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

The pioneer of systems thinking, Donella Meadows, offers this definition of the work in her essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System: So how do you change paradigms? In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, loudly and with assurance from the new one, and you insert p

Numbers, the sizes of flows, are dead last on my list of powerful interventions. Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably 90—no 95, no 99 percent—of our attention goes to parameters, but there’s not a lot of leverage in them. It’s not that parameters aren’t important—they can be, especially in the short term and

MIT’s Jay Forrester likes to say that the average manager can define the current problem very cogently, identify the system structure that leads to the problem, and guess with great accuracy where to look for leverage points—places in the system where a small change could lead to a large shift in behavior. This idea of leverage points is not unique

Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which the faucets turn, but if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information and goals and rules, the system behavior isn’t going to change much.