DEV3L on The Personal MBA 4
Tags: systemsthinking, understand, analyze, improve
Published: 2018-04-01 03:55:56

---
title: DEV3L on The Personal MBA 4
published: true
description: My notes taken while listening to The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman part four.
tags: systemsthinking,understand,analyze,improve
---
*(raw)*

## Table of Contents

1. [Part 1](https://dev.to/dev3l/dev3l-on-the-personal-mba-pt-1n-b2n) : 
(Introduction) (Marketing)
2. [Part 2](https://dev.to/dev3l/dev3l-on-the-personal-mba-pt-2-37da) : 
(Sales) (Delivery) (Finance)
3. [Part 3](https://dev.to/dev3l/dev3l-on-the-personal-mba-3-322a) : 
(Human Mind) (Yourself) (Others)
4. Part 4 : 
 - [Understanding Systems](#Understanding Systems)
 - [Analyzing Systems](#Analyzing Systems)
 - [Improving Systems](#Improving Systems)

<a name="Understanding Systems"></a>

---

# Understanding Systems

A business is a turducken of complex systems

Galls law, all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked

Flow is the movement of inputs to outputs in a system
Stock and Slack should be managed efficiently in a value stream. Stock is the amount of items and slack is the excess stock. Keeping slack low reduces Inventory management cost, but requires higher amounts of coordination cost

The theory of constraints, any manageable system is always Limited in a cheating more of its goal by at least one constraint. If you can identify in alleviate the constraint oh, you won't increase the throughput. Improvements made outside the bottleneck are an illusion

If you don't want to go the way of the dinosaur you must always consider how conditions in the environment affect your system
Selection test are the process by which systems and organizations perpetuate through an environment. For example humans who do not get enough air water or food fail the selection test.
If you can identify what the selection test in the market really are, you'll be able to compete in that market much more effectively
Black Swan event can dramatically change selection test without notification

The more tightly coupled processes within the system are, the more likely local failures and delays will  Impact the rest of the system

Normal accidents theory, or s*** happens, states that in complex systems something will go wrong. Overreacting to normal accidents is counterproductive, when something goes wrong are extinct of response to become hyper sensitive, lock everything down and adding more controls to prevent them Fortune event from occurring again. Locking things down only makes the system more tightly couple

<a name="Analyzing Systems"></a>

---

# Analyzing Systems

Deconstruction is the process of breaking complex systems into the smallest possible sub systems in order to understand how things work
Comfort Systems maybe hard to describe in words. Use diagrams to represent flows stocks and the inputs and outputs of the system

Measuring something is the first step to improving it
What gets measured gets managed
Kpi are the measurements of the critical parts of the system
Measurements that don't help you make improvements to the system are worse than worthless, there waste of your limited attention and energy
Garbage in garbage out the straightforward principle, if you put useless input into a system you will get useless output. If you don't want garbage when you're done, don't begin with garbage

Analytical honesty is representing the KP eyes of a system in spirit and with his highest accuracy as appropriately possible
As a general rule look at no measurements in isolation, always consider the context of the system

Common measurement, mean mode median and mid-range
Correlation is not causation. Even if you find one measurement is highly correlated with another oh, that does not mean they have a direct impact on each other

Change the measurement method, and you disassociate any historical norms


<a name="Improving Systems"></a>

---

# Improving Systems

Null hypothesis, when something goes wrong avoid your bias to add process, evaluate the situation and see if they system-wide change is necessary or is the instant a local one off
Min-max individual variables to increase system performance. Attempting to work on many variables at once makes it difficult to separate correlation from causation
Refactor your systems by a continuous Improvement. Think lean value stream optimization
Leverage the Pareto Principle, 80-20 rule, critical few to your advantage when marketing to customers or designing products.
Reduce friction and increase Automation in the system. A small amount of friction in a high-traffic process can be very expensive period test that are done manually that can be automated or also expensive and do not scale
Use checklist to help Ensure critical paths hit while completing a process
What the business world needs is more Turtles and less tigers. Resilience is an underrated quality in business, just like the turtle it may not be sexy, but it lives another day
By the time you need one or, a Fail-Safe is too late to develop. Find comfortable amounts of preparation on your critical path to prevent catastrophic failure

Let your inner demon run wild, and fix any issue fine before they impact customers. Chaos monkey testing

Scenario planning, counterfactual simulation, lets you mentally stimulate how to achieve a goal or react 2 in outside force
"What would I do if"
A healthy business Cycles between growth, maintenance, and consolidation

Self-education is a never-ending process
There's never a limit on how much you can grow

Great people and great technology can exponentially be leveraged with in a machine. The mythical 10 XR exist