Power, Persuasion, Passion

I've decided to address these three "P"s together - they are, I believe, strongly inter-related.  If does mean, however, this is another long post!

At their core, these three P's fascinate me.  What is is that drives People within the Political context of their working lives to care about Architecture (up and downstream) and Design, when so much of it is "just plain hard work"?  And, intimately intertwined with this on a very personal level, why am I writing this blog?

Passion
Because I and we believe in it - we are Passionate about it.  We are so sure that the arguments I and others put forward for A&D make it so "obviously" critical to any project's success, whether that project is delivering an IT system, or some other sort of system - from building a ship, to building an organization - that we cannot imagine how others would see it any other way.

Put otherwise, and in a cautionary manner - passion is dangerous!  If left unchecked and allowed free rein it can isolate and alienate those who believe in A&D from those who do not get it - such as I've observed before about Execs and others, some of whom think it's there to hinder rather than help:  imagine how our "blind passion" for A&D may affect them:  "you're here to stop me!" or similar.

Passion needs to be controlled and focused positively as a "contagious" rather than "isolationist" thing.

But how?  The answer lies in this post's name:  "Persuasion" and "Power"

Persuasion
Clearly, we hope our passion is infectious; we are able, simply through impassioned logical reasoning that others will "get it" and "believe"!  Of course this rarely happens (at least in my experience!), and we need to adopt other tactics - we need to Persuade them in a passionate way!

I've found, on almost all occasions, that someone is more likely to be persuaded of A&D's value by  practical experience rather than (just) academic theory.  But - and this is critically important - that practice needs to be of the theory.

Maybe one of my most disliked words is another P: "pragmatic"; not because of it's dictionary definition ("dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations"), but because it is constantly invoked as a mantra for doing it the easy or politically expedient way.  And even when it is properly applied, it still fails to address the need for "professional improvement", never addressing the underlying basic problems A&D are designed (sorry!) to overcome.

Power
But what if "they" still don't "get it" (no Passion), or can't (you'll say refuse to!) be Persuaded?  Then I guess, as a last resort, we need the Power to enforce the Architecture (on designers!) and/or Design (on the project team and its sponsors)...