Signals & Levers Reader's Guide

The Signals & Levers Reader’s Guide is a companion for book clubs, study groups, leadership teams, and anyone working through Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi’s Signals & Levers: Systems Thinking Tools to Unblock Software Delivery. For the Introduction and each of the book’s fourteen chapters, you’ll find a short summary, a “Try This” exercise adapted for groups, and four discussion questions that move from understanding the ideas to applying them and arguing with them.

As in the book, the exercises build on each other. Pick one real challenge from your organization at the start and carry it through every session, from naming the illusions behind it to drawing causal models and U-curves and writing decision records. The guide also suggests three ways to schedule your sessions, and it ends with general discussion questions and a quick reference to the book’s key concepts and frameworks.

Formats
epub · pdf
License
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

About the authors

2 authors
Elisabeth HendricksonFounder & CEO, Curious Duck Digital Laboratory

Affiliation as of 2026-09-04

Elisabeth Hendrickson is a technology leader with over thirty years of experience in the tech industry, having led geographically distributed teams of engineers, product managers, and designers as VP R&D at a publicly traded company and VP Engineering at a Series B startup. She is the author of Explore It! and There's Always a Duck , and currently works with technology leaders to improve collaboration, decision making, and execution. Her philosophy centers on putting people first, focusing on incremental delivery and learning, and recognizing that there are many right ways to achieve outcomes depending on context, making her methodology-agnostic while emphasizing the importance of tight feedback loops and collaborative partnerships.

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Joel TosiCo-Founder, Dojo & Co.

Affiliation as of 2026-08-31

Joel Tosi has been delivering software products for over 25 years. Along the way, he has felt frustrated that he couldn’t express himself effectively; managed teams where he could see the problems they were experiencing but couldn’t get his peers to see them the same way; and seen far too many good intentions end in less-than-desirable results. Joel has stories. For the past decade, Joel has focused on helping make it easier for teams to enjoy their work and innovate. This has led him to seek new ways to express what is holding teams back so everyone can see the same reality. Frequently, what is holding teams back is the network effect inside of an organization—the system reacting. Blindly following processes never solves this. Joel started leveraging the techniques in this book to help teams tell their story, then to educate managers and executives on them so they could make better decisions together. Ultimately, it is about stopping change theater. Joel has been presenting the concepts in this book internationally for over five years and continues to explore new ways to leverage these techniques to help make work more enjoyable. The joy when people say, “Now others can see what I have been feeling,” is a wonderful feeling.

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