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Strategy & Systems Thinking
See the whole board.
Mental models, feedback loops and strategic frameworks for thinking clearly about complex systems — and acting well within them.
Mental Models
Reusable lenses for thinking.
- Feedback loops How reinforcing loops amplify change while balancing loops resist it, and why delays make both hard to read. ●●○○○ 14 min
- Stocks & flows Why accumulations behave differently from rates, using the bathtub metaphor to explain inertia and decoupling. ●●○○○ 13 min
- Leverage points Donella Meadows' places to intervene in a system, and why parameters are weak levers while goals and paradigms are strong ones. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Second-order thinking Asking "and then what?" to trace the consequences of consequences and avoid the traps of first-order reasoning. ●●○○○ 12 min
Frameworks
Structured approaches to strategy and systems.
- The OODA loop John Boyd's Observe-Orient-Decide-Act cycle, why orientation is its hinge, and how tempo defeats an opponent. ●●●○○ 14 min
- Systems archetypes Recurring patterns of system behaviour — limits to growth, shifting the burden, fixes that fail, escalation — and what to do about each. ●●●○○ 15 min
- Theory of Constraints Goldratt's insight that a single bottleneck governs a system's throughput, and the five focusing steps for improving it. ●●●○○ 14 min
Case Studies
The models applied to real situations.
Related reading
Books from the shelf that go deeper on this.
- A Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense Rory Sutherland
- N Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein
- R Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness Frederic Laloux
- T The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right Atul Gawande
- T The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How the World Lost Its Mind Dan Davies
- T Thinking in Systems: A Primer Donella H. Meadows
- T Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman