System behaviours and patterns

What systems actually do over time - the shapes you see when you step back far enough.

Systems don’t just sit there. They move. They grow, they oscillate, they drift, they suddenly flip. And the shapes they make over time are surprisingly consistent - you see the same patterns whether you’re looking at a startup, a market, or an ecosystem.

This is about learning to read those shapes. When you see exponential growth, you know a reinforcing loop is running. When you see oscillation, you know there’s a delay in a feedback loop somewhere. When you see a sudden collapse, you know something overshot a limit it couldn’t see.

The patterns aren’t predictions - they’re diagnostic tools. They tell you what kind of structure is producing the behaviour you’re watching. And once you can see the structure, you can start to think about where to intervene.

12 concepts

The states a system naturally gravitates toward - change the attractor and the system reorganises itself

Slow, invisible movement in a system's behaviour that goes unnoticed until it's dramatic

When the whole does something none of the parts could do alone - behaviour that arises from interactions, not instructions.

A state where opposing forces balance - stable until something shifts the balance

Exponential Growth

When something grows by a percentage rather than an amount - it feels slow until it suddenly feels unstoppable.

When path dependence becomes a trap - the cost of switching is so high that inferior solutions persist

Systems that overshoot and undershoot because feedback arrives too late

Overshoot and Collapse

When a system blows past its sustainable limits before feedback kicks in, and the correction is catastrophic

Path Dependence

Where you can go depends on where you've been - history constrains future options

Growth that starts slowly, accelerates, and then levels off as it hits limits - the shape of most real change

The moment when a gradual change suddenly becomes a dramatic, often irreversible shift

Unintended Consequences

Every intervention in a system produces effects you didn't plan for - sometimes bigger than the ones you did.