I’m finding that creating this by hand in mostly Markdown Language, with the fiddly bits in HTML and CSS is helping with my thinking, even though it can be at bit painful. Yesterday, GitHub went down and I didn’t realise because I was testing this locally. However, the references back to theme files on GitHub weren’t found so everything was messed up so I tried to fix what was not my error. Sigh. However, trying to set up the navigation through the site has made me think more about the order of things.

This whole workbook is, so far, structured around two basic loops.

One of them, shown in my logo image at the top of the page, is a loop which describes a process of designing new systems by analysing existing systems, designing new ones and planning their implementation, executing the plans and monitoring the results. This is described in more detail in the section in the introduction on what to expect in the workbook.

The second loop happens within the workbook, sometimes within individual workshops. It involves using the thinking tools I currently have, in order to do the work described in the first loop. Then I look at how well that worked out and try to understand if the tools worked well and if not, try to improve on them and repeat the process in another workshop.

Sometimes, I’m already aware of the limitations of the tool as I explain it and know of more sophisticated versions, but I think it’s the best way to explain them, by showing how a simpler version sort-of works.

That is why I think of this as a workbook — a set of exercises to gain skill in thinking about complex human-made systems — and will leave those “mistakes” in place. Simpler mistakes — errors I catch later on re-reading which I ought not to have made in the first place and which don’t seem to be instructive — I will change in place when I catch them.