The JERK Report is a free weekly email that reads one business signal through four layers of change: position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk.
Most people track where things are. Almost nobody tracks how the change itself is changing. That’s the difference between reacting late and navigating early.
Each Monday, I take one real signal — hiring, pricing, AI adoption, customer demand — and read it through all four layers. Then I give you a five-minute practice to apply the same framework to your own business.
3 minutes to read. 5 minutes to use. A calmer way to see what’s coming.
(As shown above: Position, Velocity, Acceleration, Jerk)
Inspired by Wikimedia Commons — “Chronogrammes loi sinusoidale par partie en vitesse” by Cdang, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chronogrammes_loi_sinusoidale_par_partie_en_vitesse.svg 16 Feb 2026
Position — your car is stopped. You know where you are.
Velocity — you’re moving. You know how fast things are changing.
Acceleration — you’re merging onto the highway. The change itself is increasing.
Jerk — an 18-wheeler drifts into your lane. You have to change how fast you’re accelerating to get out of the way in time.
This isn’t just a metaphor. Your body reads jerk literally — when forces change too quickly, your muscles can’t adjust fast enough. That’s whiplash. Engineers design highway curves, elevator rides, and roller coaster loops with managed jerk limits so your body can keep up. NASA set jerk limits for the Hubble Space Telescope for the same reason.
Business works the same way. When your market shifts faster than your team, your cash flow, or your decision-making can adapt, you get whiplash. This report helps you sense the shift earlier.
Free. Weekly. Unsubscribe anytime. From Rose Thun at Design Rosetta.
Small business owners, consultants, and operators with 10 to 200 employees who are making decisions about hiring, pricing, AI-driven change, demand signals, or trying to tell the difference between noise and trend.
Each Monday you get: one signal worth watching, the four-layer read in plain language, what it means for your business, and a five-minute practice you can apply that week.
I’m Rose Thun, founder of Design Rosetta. During the dot-com era at Network Solutions (1999–2002), my colleagues and I tracked domain registration patterns through three derivatives of change: position, velocity, and acceleration. It worked — the acceleration signal flagged the shift before most people saw it coming.
This year I added the fourth derivative — jerk — and it’s become the one that matters most. It’s the earliest signal in the chain: the moment something starts shifting underneath the surface, before the other numbers catch up.
The metaphor comes from Pacific Islander wayfinders, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean by reading layers of signals — stars, birds, surface swells, deep currents you could only feel with eyes closed. Each layer saw further ahead. Each required a different kind of attention.
I’m writing a book about it. The JERK Report is the practice in public.
Jerk Report #1 — The jobs numbers everyone celebrated are hiding something
130,000 jobs added in January. But 70% of 2025’s reported growth just disappeared. The derivatives tell a different story.
Jerk Report #2 -When the rules change overnight The Supreme Court ruled IEEPA tariffs illegal on Thursday. A replacement 10% global tariff landed Friday. In 48 hours. That's not acceleration. It's jerk.
The JERK framework applies the four derivatives of motion from physics — position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk — to business signals. Position shows where things are. Velocity shows how fast they’re changing. Acceleration shows whether the change is speeding up or slowing down. Jerk reveals the earliest warning that an inflection point is approaching.
Jerk is the rate of change of acceleration — the third derivative of motion. In physics, it’s the force that causes whiplash: conditions changing faster than your body can adapt. In business, when jerk turns negative while other metrics still look healthy, it often signals an approaching inflection point.
Acceleration tells you change is speeding up. Jerk tells you the rate of acceleration itself is shifting — it’s the earliest signal in the chain. Engineers design highway curves, elevators, and the Hubble Space Telescope with jerk limits because systems need time to adapt. Sensing jerk early in your business gives you that time.
Rose Thun, founder of Design Rosetta. Rose tracked domain registration patterns through three derivatives at Network Solutions during the dot-com era and added the fourth — jerk — in 2026. She runs workshops for small business owners on AI fluency, strategy, signal-reading and AEO monitoring.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) monitoring is one application of the JERK framework. By tracking how AI engines surface your business over time and measuring the derivatives of that visibility, you can detect shifts before they become obvious.
Free. Weekly. Unsubscribe anytime. From Rose Thun at Design Rosetta.
