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Systems archetypes

Recurring patterns that show up across wildly different systems. Once you can name them, you start seeing them everywhere.

Every experienced leader has a moment of recognition: “This has happened before.” Not the specifics - different team, different project, different year - but the shape of it. The way a well-intentioned fix made things worse. The way two departments that should be collaborating ended up undermining each other. The way growth stalled just when everything seemed to be working.

These aren’t coincidences. They’re archetypes - structural patterns that produce predictable behaviour across completely different contexts. Peter Senge identified them in The Fifth Discipline, but practitioners have been expanding and refining them ever since.

The value of knowing archetypes isn’t academic. It’s practical. When you can name the pattern, you can stop treating the symptoms and start seeing the structure. You move from “why does this keep happening to us?” to “ah, this is a Shifting the Burden pattern - and here’s where the leverage is.”

Ten archetypes. Each one a pattern you’ve probably seen. Each one with a structural explanation for why it happens and - more importantly - where to intervene.

10 concepts

Accidental Adversaries
Two parties who should be collaborating but whose actions inadvertently undermine each other
Escalation
Two parties each responding to the other's moves, ratcheting up intensity until both lose
Eroding Goals
When you lower your standards instead of closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be
Fixes that fail
A quick fix that addresses the symptom but makes the underlying problem worse over time.
Growth and Underinvestment
Growth creates demand, but investment in capacity doesn't keep up - so performance drops and justifies not investing
Limits to Growth
Every growing system eventually hits a constraint - the question is whether you see it coming
Rule Beating
People find ways to comply with the letter of a rule while violating its spirit - and the system gets what it measures, not what it wants
Shifting the Burden
Relying on a quick fix so much that the ability to do the real thing slowly disappears.
Success to the Successful
Winners get more resources, which makes them win more - a structural advantage that compounds over time
Tragedy of the Commons
When everyone acting in their own interest destroys the shared resource they all depend on