Every organization makes its living fitting into a value chain ecology where it takes inputs from suppliers outside the system, does something internally, and provides outputs to the next customer in the chain. Primary links chart the major upstream-downstream flow between internal functions. Process relationships are represented in organization names and position titles. How they hook up is well-known locally, but rarely mapped globally, except at the top component level.

One of the early, great discoveries of systems science was the necessary role of feedback regulatory relationships in complex dynamic systems. Feedback can produce both dampening (“negative”) and amplifying (“positive”) effects. It is the most “hidden” of the four major organizational forces