STfA
Symptom-to-path

Runaway Tech Debt

Technical debt grows faster than the organization's ability to make it visible, prioritize it, and reduce it systematically.

archetypes

Growth and Underinvestment

A growing environment withers because investment in core capacity is delayed until it is too late.

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Why this step:Makes the underlying pattern visible that keeps producing Runaway Tech Debt in everyday work.
diagnostics

Stock and Flow Mapping

The precise quantitative map of systems thinking. It visualizes architecture as a network of stocks that fill and drain through rates.

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Why this step:Helps explain Runaway Tech Debt not just descriptively, but in a structurally understandable way.
diagnostics

Behaviour over Time Charts

A visualization tool that reveals how system variables such as metrics, debt, or productivity change over time.

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Why this step:Adds a second perspective to the diagnosis so that side effects and limits become visible.
interventions

Explicit Tradeoff Policies

The end of the architectural lie that you can have everything at once, forcing teams to declare what they are sacrificing in every system design.

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Why this step:Derives an initial intervention from the diagnosis that targets structure rather than only the symptom.
tooling

Architecture Observability Tooling

The X-ray machine of systems theory. Tools built on traces, metrics, and logs that drag invisible architectural decay into the light in real time.

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Why this step:Supports the practical implementation and documentation of the path from Runaway Tech Debt to change.

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