The Siphon System
Where it drains.
The Bloom System is what you build.The Siphon System is its shadow: where what your people bring is drained before it reaches your margin.
Read it from the bottom. Labor brings four things to work: judgment, knowledge, time and ideas. Capital brings one. At the top the count reverses. The pale band is what people bring that goes unused. On this site we call it the vault.
The Map · Five levels
The five levels, defined.
X1Card · SuppressionThe work is written above and handed down. The people who do it are not asked how.
X2Dashboard · TransmissionCarries the pressure from above to the floor: output, cost and headcount, and nothing about capability.
X3Pay Stub · ExtractionWhere the value changes hands, and where every worker can see it.
X4Package · PermissionRewards holding the pay stub down, and decides whether the floor is paid enough to stay.
X5Ticker · PressureThe share price, which every level beneath it ultimately serves.
MEASURE
The Siphon Diagnostic
Reads where a company sits among four positions: built to last, drifting, extracting, built to extract. A first version, not yet tested at scale. In full at the back of Built to Extract.The fix · The Bloom System
What to build.
The Siphon System shows where it drains. The Bloom System is the other reading: six elements, in order, so capital and labor rise together.
Your turn
See it on your own numbers.
The model is the argument. A session is where you score your own business against it and leave with one move.