Thinking in Diagrams

Contents

Part I — Framing

Setting out a situation, and what is known about it, before working out how it behaves.

• What Is a Diagram For?: What does a diagram show that a paragraph doesn’t?
• Drawing the Boundary: What is inside the system you’re responsible for?
• Surfacing Influences: Which things affect an outcome, before you know how each changes it?

Part II — Feedback

How changes come back around to push themselves further or hold themselves back, first alone, then in interaction.

• Loops That Amplify, Loops That Correct: Why do some changes snowball while others settle?
• Delays, External Drivers, and Competing Loops: Why does the obvious fix make things worse?

Part III — Accumulation

What becomes available as a resource over time, first on its own, then as Part II’s changes come back around through it.

• What Accumulates: What would still be there if everything stopped?
• Stocks Inside Feedback: Where do things wait on their way through a system?

Part IV — Control

Keeping something steady by measuring it and acting on what you find, then adding forecasts, limits and control nested in control.

• Sense, Compare, Correct: How does anything stay near a target?
• Anticipation, Limits, and Nested Control: What happens when correction isn’t enough?

Part V — Pattern and Judgment

Bringing the earlier parts to a new situation: recognizing what it shares with others, and deciding what to draw.

• Structures That Recur: Which stories play out again and again?
• Diagnosing Tangled Situations: What if more than one story is true at once?
• Choosing the Diagram: Which diagram, if any, answers your question?

Using the book

• Open the lab to draw any of the six diagram types without an exercise.
• Look up any of eighteen diagram types in the field guide: the six this book teaches and twelve others.
• Look up any term the book teaches in the glossary, with its other names.
• See which exercises you’ve attempted and which pass their checks.
• Print the book and the workbook of exercise sheets with their answers, as PDFs; the book also prints from its print view.
• Print a dot-grid sheet and a palette card for each of the six diagram types, to draw without an exercise.
• Teach a class with notes on each chapter’s timing, common misreadings and exercises to set.