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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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Fill in a block

Where each figure lives in the block editor, what it means, and what you can leave empty.

  • Step by step
  • 6 min read

Open the editor

Select a block and choose the pencil button, Edit, beside its name in the right panel. The Edit node dialog opens with the name and Description at the top, four tabs (Metrics, Resources, Costs, Settings), and a side column with a Live preview of the card, the Process owner and the Process behavior. Open full editor ↗ shows the same thing as a page; Done closes it.

Illustration to come

The Edit node dialog: name and description at the top, the Metrics tab open with the Duration and Delay rows, the live preview of the card on the right.

Duration and Delay

On the Metrics tab, each figure is a row with a Value and a Unit. Two rows are there from the start.

  • Duration is how long the step itself takes once it starts, from start to finish on the clock. Choose minutes, hours, days or weeks.
  • Delay is how long work waits before this step can start: for a person to be free, for a delivery, for a reply, for dough to rise. Same units. Enter it on the block that receives the work after the wait.

Neither is working hours. A step can take one hour of someone’s work and four days on the clock. Working hours come from the people you assign (next section). Leave a row blank if you do not know: when you calculate, a blank counts as zero and the result says so, so a blank is never mistaken for a measurement. Days and weeks are turned into hours with the workspace’s work-time settings, which have no screen of their own yet.

The Show column decides which rows appear on the card; the star makes one row the card’s lead figure.

Who carries it

On the Resources tab, Add assignment, pick a person, machine or other resource from the workspace list, and enter the amount of their time the step takes, in the unit and period shown beside the field (hours per week, for example). This is the step’s planned working time, and it is what the Resources page adds up against each person’s stated capacity. Assign the same person to several blocks and their load is the sum. In the side column, Process owner names who answers for the step; it does not add load.

People and machines are created on the Resources page, not here. See People, machines and capacity.

What it costs

The Costs tab shows two things. Calculated costs are read-only: the rates of the people you assigned multiplied by their hours, once the canvas has been calculated. Add direct cost contribution is where you enter a cost of the step itself, such as materials or a carrier’s fee:

  • Amount and Currency, as a three-letter code such as CAD. Amounts in different currencies are never added together.
  • Class: Fixed, Variable, or left unclassified. Totals are kept per class.
  • Basis: One-time, Per period (then choose the period), or Per quantity (then name the quantity, such as “order”; the step needs a stated volume in the same quantity before the cost becomes a total).
  • Scope: whether the amount is added to the total, covers the child canvases below, or is still to be allocated.

Costs are directional estimates for the operator. They are kept apart from the operational description of the step.

How often it runs

In the side column, Process behavior states the rhythm: Flux · per unit of work for work triggered by a client, invoice or request (then name the Work unit), Periodic · scheduled for work on a calendar (then Every and the Periodicity, from hour to year), or One-time. The card shows the result as a small chip. A periodic process counts for cost but adds no lead time to the Total duration. Its card shows the person time of one run as Effort, not as a Duration. Effort is person time (a crew of 6 for 30 min is 3 h); a step that states no Duration takes its longest single allocation, per person, as its Duration (30 min for that crew). The cadence does not schedule anything, count occurrences or change cost or capacity, which the editor also says.

More figures, targets and the child canvas

  • Add metric (Metrics tab) creates a figure of your own with a Name, Value, Unit, Per and Period: “Orders” at 40 per week, say. Create metric adds it as a row.
  • Advanced metric settings → opens the full table. There a figure can be marked as a stock or a flow, set to add up from the child canvas (Sum compatible values), given a Target that the panel shows as an objective beside it, or made Computed from two other figures with one add, subtract, multiply or divide.
  • Settings holds the card’s appearance, two operator annotations (High risk, Fragile dependency) and Child canvas, with Open child canvas. Double-clicking the block on the canvas does the same and creates the child if there is none.
  • Presentation, under the description, changes how the card reads: a process, a machine, a ceremony (a recurring gathering, whose Resources tab becomes People and support) and others. “Automatic” picks from what the block contains.

Not there yet: the back of a card shows Notes and References, but the editor has no field for them; risks are listed in the right panel but cannot be added. Both are recorded as open items.