Every few months I fall down the same hole. Something on systems thinking crosses my feed, I remember that Colorado State runs one of the better online Systems Engineering programs in the country, and I quietly add “PhD” back to a backlog that is already embarrassingly long. This is the video that did it this time — and an honest note about why the itch won’t leave.

Watch it here: System Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World

Lecture courtesy of MIT OpenCourseWare — the whole course is free, which is the best kind of price.

The thing I can’t stop seeing

Once you learn to see systems — stocks and flows, feedback loops, delays, the way a “fix” in one place bulges right back out somewhere else six months later — you can’t un-see them. It stops being a subject and turns into a lens.

And here’s what got me: I don’t have to reach for software to feel it.

• A fire call is a system. Dispatch, staffing, apparatus, water supply, and the incident itself — coupled feedback loops running under a hard time delay, where the wrong move early makes the whole thing worse. Incident command is applied systems thinking whether anybody on scene calls it that or not.
• A codebase is a system. Every architecture decision I’ve ever regretted was a local optimization that ignored a loop I couldn’t see yet.
• A startup, a squad, a small town’s volunteer roster — same shape. Stocks, flows, delays, and second-order effects that quietly punish anyone who insists on thinking in straight lines.

Twenty-plus years across the Marine Corps, cybersecurity, cloud, and now AI, and the through-line was never a language or a stack. It was this: the interesting problems are always systems problems, and I’ve spent most of my career solving them by instinct instead of by discipline. I’m an emotional meat brain, and I’m proud of it — the instinct is a feature, not a bug. I’d just like the discipline to finally catch up to it.

The book, if you want to go deeper

The video is the on-ramp. The actual canon is John D. Sterman’s Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World — the standard graduate text, and the source the lecture is drawn from:

• Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World — John D. Sterman, via the System Dynamics Society

It’s a doorstop, and it will happily ruin linear thinking for you forever.

Why Colorado State, specifically

Two reasons — one sentimental, one practical.

The sentimental one: I already hold Colorado State paper. Their IT Project Management certificate is in my pile, and CSU has quietly become a serious home for Systems Engineering as a discipline — not a job title, a field. Exactly the kind of program built for the person I actually am: someone doing the work full-time who wants the rigor to finally catch up to the instinct.

The practical one: everything I’ve earned, I earned online, at night, while working — a bachelor’s, a stack of certs, a MicroMasters, and the MS in Data Analytics I’m in the middle of right now. A remote, working-professional doctoral program isn’t a compromise for me. It’s the only version that was ever going to happen.

So why is it backlogged and not scheduled?

Because I try to be honest about capacity. I’m finishing a master’s, running a stack of side projects, and — the one that reorders everything — I run calls for my town’s volunteer fire department. A PhD isn’t something you bolt onto a full plate. It’s something you clear a plate for.

So it stays on the backlog. Not shelved — backlogged. There’s a difference. Shelved means I gave up. Backlogged means it’s prioritized, waiting, and it will get pulled forward the second the dependencies clear.

Videos like this one are how it holds its place in the queue. Every so often something reminds me that the way I already think has a name, a literature, and a doctorate attached to it — and the itch to go do it properly comes right back.

One of these years, backlog grooming pulls this card to the top.

Made in Nebraska. Go Big Red. 🌽

GaTech > MIT