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Thinking in systems

A business is a systemA business is easier to read when you stop listing its tasks and start watching what builds up, what moves, and how long things take to move. This part introduces five plain ideas from systems thinking: stocks (what accumulates), flows (the rates that fill or drain them), delay (the gap between a cause and what you see), feedback loops (results that circle back and change what happens next) and cadence (the rhythm at which recurring work happens).Seeing what holds you backMost of what slows a business down is not visible on a normal day. Work waits between steps.Systems dynamics applied to businessA business changes through a few patterns: things that feed on themselves, things that push back, waits that make both overshoot, and limits that stop growth. This part applies stocks, flows, delay and feedback to two small businesses: referrals and the morning rush at a bakery, and rework, steel lead time and a bottleneck at a fabrication shop.

Working with the map

Two clocks: work and waitingEvery job in your business runs on two clocks: the hours someone works on it, and the time it takes from start to finish. The gap between them is waiting, and waiting is what customers feel and task lists hide.Ceremonies: what the rhythm costsA ceremony is a gathering that comes back on a rhythm: the morning huddle, the Wednesday order review, the month-end look at the numbers, the yearly planning day. Each one is small on the day it happens and large over a year, because the rhythm accumulates.ChunkingA chunk is a group of things you treat as one thing, so you can think about the group instead of every piece. Chess players, climbers and everyone planning a week do it all the time.Discipline and disciplined processA process written on a wall is a hope. A process that is repeated, on a rhythm, by the same people, in roughly the same way, is something you can look at, discuss and change.Adding up: cost, working hours and elapsed timeWhen you map a process you end up with figures on many blocks: hours of work, costs, durations, waits. It is natural to add them all up, but they do not all add the same way.

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Two clocks: work and waiting

Every job in your business runs on two clocks: the hours someone works on it, and the time it takes from start to finish. The gap between them is waiting, and waiting is what customers feel and task lists hide.

  • Working with the map
  • 3 min read

Try changing a wait, then see how to represent it on your own canvas.

Start with something you know

A customer asks for a quote on Monday morning. Writing it takes about forty minutes. The customer receives it on Thursday.

Nobody did forty minutes of work three days long. The quote waited: for a supplier's price, for a quiet moment, for a second look. Forty minutes is one clock. Three days is the other.

You already know this about your own business. What is new is only the habit of keeping the two figures apart, and the idea that both deserve a number.

The idea in one line

Working time is the hours people spend on a step. Time on the clock is how long the step takes from the moment it could start to the moment it is done. The difference is waiting: time that passes with nobody working on the job.

Working time costs hours and money. Waiting costs neither, but it delays everything after it, and it is where most of a long lead time usually hides.

Try it: move the sliders. Add waiting to a step and watch which clock moves.

  1. Take the order

  2. Bake the layers

  3. Decorate

Working hours
5.5 h
Time on the clock
20.5 h, of which 15 h is waiting
Dark is work, light is waiting. Invented figures for Maple Street Bakery; nothing here is saved. On a canvas, “Work” is the hours you assign to people on the block, and “Wait” is the block’s Delay.

Why it is easy to miss

Waiting has nobody doing it, so nothing in the room changes while it happens. A task list shows the forty minutes. The customer lives through the three days. When you only look at the first clock, a process can seem fast while customers feel it as slow.

Not all waiting is a problem. Dough has to rise and a customer may need a day to think. The point is to see the waiting, so that you can decide which of it deserves a conversation.

Illustration to come

One quote as two bars: a short bar of working time (40 minutes) and a long bar of time on the clock (3 days), with the gap labelled "waiting".

In the app

Each block carries the two clocks as separate figures, and you enter both yourself.

  1. Select a block and choose the pencil button, Edit, beside its name in the right panel. The Edit node dialog opens on its Metrics tab.
  2. The Duration row is time on the clock for the step itself, once it starts: enter a value and pick minutes, hours, days or weeks.
  3. The Delay row is the waiting before this step can start, for a person, a delivery, an oven or a reply. Same units. Put the wait on the block that receives the work after it.
  4. The working hours are not a row here. On the Resources tab, Add assignment, pick the person and enter the hours of their time the step takes. That is what the Resources page adds up against what each person can give.
  5. Choose Done. When you want the figures along the whole chain, use Parse above the canvas: durations and delays add along the connections, and the card and the right panel show Duration, Delay and Total duration. A blank counts as zero and the result says so.

The step-by-step pages Fill in a block and Calculate and read the figures go through the same screens with pictures.

One question to take away

Pick a job you quoted or delivered last week. Of the two clocks, which was longer, and by how much? Would the person who did the work give the same answer as the customer who waited for it?

Ceremonies: what the rhythm costs