A payments platform faced increasing incident load. By mapping cross-team flows they discovered a manual reconciliation step bridging two services; that step created a single point of failure and blocked deploys. Instrumentation showed long queues during peak times. A small redesign automated reconciliation and added async retries; incidents dropped 70% and deploy frequency increased.
How to find the hidden machine running your life, work, or creative projects — using category-first thinking
We live inside invisible machines.
Every business, habit, relationship, and workflow is held together by a system — but most of us never see it. We see symptoms. We see clutter, missed deadlines, recurring arguments, or stalled growth.
What we don’t see is the underlying architecture. searching for the system by todd inall catego
That’s what “Searching for the System” — an approach inspired by systems thinker Todd Inall — is all about.
Inall’s key insight is simple but powerful: You cannot improve a system until you first categorize its parts correctly.
Most people try to fix what’s broken without understanding how the pieces fit together. They reorganize their desk, reshuffle their team, or reboot their schedule — but the same problems return. Why?
Because they never found the system. They only touched the symptoms.
Here’s how you start searching for the system in any domain, using Inall’s category-driven method. A payments platform faced increasing incident load
Searching for the system is an ongoing discipline: map flows, instrument, experiment, and align incentives. Small, data-informed changes in leverage points often yield outsized results. The goal is not perfect prediction but better-informed, humane systems that reliably deliver value.
Even if the original is lost, the act of searching for it teaches systems literacy. The keyword itself is a case study in incomplete information and the need for categorization.
Best places: Udemy, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, Teachable, Podia, official website (toddinall.com if exists) Searching for the system is an ongoing discipline:
Search query:
Todd Inall course "The System"
"System" Todd Inall training
Alternative: Search YouTube for “Todd Inall System” — sometimes course previews or summaries are posted.