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    Cover of Stories from a Systems Thinker
    Revuity Press

    Stories from a Systems Thinker

    Jay Burgess

    Twenty-five parables on why the obvious fix never works, and what to do instead. Short stories, each with a systems lesson at its center.

    About this book

    Most problems are not what they appear to be.

    They are the visible part of a system, and pulling on the visible part is what keeps it stuck.

    These are stories about that. About the manager who could not stop helping, and quietly hollowed out her team. About the founder who counted the wrong customer for thirty-one years. About the new leader whose entire turnaround came down to four coffee machines. About the architect who, late in her career, finally learned to stop designing.

    There are no frameworks here. No diagrams. No charts. Just twenty-five short parables about the patterns that run through every organization, every relationship, every life.

    For readers of Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, and anyone who has come to suspect that the obvious solution to a hard problem is rarely the right one.

    Read one a day, or all in one sitting. Either way, you will start seeing them everywhere.

    Part of a trilogy that includes Agentic Engineering: Building Autonomous AI Systems That Actually Work and The Agentic Builder: Field Notes on Product Development for Systems Thinkers.

    Product details

    PublisherRevuity Press
    Publication dateMay 4, 2026
    Print length72 pages
    LanguageEnglish
    ASINB0GX2YFH78

    About the author

    Jay Burgess is Founder & Managing Director and Principal Forward Deployed Engineer at Revuity Systems, an operational systems company that helps organizations diagnose where operations are breaking down, redesign the underlying process, and build and deploy the systems needed to make the work run better. Most recently, he built a production compliance and decision-support system for a regulated organization. Before that, 15+ years across Fortune 500 engagements at Walmart and Adobe. He holds an MBA and M.S. in Data Science from Eastern University, a Harvard AI Graduate Certificate, and an M.Ed. and B.A. from LMU.

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