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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth.

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

Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems — poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment — are related and how they might be solved, Forrester made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point1: Growth.