The Architect Inside the Tesseract

Episode 1 of 3 - What Interstellar's tesseract and docking scenes taught an enterprise architect about systems, people, AI, and building things that actually reach the person they were meant for.

Cooper falls into Gargantua and suddenly he is looking at Murph's room across different points in time. Now, obviously, I am not trying to get into whether a tesseract like that is scientifically possible. That's not really the point.

What stayed with me was the idea itself.

He is somehow able to see the beginning, the middle, different moments... almost together.

But even after seeing all of that, he still has a problem.

How does he actually get something across?

Eventually it is data. TARS has the data, Cooper has to send it, and somehow it has to reach Murph in a form she can understand and use.

Through the watch.

And maybe I am reading too much into a film here, but I have honestly been thinking about this for a while because it feels strangely close to what I have spent a large part of my career doing.

I am an enterprise architect by background.

And when I say architect, I don't mean just drawing boxes and arrows on a PowerPoint.

For me, architecture has always been about trying to understand the whole picture.

Where does something start? Where is the data coming from? Which system talks to which system? Who uses it? What happens if this thing fails? If you change something here, what breaks somewhere else six steps later?

Most people inside a process don't have the luxury of looking at it that way.

And that's not a criticism.

If you are working in finance, operations, sales, HR, whatever... you are mostly dealing with what is in front of you. Today's approval. Today's report. The customer waiting. The system not working. The deadline.

Someone has to step slightly outside that and look at the whole thing together.

Maybe that is why the tesseract scene connects with me.

An architect is also, in some way, trying to see different parts of the timeline at once. Where we came from, where we are now and where we are trying to go.

Of course we can't see the future.

If only architecture worked like that.

But we are trying to create enough of a picture that the next decision doesn't create another problem somewhere else.

There is another Interstellar scene which I think actually explains a different part of architecture even better.

The docking scene.

The Endurance is spinning and Cooper has to dock with it.

And the point is... he cannot tell the spacecraft to stop spinning.

He has to match the spin.

That is such a good analogy for transformation.

Businesses don't stop because you have started an architecture project.

The invoices are still being raised. Customers are still calling. Employees are still using the old system. Someone has built an Excel workaround five years ago and the entire department is somehow running on it. New systems are coming in while old systems are still there.

Everything is moving.

You don't get to say, okay everyone, stop for three months while we redesign everything perfectly.

You have to understand what is already moving, match some of that movement, connect things carefully... and then slowly change direction.

I don't know if Christopher Nolan intended that as an enterprise architecture lesson. Almost certainly not.

But that is what I see when I watch it now.

And then I became a founder.

That changed this whole perspective again.

Because architecture teaches you to look at systems.

Running a business forces you to look at people.

You can have the cleanest architecture diagram in the world and still have a solution that nobody uses.

I have seen this again and again.

The data exists, but people don't trust it.

The workflow technically works, but everyone still sends a WhatsApp message because that is easier.

The system generates the right answer, but it reaches the wrong person.

Or it reaches the right person three days too late.

Or it sits inside a dashboard nobody opens.

Technically everything is working.

Practically nothing is working.

That gap has become much more interesting to me over the years.

And I think AI is making that gap even more important.

We are entering a phase where systems can generate an incredible amount of information, make recommendations, automate tasks and increasingly execute work on our behalf.

But that doesn't automatically mean the organisation becomes better.

Someone still has to decide which data matters.

Someone has to figure out where it should go.

Systems have to connect.

Processes have to connect.

And ultimately people have to trust what comes out at the other end.

Which takes me back to Cooper and Murph.

It wasn't enough that the data existed.

There had to be a path for it.

And there had to be someone on the other side who could make sense of it.

The other scene I have always liked is actually towards the end.

Cooper meets Murph again, except she is now an old woman. She has lived her life. She has her family around her. She finished what he started.

And she basically tells him to go.

Brand is still out there.

There is still work unfinished somewhere else.

I don't know... maybe that scene means something different to me today than it did when I first watched the film.

Maybe that is what happens when you become a founder as well.

You never really reach a point where everything is complete.

You solve one thing. You help someone get somewhere. You build something that works.

And then there is something else waiting on the other side.

So yes, maybe the architect in me likes the tesseract because it can see the whole picture.

Maybe I like the docking scene because eventually all those moving parts have to actually connect.

And maybe the founder in me has started understanding the part that I probably ignored earlier...

none of it matters unless what you build reaches the person it was meant for.

And works when they need it.

Next : Episode 2, The Chameleon Never Loses Himself.