Tag: SystemsBookcase

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On transforming time and system immunity

Malcolm Gladwell claimed in his book Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. 

How many days is that?

How many years?

It’s not quick to flip between these very common units of time. Unless we are very good at multiplying and dividing by 24 and 365 respectively. 

The answer is 416 and 2/3 days.

Which is equivalent to roughly 1.14 years.

Solid. No time for breaks.

But the point isn’t about how long this is or with Gladwell’s theory is true or not. My point is, isn’t it strange how awkward it is to convert between our common units of time.

This was sorted out for distance a long time ago. Metres, millimetres and kilometres are easy to switch between: just move the decimal point three spaces to the right or left. 

Why don’t we have this same simplicity for time?

I had been aware of the creation of a calendar based on 10-day weeks in post-Revolutionary France. This calendar was in use for about 6 years, and is in itself a fascinating story. 

But I hadn’t realised until this weekend that during a similar period there was a decimalisation of time. Under this model:

  • A day is broken into ten hours
  • Each hour has 100 minutes
  • Each minute has 100 seconds

With this system, the unitary conversions are easy. If someone were to say that something will take 10,000 hours, you can quickly step up and down through the different units.

  • 1000 days
  • 10,000 hours
  • 1,000,000 minutes
  • 100,000,000 seconds.

Very sensible for quick calculation. No calculators necessary!

But the new system was not popular. The wikipedia page on decimal time cites a paper presented by C.A Prieur at the French National Convention on why decimalisation of time is not a good idea. And the reasons given present a good example of ‘system immunity’ – why systems resist change.

Here are a few of the reasons listed:

  • Since time is not commercially regulated (unlike say, weights and measures), there is no enforcement and so the old system will remain in use. Using our Systems Bookcase model, here the operating rules don’t reinforce the new design. Equally there is no rule stopping the use of this new system — but nothing to help it punch through either.
  • The rural population does not need such an accurate measure of time, and so are unlikely to use the new system. This is an example of there being no reinforcing feedback loop in the system. Shifting to the new system does not confer any benefits to these users, so its uptake will not naturally emerge. 
  • Watches are people’s most expensive possessions – asking people to buy a new watch by decree is not likely to be popular, unless it is supported and comes with a benefit. This is an example of both capital investment and pride.

These are examples of where the purity of an abstract idea meets the realities of the present. 

But is it the present that is the problem, or is it the idea? Because it is only in practice that things work. 

Forcing an idea into a system that doesn’t want it will take energy. If that energy delivers a yield, then it can be overcome. But if there is no benefit, the system will snap back. 

As it stood, decimal time lasted 6 years before it was abandoned.

How many hours is that? That may take some time work out in my head.

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Clash of system goals

I took this photo at Étampes station. It shows a nineteenth-century roof that spans four platforms with no internal columns. And then, right in the middle of that column-free space, stand the massive posts that support the electric cables — added in the 1920s.

It’s a clear clash of system goals.

The roof was built to create a grand civic space — a place that celebrated the station as a node of travel and encounter.

The cable gantry belongs to a different system altogether: it’s about maintaining a rigid, continuous grid for electrical power.

In the first, place is what matters.

In the second, continuity is what matters.

Retrofitting the roof to carry the cables would have been expensive, yes. But the network engineers could at least have designed special gantries for inside the station — ones that respected the goal of place while still meeting the goal of network.

The station architects began with a blank sheet of paper and could design more or less what they wanted.

The electrification engineers didn’t start with a blank sheet, but arguably designed as if they did.

We rarely start with a blank sheet of paper. Existing and new systems bring different goals. Our task as designers is to reconcile those goals through better design.

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The Map Room – mapping systems, horizons, and change

This week we ran The Map Room, the second workshop in our Critical Thinking for Engineers (and Other Humans) programme. If the Observatory was about looking outwards, this session was about making sense of what we’ve seen—mapping the system, tracing its logic, and finding out where we might start to make change.

We explored:

  • The Systems Bookcase model: a tool for organising system layers, from what gets built through to the values and paradigms that shape it.
  • The Three Horizons framework: helping participants spot signs of long-term change—and understand their own role in it.
  • The Library of Systems Change: a way of recognising how future practices are already quietly present in today’s systems.

Some of the most powerful insights came when participants started applying the tools to parts of their work they hadn’t considered “design” before—like internal policy, comms strategies, or team culture. It was a reminder that systems thinking isn’t just for buildings or infrastructure—it’s for how we work, organise, and evolve.

We also talked about system boundaries, shifting roles, and what it means to design something that doesn’t just meet a brief, but changes the system the brief sits inside.

The Map Room builds on the Observatory, taking data and analysing it in readiness for the Decision Engine, where we decide on the next course of action to take. That will come later in June.