[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # From Cave Walls to Obeya Rooms: Why we Think Through Visual Systems ## Details **Authors** Berg Wig, Bjarne **Year** 2026 **Publisher** Bjarne Bergs Substack **Kind of work** article **Discipline** Business & Management **Secondary disciplines** Systems Science **Kind of engagement** public **Applied** false [Read it](https://bjarnebergwig.substack.com/p/from-cave-walls-to-obeya-rooms-why) ## In authors' words ### What they set out to do (purpose) To argue that making a system visible is how a group arrives at a shared mental model, and to set out a visual mapping practice for doing that in an Obeya. ### How they did it (methods) An argumentative essay for Lean and learning-organization practitioners. It opens on children learning by trying, observing and adjusting, and on cave art as early evidence that people have always made ideas visible. It states a formula, I x O = K, in which information multiplied by its organization yields knowledge, and argues from it that schooling should teach organizing rather than memorizing. It then turns to W. Edwards Deming's system diagram and his photograph of the London Symphony Orchestra as images that gave Japanese engineers a shared model, which Berg Wig calls the beginning of Lean. DSRP enters as the vocabulary for doing the same work deliberately, and is applied to a restaurant, Symra, that is first mapped as an order-to-delivery process and then examined from the guest's, the chef's and the waiters' viewpoints. The essay closes on a see-think-try-learn cycle of small experiments. ### What they found (results) Berg Wig concludes that visualization is not a presentation technique but the means of building collective understanding, and that collective understanding is the foundation of an adaptive learning organization. He claims visual mapping produces shared understanding, clearer communication, a test of whether people actually hold the same mental model, surfaced differences in viewpoint, and less siloed work, and that improvement becomes collective rather than individual once a group can see the same system together. He argues that preparing people for a fast-changing future calls for skills in organizing information rather than more information. ## Commentary ### In short A Lean and learning-organization essay that uses DSRP as the working vocabulary of an Obeya, applying the four patterns and two of the Cabreras' mapping moves to a restaurant's order-to-delivery process. ### In more detail Berg Wig's subject is visual management, and DSRP arrives in the essay as the part that was missing from it. He credits Derek Cabrera's account of how the brain organizes information with supplying a clearer language for visualization, then states the four patterns compactly: distinctions as what a thing is and what makes it different, systems as what it is made of and what it is part of, relationships as the interactions that can be observed, and perspectives as how the thing looks from different viewpoints. The restatement is brief but not garbled, and it keeps each pattern's two elements rather than reducing the set to four topics. The application is where the essay does most of its work. Berg Wig maps the Symra restaurant as a process in which a guest reads the menu, speaks with a waiter and orders, the waiter carries the order to the kitchen, and food and drink come back out. He then names two moves for going further. The first he writes as RDS: describe a relationship, make a distinction of it, and open that distinction as a system of parts. The second is the P-circle, in which the same order-to-delivery process is examined from the guest's, the chef's and the waiters' positions, with the question of how each would understand and improve it. Both are the Cabreras' own moves, carried over under their own names, and the restaurant example shows a reader what each one produces rather than only asserting that it works. The essay's wider argument is historical and pedagogical rather than theoretical. Deming's diagram and orchestra photograph stand as evidence that a shared picture can reorganize an industry, and the formula I x O = K carries the claim that knowledge is information plus its organization, which is what makes an organizing vocabulary worth teaching. DSRP is positioned as the vocabulary for the see-think-try-learn cycle Berg Wig recommends: a group maps what it can see, examines the map through distinctions, parts, relationships and perspectives, runs a small experiment, and maps again. ### Response The essay's rendering of the four patterns is accurate, and it carries over two of the Cabreras' moves, the RDS barbell and P-circles, under their own names and to their own purpose, which is rarer in practitioner writing than restating the acronym. The Symra example is the useful part: a reader sees what shifting from a process map to a P-circle actually yields, and the three viewpoints are treated as positions that see different systems rather than as opinions about one system. One attribution is missing. I x O = K is the Cabreras' formula, information organized yields knowledge, and the essay presents it unsourced while crediting Cabrera a few paragraphs later for the four patterns; a reader is left unable to tell that the formula and the patterns come from the same body of work, which matters because the formula is what makes DSRP a claim about knowledge rather than a diagramming aid. The claim that more nerve cells connect to the eyes and hands than to other parts of the body is offered without a source and does not need to carry the argument, which stands on the restaurant example without it. The essay also uses DSRP as a mapping vocabulary rather than as a structural theory, so the universality claim and the evidence behind it go unmentioned; that is a choice of scope appropriate to the audience, not an error. **Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P **Added** 2026-10-21 **How to cite this** Berg Wig, Bjarne (2026). From Cave Walls to Obeya Rooms: Why we Think Through Visual Systems. Bjarne Bergs Substack.