How to Think in Systems (When Everyone Else Thinks in Moments)
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The fight, the missed deadline, the health scare, the empty bank account. None of them are the problem. They’re outputs. Something upstream produced them, and until you see what, they’ll keep coming.
You’re stuck in traffic. No accident, no obvious reason. Just a wall of brake lights stretching to the horizon. You sit there for forty minutes, finally start moving, and there’s nothing. No wreck, no lane closure, no explanation. The traffic just dissolves.
This drives people insane because they’re looking for a cause. Something happened. Someone did something. But nobody did anything. One driver tapped their brakes slightly twenty minutes ago, the car behind them braked a little harder, the car behind that one harder still, and the ripple traveled backward through the system until it became a standstill three miles back. The jam wasn’t caused by any single car. It was caused by the system. The way the cars were spaced, the speed they were traveling, the tiny input that got amplified through a chain of reactions.
Nobody in that traffic jam thinks in systems. I never did either. You sit there convinced someone caused this, annoyed at a person who doesn’t exist, waiting for the moment to end so you can get home.
I started seeing that my life works the same way.
