Wolves Move Rivers

When Yellowstone's wolves were hunted to extinction, everyone knew what would happen. More elk.

What nobody predicted: rivers would move.

Without wolves, elk stopped running. They lingered in valleys, ate vegetation down to roots.

Riverbanks eroded. Channels widened and shifted.

The "problem"… wolves killing elk… was actually shaping where elk stood, which shaped what grew, which shaped how water flowed.

The wolves weren't just predators. They were system architecture.

The leader who just did 360 feedback has the same blind spot.

Discovered they're conflict-avoidant. Made it their project. Six months of coaching later, nothing changed.

Not because the insight was wrong. Because it was incomplete.

Their avoidance wasn't blocking progress. It was protecting certain team dynamics that other parts of the system depended on.

Engineering had learned to route around them. Sales built workarounds. The organism adapted.

Change the behavior without understanding how it propagates? You don't improve the system. You destabilize it.

The question isn't "where am I the constraint?"

That assumes you're blocking something. You might be. You might also be an accelerant. You might be both in different parts of the same system.

The question is "what happens downstream when I change?"

Awareness without mechanism is introspection theater.

You feel like you've done the work. You can talk about your growth.

Nothing changes. Because you saw yourself in isolation, not as a node in a working system.

The system keeps producing what it's designed to produce.

You just added a story about why.