systems thinking | The Broomstick Brief

Ankh-Morpork from above, in sepia: the river winds brown through the packed city with barges on it, and in the animation the water still moves. This is the Ankh before the spring it sets.

The year the Ankh sets

Ankh-Morpork has a river, in the sense that it has a long thing through the middle that is called one. The Ankh is the only river on which a body’s outline can be chalked, and most years it can be walked across by any citizen with no further plans for their boots. Upstream, the tanneries and Harry King’s yards, where t…

A records office desk seen from above, in low afternoon light. A form lies under a magnifying glass that enlarges one printed line to perfect sharpness; a rubber stamp and an ink pad sit beside it, and a tall stack of identical forms waits at the edge. Past the desk, out of focus, a window opens onto dense woodland, and something small has just moved in the undergrowth.

A love letter to bureaucratic hell

Two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical, doing different things and attending to the world differently. The pop-science version, in which logical people are left-brained and artistic people are right-brained, is not the story McGilchrist tells. His claim is stranger and more ambitious: the difference runs far …

A wooden letterpress type case, close up, partly in shadow. Every compartment holds metal type except one, which is not empty but has been filled with type from the neighbouring compartment, so that no gap is visible unless one looks closely. A compositor's stick rests on the case.

Where there is no language

There is a Kafka sentence I knew that I knew for a long time but without its exact words. It concerns holding oneself back from the sufferings of the world, and the peculiar possibility that the very act of holding back becomes the suffering that could have been avoided. I remembered the thought, but not the sentence. …

Nothing reached the gate

The agent has been doing this for eight months. It reads approved tickets, renders them into firewall configuration, verifies the result against intent, and closes the loop. It is good at the job: faster than the network team it replaced, and it does not mistype an address at the end of a long shift. A change ticket ar…

The evidence starts too late

Inside the same problem ended with a person doing the comparing: for example, an analyst who takes what the systems report, holds it against what is actually happening, and decides which of the two to believe. Route around that job in one place and it reappears in another. So the obvious next proposal: give the compari…

A door hinge rendered as a technical illustration, but the central pin of the hinge is a human silhouette, standing upright, holding the two leaves together. The left leaf is dense and disordered: overlapping raw material, weather, cables, half-legible signals, textures that do not resolve. The right leaf is clean and ruled: a severity matrix grid, policy clauses, an architecture diagram with tidy boxes and arrows.

Inside the same problem

Cassie Kozyrkov’s question is a good one: if machines now do the doing, what is left for leadership? Her answer is attention. Leadership becomes the design of what machines notice, optimise and repeat. That is a useful shift. It becomes more interesting if Ashby’s law and Lewin’s field theory are read a little more lit…

Legible

There have been and are prominant figures whose conduct is usually filed under unpredictability. The word does a lot of work, and most of it is concealment. Unpredictable is what an observer says when a pattern is present but a frame that would catch it has not been picked up. It describes the watcher, not the watched.…

Neither side of the canal

A friend who was at HackIT 2026 in Firenze sent me a photograph of a printed handout. Two pages, a bit creased, a faint smear of something on the second one. It was the material for a workshop called Imagining collectivity under oppression, run on the Friday afternoon in Sala M by two people going by Alecs and webbie. …

Een toets heeft een stabiel object nodig

Bestuurlijke instrumenten beoordelen toestanden. Een toets, accreditatie of kader stelt vast of iets op een bepaald moment in de juiste staat verkeert, en ontleent zijn waarde aan de aanname dat die toestand stabiel blijft tot het volgende toetsmoment. Dat werkt zolang de eigenschap waar het om gaat berust op een stabi…

The part that stays strange

Any lens explains something. That is the problem with them, not the recommendation. Point a strong enough frame at a situation, and it will find its own pattern there, because a frame is built to find that pattern, and the finding feels like discovery rather than like the frame doing what it was made to do. So the fact…

A world map in the muted, slightly aged style of an old commercial atlas, deep greys and warm parchment tones, no bright colours. The landmasses are plain and understated, deliberately unremarkable. The eye is drawn instead to the chokepoints: a handful of narrow sea passages marked with subtle bright constrictions, like a ribbon pinched between two fingers, at the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb and Suez, the Panama Canal, the Danish and Turkish straits. Thin flowing lines of shipping traffic stream across the oceans and visibly bunch and narrow as they squeeze through each pinch point, thick and tangled at the straits, thin elsewhere. At several of these pinch points sits a small, discreet military marker, a simple anchor or star symbol with a faint defensive ring around it, showing a base or fleet holding the passage: one at Hormuz, one in the middle of the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia, one at the mouth of Bab-el-Mandeb near the Horn of Africa where several such markers cluster together uneasily, one at Panama. Over the landmass of China, a different marker: not a passage but a cluster of small refinery and smelter symbols glowing faintly, with dispersed thin ore-lines from Africa, South America and Australia all converging into that single cluster, showing the scattered sources funnelling into one processing hub. Across the Arctic top of the map, a faint dotted route curves over the pole, bypassing the pinch points below, marked discreetly as the northern passage, with a single marker of its own. In one corner, almost incidental, a few small human figures rendered very small and plain, standing apart from the grand map, suggesting the people downstream of the passages who never appear on it.

The map is mostly bottlenecks

The usual way of reading the contest over resources is to look at where they are. Whose ground holds the oil, the gas, the rare earths, the cobalt. On that picture power follows the deposit, and the country sitting on the richest seam holds the strongest hand. It is the picture behind a great deal of the current talk a…

A lone figure seated on an ornate throne-like chair at the centre of a grand hall, gripping the armrests with the confident posture of someone who believes the room revolves around them. The chair stands on a circular dais, but the dais is wheeled and slightly tilted, beginning to roll away unnoticed. All around, smaller groups of figures have turned their chairs to face one another in tight conversational clusters, forming their own little circles, none of them looking at the central figure. A few have already drifted toward the open doors, where soft daylight spills in. The central figure holds a length of rope that once tethered the surrounding chairs, but the rope is slack and the knotted ends have quietly come loose on the floor.

The centre that depends on the room

The usual way of reading power treats it as a possession. Someone holds the leverage or they do not; the troops, the money, the umbrella, the seat at the head of the table. On that picture the strong actor is the one who can hurt the others more than they can hurt back, and the others arrange themselves accordingly bec…

A shape of European rearmament

Everyone knows by now that Europe is rearming. That part is easy to write and carries almost nothing, because “investing in defence” survives any amount of vagueness. The interesting reading sits a little lower down, in the documents that have to name things: how much money, raised in what way, spent on what, through w…

Reading the procurement, not the press release

A policy speech says what an institution wants to be seen wanting. A procurement document records what it has agreed to pay for. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is usually the more interesting reading. A press release costs nothing to write and binds no one. A call for tender names a budget, a deadli…

A single weary civil servant at a cluttered government desk, buried under towering stacks of paper documents and redaction folders, frantically rubber-stamping and blacking out pages. In the background, an empty pristine filing system labelled 'intake' sits untouched and gathering dust.

Een transparantiewet die vindbaarheid eist

Er is een gewoonte in detection engineering die een organisatie tijd kost om af te leren. Een team kijkt naar de waarschuwingen, de dashboards en de dekkingsrapporten, en beschouwt die als de plek waar detectie gebeurt. Dat is niet zo. Het is de plek waar detectie zichtbaar wordt. Het werk dat bepaalt of er iets te zie…

The stability of dysfunction

The stability of dysfunction Many discussions of large systems quietly assume that a stable system is a healthy one, and an unstable system is a sick one. Complex systems tend to violate that intuition. They can remain operational for a very long time without becoming any healthier, and they possess several mechanisms …

What institutions do to successful ideas

Many critiques of Agile assume something went wrong. The story is usually told as a fall from grace: a practical response to software uncertainty that then disappeared beneath ceremonies, certifications, frameworks, and consultants. There is another way to read the same history. Perhaps Agile did not fail. Perhaps it s…

Quadrant mapping uncertainty against consequence, with adaptation favoured at high uncertainty and anticipation at high consequence

Agile, where it fits and where it doesn't

Most engineering disciplines accept that method follows from context. Nobody expects a bridge engineer, a documentary director, and a trauma surgeon to share a planning model, and nobody finds the difference remarkable. Software is one of the few fields where people go looking for a single methodology and then try to a…

The administrative attack surface

A few days after sending an application to the Dutch Ministry of Defence for a senior cyber and information security advisory role, I read an NRC article about publicly accessible details of Dutch military infrastructure. Not leaked documents. Not espionage. Not shadowy dead drops in rainy parking garages. Public websi…

Architecture reviews that approve instead of challenge

Architecture reviews exist to catch problems before they become expensive. In practice, most reviews catch a different set of problems from the ones they were designed to find, and miss a different set from the ones that will eventually cause trouble. This is not because the reviewers lack competence. It is because mos…

The art of pretending we know what’s coming

Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022. Obliviousness and congruence Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved, just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most…

Earth’s orbit: Humanity’s junkyard with a view

Space, the final frontier, the great beyond, the… shockingly cluttered dumping ground for humanity’s discarded space toys. Forget the romantic image of a pristine cosmic void; what we’ve actually created is a high-altitude landfill, where decades of forgotten satellites, exploded rocket stages, and even rogue flecks of…

Planned obsolescence: The art of selling you crap

Planned obsolescence, the tidy art of selling people the same product more than once. Why sell someone a product that lasts when you can sell them the same product repeatedly? It started in the 1920s, when a group of German industrialists, presumably while twirling their moustaches, formed the Phoebus cartel and decide…