Avoiding Accidental Design: the one-page picture

October 2026 · companion to the full essay

One graphic to talk someone through the whole argument, in six steps.

Talk track

1. Start with the customer. Value is released at the front, in the services people actually use. If no one is served there is no business, so the service sets the test everything else is judged by.
2. Look behind the service. The security factory holds the capabilities, aligned to a framework such as NIST CSF. The enabling functions provide the engineering and data underneath. The customer never sees these layers, but every service depends on them.
3. Each layer has a lead discipline. Service design leads at the front, organisation design and enterprise architecture in the factory, and architecture at the back. The arrows between layers are where the tensions live. Conway's law warns that if you design one layer without the others, you have still designed them all, just by accident.
4. Business operations holds the whole. People, planning, resourcing, architecture, portfolio and investment touch every layer. This is the natural owner of the operating model, and its job is to keep the layers in balance, not to become the real centre.
5. Strategy above, policy below. Strategy gives direction: which services and risks matter most. Policy sets the boundaries: what must always or never happen. Good policy lands as design in a layer, not as an instruction to people.
6. The loop keeps it honest. Paired metrics show when one layer is winning at another's expense. People raise problems openly, the problem is diagnosed honestly, and the design is reworked. Blame breaks the loop, because problems go into hiding instead of being raised.

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