You're right! Having a council of tech leads is absolutely a viable approach to designing overall architecture. With that said, it seems to me that each tech l

You're right! Having a council of tech leads is absolutely a viable approach to designing overall architecture. With that said, it seems to me that each tech lead might individually suffer the same problem you have wisely identified - architects failing to keep up. As a result, it's perhaps possible that you might wind up with a committee of tech leads that have useful expertise in their domain but minimal knowledge outside of it. My experience with design-by-committee is that it can be challenging to get a quality design out of one when members have broadly shared expertise, backgrounds, and interests. It's very possible that putting a bunch of people with different expertise and interests in a group and asking them to design something might get you a far superior design! It may be worth considering that it could also produce one with one with opportunity to adopt a unified vision. My experiences to date have been that you're absolutely correct - a council of tech leads is unquestionably invaluable for their ability to supply critical technical detail to an architectural project. It just may be worth considering having an owner for the architecture itself, rather than having it be subject to the vicissitude of community ownership..