Systems & Strategy
16 concepts
- EmergenceThe system is producing behavior that no individual component exhibits and no one designed or intended.
- Red Team/Blue Team ThinkingYour plan survived every friendly review, then someone assigned to destroy it found the flaw in twenty minutes.
- Leverage PointsYou keep applying the same kind of fix, improvement is always temporary, and the problem reverts to its original shape.
- Network EffectsYou choose the dominant platform not because it is best, but because everyone you need is already there.
- Compound Growth FMThe results from years of consistent effort arrive suddenly, as if overnight, after a long stretch of almost nothing.
- Pareto PrincipleYou spread effort equally across every task — and most results came from the same small handful.
- Supply and DemandWhen a price strikes you as outrageous or impossibly cheap, and you haven't asked what's scarce and who wants it.
- Explore/ExploitYou keep sampling new options long after the clock says you should have committed to the best one found.
- Tipping PointsEverything appears stable despite years of slow pressure building — then a single unremarkable event triggers a dramatic, irreversible shift.
- Butterfly EffectA trivial rounding error, a wrong turn, a chance meeting — and the entire trajectory becomes unrecognizable.
- Path DependenceYou notice that alternatives technically exist but early structural choices have made them prohibitively costly to reach.
- Lindy EffectYou are choosing between a centuries-old practice and one launched this year, with no strong evidence favoring either.
- Schelling PointsYou and a stranger must independently pick the same option with no way to communicate, and one answer feels obvious.
- Goodhart's LawThe team hit every target on the dashboard while the thing the targets were supposed to measure quietly deteriorated.
- Information AsymmetryYou are about to commit to a deal and realize the other party knows something material that you do not.
- Zero Marginal CostThe product cost a fortune to create, but sending one more copy to one more customer costs effectively nothing.