Lesson 16
System Mapping in Practice
Put the whole course to work on one real problem: a bike shop whose backlog is feeding itself. Count it, find the loop, choose the lever and judge the result.
Sam’s spring
Sam runs a one-person bike repair shop in a market town. It’s April, the first warm weekends have arrived, and everyone has dragged their bike out of the shed at once. Say about 10 bikes are booked in each day, and Sam can repair about 8. There are 30 bikes waiting, leaning three deep along the wall.
The phone hasn’t stopped. Most calls are the same question, “Is my bike ready yet?”, and each one means putting down a spanner, finding the bike and its ticket and explaining. Sam reckons the calls cost him about two repairs’ worth of time a day.
He works long days already. His question is simple: what would actually stop the backlog growing?