When We Understand This Slide

In the summer of 2009, in a briefing room in Kabul, the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was shown a single PowerPoint slide. It had been built by PA Consulting with military planners — a system dynamics model: every major force in the war, and every causal arrow between them. Popular support. Insurgent recruiting. Government capacity. The narcotics economy. Coalition priorities. All of it, on one page.

The room erupted in laughter. A year later the New York Times put the slide on its front page as a symbol of everything wrong with the war effort — and with PowerPoint, and possibly with civilization. It has been an icon of institutional chaos ever since.

Afghanistan Stability / COIN Dynamics

= Significant Delay

Fig. 1 — The slide. Look at it the way the room in Kabul did: all at once. Do not try to read it yet.

Here is what the laughter missed, and what the people who built the slide kept trying to explain: the diagram was accurate. It had been developed over an hour-long working session, subsystem by subsystem, with people who understood the ground truth. Every arrow earned its place. The slide didn’t fail to describe the war. It succeeded — and the description was unbearable.

The problem was never the slide.
The problem was that the slide was true.

Now scroll back up for a moment — or don’t, we’ll wait — and read the labels on Figure 1.

“Shadow AI.” “Tool Vetting Throughput.” “Faculty Workload.” “Vendor Gold Rush.”

That was never the Afghanistan slide. It is a working model of AI on a university campus, drawn with the original’s own grammar: the same eight kinds of actors, the same causal arrows, the same “significant delay” hash marks. We just changed the nouns — and almost nothing else needed changing.

If you work in higher education IT, you already knew this diagram before you saw it. You live on it. You are a node on it — possibly several.

What follows is the hour-long build the original deserved: the system, one subsystem at a time.

THE FULL MAP · INTERACTIVE

Explore the system

Every node is clickable and carries its counterpart from the 2009 original. Hover to trace influence. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. Or take a guided tour of the feedback loops that actually run this place.

GUIDED TOURS — THE LOOPS THAT RUN THE PLACE:

PHASE TWO — IN DEVELOPMENT

When we understand this slide…

McChrystal’s line was a joke, but it was also a hypothesis: that understanding the system is the precondition for changing it. The joke aged badly in Afghanistan because understanding never arrived. It doesn’t have to go that way here.

Look back at the map. Almost every loop on it is a reinforcing loop running against the institution — the Shadow Spiral, the Policy Lag, the Talent Drain, the Vendor Squeeze. But there is one loop drawn in the institution’s favor: . Visible wins → trust → disclosure → visibility → better tools → more wins. Every serious path forward is a strategy for starting that wheel and starving the others.

That’s Phase Two: not another diagram of the problem, but an honest sequence of moves — what to build, what to stop blocking, what to fund, what to say out loud. It is being drafted now, with people who live on this map.

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT UNFINISHED.

FOLLOW THE DRAFT

Be there when V4 ships.

The lightest possible ask: leave an email, pick your dose — just notify me, or count me in as part of the solution. No newsletter cadence, no committee, nothing to attend. You’ll hear from this project when there is something worth hearing.

→ GET V4 & PHASE TWO

MARK IT UP

Or better: redline it.

The general’s joke was that nobody could understand the slide. Prove him wrong. Which node is missing? Which arrow points the wrong way? Which loop do you live in that we haven’t named? The best redlines end up in V4 — no reply expected, no obligation created.

✎ REDLINE THE MAP OR OPEN A GITHUB ISSUE →