01. 🔁 Systems & Feedback

The first map I built in this vault, on the Sunday I finished the leverage essay. It collects what I believe about stocks, flows, delays and structure: the vocabulary 📕 Thinking in Systems gave the year, and the reason the newsletter has the name it has.

Every line is a claim of mine, with a word on why it is here. If a note stops earning its line, it leaves the map.

🧭 The Atlas

Stocks and delays

• 💎 A backlog is a stock and only the outflow shrinks it: the one I use most. Prioritising is rearranging the bath water.
• 💎 Delays make a sensible reaction look like the wrong one: why the fix always seems to arrive after the problem has moved.
• 💎 Demand swings grow as they travel away from the customer: the same delay, multiplied by every handover. The mechanism has a name, 🧩 Bullwhip effect.

Structure before people

• 💎 The structure of a system explains more than the people in it: the note behind every blameless review I have run.
• 💎 Changing a parameter is the weakest way to change a system: dates, budgets and targets are the knobs we reach for because they are weak.

Where the work waits

• 💎 A bottleneck sets the pace for everything upstream of it: in the launch it was QA, and I kept feeding design.
• 💎 Local efficiency can lower the output of the whole: a team that is always busy is hiding its queue.

Humility

• 💎 I can listen to a system but I cannot control it: the note that argues with all the others, and usually wins.

🔗 Connected MOCs

• 📕 Thinking in Systems: where the cluster started, in January.
• 02. 🎲 Decisions under Uncertainty: what to do while the delay is still running.
• 05. 📦 Product & Operations: the same ideas with freight on them.

❓ Open question

When is a delay information, and when is it just lateness? A slow response from a system can mean wait, the correction is on its way, or it can mean nothing is coming. From the inside the two look the same for a long time, and I do not yet have a rule for telling them apart.