A Short Book About Tea is not really about tea.
It's about complexity - the kind we live with every day - and how small, ordinary actions sit inside layered systems we rarely stop to notice.
Written for designers, developers, product managers, and anyone involved in making and maintaining digital systems, the book looks at complexity not as a technical problem to solve, but as a lived condition to work with. Through short chapters, gentle metaphors, and practical observations, it explores how loops, feedback, and accumulated decisions shape both our tools and our working lives.
The metaphor
The "tea" is a way in. Making tea is simple, familiar, and repeatable - yet it depends on supply chains, habits, social rituals, technologies, and expectations built up over time. A kettle. A cup. A preference. A pause. Each one seems trivial on its own, but together they form a system that mostly works because we don't think about it too hard.
The approach
Rather than presenting complexity as something abstract or intimidating, the book brings it back to everyday experience. It asks small questions:
- Why do some systems feel calm while others feel brittle?
- What happens when we optimise one part and ignore the rest?
- How do well-intended changes quietly create new problems elsewhere?
The book avoids grand theories, dense diagrams, and universal answers. Instead, it offers moments of recognition - places where readers may see their own work reflected in familiar patterns: feedback loops that never quite close, fixes that create more work, and simplicity that only exists because complexity is being held somewhere else.
Intentionally concise and approachable, each chapter is designed to be read in a single sitting. It's a book for slow reading, repeat visits, and quiet thinking - equally suited to an afternoon break or the space between meetings.
At its heart
A Short Book About Tea is about learning to notice the systems we are already part of. Not to control them, simplify them away, or pretend they aren't there - but to work within them with a little more patience, curiosity, and care.
Availability
A Short Book About Tea is currently in development. Updates will be shared as they become available.
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