Part of Explaining the power of systems thinking practices using reference frames.
Levenchuk stresses in the book that system breakdowns should be shared/agreed upon/collaboratively created by all people who work on the system. And while it's a truism that alignment reduces the need for micro-coordination in projects, the additional benefit of aligning on system breakdowns is that if team members and stakeholders all internalise them as singular Reference frames in their minds, communication becomes even more efficient and losses decrease. Communication without alignment on system breakdowns looks like this:
Vague/fuzzy/idiosyncratic topology of reference frames in the mind of person A → Language (as produced by person A: phrases, speech, text) → (losses in speaking/writing/reading/hearing) → Language (as perceived by person B) → Vague/fuzzy/idiosyncratic topology of reference frames in the mind of person B.
The problem here is that since the topology (and the set) of reference frames in the mind of person B is different from those in the mind of person A, any losses and mistakes are exacerbated. Also, in long chains of communication, person A → person B → person C, the message gets transformed because there is no shared internal "base" in the minds of these people. This is the Chinese whispers effect.
When, on the contrary, people have similar reference frames of system breakdowns in their minds, mistakes during communication are likely contained much better: the receiver needs to "pigeonhole" the message into the same topology of reference frames as from which it originated. Mistakes in the message (remember: a message is a pathway in or across the reference frames) should often be effectively "error-corrected" to the original message. Also, multi-stage communication when all people in the chain share a map of reference frames (system breakdowns) should be much more reliable: errors should not amplify as quickly as in the case when these people don't share reference frames.
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