Glossary

Use the ones that help you and ignore the rest. A map with only a description on each box is still a useful map.

How to read this glossary

Each entry gives a short plain definition, an everyday example, and a line on how the idea shows up in the tool. The examples come from two invented businesses used throughout this guide: Maple Street Bakery, a local shop with a counter, ovens, special orders and a delivery run, and Northline Fabrication, a small manufacturer of custom steel gates and brackets. Both businesses and all their figures are illustrative only.

The words fall into three groups: ideas about how a business moves (stock, flow, inventory, cash, delay, cadence), ideas about what it can carry (capacity, demand), and the parts you draw with (node, edge, child canvas).

Words about movement

Stock. Something that accumulates. It is the amount you could count if everything paused for a moment: orders waiting, flour on the shelf, cash in the account, hours of work in a queue. A stock is a quantity, not an activity.

Example: On Monday morning, eleven special-order requests are sitting unanswered in the Maple Street Bakery inbox. That is a stock. So are the six bags of flour on the shelf.

On the map: Stocks are what you tend to see accumulating in front of a step, such as work waiting, and what a resource holds, such as hours of a person's time in a period.

Flow. A rate that moves something into or out of a stock: requests arriving per week, replies sent per day, flour used per batch. A flow is measured as an amount per period of time, or per unit of work.

Example: Around six new special-order requests arrive each week, and the bakery answers around five. The stock of waiting requests grows by the difference, about one a week.

On the map: The connections between nodes show where work moves. A custom metric can be given the nature Stock or Flow, with its own unit and period, to describe a rate you want to state.

Inventory. Physical things you hold until they are used or sold: flour and butter at the bakery, steel bar and sheet at Northline, finished gates waiting to ship. Inventory is a stock. It goes up when a delivery arrives and down as work uses it.

Example: Maple Street Bakery keeps about six 20 kg bags of flour on the shelf. Roughly two bags go into the ovens each day, and a delivery of eight arrives on Thursdays. Northline holds a few lengths of steel bar for gate frames and orders more when the rack looks thin.

On the map: Ursa Major does not track inventory yet. It has no stock levels, counts or reorder figures. The map today carries hours, durations, delays, costs you enter, people and capacity. If inventory matters to a step, you can describe it in the block's description or in a Note beside the map, and keep it in mind alongside the map.

Cash. The money you can use today: what is in the till and the bank account. Cash is a stock too. Sales and payments from customers move it up; wages, rent and bills move it down. Because the inflows and outflows rarely land on the same days, the amount can move around even when the business is doing fine.

Example: The bakery's takings arrive daily, but the flour bill and payroll come due on set dates. Northline ships a gate in March and may not be paid until April, while the steel was bought in February.

On the map: Ursa Major does not track cash yet. It has no balances, forecasts or bank connections. You can enter cost figures on the work you map, as directional estimates. Anything you want to say about cash can go in a block's description or in a Note beside the map, or stay in your accounting records, where the actual figures belong.

Delay. The time that passes between something starting and its result, or between work arriving and work being done. It can be a deliberate wait (dough has to proof) or an incidental one (nobody got to it). Delays are easy to overlook because nobody is doing anything during them.

Example: At Maple Street Bakery, sourdough proofs overnight, about twelve hours, before it can go in the oven. At Northline, a painted bracket needs a day to cure before it can be packed. A special-order request sits in the inbox for two days before anyone reads it.

On the map: A node can carry a Delay as well as a Duration, in minutes, hours, days or weeks, and the map keeps the two apart. Duration is the elapsed time the step takes; Delay is elapsed waiting, and you enter it on the block that receives the work. Neither is working hours, which come from the people assigned. Time along a path can then be read as execution plus waiting.

Cadence. The rhythm at which something recurs: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, once, or whenever a client or invoice triggers it. Cadence is a property of when, not of how much.

Example: At the bakery, special-order replies go out on Mondays and Wednesdays, the flour delivery arrives on Thursdays, and the ovens are cleaned every Sunday. At Northline, shipping runs on Fridays.

On the map: A process card shows its cadence as a chip. A block with no schedule shows a dashed placeholder chip. Cadence records the pattern you intend and nothing more: it does not schedule occurrences, count how often the work ran, or change any total, demand or cost. See Part 6.

Words about what a business can carry

Capacity. The amount of something available over a period for the work shown. For a person, it is often hours; for a machine, run time or output; for a team, the sum. Capacity is not the same as the hours in the week: unstructured time, time you have reserved and unplanned events all take part of it. See Part 7.

Example: A baker at Maple Street works forty hours a week. After the morning huddle, interruptions at the counter and oven cleaning, perhaps twenty-eight are available for baking.

On the map: A resource has a stated capacity for a period, and work assigned to it adds up as demand. Where demand goes beyond stated capacity, the map shows the excess as a figure, with no label attached. Whether the excess means anything is for you to read.

Demand. The amount of capacity that the mapped work asks for in a period. Capacity and demand are the two sides of the comparison.

Example: Thirty hours a week of baking work is the demand on the baker's twenty-eight hours.

On the map: Calculated from the amounts assigned to a resource on blocks. Cadence does not multiply it.

Words about the parts you draw with

Node. One box on the map. It stands for a piece of work, a recurring gathering, an input or an output, or a note. A node can be broad or detailed. A node with only a name and a sentence of description is perfectly valid.

Example: "Take a special order" is a node at the bakery. So is "Friday walk-through" at Northline.

On the map: Nodes can be process blocks, ceremonies, inputs, outputs and Notes, among others. You add as much detail to a node as is useful to you, and no more.

Edge. A line between two nodes. It shows an operational relationship between two nodes: one leads to, feeds, or relates to another. It is a statement about order or connection on your map, and not an assertion by the tool that one thing causes another. If you see a cause in a line, that is your reading.

Example: A line from "Take a special order" to "Bake the order" says that accepted orders lead on to baking.

On the map: Edges are drawn by connecting two nodes. They can be rearranged by dragging an end onto another node.

Child canvas. A separate map that sits inside a node. When a box turns out to hide several steps, you can open it into its own canvas and map those steps there. The child canvas is its own document, linked from the parent node. It is not a copy and is not kept in sync with anything else.

Example: Northline's "Finish a gate" node opens into a child canvas with grinding, priming, painting and curing.

On the map: A node that links to a child canvas shows a way to open it, and the map shows where you are through nested levels. A child canvas is never deleted by simply leaving it. See Part 4 for when to nest.

A short worked example

Invented, for illustration only.

Dana, who owns Maple Street Bakery, draws "Take a special order" as a node and connects it to "Bake the order" with an edge. Requests arrive about six a week (a flow) and wait in the inbox (a stock), where they stand for a day and a half before being read (a delay, entered on the receiving block). Replies go out on Mondays and Wednesdays (a cadence). She has twelve hours a week for order work (capacity) and the work asks for about fourteen (demand). The map shows the two hours of difference as a figure. She also knows that flour and cash matter to the same steps; those are inventory and cash, and she notes them in the block's description. When the steps of baking an order turn out to be complicated, she opens "Bake the order" into a child canvas.

None of the words was needed to draw the first box. They became useful as the picture got more detailed.

Reflection questions

1. Which of these words do you already use in your own way? Does your meaning match the one here?
2. Pick one stock in your business, such as the flour on the shelf or the cash in the bank. What are the flows that fill it and the flows that empty it?
3. Which node on your map is hiding a child canvas?