System Change

It’s also something that I encourage people to investigate with their own practices. There’s so much that you can do beyond just making your thing. You can also work on the whole system of getting that thing and others like it out into the world. There’s a lot of room for expansion and creativity there. I think the coolest projects look at the

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).


13. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.


14. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).


15. The lengths of delays, relative to the

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

From mythmaking to legal treaties to weaving to movement building, what knits these various examples together is their avoidance of single solutions to complex problems, instead enabling a pursuit of multiple different actions and wider systemic changes with long term, positive transformations