Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project

You can often stabilize a system by increasing the capacity of a buffer.4 But if a buffer is too big, the system gets inflexible.

You hear about catastrophic river floods much more often than catastrophic lake floods, because stocks that are big, relative to their flows, are more stable than small ones.

Consider a huge bathtub with slow in and outflows. Now think about a small one with very fast flows. That’s the difference between a lake and a river.

Parameters become leverage points when they go into ranges that kick off one of the items higher on this list

People care deeply about parameters and fight fierce battles over them. But they RARELY CHANGE BEHAVIOR. If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it. If it’s wildly variable, they don’t usually stabilize it. If it’s growing out of control, they don’t brake it.

The amount of land we set aside for conservation. The minimum wage. How much we spend on AIDS research or Stealth bombers. The service charge the bank extracts from your account. All these are parameters, adjustments to faucets. So, by the way, is firing people and getting new ones, including politicians. Putting different hands on the faucets may ... See more

And we know from bitter experience that, because of counterintuitiveness, when we do discover the system’s leverage points, hardly anybody will believe us.

Counterintuitive. That’s Forrester’s word to describe complex systems. Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.

The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.