GreenIO London and Architecture Governance Episodes
Firstly apologies for the radio silence from Architect Tomorrow. We’ve been cooking up plans and are in the process of rebooting the community and podcast (as we’ve started to announce)
As a result of that we are actually releasing 2 episodes today to make up for the lack of content this year!
The first is the special edition covering: Green IO London 2025 Conference Interviews and Highlights
The second is Architecture Governance with Selena, Darryl and Grant: Governance Is Your Innovation Engine (If You’re Doing It Right) with Grant Ecker
As always these episode are making their way on to audio services now as well.
Green IO London 2025:
So another special edition of Architect Tomorrow for 2025 Green IO conference in London. Whilst we couldn’t capture everything, this episode gives you a taster of what was shared on the day - with interviews with some of the speakers and of course, Gael Duez!
Massive thanks to Gael and the Green IO speakers for working with me on this episode - I think this might be the record for most guests on a single recording of AT!
Gaël DUEZ
Amael Parreaux-Ey @Resilio
Magali Saúl @ Sopht
Anne Chow
Mark Buss @ Ovo and Charlie Beharrell @ heata
Dryden Williams ams CEO CarbonRunner (at the time of recording - see note below)
Hannah Smith Director of Ops Green Web Foundation
Oliver Winks @ Root and Branch
Ian Brooks @ UWE
If you’ve already watch the version of this that went out on the GreenIO podcast note that this has a bonus extra clip from me on the networking impacts panel I ran (this is at 23 mins in if you want to skip to just that as you’ve already watched the Green IO version).
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RIP CarbonRunner
Something that should be noted about this episode is that it was recorded before the sad news about CarbonRunner ceasing operations.
Was CarbonRunner a business or a design pattern?
I’ve had lots of ideas that I thought could be businesses during my career. Aside from fear of failure the main reason I’ve not executed on them - they didn’t stand commercial tests (they might be “good” ideas technically but what is the product market fit and is there demand? I do wonder (but of course don’t know as I’ve not spoken to Dryden since this episode was recorded in 2025) whether this was the case for CarbonRunner as well. It was a wonderful idea but was there enough of a commercially defensible moat around it? I wonder whether in time Dryden might be open to licensing or open sourcing the IP behind the CarbonRunner algorithm. There is also of course the Carbon aware vs Grid aware piece of this that needs consideration (but I know Dryden was focused on consequentiality rather than just attributional reporting impact when he presented at GreenIO).
Governance Is Your Innovation Engine (If You’re Doing It Right) with Grant Ecker of Chief Architect Network
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This is rather timely given Architect Tomorrow will be at Chief Architect Network London with Grant Ecker). This is the second episode with the new semi-regular line up!
Good governance unlocks your innovation engine. So why are we still getting it so wrong?
It was a throwaway line in a previous episode. Selena Evans observed that bad governance certainly slows things down, but good governance unlocks your innovation engine. Enough people responded to it that I wanted to dig in properly. So I brought Selena and Darryl Carr back, and added Grant Ecker, founder of the Chief Architect Network, to the conversation.
What followed was one of the most practically useful conversations we have had on the podcast. Here is what stuck.
Governance has a reputation it does not fully deserve
The “department of no” framing is real, but it describes governance done badly, not governance done well. The bad version abounds because it is easier to build:
“Governance can tend to be so bureaucratic and rules-based and oriented around committees and cross-functional alignment that structures can make things near impossible.”
The better version looks completely different. It is a learning function. A memory function. It answers the question: what information do we need, in what context, to make the right decisions and achieve our objectives? When governance is built around that question rather than around compliance checklists, something shifts. It stops feeling like friction and starts feeling like alignment.
Someone’s no is always someone else’s yes
When governance says no to a proposal, there is always a reason, and that reason is usually that it is saying yes to something else. Consolidating cloud infrastructure. Protecting operational cost. Maintaining consistency across a portfolio.
“The governance should be set up to help the company achieve its goals aligned to that strategy, and to challenge when those two things are out of alignment.”
The governance that earns a bad reputation is the governance that forgets this. When an ARB says no without articulating what it is saying yes to, it becomes an obstacle. When the organisation moves on from a strategy but the governance has not updated its rubric, it becomes the enemy. Grant’s practical tip: pay attention to your escalations. They are telling you your governance is out of step with what the organisation actually needs.
AI: same questions, harder game
Does AI fundamentally change governance, or is it just another technology to scrutinise carefully? Darryl’s answer was measured: yes and no.
“We still need to understand what the purpose is of introducing a new capability into the organisation. We need to understand how it delivers value and the consequences of the decisions we’re making around it.”
The fundamentals hold. The subject matter changes. What is different with AI, particularly with agentic AI, is that you are no longer governing a system that follows discrete rules. You are governing a system that might take unpredicted action. Grant describes needing to “think in 3D chess.” You have to teach these things how to learn, how to think, how to act, and then govern those things. That is a genuinely new dimension.
Selena’s instinct here: resist anthropomorphising. These systems have a specific kind of intelligence built on specific mathematical parameters. You can put certain risk mitigations around them. Treating them as human-like decision-makers is where organisations get into trouble.
Her preferred reframe: stop saying “human in the loop.” Say “AI in the loop” instead, and keep it that way. It is a small linguistic shift with significant implications for how you design governance around these systems.
Feedback loops: the thing we consistently get wrong
Running through the whole conversation was a theme about feedback. Not collecting feedback, actually closing loops and acting on what you learn. As Selena puts it:
“We need to be sensing more holistically and more continuously around feedback loops, both in terms of what is happening, how things are changing, the external environment, the internal environment. Those feedback loops degrade over time, so they require upkeep.”
This is where traditional compliance-oriented governance tends to fail. It was built for a stable environment. It does not have good mechanisms for continuous sensing and adjustment. AI makes this more urgent, not less.
The uncomfortable question
If governance exists to enable good decisions, to bring the right information to the right people at the right moment, then most architecture governance is not really doing that. It is doing something that resembles it from the outside: committees, review boards, approval gates. But the underlying function is missing.
The organisations that get this right treat governance as infrastructure for decision-making, not as a control mechanism. They build feedback loops. They align their rubrics to current strategy, not last year’s. They differentiate between the parts of the architecture that need standardisation and the parts that need room to experiment. They make sure that when governance says no, everyone in the room understands what it is saying yes to.
The ones that get it wrong are still running the immune system of 2015 on the challenges of 2026.
So: does your governance framework know what it is trying to enable? And when did you last check?
Listen to the full episodes on the Architect Tomorrow podcast. Find Grant Ecker and the Chief Architect Network at chiefarchitectnetwork.com. The previous episode with Selena and Darryl, Architecting Human-Centred AI, is available now.
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