We speak of "the architecture" as if it were singular and static, when in reality it exists in multiple states simultaneously: as the original intention, the documented plan, the implemented system, the emergent adaptation, and the interpreted experience. Each state is legitimate. Each tells a different truth.

Attitudes are rarely made explicit. Teams argue about the plan when they are actually disagreeing about their different relationships to it. A developer knows that a requirement is technically impossible. A legal team advises that it is prohibited. A CEO intends to pursue it regardless. All three are describing different subjective relationships to the same object, not different facts about it.

Understanding attitudes does not dissolve these tensions. It makes them visible, nameable, and therefore negotiable.

Note: There are no ready-made recipes in this article. It is intended for readers who wish to understand the foundations of strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave.

What Is an Attitude?

An attitude is the subjective dimension of any engagement with strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave. It operates alongside, but independently of, the constraints on the work itself. Those constraints belong to the domain of modalities, addressed in the companion article Beyond Blueprints — Modalities.

Formally, an attitude is a dispositional state that influences perception, decision-making, and behaviour. In simple terms: a mental stance, disposition, or orientation that shapes how an agent perceives, evaluates, and responds to something.

The Structure of an Attitude

Every attitude can be analysed through four components:

1. The agent — who holds the attitude: a person, a team, a role, or a machine-agent
2. The mental stance — the type of attitude held: belief, intention, desire, commitment, and so forth
3. The object — what the attitude is directed toward: a plan, a design decision, a requirement, a practice
4. Qualifiers — modalities and modifiers that sharpen the attitude: certainty, urgency, scope, and so forth

© 2009–2025 WorkEm Toolsmiths, Anders W. Tell. All rights reserved.

Hold, Ascribe, Be Ascribed

Attitudes do not exist only within individuals. In multi-practice situations, where strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave intersect across teams and roles, three distinct attitude relationships matter:

• Holding: An agent holds an attitude toward something.
  Nina believes that Solar Energy is preferable to energy from coal.
• Ascribing: An agent attributes an attitude to someone else.
  Nina thinks that Nils intends to build a swimming pool.
• Being ascribed: An agent is attributed an attitude by another.
  Nils believes that Nina wants him to want to build a swimming pool.

This structure has direct practical value for analysing agreements. When a team declares consensus on a plan, three questions deserve explicit answers:

• Does each party believe and understand that they have agreed? (Hold own)
• Does each party believe that the other party has agreed? (Ascribe to others)
• Does each party believe the other party understands and accepts the commitment? (Mutual ascription)

These are not the same question. Agreement failures most often occur not because parties disagree on substance, but because one or more of these conditions is absent.

The ABC Model

An attitude operates across three layers, known collectively as the ABC model:

• Cognitive (Beliefs): What the agent thinks or believes.
  Structured design reduces development costs.
• Affective (Feelings): How the agent feels emotionally about the object.
  I find this architecture genuinely compelling.
• Behavioural (Actions): The agent's readiness and inclination to act.
  I am willing to commit time to executing this strategy.

All three layers are present in any real engagement with strategy, design, architecture, or Interweave. Treating attitude as purely cognitive, as a matter of belief alone, misses the affective investment that drives or undermines commitment, and the behavioural readiness that determines whether intention becomes action.

Communicated Attitudes

Much of the work of strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave happens through communication: in meetings, documents, directives, and conversations. Every communication carries one or more speech acts, and these acts reflect the speaker's attitude toward the content being conveyed.

• Informative: The speaker communicates that the (substance of the) knowledge or awareness is to be considered as information that the listener may consider interesting and valuable (conveying facts or data without prescribing behaviour). Examples include: You should read the white paper; it is interesting.
• Advised: The speaker believes that the advice is of interest and valuable to the listener (offering advice that may be accepted or rejected). Examples include: This hammer is useful when building a small house.
  • Guided: The speaker believes that the guidance provides direction, best practices, and leadership that will support resolving a problem or difficulty (leading toward an outcome while permitting interpretation). Examples include: This checklist will help you avoid fundamental problems.
  • Recommended: The speaker believes that the effectuation of the recommendation will lead to qualitatively better effects and results, and that the recommendation should be accepted and used (endorsed as favourable but not required). Examples include: The international standard ISO 14000 will lead to better quality as well as customer satisfaction, and should therefore be used.
• Directed: The speaker believes (based on the authority given) that the listener must follow the intent and substance of the directive (commanding or ordering with expectation of obedience). Examples include: This Strategic principle must be followed by all business units.
  • Required: The speaker believes that the listener has no choice but to comply with the requirement, often due to the speaker's authority or established rules (it is a non-negotiable demand). Examples include: The stakeholder requirements must be realised in the next iteration.
• Promised: The speaker commits to a promise to perform a specific action or ensure a particular outcome in the future, hereby creating a self-imposed obligation (declared intention to deliver with obligation). Examples include: I promise to provide this report by tomorrow.
• Agreed: The speaker commits to a mutually accepted proposition or course of action, establishing shared obligation between parties (reached through mutual consent and shared commitment). Examples include: I agree to the changes in the plan.

Recognising these distinctions matters in practice. When a guideline is treated as a directive, or a recommendation is interpreted as an obligation, the resulting friction has nothing to do with the content itself. The misalignment is in the communicated attitude.

Belief Attitudes

Beyond communication, agents hold epistemic attitudes — stances about what is known, unknown, or uncertain about strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave:

• Known: Information is known when it is understood, verified, and part of established knowledge; certainty exists about its nature (confirmed through evidence or experience).
• Unknown: Information is unknown when it is not understood or discovered; no knowledge exists about it (absence of information or awareness).
• Known Unknown: A known unknown is a risk or area of uncertainty that you are aware of but whose outcome or details you cannot predict; an awareness of gaps in knowledge (conscious ignorance — we know what we do not know).
• Unknown Unknown: An unknown unknown is a risk or factor that is completely unforeseen; a complete lack of awareness of the gap (unconscious ignorance — we do not know what we do not know).
• Expected: An expected outcome or state that is anticipated to occur based on current knowledge, plans, and models (projected or forecasted with some degree of confidence).
• Source of Truth: A source of information or data that is considered authoritative and accurate.
  • Single Source of Truth: A single source of information or data that is considered authoritative and accurate (one canonical reference considered by someone as wholly accurate).
  • Multiple Sources of Truth: Several versions or perspectives of sources of information or data exist, each potentially valid in different contexts or for various stakeholders (plural legitimate representations that may conflict or complement).

The Known Unknown / Unknown Unknown distinction carries particular weight in architecture. A team that believes it has a clear picture of a system may be operating from a single source of truth, when, in reality, competing, equally valid sources and perspectives exist that would materially alter that picture.

© 2009–2025 WorkEm Toolsmiths, Anders W. Tell. All rights reserved.

Evolutionary Attitudes

Every strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave follows a natural evolution — a journey through stages of intention, realisation, and reflection. What begins as an idea or possibility gradually transforms through planning and deliberate action, ultimately becoming a reality in the real world. Yet, that which exists years later often differs from what was once intended or designed.

The attitudes described so far each name a particular type of stance: what an agent believes, desires, commits to, communicates, or holds as known. The Evolutionary Attitudes describe a further dimension: how agents characterise the evolutionary status of work, where strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave stand at any point across its full lifecycle.

These attitudes are expressed through verb forms: considered, desired, intended, realised, sensed, interpreted. The verb form is not incidental — it names a state in the relationship between an agent and work through the temporal and aspectual character of a verb: completed, ongoing, prospective, or resultative. Realised is perfective — the work has been brought into being. Considered is imperfective — it is under active attention. Intended is prospective — a direction has been committed to. Emergent is present-participial — it is actively arising. Together these verb forms trace the full arc of work from first attention through action, adaptation, and interpretation. They are a cluster, not a taxonomy: a family of verbal attitudes through which agents collectively characterise the evolutionary condition of what they are building.

The Evolutionary Attitudes form a cycle illustrated in the diagram below. The cycle operates through two concentric loops. The outer loop carries the evolutionary attitudes themselves — the stances agents hold and express about where work stands. The inner loop carries the architectural processes that connect those stances: Design / Specify / Blueprint; Transform / Change / Experiment; Measure / Experience / Perceive; Evaluate / Analyse / Interpret. These processes are not attitudes — they are the activities through which one evolutionary stance gives way to the next.

© 2009–2025 WorkEm Toolsmiths, Anders W. Tell. All rights reserved.

Three territories mark where the work resides at each point in the cycle: Embodied, Explicit, and Embedded. These are not phases — they are loci. Embodied knowledge resides in agents: in judgment, experience, intuition, and the stances agents hold toward the work. Explicit knowledge acts as the mediating layer — the documents, models, and specifications through which embodied understanding becomes shareable and actionable. Embedded knowledge is strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave as it lives in organisational reality: in routines, systems, structures, and the shaped behaviour of people and machines. The companion article Beyond Blueprints — Manifestations addresses these three forms in full.

Most attitudes are straightforwardly agent-relative — a belief, a desire, a commitment belongs to an agent. The Evolutionary Attitudes span a spectrum. Some, including Considered, Desired, and Intended, are agent-relative: they require an agent's orientation to exist at all. There is no intended direction without someone intending it. Others, including Realised, Actual, Emergent, and Unplanned, describe conditions of the work that obtain whether or not anyone planned or recognised them. Actual in particular corresponds to the philosophical concept of Actuality: what is the case in the world as it is, independent of documentation or intention. Still others, including Sensed and Interpreted, are agent-mediated readings of conditions. This spectrum across a single cluster — agent-relative, work-relative, agent-mediated — is what makes the Evolutionary Attitudes conceptually distinct from all other attitude types.

The states are organised by their position in the cycle.

Forward Arc - From Consideration to Deliberation

This is the agent-relative phase. The work is predominantly Embodied: it lives in the minds, orientations, and decisions of agents before moving through Explicit form and into deliberate action.

• Considered: Something that is in focus (allocation of attention), and an object and talking point in discussions, designs, building, measurement, etc. (careful thought before making a decision or judgment about something).
  • Optional: Something recognised as a valid alternative that can be chosen or disregarded without compromising the core integrity of the system. It represents a point of choice rather than a necessity (something that may be selected but is not compulsory).
  • Variant: Something that is a distinct version or formulation that is being recognised and explored, differing in specific approaches, components, or characteristics while often aiming to achieve the same overarching goal (a different manifestation of the same concept).
• Desired: Something that has moved beyond consideration to active preference — the agent recognises this direction as desirable without yet having committed to it as intention. Desire is agent-relative: it requires someone who wants.
• Intended: Something that, over time, is recognised as a desired direction. It represents a crystallised intention to follow a particular path.
  • Decided: A considered and intended variant that has been chosen through a decision-making process; the point at which intention crystallises into commitment (formal selection made from among alternatives).
• Deliberate: Something intended or decided that is consciously and purposefully acted upon. The intentions, or parts of them, are translated into actions and outcomes, which, in practice, often subtly transform the original intentions.
  • Planned: The deliberate planning and arrangement of actions, resources, and timelines to realise the deliberated actions; detailed preparation of how intentions will be executed (systematic organisation of means to achieve ends).
  • Prepared: The deliberate actions achieve a state of readiness where resources, capabilities, and conditions have been arranged for the realisation of deliberate actions, and ensuring all prerequisites are in place (made ready for action or use).

The Embedded World

Once enacted, the work enters the Embedded world — organisational reality. These states describe conditions that obtain whether or not any agent planned or anticipated them.

• Realised: The deliberate actions and outcomes have been brought into being.
• Not Realised: Parts of the intended actions have not been realised — due to time, resources, changing circumstances, or competing demands.
• Actual: What actually happens, comes into being, or occurs — regardless of documentation, intentions, or deliberate actions. Actual states are not always realised states; much of what exists emerged without being planned.
• Unplanned: Something that came into being in the actual world but was not the product of deliberate planning — distinct from Emergent, which encompasses broader spontaneous arising, and from Accidental, which arises from the particular circumstances of how life unfolds. The unplanned simply occurred, outside the deliberate arc.
• Emergent: Arising spontaneously through the interaction of internal decisions and external forces, often diverging from original plans.
  • Accidental: Occurring without deliberate intent — not because something went wrong, but because life unfolds in ways that were not planned and could not have been fully anticipated.
  • External Emergent: Developing in response to unforeseen external events, challenges, or environmental changes outside the control of decision-makers.
• Generative: Parts of the strategy, design, architecture, or Interweave serve not only their intended purpose but also create the conditions for new, reorganised, transmuted ideas and forms, unforeseen strategies, designs, or capabilities to emerge from it organically beyond what was realised (the creative and productive capacity that yields new forms). This is the creative and productive dimension of architectural work: enabling future possibility, not merely fulfilling current requirements.

Return Arc - Sensing and Interpretation

The return arc closes the cycle. These are agent-mediated stances: agents read, experience, and evaluate the embedded reality, reshaping their understanding before the cycle resumes.

• Sensed: The actual work and its environment are observed, perceived, experienced, and measured. These observations produce their own version of the strategy, architecture, or design, which may differ substantially from what was intended. Sensing can occur years after the original architects, designers, and strategists have moved on.
• Interpreted: The sensed work is analysed and evaluated, producing a reconstructed understanding shaped by actual outcomes, unintended consequences, and the wisdom of hindsight. This interpretation almost inevitably differs from the original plan.

Why This Matters

Strategy, design, and architecture debates are rarely about facts in isolation. They are about people holding different attitudes toward what they take to be the facts. One person defends what was intended. Another describes what was built. A third reports on what was measured. A fourth articulates what must be done next. None of them is wrong; they are working from different stances toward different objects, without recognising the distinction. Confusions arise not from disagreement but from differing attitudes toward the topic under discussion.

Recognising and naming attitudes does not remove this complexity. It makes the different stances visible, precise, and available for productive negotiation. A team aligns not because everyone collapses into one view, but because they can see whose stance is which and why.

This is why making attitudes explicit is not a philosophical exercise. It is the prerequisite for honest, effective collaboration on strategy, design, architecture, and Interweave.

Attitudes — including the full evolutionary cluster — describe how agents characterise and relate to work across its lifecycle. The companion article Beyond Blueprints — Modalities addresses the constraints that govern what work may, must, or can be: the deontic and alethic conditions that hold independent of any agent's orientation. Both articles complement the three manifestations of knowledge explored in Beyond Blueprints — Manifestations.

Anders W. Tell — Senior Enterprise Architect and Master Interweaver

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• Book of Interweaving
• Architectural Thinking