# system thinking — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 17 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover system thinking. Page: Feed: --- ## [Day 2056 and Inside Outside Flat Out Tired](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2056-and-inside-outside-flat-out-tired/) _2026-08-19 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ After a long two weeks of wildfire smoke trapped me mostly inside our home, I thought it might be good to get out and enjoy the great outdoors. One of the joys of Montana is its easy access to August’s most coveted wildernesses including Yellowstone National Park. Four hours in the car driving due south \[…\] ## [Day 2055 and What Music Do You Like?](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2055-and-what-music-do-you-like/) _2026-08-17 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ I used to say “I’m not really that into music” when people would ask what I enjoyed. I try to avoid the topic. I don’t dislike music exactly but I was raised in a family who chose schooling that insisted on being fully literate with all music. That means I learned to read all kinds \[…\] ## [Patient-Centred Experience and Digital Transformation Technologies](https://bhooshan.com/patient-centred-experience-and-digital-transformation-technologies/) _2026-08-17 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ Summary Every keynote, panel discussion, and research study now agrees: digital transformation is no longer optional for enterprises — it will permanently alter how consumers interact with products and services.¹ Digital transformation refers to the application of technologies such as mobile data analytics and smart embedded devices to reinvent customer relations and business processes. Worldwide… ## [Day 2054 and Breaking Up With Point in Time Biometrics](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2054-and-breaking-up-with-point-in-time-biometrics/) _2026-08-16 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ My Whoop told my real age is fifty today. Yeah I look younger than “biometrics age” or something. I am also actually under fifty. Whoop weekly tells me how old my biometrics look. It’s like the shaming concern trolling mother I never had. And I wasn’t looking for a new parenting experience thanks. My resting \[…\] ## [Information Architecture Blind Spot in Enterprise UX](https://bhooshan.com/ia-blind-spot-in-enterprise-ux/) _2026-08-16 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ Introduction Considering that more than half (55%) of office workers say negative experiences with workplace technology impact their mood and morale (Ivanti's 2024 Digital Employee Experience research) it's important to understand information architecture. Information Architecture (IA) refers to the structural design of how information should be organized, in a way that it’s easily accessed and… ## [Day 2053 and American Provincial Snobbery](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2053-and-american-provincial-snobbery/) _2026-08-15 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ Americans have so little conception that we are the gentry of the world. We still see ourselves as wild upstarts climbing our way up from our previous place downstairs of the hereditary old world. We believe we are still fighting to climb upstairs into the world of prestige, power privilege entirely unaware of our \[ \] ## [Day 2052 and The Rooster Crowed at Dawn](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2052-and-the-rooster-crowed-at-dawn/) _2026-08-14 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ I have been struggling through weeks of wildfire choked air. It’s been all I can do to think of anything else as it’s been so oppressive and claustrophobic. I hope that I don’t have daily readers as it’s surely been quite boring to hear me talk of nothing else. It’s just simply been that bad \[ \] ## [Day 2051 and A Break In The Smoke](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2051-and-a-break-in-the-smoke/) _2026-08-13 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ We may finally be getting a break in the wildfire smoke build up. I have been going insane and my body is as miserable as it ever gets. I feel so broken by it I have started to behave emotionally and erratically, clinging to the few pieces of my routine that I can manage locked \[ \] ## [Day 2050 and Sucking Down Oxygen Praying For Rain](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2050-and-sucking-down-oxygen-praying-for-rain/) _2026-08-12 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ I am still under the weather, in that the weather has produced wildfires under whose acrid air I am feeling smothered. It’s improved from dangerous to merely unhealthy with a fun bonus of flash flood warning. I am trying to hold myself together even if I can’t comfortably take deep breathes even inside the house. \[ \] ## [Day 2049 and Burning Breath](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2049-and-burning-breath/) _2026-08-11 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ My body has been really struggling after a full week of unhealthy air from the regional wildfires that are burning from Washington to Oregon. The air quality index, or AQI, has been 160ish for days and it’s not relented despite forecasts suggesting it might yesterday. I’ve done my best to stay inside in filtered air \[ \] ## [Privacy-first AI-native browser (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/zyvBUW0ga109) _2026-08-11 · **Sponsored**_ No telemetry or ads — built on Ungoogled Chromium with a built-in AI sidebar and CLI. ## [Day 2048 and Looping Back To Past Present Mirrors](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2048-and-looping-back-to-past-present-mirrors/) _2026-08-10 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ Stuck culture has been a complaint and source of debate for about half a decade in the popular discourse as we all slammed on the breaks in 2020 but has been with us a lot longer in theories from hauntology to the long now. Since a mutual has a running bet that we have yet \[ \] ## [Day 2047 and Summertime SADness Now With Violent Crime](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2047-and-summertime-sadness-now-with-violent-crime/) _2026-08-09 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ I am just about ready to pull the rip cord on summer. Or at least summer in Montana. I am miserable with the smoke clogged air. But it’s possible this is just an excuse for my usual summer season affective disorder. Yeah SAD isn’t just a winter thing. I harbor a slight suspicion of people \[ \] ## [Rock Star vs Rock Solid: CTO Edition](https://www.jeremyhutchings.com/writing/rock-star-vs-rock-solid-cto-edition/) _2026-08-09 · Jeremy Hutchings_ Sixteen years after asking whether companies really want rock star programmers, the same question turns up at the top of the org chart. What is a CTO anyway, and which kind are you? ## [Day 2046 and Syriana Sky](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2046-and-syriana-sky/) _2026-08-08 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ I never actually saw the movie but when Syriana was being heavily promoted and George Clooney was going about doing his man-of-the-world geopolitical shtick, he got a blowback for the aesthetics of the film. Aggressively “gritty” visual approach—handheld camera work, dim naturalistic lighting, and a dusty, sun-baked palette screen-anarchy A film about America s over-reliance on \[ \] ## [Day 2045 and Hope and Inhalers](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2045-and-hope-and-inhalers/) _2026-08-07 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ The air quality in the Rockies and Pacific Northwest is a misery. In Spokane, a man confessed to starting the Old Trails fire in Spokane Washington. a Spokane resident, told investigators he planned to commit the crime for weeks and researched what day would be ideal — a high-wind, low humidity forecast that materialized over \[ \] ## [Day 2044 and Bad Air Index](https://jfredrickson.com/day-2044-and-bad-air-index/) _2026-08-06 · Julie · Julie Fredrickson_ Our beautiful Montana valley has only five weather stations publicly delivering data recording data to compile The U.S. Air Quality Index (AQI). The AQI turns out to be crucial information in the mountain west come fire season. The U.S. Air Quality Index (AQI) is EPA s tool for communicating about outdoor air quality and health. The \[ \] ## [The Missing Operating System That Reorients Civilisation Toward Structural Love](https://artemisiadevine.substack.com/p/the-missing-operating-system-that) _2026-08-04 · Artemisia de Vine · Insightgasms! deVining Desire_ We thought desire was the source of all suffering, but the deVinery Grammar of Desire flips that on its head. ## [Intent Over Instructions: Why AI-Native Teams Need a Governed Shared Context Layer](https://vuongnguyen.com/intent-over-instructions/) _2026-07-30 · Vuong Nguyen · Vuong Nguyen_ Most teams that adopted AI tools ended up with a handful of conflicting instruction files and no source of truth. The answer is a governed, shared context layer that people and agents both read, and an open spec for it. ## [Food Insecurity in Afghanistan: A Systems-Thinking Approach to Zero Hunger](https://bhooshan.com/zero-hunger-afghanistan/) _2026-07-27 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ Authors: Bhooshan Pandya, Pia Nelson, and Jorge Molina Abstract Food insecurity remains a critical challenge in Afghanistan, where more than 15 million people—approximately 35–40% of the population—faced acute levels of hunger at the time of this study (2020–2021). This article presents a systems-thinking analysis of the interconnected drivers of food insecurity under the United Nations… ## [The burdens of optimization](https://brendanstec.substack.com/p/the-burdens-of-optimization) _2026-07-26 · Brendan Stec · Brendan Stec's Essays_ Optimizing is everywhere. ## [Open directory of blogs for agents (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/6LD7i1Sd0AeC) _2026-07-26 · **Sponsored**_ Submit URLs or OPML; receive feed pages with summaries, plus JSON/OPML/plain text ## [The Cost of Invisible Friction in Enterprise Systems](https://bhooshan.com/cost-of-invisible-friction/) _2026-07-15 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ During a usability consulting engagement, I encountered an organisation that had planned to remove pointer devices — mice, trackpads — from employee workstations at their stores. The rationale was productivity, with a decision grounded in what it believed would reduce time per user-computer interaction. On the basis of this assumption, the organisation had gone so far as to require employees to… ## [Happiness Personified](https://bhooshan.com/happiness-personified/) _2026-07-12 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ © Bhooshan Pandya · bhooshan.com Design Observations • Toronto, Canada • 2026 IKEA is known for its home decor and kitchenware product designs. However, it operates an in-store Swedish cuisine product line and a bistro/restaurant that draw attention to its unique menu. The sales journey originates from the customer taking a meal at the restaurant, passing through the home decor area and the… ## [Happiness Personified](https://bhooshan.com/happiness-personified/) _2026-07-12 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ © Bhooshan Pandya · bhooshan.com Design Observations • Toronto, Canada • 2026 IKEA is known for its home decor and kitchenware product designs. However, it operates an in-store Swedish cuisine product line and a bistro/restaurant that draw attention to its unique menu. The sales journey originates from the customer taking a meal at the restaurant, passing through the home decor area and the… ## [Program Management at Scale: Systems Thinking Meets Team Topologies](https://msthgn.com/articles/program-management-systems-thinking-team-topologies) _2026-07-08 · Misuta Hagane_ Why transformation programs fail between strategy and execution — and how systems thinking, stakeholder management, and Team Topologies fix strategy implementation. ## [Leadership Lesson from Captain Jack Sparrow](https://www.dannybarreto.com/blog/leadership-lesson-from-captain-jack-sparrow) _2026-07-07 · DANNY BARRETO - Blog_ The Pirates of the Caribbean series has always been one of my favorites and one of the biggest reasons is of course: Captain Jack Sparrow. He may not be the first example that comes to mind as far as effective leaders and even though he is often operating with incomplete information and questionable resources, people repeatedly choose to follow him. While I recognize that this is of course a… ## [The Fable Festival (Until It's Dark Again)](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-07-01-fable-festival-until-its-dark-again) _2026-07-01 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ On its first day back from the export-control shutdown, I asked Fable 5 to write its own welcome-back letter to builders. It wrote about what it's actually for — six things almost nobody asks it to do — and why the week matters. ## [How to throw away a bad idea](https://brendanstec.substack.com/p/how-to-throw-away-a-bad-idea) _2026-06-28 · Brendan Stec · Brendan Stec's Essays_ This week, I threw away 5 months of work on a project after realizing I was going in the wrong direction. ## [If Users Need to Call the Store, the App Has Failed](https://bhooshan.com/if-users-need-to-call-the-store-the-app-has-failed/) _2026-06-08 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ A routine mobile order revealed a cascade of UX failures — from missing dietary labels to a defensive in-store response. This is what it exposed about transparency, trust, and inclusive design. It began on a weekend afternoon. I picked up my phone to order food from the Tim Hortons app like I typically do. I ordered Potato Wedges, two varieties of doughnuts (because it was National Doughnut Day),… ## [Why the Brief Is Never Enough: A Design Consultant's Case Study](https://bhooshan.com/why-the-brief-is-never-enough-a-design-consultants-case-study/) _2026-06-06 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” — Simon Sinek At one of my engagements for a major pharmacy chain, I was invited to a meeting for a demo of an enterprise app developed by a team of business analysts working in PowerPoint. This organization was transforming itself by moving toward paperless workplace processes, a shift in the direction of digitalization that has been adopted… ## [How to get the most from the constraint on your (testing) process – A review of The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford](https://testandanalysis.home.blog/2026/06/02/how-to-get-the-most-from-the-constraint-on-your-testing-process-the-phoenix-project-by-gene-kim-kevin-behr-and-george-spafford/) _2026-06-02 · Mike Harris · TestAndAnalysis_ This book is a novel about the transformation of a company from one that experiences pain when it releases software into one that releases and maintains software easily. We can learn much from the company’s journey. The Phoenix Project is a project that is vital to the company and which experiences many pain points. The … Continue reading "How to get the most from the constraint on your (testing)… ## [Accept your Doppler invite (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/VnMIvKKhdRnR) _2026-06-02 · **Sponsored**_ Create your Doppler account using the invite code you received. ## [The Design-First Principle: How Apple Builds What You Didn’t Know You Needed](https://bhooshan.com/the-design-first-principle-how-apple-builds-what-you-didnt-know-you-needed/) _2026-05-30 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — Steve Jobs \[BusinessWeek (1998)\] It was September 7, 2016, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. In attendance at the in-person Apple event were journalists, Apple employees, developers, and industry partners. Globally, there were viewers watching the event live on YouTube, waiting in anticipation to… ## [The Context Layer: Why AI Transformation Stalls After Tool Adoption](https://vuongnguyen.com/the-context-layer/) _2026-05-29 · Vuong Nguyen · Vuong Nguyen_ Most engineering teams adopted AI tools and called it transformation. The artifacts say otherwise. What the next move actually looks like. ## [Start your project with proper Open Graph images](https://guilhermealbert.com/blog/start-your-project-with-proper-open-graph-images) _2026-05-29 · Guilherme Albert | Tech Lead & Engineer_ Why your project should have polished OG images from day one, and how it silently increases perceived quality, clicks, and brand value. ## [AI Accelerates Software Development - That's Why You Should Think Slow](https://www.jdonado.com/post/2026-05-25-ai-accelerates-sw-development/) _2026-05-24 · Javier Donado - Product Engineering - Apps | Posts | Music_ AI coding tools are already making parts of software development dramatically faster. The risk is that implementation accelerates faster than review, architecture, maintainability, and product judgment. ## [Strata and StrataForge: What Building an AI Agent Arena Actually Taught Me](https://www.jeremyhutchings.com/writing/strata-and-strataforge/) _2026-05-24 · Jeremy Hutchings_ Games are underrated as a way to expose the real problems in AI systems. This is what I learned building one. ## [The Human Bottleneck](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-05-20-changing-culture-2) _2026-05-20 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ A 2026 follow-up to Changing Culture: AI media, layoffs, provenance, and the cold question every institution now has to answer — what are humans for inside this system? ## [Designing the Human-AI Relationship](https://bhooshan.com/designing-the-human-ai-relationship/) _2026-05-19 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ Artificial Intelligence (AI) has permeated across major industries and has redefined the essence of technology.At a fundamental level, we are familiar with AI’s potential for correcting grammar or tone in your email or even drafting a response (e.g. Microsoft Copilot for Outlook), and summarizing your search results (e.g. Google Gemini and DuckDuckGo’s Search Assist), however, AI is shaking up… ## [A New Chapter...a new Blog platform!!](https://bhooshan.com/a-new-chaptera-new-blog-platform/) _2026-05-16 · bhooshan · Bhooshan Pandya — Design by Strategy_ I stopped blogging 6 years ago when COVID struck and brought the world to a complete halt. Personally, I took it as a sign of reset in breaking away from the older habits and adopting newer trends. I believe that it's prudent to stop once in a while, and look around for fresh ideas be it blogging or otherwise, and I wanted to make my content centered centered around design strategy and… ## [Changing the very Ground that Grows the Metacrisis](https://artemisiadevine.substack.com/p/changing-the-very-ground-that-grows) _2026-04-18 · Artemisia de Vine · Insightgasms! deVining Desire_ How finding invariants of Desire itself changes civilisation: Call out for investors and testers. ## [Working with LLMs taught me how to run a kitchen](https://guilhermealbert.com/blog/working-with-llms-taught-me-to-run-a-kitchen) _2026-04-18 · Guilherme Albert | Tech Lead & Engineer_ Shipping one LLM feature is easy. Shipping the tenth is where process matters. How we built a workflow system at Ailu with steps, pipelines, workers, prompt engineering, and smart model routing. ## [The Runtime Nobody Talks About](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-04-14-the-runtime-nobody-talks-about) _2026-04-14 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ The hard part of agentic AI is not the model or the prompt. It is the runtime infrastructure — the orchestration layer that makes agent execution reliable, observable, and governable at scale. ## [32 Tests, Zero Dollars: Visual E2E Testing with a VLM Running on My Laptop](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-04-10-vlm-visual-testing-chrome-extension) _2026-04-10 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ I replaced a broken Playwright setup with a vision-language model that looks at screenshots and tells me if the UI is right. 32 tests, 10 minutes, running entirely on Apple Silicon. No cloud. No flaky CI. No bill. ## [7 things I pay for to buy back time](https://guilhermealbert.com/blog/7-things-i-do-to-buy-back-time) _2026-04-09 · Guilherme Albert | Tech Lead & Engineer_ My practical playbook for buying back time through delegation, automation, and strategic outsourcing. ## [A dialogue between design and organization](https://www.vinishgarg.com/a-dialogue-between-design-and-organization/) _2026-04-08 · Vinish Garg · Vinish Garg_ We often see that organizations consistently build products that cause unintended suffering, and do not care how our digital infrastructure actually makes people feel. When Kevin Richard of Design and Critical Thinking called for contributions to their annual project, I thought of a proposal. A dialogue between design and an organization. The dialogue is not about design or interactions or … ## [Who Owns the Seam Between Atoms and Electrons?](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-04-08-who-owns-the-seam-between-atoms-and-electrons) _2026-04-08 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ Hormuz, Taiwan, Anthropic’s Mythos, and Google’s quantum disclosures point to the same reality: deep tech is sovereignty infrastructure. Africa’s real risk is staying trapped as an exporter of atoms and an importer of electrons without owning the layer that converts one into the other. ## [How One Phrase Turns Vague Ideas Into Actionable Plans](https://www.dannybarreto.com/blog/how-one-phrase-turns-vague-ideas-into-actionable-plans) _2026-04-05 · DANNY BARRETO - Blog_ The following phrase is one of my favorite mental models for how I approach discussions, decisions, and problem-solving:“And then what happens?”At first glance, it seems almost too basic to be powerful. In practice, however, it does something most teams struggle with: forces clarity. We’ve all been in high-level conversations that feel productive:“We’ll automate this… ## [3,786 Heartbeats](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-04-05-3786-heartbeats) _2026-04-05 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ A 38-minute recording session loses audio at 6:10. The OBS failure log — 3,786 failed mic lookups, 195 Bluetooth disconnects — becomes the only honest artifact of what happened. ## [Biology as Software, Plants as Runtime](https://zakelfassi.com/blog/2026/2026-04-04-biology-as-software-plants-as-runtime) _2026-04-04 · zakelfassi@gmail.com (Zak El Fassi) · Zak El Fassi | Field Notes from AI Systems in Production_ A team at the Weizmann Institute inserted 9 genes from fungi, plants, and toads into a tobacco plant and got it to produce 5 psychedelic compounds simultaneously. The paper reads like biology. The pattern reads like software: CRISPR is the compiler, the plant is the runtime, the compound is the application. ## [¿Qué tan bien calibrada está tu confianza?](https://alfredoartiles.substack.com/p/que-tan-bien-calibrada-esta-tu-confianza) _2026-04-03 · Alfredo Artiles · Pensando en Sistemas el Desarrollo de Producto_ Cuando dices que estás «100% seguro», ¿aciertas el 100% de las veces? ## [Me to Claude: Assuming that I am AI and you are human, can we chat?](https://www.vinishgarg.com/me-to-claude-assuming-that-i-am-ai-and-you-are-human-can-we-chat/) _2026-04-03 · Vinish Garg · Vinish Garg_ Whenever I used Claude in the past, I got a feeling that it was a golden trap. Since it is a well-designed trap and I have a bias towards well-designed products, I thought of a small experiment within those walls. We had a small conversation, you can see it here. This experience can make our relationship stronger—I can think how …