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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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Four gestures cover most of what you do on a canvas. Try each one in the practice area below it.

  • Guide
  • 5 min read

Illustration to come

Annotated screenshot of a canvas: the left pane, the canvas with three connected blocks, one block’s card with its figures, and the bar above the canvas with the save state, Parse and Update.

1. Move around and move blocks

Drag empty space to pan and scroll or pinch to zoom. Drag a block to move it. Each block is a part of your operation: a process, a step, a stock or a note.

Try it: Drag empty space to move around, scroll or pinch to zoom, and drag a block to a new place.

Practice area with the app’s own cards. Nothing here is saved. Mouse, touch or pen only.

2. Connect two blocks

Drag from the dot at the bottom of a block to the dot at the top of another block. Processes run from top to bottom. The line shows that work or material moves from one to the next. The tool draws what you tell it; it does not decide what causes what.

Illustration to come

Close-up of a block’s bottom dot, where a line starts, and the next block’s top dot, where it ends.

Try it: Drag from the dot under Purchasing to the dot above Assembly.

Practice area with the app’s own cards. Nothing here is saved. Mouse, touch or pen only.

3. Add a block by dropping a line

Drag from a block’s bottom dot and release on empty space below it. Leave yourself some room: the practice area is zoomed out a little for this. A new block appears there, already connected. In the real canvas the new block starts with Duration and Delay rows you can fill in, or leave empty, and shows a Total cost row once it has a cost. A block with only a description is valid.

Try it: Drag from the dot under the block and let go on empty space below it.

Practice area with the app’s own cards. Nothing here is saved. Mouse, touch or pen only.

4. Re-route a line

Drag the end of an existing line onto a different block to change where it goes. It stays the same line, with its settings.

Try it: Drag the arrow end of the line from Order onto Delivery.

Practice area with the app’s own cards. Nothing here is saved. Mouse, touch or pen only.

These practice areas need a mouse, touch or pen. If you cannot drag, the written steps above still describe each gesture, and you can ask for help through the support link in the Help Center menu.

Going deeper

  • Double-click a block to open its child canvas (one is created if the block has none), or zoom in on it. Zoom out, press Escape or use the breadcrumb to come back. A child canvas is its own document, and leaving it never deletes it.
  • Open a block’s editor (the pencil in the right panel, or “Edit node”) to give it a name, a description, a duration and a delay, costs, and the people or machines that carry it.
  • Add only the detail you need. Broad blocks are fine, and you can refine them later.
  • Figures such as cost and delay come from the numbers you enter. They are directional estimates, not accounting, and the tool never ranks people or tells you what to cut.

The practice areas here are separate from your workspace; nothing in them is saved.