Blog

In Certified LeSS Practitioner classes by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, system modelling is introduced as a way to dialogue your way toward a common understanding of "the system" — through causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams. This piece looks at how that approach plays out in practice, from modelling the impact of implicit product backlogs (think Jira filters that quietly turn one backlog into many) to using tools like kumo.io and insightmaker.com to develop progressively wilder, more useful models. There's a social dynamic to this work — never ask people to review a system model by email — and a whiteboard with markers usually beats any electronic tool. Plus a real example where five people from five different countries, who'd never met ten days earlier, modelled a decades-old problem and found a potential solution in an hour. Sometimes the best thing a retrospective can do is help the team better understand the system itself.