Part 15 · 1 chapters · ~8 min
Thinking in Systems
Donella Meadows' primer on stocks and flows, balancing and reinforcing feedback loops, delays and oscillation, the recurring system traps and their ways out, leverage points from parameters to paradigms, and resilience, self-organisation and purpose, with traps mapped to engineering organisations.
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Thinking in Systems
| trap | in an engineering org | way out (Meadows) |
|---|---|---|
| drift to low performance | "flaky tests are normal here"; the SLO quietly lowered after each incident | hold standards to the best past performance, not the recent average |
| shifting the burden | retries hide a broken dependency; the platform team always fixes product teams' builds | use the quick fix only while strengthening the system's own capability |
| tragedy of the commons | a shared CI pool or signing service overused by every team | quotas and feedback of each user's consumption to that user |
| seeking the wrong goal | optimising story points or lines of code | define goals in terms of the real outcome (Accelerate's metrics, user outcomes) |
| policy resistance | a code freeze that teams work around with hotfixes | find a goal everyone shares and redesign around it |
pairs with
Systems Engineering part 7 applies these ideas to the clearance letter and to engineering loops. The book is short and readable in a weekend; Meadows' essay "Leverage Points" is the twenty-page version.
THINKING IN SYSTEMS
Donella Meadows, 2008: stocks, flows, loops, traps and leverage points
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Stocks and flows
Stocks and flows: a stock is anything that accumulates (water in a bath, money in an account, technical debt, trust in a team); flows are the rates that fill and drain it. Because stocks change only through flows, they change slowly, buffering shocks and introducing delays.