Stories from a Systems Thinker

Most problems aren't 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 couldn't 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'll 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.