🏭Industrial Dynamics - A Major Breakthrough for Decision Makers

The behaviour of a company over time, its booms, shortages and overreactions, comes less from outside events than from its own structure: the delays in passing orders and goods along, and the rules each stage uses to decide what to order. Model those delays and rules, and a small, permanent change in customer demand turns into large, slow oscillations upstream, with nobody doing anything foolish. To change the behaviour you redesign the structure, not exhort the managers.

What it means for the scorecards. A carrier's on-time number is measured at the far end of exactly this kind of chain. When a shipper's orders swing, the carrier's lanes fill and empty a few weeks later, and its punctuality moves with them. Some of what a scorecard would call a bad month is the shipper's own order pattern coming back.

This is half of 📞 Gideon's objection, which I heard three days before reading this: that small carriers would be punished by noise. Forrester suggests it is not even noise. It is signal about someone else.

For 📂 Carrier Scorecards discovery, then: score over a window long enough to cover the delay, and show the shipper's volume on the same chart. Raised with Zainab Karimi on the Monday as a question for the prototype sessions.

• Sent by Yusuf Demir in September, before our first call, as a scan with his pencil numbers in the margin, one to fourteen. I read it on Saturday 25 October at Lantern Coffee, the first Saturday back at the wall after the cold.
• 1958. An engineer who had built computer memory walks into a business school and says a company is a feedback system and can be simulated like one.
• This is where the vocabulary I have used all year comes from. Meadows came out of his group. The stocks, the flows and the delays in my January notes are his, fifty years before her book.
• The title promises a breakthrough for decision makers and the prose is that of a man selling one. Underneath is a single worked example that is still the clearest thing I have read on why supply chains swing.
• Thirty pages. The diagrams take a while. Worth it.