Hi, I’m Rodrigo Calderón.

01 / 08

It started in medical school

In medical school I had a problem my classmates found strange: I liked every specialty. Cardiology, nephrology, endocrinology, infectious diseases. Every rotation convinced me it was the one, until the next one started.

It took me years to see why. Each specialty studies one system with its own rules, and the human body is all of those systems running at once.

02 / 08

One body, many systems

Take the body apart and its systems appear: the heart and vessels, the lungs, the kidneys, the hormones, the immune defences, the nerves, digestion. Each specialty takes one and learns it in depth.

The figure does the same thing: every point in the body moves to the column of the system it belongs to.

03 / 08

Every system has its variables

Inside each system there are things you can measure: blood pressure, sodium, glucose, white cells. Those are its variables.

They don’t all live at the same level. Some are molecules, some are cells, some are a whole organ, and some only make sense when you look at the whole person. That is why each variable in the figure sits at a different height.

04 / 08

The interesting part happens between systems

When blood pressure drops, the kidney notices and releases renin, a hormone that pushes it back up. A fever speeds up the heart. Stress raises cortisol, and cortisol raises glucose and holds back part of the immune response.

These relationships don’t all behave the same way. Some are proportional: more salt, more pressure. Some do almost nothing until they cross a threshold, and then they take off: oxygen can drop a little without consequence, but below a certain point the heart races. And some correct themselves, like glucose and insulin.

Medicine has a name for the balance that holds while everything around it changes: homeostasis. It was what fascinated me most.

Hover over a variable to see what it connects to.

05 / 08

That’s when I understood what I liked

It wasn’t a specialty. It was understanding a whole system: which variables make it up, how they affect each other, and what keeps it stable.

So after medical school I did a master’s in research and biostatistics. Medicine had given me the map. Statistics gave me a way to measure it: how much each variable weighs, which one moves first, and which relationship is real and which is coincidence.

06 / 08

But the body isn’t the only system like this

A large company also comes apart into pieces: sales, production, maintenance, warehouse, logistics, finance, people. Each department has its own variables, and they also live at different levels, from a single order to the margin of the whole company.

07 / 08

And problems live between departments too

If sales promises a date production can’t meet, production runs overtime, logistics pays for rush freight, and finance watches the margin drop at the end of the quarter. Nobody did anything wrong. The problem is in how the departments connect, just like in the body.

And just like in the body, some loops feed themselves: more overtime, more people quit; more people quit, more overtime.

08 / 08

That’s what I do

I love understanding complex systems. Building the complete map, finding where time, money or information leaks out, fixing it, and leaving it stable so it keeps working over time.

Today I do it in companies, and the way I work looks a lot like a doctor’s.