Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

1 min read Free

Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #9: Systems Thinking Without a Framework Is Just Feeling Like Something's Off.

"Think systems!" sounds profound. It delivers nothing — because nobody explains the thinking, just the aspiration. Post 03 has the full toolkit: stocks, flows, delays, reinforcing and balancing loops, and how to see them. Read that first if the terms are unfamiliar. This post is about the failure mode
1 min read Free

Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #8: Local Optima Are the Most Dangerous Places to Feel Successful.

You can optimize a component of a system to near-perfect efficiency while the system as a whole gets worse. The engineering team cuts cycle time in half. Customer satisfaction is at an all-time low. The sales team closes more deals than any quarter on record. Net revenue retention
2 min read Free

Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #7: Why Smart Groups Make Worse Decisions Than Any Individual Would

Groups are supposed to improve decisions. More perspectives, more information, more scrutiny. The wisdom of crowds. Collective intelligence. The reality is more complicated, and in high-stakes environments, often worse. Smart groups consistently make worse decisions than the individuals within them would have made alone. Not because the people are
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Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #6: Incentives Don't Just Drive Behavior. They Reshape What Behavior Means.

Give sales a commission and they'll close deals that shouldn't close. Give engineers velocity targets and they'll ship features that shouldn't ship. Give managers headcount targets and they'll hire people they don't need. The failure mode isn'
2 min read Free

Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #5: There's Always One Thing Blocking Everything. Find It First.

In any system, one constraint determines throughput. In a factory, it's the machine with the longest queue. In a team, it's the person or process that everything waits on. In an organization, it's the approval gate that every critical project queues behind. The failure
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Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #4: First-Order Effects Are What You See. Second-Order Effects Are What Gets You.

Raise prices. Get more revenue per unit. That's the first-order effect. Also: lose some customers who then tell others. Lose some word-of-mouth momentum. Annoy some of your best customers who now feel like they're paying a premium. That's also happening — at
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Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #3: Your System Is Already Running. You're Just Not Reading It.

Sales hires more closers. More closers produce more revenue per quarter. More revenue produces more headcount budget. More headcount budget produces more closers. Engineers optimize for velocity. Velocity goes up. Management rewards velocity. Engineers optimize harder. Technical debt accumulates. Velocity drops. Management pushes for more velocity. Engineers optimize harder. These
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Decision Making and Systems Thinking Series #2: Most Decisions Should Be Made Faster. Here's How to Know Which Ones Can't.

There's a pattern that shows up in almost every organization, and it looks like this: three weeks of debate about which project management tool to use, decided by committee. And a 30-minute all-hands meeting announcing a major architecture change. The first is trivially reversible. The second
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