Mechanism that pushes back against a change to create stability.
Flywheel Effect: Why Positive Feedback Loops are a Meta-Competitive Advantage
A fascinating adventure through Competitive Advantages, Mental Models, and practical lessons for operators. Also lots of fun pictures here!
Requisite Variety - gordonbrander.com
If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled.
Knowing When to Stop: The Art of Making a Loop Converge | Andreessen Horowitz
The systems that matter will not be the ones that can keep going. They all can.
Vector theory of change — a theory of change for complex systems - The Cynefin Co
We're launching a short explainer on vector theory of change, which describes how approaches to theory of change thus far have not been suitable for complex systems, and how vector theory of change helps to rectify these issues. It walks you through vector theory of change step by step: starting from where you are, setting direction and finding stepping stones, designing interventions, and monitoring continuous feedback as opposed to recklessly aiming for a fixed endpoint at any cost.
Growth Loops are the New Funnels | Reforge Blog
Reforge drives team performance, with the most actionable learning from vetted operators that your team will actually use and apply.
On the Mechanism Institute (Ori Shimony) : Metagovernance Seminar
Ori Shimony presents his team's research and plans at the Mechanism Institute, which has a compiled a large library of mechanisms and is doing research on...
Why we're bullish on loops
WTF are loops, why is everyone arguing about them, and why do they actually matter?
What is “loop engineering?”
There’s talk about loop engineering, but what is it exactly? I looked into it, and found triggers, cron jobs, AI slop & more. Is it a “here today, gone tomorrow” trend?
Harnessing Chaos: How the Brain Turns Randomness into Robust Memory | Columbia Engineering
AI systems reveal how random fluctuations in brain activity may help stabilize memories
Tom Costello on Twitter / X
Apropos of everything here’s my uninformed idea for alignment: homeostatic mechanisms (control systems / cybernetics) that force a system to optimize for satiation and normal-range variation (rather than maximization) across a set of goals such that, if any one of them were…— Tom Costello (@tomstello_) September 9, 2026
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Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning · Journal of Design and Science
Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health. I propose six significant levels of pace and size in a robust and adaptable civilization.
The emergence of consensus: a primer
The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. However, the literature is vast and widely scattered across fields, making it hard for the single researcher to navigate it. This short review aims to provide a compact overview of the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and to discuss some representative examples. It focuses on those situations in which consensus emerges ‘spontaneously’ in the absence of centralized institutions and covers topics that include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems.
