Thinking in Systems and the Logical Thinking Process
Why it is hard to identify true source of problems, agree on that and align on what to do about it
Or why fixes don't stick, why reasoning needs to be visible, and the method that connects them. A series in three parts.
Almost every enterprise is busy whether it’s a corporation, a non-profit or a movement. Rather fewer are getting anywhere. This is about the difference — and about a way of thinking, invented for factories, that turns out to apply to almost anything you are responsible for.
Each part is a scrolling piece: the drawings build as you read. Best on a reasonably wide screen.
Part one · The Wrong Queue
A clinic where sixty people are waiting and everybody knows where the problem is. They are all wrong — and what they get wrong is the most reliably counterintuitive thing about how systems behave.
Also available as a plain, non-scrolling version — same words, static diagrams.
Part two · The Arrows Nobody Checks
Five intelligent people, five confident and incompatible answers. Why arguing doesn't settle it, why most diagrams are decoration, and the eight questions that turn a picture into an argument.
Part three · Five Shapes
The method itself: five questions any real change has to answer, the differently shaped answers they need, and why its author quietly retired one of his own tools.
The method on a real problem
The Forum Doesn't Remember, and Doesn't Cumulate
A sibling to the trilogy rather than a fourth part, and readable entirely on its own. Maren posts a good suggestion to the Second Renaissance forum, nine people reply, and a year later nothing the movement believes has changed because of it. Not for want of goodwill, but for want of a way to integrate a good thought into what the group knows, and what AI now makes possible. Every diagram in it comes from that group's actual analysis.
There is also an earlier scrolling version, where the drawings build as you read.
Whose Map Is It · the deeper cut
The same subject taken further, for a reader who already knows what the trees are. The movement sat down to define what counts as progress, could not, and found in failing that its real constraint was not its strategy but its inability to change its own mind. Written first, and superseded as the way in — it opens on an argument about a word — but it goes somewhere the accessible version deliberately does not.
