The nine enterprise architecture anti-patterns according to TEAF

An anti-pattern isn't a one-off mistake — it's a practice that seems reasonable at the time, repeats itself, and ends up systematically producing the very problem it claimed to avoid. The TEAF collection documents nine of them, identified across enterprise architecture engagements. None is specific to any one organization: these are recurring mechanisms, each with a recognizable symptom and a structural fix rather than a wish.

The decision anti-patterns

The verbal decision. An architecture choice settled in a meeting, never written down anywhere accessible — the fix isn't "write more," it's a mandatory Living ADR for any decision that engages multiple teams. The ghost decision. An ADR exists, but nobody checks it before re-deciding the same thing six months later — the fix is discoverability, not authoring: a Knowledge Backbone nobody consults has no more value than a forgotten shared folder.

The duplication anti-patterns

The duplicated repository. Two teams each build their own customer repository because no shared source was identified — the fix is explicitly declaring a single source of truth per capability, not an injunction to "communicate better." The redundant connector. Several integrations to the same third-party system, built independently because nobody knew the other already existed — a direct symptom of missing a shared Capability Map.

The governance anti-patterns

PowerPoint architecture. An architecture doctrine exists, carefully documented, but drives no real decision — this is level 1 of the TEAF maturity pyramid, and it's fixed only by connecting the doctrine to traced decisions, not by producing more diagrams. Governance by point-in-time audit. Compliance gets checked once a year rather than continuously — TEAF answers this with Continuous Governance, which assesses compliance as it goes rather than on a fixed date.

The automation and debt anti-patterns

Unsupervised automation. An agent or pipeline deploys critical changes without going through a control point — the AI Control Plane's role is precisely to close that gap before an incident reveals it. Silent debt. Every shortcut taken to meet a deadline is individually defensible; added up without measurement, they produce a system nobody understands as a whole anymore — hence an architecture debt indicator rather than a qualitative assessment. Uniform granularity. Documenting a minor capability with the same rigor as a critical one exhausts the governance energy available — TEAF answers this with adaptive granularity: the level of detail follows criticality, not a uniform standard.

• An anti-pattern isn't an isolated mistake: it's a mechanism that repeats and systematically produces the problem it claimed to avoid.
• Verbal decision, ghost decision, duplicated repository: three anti-patterns tied to the absence of a single source of truth.
• PowerPoint architecture and governance by point-in-time audit are fixed by connecting doctrine and compliance to continuously traced facts.
• Unsupervised automation, silent debt, uniform granularity: three anti-patterns the TEAF loop addresses structurally, not through good intentions.