142: Modeling Constraints in Human Systems with Will Larson
August 7th, 2019 · 1 hr 10 mins
About this Episode
00:48 - Will’s Superpower: 1) The ability to take something complicated and to find simple ways to think about it that work most of the time. 2) A rigorous love of structure.
02:30 - Systems Thinking/Theory
08:48 - How do you know when to stop modeling?
10:12 - How do you figure out what your team’s rate of change is?
- Organizational Changes
- Process Changes
- Changes to the Software Systems You’re Managing
19:30 - Focusing Attention
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
20:31 - Impacting Systems
24:47 - Patterns of Dysfunction
32:13 - Sharing Ideas and Contributing with Systems Thinking
38:59 - Having Adaptive Capacity
44:30 - Taking Bets (Risks): Cheap vs Expensive
48:10 - Systems Having Properties and Behaviors and Building Useful Missing Tools
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Reflections:
Jessica: The difference in reasoning about properties vs reasoning about behavior.
Will: It’s easy to look at yourself sometimes as the lone practitioner trying to pull the industry forward. But, it’s exciting to have conversations like these to know there are other people out there trying to do the same thing.
Arty: Systems thinking as a way to think about how to optimize the quality of decisions.
Rein: A problem is a reduction of the system. One of the most important skills for a systems thinker and a problem solver is the ability for form a problem with a complete understanding of the complete mess that we’re choosing to not think about right now.
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