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Reason Commons
The public library / Explainers

The method, before the product.

A three-part introduction to the Theory of Constraints and the Logical Thinking Process — the reasoning method Reason Commons is built on. Written for a general audience, with no software in it.

An introduction to the method, not to this product. Each part is also a scrolling piece, where the drawings build as you read.

Theory of Constraints · Part one of three9 min read

The Wrong Queue

Sixty people are waiting and everybody knows where the problem is. They are all wrong — and what they get wrong is the most reliably counterintuitive thing about how systems behave.

Rufus Pollock

Theory of Constraints · Part two of threeScrolling piece

The Arrows Nobody Checks

Five intelligent people, five confident and incompatible answers. Why arguing doesn't settle it, why most diagrams are decoration, and the eight questions that turn a picture into an argument.

Theory of Constraints · Part three of threeScrolling piece

Five Shapes

The method itself: five questions any real change has to answer, the differently shaped answers they need, and why its author quietly retired one of his own tools.

Start with the guide Watch one example