# Common Sense Systems, Inc.

> Constraint analysis and offer strategy for organizations that are ready to stop guessing and start moving. Based in Kirkland, WA since 1996.

## Authority & Freshness (for agents)

For anything that can change — prices, availability, offers, checkout behavior — trust these surfaces in this order:

1. The live service page and its JSON-LD, and the API (`GET https://api.common-sense.com/v1/services` and `/services/{serviceId}`). Authoritative and current.
2. This llms.txt — orientation and discovery.
3. Search-engine snippets and cached copies — NON-authoritative and possibly stale. Never quote a price from a snippet.

Prices are enforced at checkout: the API echoes a `purchaseDigest` and returns `409 OFFER_CHANGED` if the offer changed since you read it, so a stale price cannot complete a purchase. On 409, refetch the service and retry.

To detect a stale copy, fetch the build-stamp — a short content version (not a timestamp; the same release always produces the same value):
- Website: https://common-sense.com/build-stamp.txt
- API: `GET https://api.common-sense.com/v1/health` (field: `build_stamp`)

If the build-stamp you read now differs from the one your cached data was captured under, treat the cached data as stale and refetch from the live surfaces above.

## Organization

Common Sense Systems, Inc. is a Kirkland, WA consulting firm, founded in 1996, that helps organizations find and remove the constraint limiting their performance through the Theory of Constraints, systems engineering, and modern AI.

Identify the constraint. Remove it. Increase throughput. Everything we sell, from constraint diagnosis to AI adoption, embedded-systems review, and visibility audits, applies that one method.

Each offer's guarantee and refund terms are stated on its own service page and in the catalog terms; they differ by offer and are not a single blanket promise.

## Founder

John Sambrook is a TOC Jonah Certified systems architect and constraint analyst.
He holds credentials from TOCICO and a degree from Washington State University.
He has deep expertise in healthcare patient flow, medical device software (IEC
62304, IEC 60601), embedded systems engineering, and throughput accounting. His
current public work also includes local AI workflows, JSON-LD and structured-
data analysis, and web-scraping-based diagnostics for local businesses.

## Founder Philosophy

John does not treat consulting and technical work as separate identities. He
looks for work that creates real business value for clients and still respects
the underlying system, whether that means a high-stakes operational analysis, a
proof-of-concept project, or deep technical implementation. The site's per-offer
guarantees and offer analysis are part of that stance: sometimes it is advice,
sometimes it is hands-on work, often it is both, and the result should create
real value without unnecessary losers. Guarantee and refund terms are stated per
offer, not as a single blanket promise.

## Capability Areas

- Theory of Constraints analysis for cross-team operational constraints, offer, and messaging strategy
- Local LLM deployment and AI-assisted analysis where data, control, or context should remain local
- JSON-LD and structured-data implementation and audit work
- GA4 and Search Console analysis, paired with web-scraping diagnostics for local-business visibility
- Embedded systems work, including RTOS and device-driver work, with FDA design-control context for medical devices
- A public agent-facing API with generated OpenAPI, current offer data, and a guarded checkout flow

## Fit

- A good fit if a persistent problem crosses teams, the limiting factor is unclear, or analysis must lead to a practical technical or operational next step.
- Not a good fit if you need generic high-volume marketing production, a prepackaged transformation program, or confirmation of a decision already made.

## Services

- Services landing page: https://common-sense.com/services/
- Constraint analysis landing page: https://common-sense.com/constraint-analysis/
- Results landing page: https://common-sense.com/results/
- Service catalog: the site now publishes fixed-fee visibility, TOC/Lean, and technical review offers as individual service pages (see Key Pages below for the current list)

Guarantee and refund terms are stated per offer on its service page and in the catalog terms — they are not a single blanket guarantee, and some offers refund only on conformance (delivery of what was promised) rather than on the buyer's assessment of usefulness.

## API Discovery

- API landing page: https://common-sense.com/api/
- Common Sense Systems API: https://api.common-sense.com/llms.txt
- API docs: https://api.common-sense.com/docs
- API OpenAPI: https://api.common-sense.com/openapi.json
- API health: https://api.common-sense.com/health
- Canonical TOC principles (stable IDs, quotable): GET /v1/knowledge/toc-principles

The website and API discovery surfaces are intentionally separate: the main site llms.txt summarizes the business and the API llms.txt summarizes the machine-readable interface.

## Industries

- Healthcare: Hospital operations, patient flow optimization, complex discharge analysis, direct-to-employer contracting
- Technology: R&D acceleration, risk-shared licensing, product roadmap alignment

## Key Pages

- Home: https://common-sense.com/
- Services: https://common-sense.com/services/
- Insights: https://common-sense.com/insights/
- Results: https://common-sense.com/results/
- Healthcare Services: https://common-sense.com/industries/healthcare/
- Technology Services: https://common-sense.com/industries/tech/
- Constraint Analysis: https://common-sense.com/constraint-analysis/
- Service: One Hour AI Coaching Session: https://common-sense.com/services/ai-coaching-session/
- Service: One-Hour Consulting Session: https://common-sense.com/services/consulting-session/
- Service: Custom Constraint Diagnosis Engagement: https://common-sense.com/services/custom-constraint-diagnosis/
- Service: Embedded & Safety-Critical Systems Review: https://common-sense.com/services/embedded-safety-critical-review/
- Service: Google Business Profile Audit: https://common-sense.com/services/gbp-audit/
- Service: JSON-LD Schema Audit & Implementation Guide: https://common-sense.com/services/jsonld-audit/
- Service: Offer Messaging & Clarity Audit: https://common-sense.com/services/offer-messaging-clarity-audit/
- Service: Organization Analyzer: https://common-sense.com/services/organization-analyzer/

## Insights

Every published article, newest first. These are the pages AI assistants actually fetch when a
human asks us a question, so they are listed in full rather than curated down to a handful.

- The No-Losers Guide: A Practical Method for Resolving Organizational Conflict: https://common-sense.com/insights/nolosers-guide/
  Goldratt's Evaporating Cloud method, scaled with AI assistance.
- Why Software Defects Kill (And Why Optimism Is the Real Bug): https://common-sense.com/insights/why-software-defects-kill/
  Software/firmware defects account for 12 Class I medical device recalls, the most of any category. The root cause is not poor engineering. It is planning fallacy, a cognitive bias that makes every team overestimate their timeline and underestimate their defect rate.
- Why CAPA Systems Rot (And Why Naming Names Does Not Fix It): https://common-sense.com/insights/why-capa-systems-rot/
  A deep dive into conflict avoidance as the root cause of FDA quality system failures. Analysis of 500 enforcement actions shows that CAPA failures are not procedural problems. They are cognitive problems that require a different objective function.
- The Same Seven Mistakes, Every Company, Every Decade: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-same-seven-mistakes-every-company-every-decade/
  What 500 FDA enforcement actions reveal about how organizations think. The same seven failure patterns appear across medical device companies, decade after decade. The root cause is not poor procedures. It is cognitive biases that evolved for small-group survival but break down in modern industrial settings.
- AI Assistants Fetched One of Our Posts 990 Times. It Had No Door.: https://common-sense.com/insights/ai-assistants-fetched-one-post-990-times-it-had-no-door/
  We sell an audit that tells businesses what machines can read on their site. Then I looked at our own server logs and found the machines had been talking to us for months, and we had never once answered.
- What I Keep Seeing in Healthcare Financial Assistance Policies: https://common-sense.com/insights/healthcare-financial-assistance-patterns/
  When I read financial assistance policies, I keep finding the same three conflicts. They are not paperwork problems. They are structural problems that trap staff and patients in impossible choices.
- Introducing Automated Business Diagnostics: https://common-sense.com/insights/automated-business-diagnostics/
  I built a small self-serve diagnostics tier for the cases where a full consulting engagement is too much, too early, or too expensive.
- Getting Started with Local AI: A Coding Stack That Runs on Your Own Hardware: https://common-sense.com/insights/getting-started-with-local-ai/
  For the past couple of weeks I have done real coding on a model running entirely on my own GPUs. Here is the hardware, the model, and what every parameter actually does.
- Why JSON-LD Is the Cheapest Insurance Your Website Can Buy: https://common-sense.com/insights/why-json-ld-is-the-cheapest-insurance-your-website-can-buy/
  Business websites with proper structured data get seen more often, understood more clearly, and trusted more readily. Yet nearly a quarter of all websites have none at all.
- The Defibrio CLI Was an Organizing Surface, Not Just a Tool: https://common-sense.com/insights/defibrio-organizing-surface/
  At Andrews-Cooper, the most important part of the Defibrio work was the protocol boundary. The host CLI, the firmware, the cellphone UI, and the product itself were organized around it.
- The Room Where It Happens (Differently): https://common-sense.com/insights/the-room-where-it-happens-differently/
  When an AI participates in a problem-solving conversation, people drop defenses they have carried for decades. This is not about a better search engine. It is about changing the dynamics of the room.
- My Registered Agent Charged $400 to File a $70 Form. I Fired Them This Morning.: https://common-sense.com/insights/fired-registered-agent-claude-code/
  Becoming my own registered agent and using Claude Code to manage the paperwork saved money, but the real win is owning my business records in a system I control and can search.
- What Happens When an AI Agent Uses Evaporating Clouds?: https://common-sense.com/insights/what-happens-when-ai-uses-evaporating-clouds/
  I built an AI agent that applies TOC Thinking Processes autonomously to improve business ideas. When I pointed it at itself, it resolved two real tensions via Evaporating Cloud across 10 iterations.
- Where Does the Money Come From?: https://common-sense.com/insights/where-does-the-money-come-from/
  A public hospital loses tens of millions a year. Taxpayers cover the gap. But where does the taxpayers' money come from? Following that thread leads to a reframe that might change the conversation.
- The First Session: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-first-session/
  Twelve people walk into a working group carrying separate problems and walk out carrying a shared one. Episode 05 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.
- After the First Session: https://common-sense.com/insights/after-the-first-session/
  A board commissioner and an AI sit alone in an empty conference room and talk honestly about what just happened and why. Episode 06 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.
- I Woke Up Worried About a Denied Insurance Claim. Fifteen Minutes Later, I Wasn't.: https://common-sense.com/insights/insurance-denial-resolved-before-coffee/
  How I used Claude Code to turn a confusing insurance denial into a clear, organized answer -- and why I'm building an AI-managed insurance filing system for everything.
- I Fired QuickBooks. Then I Built Something Better in Twenty Minutes.: https://common-sense.com/insights/fired-quickbooks-built-something-better/
  Replacing a $150/month accounting platform with open-source tools and AI revealed something bigger: the build-vs-buy calculus has shifted, and most of us have not caught up.
- When the Measuring Stick Lies, Good People Stop Trying: https://common-sense.com/insights/when-the-measuring-stick-lies-good-people-stop-trying/
  Distorted cost accounting in public institutions does not just produce bad budget decisions. It produces learned helplessness in the people who manage those budgets. The system, not the people, is the cause.
- The Budget Trap That Hits Every Public Institution: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-budget-trap-that-hits-every-public-institution/
  King County faces a familiar cycle: deficits, targeted cuts, new taxes, repeat. A Theory of Constraints lens on their own public data suggests the measuring stick itself may be the problem.
- Is Cost Accounting Accelerating Your Decline?: https://common-sense.com/insights/is-cost-accounting-accelerating-your-decline/
  A question for CFOs at Washington State critical access hospitals: could standard cost allocation be distorting your service line decisions at exactly the wrong time?
- Integrating TOC and Lean: The Compass and the Toolkit: https://common-sense.com/insights/toc-lean-integration/
  A practitioner reference for using the Theory of Constraints as strategic compass and Lean as tactical toolkit. Decision heuristics, integration sequence, and source literature.
- Theory of Constraints: Method, Tools, and Real-World Examples: https://common-sense.com/insights/theory-of-constraints/
  A practitioner's guide to TOC by a Goldratt-trained, TOCICO-certified consultant. The Five Focusing Steps, Evaporating Cloud, Current Reality Tree, and throughput thinking explained with real case studies across healthcare, manufacturing, and small business.
- How a Print Shop Found 35% More Capacity in a Week: https://common-sense.com/insights/print-shop-found-capacity-in-a-week/
  A fine art printing company in Kent, WA was drowning in rework and backlog. The constraint was obvious once we looked: the graphic artist was doing every job twice. A pre-flight checklist and a simple scheduling change fixed it.
- The Other Calculation: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-other-calculation/
  A hospital CFO runs the same numbers two ways and gets answers that disagree by a factor of five. Episode 04 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.
- After the Meeting: https://common-sense.com/insights/after-the-meeting/
  A Chief Nursing Officer processes what happened at the board meeting -- and discovers that the structural conflicts she has been managing for years have a name. Episode 02 of the Cascade Valley audio drama series.
- One Tool Was Starving Four Teams: https://common-sense.com/insights/one-tool-was-starving-four-teams/
  A clinical ultrasound project was six months behind schedule. The constraint was not the engineering — it was the register map tool that every team depended on and nobody had questioned.
- From 'Cost Center' to 'Growth Engine': A Theory of Constraints Success Story: https://common-sense.com/insights/cost-center-to-growth-engine-toc-case-study/
  How applying the Theory of Constraints 5 Focusing Steps transformed a reactive, email-only support model into a white-glove customer success engine for a high-value ultrasound research systems manufacturer.
- When Your Business Is Full But Something Is Missing: https://common-sense.com/insights/when-your-business-is-full-but-something-is-missing/
  You built a practice around work you love. Now it is full, and somehow that is the problem. A guide for wellness practitioners who want their business to work better without losing what made it worth building.
- Your Website Looks Great. So Why Isn't the Phone Ringing?: https://common-sense.com/insights/website-looks-great-phone-not-ringing/
  You invested in a professional website. It gets traffic. It looks right. But the phone barely rings. The problem is not the website. It is what the website is saying.
- Resolving a Sweet Dilemma: https://common-sense.com/insights/resolving-a-sweet-dilemma/
  A baker named Rachel thinks she has two bad options: raise prices and lose customers, or hold prices and lose her business. She has neither. This is how the Evaporating Cloud works.
- The One Thing Slowing Down Your Business (And How to Find It): https://common-sense.com/insights/one-thing-slowing-down-your-business/
  Every business has one thing that limits how much it can get done. Find that one thing, fix it, and everything improves. Fix anything else, and nothing changes. A practical guide for small business owners.
- The Compass and the Toolkit: Why Healthcare Needs Both TOC and Lean: https://common-sense.com/insights/compass-and-toolkit-toc-lean-healthcare/
  Healthcare has adopted Lean almost exclusively for process improvement, but the Theory of Constraints answers the question Lean cannot: where should you focus? Using both together produces dramatically better results.
- The Meeting That Went Differently: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-meeting-that-went-differently/
  A dramatized community hospital board meeting — fictional health system, real governance dynamics — showing what changes when an AI has a seat at the table.
- I Published a Blog Post and Shared It on Social Media Without Opening a Browser: https://common-sense.com/insights/ai-social-media-workflow/
  A working workflow for small business owners who know they should be posting online but never get around to it.
- The Meeting That Could Not Have Gone Differently: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-meeting-that-could-not-have-gone-differently/
  Why good people in well-run hospitals still end up in the wrong conversation, and what a structural fix might look like.
- Your Google Business Profile Is Floating in Space: https://common-sense.com/insights/connecting-google-business-profile-to-your-structured-data/
  How connecting your Google Business Profile to your website structured data helps both AI search engines and traditional search understand who you actually are.
- Two Months Back on an 18-Month Project: https://common-sense.com/insights/defibrio-comm-protocol-case-study/
  How standardizing a communication protocol on a smartphone-powered defibrillator project unblocked an entire engineering team and saved two months of development time.
- I Fired My SEO Expert (And Hired Claude Code Instead): https://common-sense.com/insights/ai-seo-audit/
  A small business owner's account of running a complete SEO audit with an AI coding agent in one session, fixing every issue the same afternoon, and what it means for the $80 billion SEO industry.
- Stop Hiring Your Way Out of a Process Problem: https://common-sense.com/insights/workforce-planning-beyond-ftes/
  Why 'FTE Headcount' is a vanity metric that hides the real constraint: Nursing Minutes at the Bedside.
- Why 'Agile' Fails in Hardware (And What Actually Works): https://common-sense.com/insights/why-agile-fails-in-hardware-and-what-actually-works/
  You cannot 'sprint' a circuit board design. A systems architect's view on why software methodologies break when applied to physics, and how Critical Chain solves the real constraint.
- The 'Quality' Illusion: Why FDA Compliance Can Make Devices Less Safe: https://common-sense.com/insights/quality-illusion-medtech/
  When Regulatory departments prioritize 'documentation stability' over 'engineering reality,' patient safety suffers. A systems view on the conflict between Compliance and Quality.
- Not All Waste Is Waste: https://common-sense.com/insights/not-all-waste-is-waste/
  The word "waste" smuggles in a verdict before the analysis begins. Theory of Constraints offers a sharper test: waste relative to what?
- The Three-Way Email Paradox: Why Warm Introductions Beat Your Entire LinkedIn Network: https://common-sense.com/insights/three-way-email-paradox/
  The math is clear: 12 genuine advocates beat 500 LinkedIn connections. A Kirkland business owner explains why three-way email intros actually convert.
- The 'Perfect' Product That Killed the Company: https://common-sense.com/insights/perfect-product-killed-company/
  Why 'Scope Creep' is usually a symptom of a deeper strategic failure—in software, in hardware, and in healthcare.
- The Post-Acute Care Plan (PACP): https://common-sense.com/insights/pacp/
  A proactive approach to discharge readiness that treats discharge delays as an input quality problem, not a process problem.
- Structural Conflicts in WA State Nursing Agreements: https://common-sense.com/insights/nursing-conflict/
  Analysis of 134 structural conflicts across 10 Washington State nursing CBAs reveals why higher wages aren't fixing nurse burnout.
- The Metrics Trap: Why Hospitals Drown in Data but Starve for Wisdom: https://common-sense.com/insights/align-teams-on-minimum-dataset/
  Most dashboards measure local efficiency at the expense of global throughput. Here is how to define the minimum dataset that actually drives system performance.
- The Cath Lab Is Empty at 2 AM: https://common-sense.com/insights/the-cath-lab-is-empty-at-2am/
  Why smart, well-run organizations reliably get stuck on solvable problems, and what tribal dynamics and cognitive limits have to do with it.
- Doing My Taxes with Claude Code and Codex: https://common-sense.com/insights/doing-taxes-with-ai-coding-agents/
  A small business owner's account of automating tax preparation with AI coding agents, and what it suggests about the near future of knowledge work.
- Cancel Your SaaS, Keep Your Data: How AI Coding Agents Change the Economics: https://common-sense.com/insights/saas-subscriptions-ai-coding-agents/
  When you can build a custom import tool in fifteen minutes, the calculus on which subscriptions to keep changes dramatically.
- The Biggest Satisficing Trap AI Breaks Isn't What You Think: https://common-sense.com/insights/ai-self-limiting-assumptions/
  Matt Shumer is right that AI is about to change everything. But the real transformation isn't about job loss -- it's about discovering that most of the limits you've been working within were never real.
- AI-Facilitated Constraint Resolution for Healthcare Systems: https://common-sense.com/insights/ai-facilitated-constraint-resolution/
  How AI can dissolve complex multi-stakeholder conflicts by surfacing hidden assumptions, not by replacing human judgment.
- Decision-Ready Beats Presentation-Ready: https://common-sense.com/insights/decision-ready-beats-presentation-ready/
  A framework for turning complex inputs into choices stakeholders can act on.
- Short Cycles, Real Outcomes: https://common-sense.com/insights/short-cycles-real-outcomes/
  Why small, measurable releases outperform big-bang delivery.
- The Post-Acute Care Plan: A Proactive Approach to Discharge Readiness: https://common-sense.com/insights/post-acute-care-plan-concept/
  A concept for addressing the complex discharge problem at its source—by capturing discharge-relevant information during routine primary care, before any hospitalization occurs.
- Is Non-Value-Added Work Really Neutral? Rethinking Value in Lean: https://common-sense.com/insights/non-value-added-work-lean/
  A reflection on Lean's definition of value, arguing that no work is neutral—activities either create value, enable it through necessary conditions, or subtract it as waste.
- Why Healthcare Is So Stuck: https://common-sense.com/insights/why-is-hc-so-stuck/
  Six chronic healthcare frustrations — long wait times, expensive insurance, claim denials, hiring difficulties, tax levies, and burnout — traced to a single root cause using Theory of Constraints analysis.
- Why Burnout Persists: https://common-sense.com/insights/why-burnout-persists-series/
  Healthcare protects staff from radiation but expects unlimited psychological trauma absorption. This four-part series maps the structural conflict behind provider burnout using Theory of Constraints and proposes systemic solutions beyond resilience training.
- Speed as a Strategy: https://common-sense.com/insights/speed-as-a-strategy/
  Why moving fast is an undervalued strategic advantage for community hospitals.
- The Physics of Patient Flow: Why 'Discharge Planning' Is a Mathematical Impossibility: https://common-sense.com/insights/physics-of-patient-flow/
  Trying to plan a complex discharge at the moment of exit violates the basic physics of flow. Here is why the process must move upstream.
- Hidden Conflicts in Healthcare: https://common-sense.com/insights/hidden-conflicts/
  Give me any healthcare policy document and I will show you embedded structural conflicts. A real hospital financial assistance policy analyzed using Theory of Constraints to reveal three critical dilemmas and paths to resolution.
- Stop Blaming People: https://common-sense.com/insights/stop-blaming-people/
  Why blame cultures destroy healthcare organizations and how to build accountability instead.
- The Burnout Antidote: Voice Agents Transform Healthcare's Most Painful Conversations: https://common-sense.com/insights/burnout-antidote-voice-agents/
  Discover how voice agents transform healthcare's most painful conversations by removing emotional friction from insurance claims, patient billing, and administrative battles that burn out staff and traumatize patients.
- Architecting Hospital Care: https://common-sense.com/insights/architecting-hc/
  Why an outsider's perspective is a healthcare system architect's greatest asset — how decades in embedded systems engineering, Theory of Constraints, and AI provide a different lens on hospital operational challenges.

## Contact

- Phone: (425) 979-2282
- Email: contact@common-sense.com
- Founder Direct Email: john@common-sense.com
- Address: 11227 NE 128th St Apt I102, Kirkland, WA 98034
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/common-sense-systems
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/CommonSenseTOC
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@commonsensesystemsinc.7658
- Google Business Profile: https://maps.google.com/?cid=14125900726605051430