Signals & Levers

Praise for this book

• Signals and Levers is already, right there in the title, an incredibly useful idea for our field. When I started into reading this book, my expectations were already high, what with this incredible author team, their systems-informed focus, and this title. But the novel approach to unfolding and contextualizing insights and leading us through systems-informed practices for leading organizations, was a lovely surprise! My initial ‘I am so excited for our field’ only deepened as I read further! This is, in a sense, an observability practice book for organizations, where we use systems tools to understand and make visible, so that we can learn and respond more effectively to the forces shaping outcomes.

• I have no doubt that Signals and Levers will be considered the definitive entry point into this fantastic body of knowledge.

• We have long known that systems thinking is the key to solving complex problems, yet its practical application has remained elusive. As AI’s impact grows rapidly, the need for this book is more urgent than ever. It transforms an abstract discipline into a powerful toolkit for anyone building today. A must read.

• After a career spent in tech, wondering why all those dumb things keep happening, Signals and Levers comes along and explains what systems theory is, how it works, and how to apply it. Instead of a simple transactional system of ‘X input delivers Y output,’ this book has helped me understand that complex systems just don’t work that way. Instead, by making structured observations of a system’s signals, one can identify the levers available—the things one can change. And most importantly, the book helps interpret the new signals resulting from the levers pulled. I’ve been using what I learned to understand metabolic changes, political situations, and, of course, why things go crazy in a software factory. The analogies are clear, the illustrations charming, and the end-to-end example visited in each chapter makes it all easy to understand and apply.

• The organizations we work in set goals. Seeking to ship faster, improve quality, increase innovation, and any number of others. You’ve tried hiring consultants, adopting ‘best practices,’ implementing various frameworks, and it’s entirely possible some things improved. Most remained the same. Why? Setting goals without understanding the system that produces the current outcomes has poor results. You were trying to control the results without really seeing the constraints that determine what’s possible. You were not understanding the inertia that lives in your system’s structures, or the relationships that actually influence how the work works. You were ignoring those self-correcting feedback loops and reinforcing cycles that compound problems. And missing the constraints created by past decisions. This book brilliantly teaches you to see those structures and relationships, expose and understand the true constraints, and discover leverage points that allow you to steer toward better. Elisabeth and Joel provide an important warning: ‘Once you learn to see, you won’t be able to unsee.

• Reading this book can take people into their past, present, and a better future.

• Programmers are rarely taught how to think about complex systems in a systematic way. This book offers tools for doing that—for distinguishing signal from noise, for identifying feedback loops, and most importantly, for communicating with colleagues more effectively.

• Our dashboards excel at showing change but leave it to us to identify anomalies. We draw flowcharts and label the boxes but not the arrows. It’s refreshing to read a book that frames system state as the product of decisions that compound over time and gives teams practical tools to make sense of them.