This is valuable, with the addition that the quality of architectural thinking could be elevated in most of the organizations I've been in if before they put ma

This is valuable, with the addition that the quality of architectural thinking could be elevated in most of the organizations I've been in if before they put marker to whiteboard if they adopted the principle of symmetry. If you don't start with symmetry, you lose meaning because you are representing relationships with a basic inconsistency. I've sat in meetings with very senior architects who say, "I'm not an artist, but here's my thinking," and then go on to ramble and sound out their own parenthetical ideas while everyone is too polite or embarrassed to interrupt. Start with dots and lines that make simple polygons or trees, or multigraphs. Use solid lines for direct relationships, and dotted ones for abstractions and conditionals, and arrows for the direction when you know it. Literally every single visual idea you are expressing reduces to a graph, and starting with symmetry in your drawing provides free clarity about the relationships between ideas. Arguably, maybe you don't want that clarity of symmetry because you want others to feel like it's not decided and they can use the uncertainty of your foggy thinking to contribute their interpretations, and the difference between collaboration diagrams and explanatory ones is probably in this, but as a boss of mine said to me once, "I don't care what you do, so long as it looks like you did it on purpose."