance of control increases while actual control decreases.

Real governance is uncomfortable. It stops work. It forces decisions. It accepts loss. It sometimes kills initiatives that people are invested in.

Ceremonial governance avoids all of that — at the cost of coherence.

Another sacred cow hides behind good intentions.

When clarity is missing and tension rises, leaders often reach for the phrase "just be pragmatic." This usually means: proceed without decisions, make assumptions quietly, let delivery figure it out, deal with consequences later.

Pragmatism is framed as maturity. In practice, it is often abdication.

True pragmatism requires clarity about what is being traded away. It requires someone to say, explicitly, "We are choosing speed over safety" or "We are accepting rework later to move now." When those statements are absent, pragmatism becomes a euphemism for silence.

And silence always pushes cost downstream.

This is where architecture becomes ethically compromised.

When systems are unclear and decisions are avoided, architects are often asked to absorb the tension. They are told to work something out, find a compromise, capture the options. Over time, architects become buffers between unresolved organisational conflict and delivery.

They translate ambiguity into artefacts. They turn indecision into diagrams. They carry risk without authority.

This is why architecture roles burn people out — not because the work is complex, but because the role is used to protect others from deciding.

Sacred cows persist because they are emotionally loaded.

Challenging them feels confrontational. Saying "stop" feels like failure. Killing a project feels political. Naming trade-offs feels risky. So organisations choose the safer path: push harder, add process, ask for more resilience, celebrate sacrifice.

Nothing changes structurally. Everything changes personally.

This is not leadership. It is avoidance dressed as endurance.

The alternative is not cruelty.

Clear systems reduce the need for heroics. Clear decisions reduce emotional load. Clear boundaries reduce burnout. The most humane organisations are not the ones that demand the most sacrifice. They are the ones that design systems where sacrifice is rarely required.

That requires courage upstream — not resilience downstream.

Sacred cows are expensive. But killing them always feels worse than keeping them — until you do.

What belief would your organisation have to abandon to fix this properly?

That is the question this chapter leaves you with.

The next chapter turns to what it means to practice architecture with integrity when the system resists clarity at every turn.