An enzyme slices through a starch chain and releases glucose. A wild yeast cell consumes it and releases carbon dioxide. Nearby, a lactic acid bacterium releases acid. The pH drops. Some colonies multiply. Others stall. Carbon dioxide gathers in microscopic pockets. Acids accumulate. Proteins stretch, bond, separate, and reconnect into an increasingly resilient network.
A few degrees change the pace. A few hours change the outcome. One reaction alters the conditions for the next. One change triggers another. Then another. Then thousands more. Then millions. Then trillions. Each change sets off another. The system keeps rewriting itself.
The system leaves behind visible evidence of everything that came before.
A crust. A crumb. The aroma of grain, acid, alcohol, and heat.
Bread. Sourdough, of course.
Remove enough of those interactions and none of it happens. No crust. No crumb. No aroma. Just a sticky, disappointing blob wondering where things went wrong.
I hopped on the sourdough train a couple of weeks ago at a cottage weekend and it feels like I’ve been running high-stakes science experiments ever since. The bread itself is delicious. The process is much more fascinating.
Ingredients are just part of the story.
The interactions between them.
The timing.
The environment around them – temperature, air, movement.
All work together to make the thing we all wanted at the end.
Sourdough starters can go back generations. They are family heirlooms. So precious people call them babies. Each week, whether you want bread or not, you have to ‘feed the baby’
There are thousands of videos on TikTok, posts on Instagram, books, courses, forums, and products you can buy. Entire communities dedicated to optimizing this process, this ecosystem, this system for the best possible outcome.
All for a peanut butter delivery system.
It’s bread. And it’s an elaborate ecosystem. Each part depends on the others. Each stage builds on the one before it.
The same pattern shows up everywhere.
Everything is a system.
Your body is a system. Actually, it’s a collection of systems: cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, lymphatic. You live inside systems too: your family, your community, your company, your softball league, your nation. Systems within systems within systems.
The parts matter. The relationships between them matter even more.
Peter Senge, one of the pioneers of systems thinking, observed that we tend to focus on isolated parts of a system and then wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.
That’s because outcomes rarely emerge from a single cause.
A traffic jam isn’t caused by a single car. A championship team isn’t built by a single player. A thriving company isn’t created by a single leader.
Outcomes emerge from interactions.
The relationships between the parts. The timing. The conditions. The feedback loops. The system.
That’s what fascinated me about sourdough.
The loaf doesn’t emerge from flour. Or yeast. Or bacteria. Or temperature. Or time. It emerges from the interactions between them.
Systems thinking invites you to widen the lens. To stop looking only at the visible outcome and start looking at the network of interactions that produced it. Because the visible outcome is usually the last chapter of the story. The system wrote all the chapters that came before.
Take a moment to look at some of the results you’re getting, good and bad.
Instead of attributing them to one bad actor, one good idea, or a single event, what changes if you zoom out and look at the entire system that’s perfectly designed to create that result?
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Each week, I share something I’m learning, living, or working out in real time. It’s part storytelling, part reflection. I hope there’s something in it for you too.
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