I don’t think your thinking about ordering is correct, in fact I remember reading a blog post somewhere (can’t seem to find it now) that made these same claims and was really confusing/poorly written, I’m wondering if you also read it. Anyway, monads can be about ordering but aren’t necessarily always used for this purpose, an example of a monad that doesn’t order operations is the Reader monad. I generally think about monads as generalizing composition, and not necessarily “transitions” because there are some contexts (ie Reader) where “transition” doesn’t really fit what’s happening in the computation.