Everyone’s Right, and Everyone’s Wrong: The Viewpoint Problem in Architecture

There’s a point in almost every architecture meeting where everyone nods as if we all agree… and then proceeds to argue for an hour about completely different things.

Someone shows a diagram. The business lead sees strategy. The developer sees code. The designer sees design debt. The security person sees risk. And the architect — usually me — is somewhere in the middle trying to hold it all together while pretending it’s going fine.

That’s the irony of modern architecture. Everyone’s right, and everyone’s wrong. We draw boxes, we connect lines, and we convince ourselves the picture means the same thing to everyone. It doesn’t.

I’ve watched teams spend days arguing about diagrams that looked perfectly logical but meant ten different things to ten different people. We call them “views.” Somewhere along the way, that word started to lose its meaning.

We built entire frameworks around them — solution views, data views, business views, integration views — until “view” became shorthand for “my perspective dressed up as truth. The result? Endless noise. Architects aren’t aligning people around shared understanding. We’re often just documenting our confusion.

The Standard Nobody Reads

And here’s the funny part… there’s actually a standard for all this. There’s a whole ISO document that’s been around for years explaining what a view and a viewpoint are, how they relate to stakeholders, and how they’re supposed to fit together to describe a system.

It’s ISO 42010, if you’re curious. And if you’ve read it, you’re in rare company.

Most architects haven’t. Not because they don’t care, but because the profession has turned simple communication concepts into bureaucratic artifacts. The standard says a viewpoint defines how to construct and use a view, that each viewpoint addresses specific stakeholder concerns, and that we should choose them deliberately.

We rarely do that. We just keep drawing until the picture looks important enough to stop arguing.

That’s why the BTABoK treats views and viewpoints differently. It brings them back to what they were always supposed to be... a way to connect people. Not a deliverable. Not a compliance exercise. Not a box-ticking model template.

A conversation.

This is why we teach Architecture Core. To create a shared understanding of the tools, the repeatable techniques. The methods that actually work.

What It Actually Means

When you strip away the jargon, views and viewpoints are about seeing the same system from multiple perspectives that matter. They’re how we make complex ideas understandable to different groups without losing the integrity of the system.

A good architect knows that diagrams aren’t truth; they’re translation. They take what one group values — performance, compliance, usability, sustainability — and express it in a way another group can act on.

This is where architecture crosses into empathy — not soft empathy, but structured, disciplined empathy — the kind that lets you hold competing truths at once and still move forward. A viewpoint isn’t a weapon to win an argument. It’s a lens to ensure that no one’s blind spot becomes a system failure later.

When we use them properly, people start to see together. The discussions shift from “who’s right” to “what matters.” That’s when architecture starts doing its job again — making complexity navigable.

Why It Still Matters

Every good architect eventually realizes that most technology problems are people problems wearing technical clothes. Views and viewpoints are how we help people with different incentives and vocabularies make decisions together.

When that happens, the diagrams stop being theater and start being tools. The meetings stop being battlegrounds and start being design sessions. And the architect stops being the person who explains the system, and becomes the person who helps others understand it.

That’s what BTABoK means when it talks about engagement. It’s not a stage in a process. It’s a way of practicing empathy through precision.

Views and viewpoints are how we do that — by giving structure to understanding. When we get them right, everyone gets a little closer to seeing the same reality. And when that happens, everything else gets easier.

https://iasa-global.github.io/btabok/views.html