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Core building blocks

The fundamental components that make up any system. Learn these and everything else builds on top.

Before you can see systems, you need a vocabulary for what you’re looking at. These are the building blocks - the elements that show up in every system, whether it’s an organisation, a market, an ecosystem, or a team.

Stocks and flows. Feedback loops. Delays. Boundaries. These aren’t abstract academic concepts - they’re the things you’re already navigating every day. The difference is that once you have names for them, you start noticing them. And once you notice them, you can work with them instead of against them.

This is where systems thinking starts. Not with complexity theory or archetypes - with the simple question: what are the parts, how do they connect, and what happens when one of them changes?

7 concepts

Boundaries
Where you draw the line around a system changes everything you see inside it
Buffers
The slack in a system that absorbs shocks and keeps things stable when conditions change
Delays
The gap between doing something and seeing what happens - the source of most bad decisions in systems.
Feedback loops
Reinforcing loops accelerate change, balancing loops resist it - together they drive all system behaviour.
Interconnections
The relationships between parts matter more than the parts themselves
Nonlinearity
Small changes can have huge effects, and big changes can have none - systems rarely respond in proportion
Stocks and Flows
Everything accumulates or depletes - and the difference between the two drives how systems behave