Leverage Points: What We Control, What We Don't Control

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In my "begging bowl" post, I referred to Donella Meadows' famous paper, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. It's one of those essays that is worth re-reading every year, as each reading generates new (or renewed) insights.

If you haven't read it recently, here are some excerpts that give a taste of the entirety:

"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 systems analysts I know have come up with no quick or easy formulas for finding leverage points. When we study a system, we usually learn where leverage points are. But a new system we’ve never encountered? Well, our counterintuitions aren’t that well developed. Give us a few months or years and we’ll figure it out. And we know from bitter experience that, because of counterintuitiveness, when we do discover the system’s leverage points, hardly anybody will believe us.

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative (i.e. corrective) feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system--its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters--arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction.
A negative feedback loop is self-correcting; a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. 
Positive feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems.
Real-world systems can turn chaotic, however, if something in them can grow or decline very fast. 

A NEW LOOP delivers feedback to a place where it wasn’t going before.

Self-organization is basically a matter of an evolutionary raw material — a highly variable stock of information from which to select possible patterns — and a means for experimentation, for selecting and testing new patterns.

When you understand the power of system self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than economists worship technology.

The intervention point here is obvious, but unpopular. Encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity means 'losing control.' 

Democracy worked better before the advent of the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications.
If rich people can buy government and weaken, rather than strengthen those of measures, the government, instead of balancing 'success to the successful' loops, becomes just another instrument to reinforce them!

There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops — and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).

The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions -- unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them -- constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. 

Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.

There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is 'true,' that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension."

The starting point in all this for me is: what do we control, and what don't we control?

Few (if any) systems (inputs and processes) are completely within our control. But the inputs of a few systems are completely within our control, for example, what food we put in our mouths, what fitness routines we pursue, and what we do with our surplus time and income.

Let's consider our health as a system. We directly control the inputs--food, water, exercise--but not the processes of digestion, immune response, etc., though there are a multitude of feedbacks between our diet, fitness and mental state and the body's complex processes and microbiome.  The output--our health--is the result of the inputs we control and processes we influence but don't fully control.

How do we change our health? The "obvious" way is to adhere to a new diet. But as Meadows pointed out, the "obvious" leverage point is not the actual leverage point: diets don't work, except if they are supported by a change of our understanding of ourselves, our relationship to food and fitness, and our awareness of a new paradigm.  This awareness is supported by joining a group of others seeking to change the paradigm of their health.

Diets by themselves don't work because we experience them as a form of deprivation and discipline. As Meadows explains, we don't change our diet and fitness until we come to a new understanding, a new paradigm, and recognize that what we thought was natural and rewarding--eating salty, sweet, fatty snacks and foods because they generated an endorphin rush of pleasure and good feelings--was not actually good for us, and there is another way of feeling good that is not self-destructive.