Feedback and accumulation

Draws the circle instead of the line: what feeds back into its own cause, and what piles up between the rounds.

You and your sister have had the same argument four times this year. Each round ends with an apology and a promise. Each round comes back sooner and louder than the one before. You keep treating it as an event, so you keep hunting for what set it off. The trigger is different every time, which is why the hunt never ends.

Feedback and accumulation draws the circle instead of the line. It asks two questions no other form can ask. Does the effect feed back into its own cause, so the thing keeps recreating the conditions that produce it? And does something pile up between the passes, so each round starts from a higher level than the last? A signed loop explains why it returns. A stock explains why it returns worse.

The family has five renderers. A causal loop joins named factors with signed arrows into a closed circuit, marked R when the circuit amplifies and B when it pushes back toward a target. Stock and flow separates the things that hold a level, drawn as boxes, from the rates that fill and drain them, drawn as valved pipes. A systems archetype is a named pair of loops whose shape recurs across unrelated situations. A spiral shows the same circuit walked several times with something different on each pass. A fishbone fans the candidate causes of one effect off a spine, which is where you start before you have a circuit.

Reach for it when a fix keeps not sticking, or when a problem returns on a schedule nobody set. It is weak wherever you cannot say which way an arrow points or what sign it carries. An arrow you cannot defend is a story, and a clean diagram will make that story look like a finding.