Architectural thinking..

Michael Platt has a couple of good postings regarding 'Architectural Thinking'. He mentioned a few approaches that are undertaken during the process, notably, 'divide and conquer' and 'simulated annealing'. Thinking about architectures is a very intuitive and thus, a  personalized phenomena that encompasses many facets, including social ones. One approach that I have found to be beneficial is the 'Pareto Law' - tackle 20% of the problem space that gives you 80% of the solution space at the first round. There are exceptions of course, and is dependent upon the nature of the problem to be solved.