🔁Thinking in Systems

A system is a set of things connected so that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time. To understand it, look at the stocks, the flows that fill and drain them, the feedback loops that adjust the flows, and above all the delays. Most of what we blame on people or on events is the structure behaving exactly as it is built to behave.

This is the book 📂 Slack in the System - 2025 issues is named for in spirit, and the base of ♦️ Systems thinking. Everything I concluded from it is on 01. 🔁 Systems & Feedback.

• Started on 2 January at the kitchen table, on purpose: I wanted the year to have a vocabulary before it had a plan.
• A bathtub explains my backlog better than three years of roadmap tooling did.
• She is kind about people and unsparing about structures. I would like to write like that.
• The manuscript sat for years and came out after she died; 🏛️ Donella Meadows never saw it as a book.
• Counts as book one of sixteen for 🎯 Finish 16 books and keep notes on the ones that matter.
• Nothing quoted from it; I paraphrase her and say so. The old line I keep beside the chapter on system traps is Nightingale's 💬 It may seem a strange principle: the first duty of an intervention is not to make things worse.