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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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People, machines and capacity

Create the people and machines your blocks draw on, state what each can give, and see the planned load beside it.

  • Step by step
  • 4 min read

The Resources page

Open Resources in the left pane. It is one table for the whole workspace, with a row per resource and the columns Resource, Type, Capacity, Demand, Excess and State. Capacity is what you state; Demand and Excess are added up from every canvas that assigns the resource. Click a row to open its inspector on the right.

Illustration to come

The Resources table with four rows (two people, an oven, a van), one selected, and its inspector showing Stated capacity, Demand, Reserved and Excess as a small bar.

Add a person or a machine

  1. Choose Add resource. A new row appears with its name ready to type.
  2. Set the Type: person, cohort (several people counted together, with a head count), machine, agent, supplier (billed per hour, order, unit, request or month) or other.
  3. Use the person’s name or their role; both work. Blocks pick resources from this list on their Resources tab.

A rate for cost can be stated on the resource too; it is used only once you calculate, and only for the cost figures.

State the capacity

Capacity edits inline: click the Capacity cell and enter an amount, a unit and a period, such as 35 hours per week for a person or 40 hours per week for an oven. You choose the units; nothing is assumed. The inspector shows the same figure as Stated capacity.

Leave it empty if you do not know yet. The comparison for that resource then reads Comparison unknown rather than a number.

Read demand and excess

Demand is the sum of what blocks ask of the resource, from the amounts on their assignments, over the same period. Excess is demand beyond the stated capacity. The State column says which case you are in: Within capacity, Excess unresolved, Excess absorbed, or Comparison unknown. On a canvas, a card whose assigned people are over shows “n above capacity” as a small signal.

Excess is a figure to look at, not a verdict on anyone. It can come from the volume of work, from the capacity figure, or from the estimates on the blocks, and often from several at once. The capacity lesson walks through one example.

Stating capacity honestly

A forty-hour week is rarely forty hours for mapped work. Some of it goes to things nobody draws (questions, small favours, finding a file), some is set aside on purpose (training, maintenance), and some is displaced by events that are likely but not scheduled. The inspector shows Reserved draws when a resource has them, but there is no way to enter them on this page yet. Until there is, state the capacity you consider genuinely available for the work on your maps, and say in the resource’s name or in a Note what you have left out.