Unnatural Systems

Systems for purposeful change

Unnatural
Systems

Nature changes by drift. People, teams and the systems they build can change on purpose, if they can see what they want, what is true, and what to do next.

Meet the systems Read the book

Change on purpose

Most change is weather. It happens to you and gets explained afterwards. Purposeful change runs the other way: it starts with a want, builds a model of what is true, acts, and measures what the act did. That loop is easy to say and hard to keep turning.

Each Unnatural system keeps it turning at one scale: a person with a goal, a team with a direction, a system being built. They share a shape, not a codebase.

The systems

  1. 01 For a person

    GRREAT

    Turn what you want into what you do.

    Goals, research, roadmap, execution, analysis and time, held in one record. Plan the work with a coach, then keep the evidence of what happened beside it, in the app or as linked Markdown your agent can pick up again.

    • Goals
    • Research
    • Roadmap
    • Execution
    • Analysis
    • Time

    Open grreat.ca

  2. 02 For a team

    Solowly

    Turn distributed thinking into a shared model.

    Founders, managers and individual contributors each add what they know, inside work they are already doing. Solowly connects it into one model, so alignment and hidden divergence show, and decisions and next moves become explicit.

    • Direction
    • Structure
    • Contribution

    Open solowly.com

  3. 03 For a system

    Bropilot

    Make what a system knows visible.

    Foundations, domain and implementation in one navigable graph: what the system is for, the language of its world, and the code that realises it. One source of truth for people and their AI collaborators deciding what to build next.

    • Foundations
    • Domain
    • Implementation

    In the workshop

One loop, three scales

Measure, model, manifest. The book calls it the MMM loop. Every system here is that loop, fitted to the size of the thing that is changing.

GRREATSolowlyBropilot
MeasureSee what is true Analysis and time: what actually happened.Local evidence and concerns from the people doing the work.Observed reality: tests, metrics and review verdicts.
ModelDecide what it means Goals, research and a roadmap.A shared model of intent, structure and dependencies.A graph of problem, hypothesis and solution.
ManifestChange the world on purpose Execution, with its evidence attached.Explicit decisions and coordinated next moves.Committed changes an agent team makes real.

The long version

The ideas under these systems are written up in Unnatural, a book about the human experience as one part of everything else: about wanting, about cutting the world into things, and about loops that learn.

Open the book