twelve leverage points to intervene in a system
Planted Dec 2020 Tended 2 years ago Linked from 3 notes
Contents
From systems thinker Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, twelve “levers” or ways we might intervene to change the behavior of a system, in increasing order of effectiveness:
- Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards)
- The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
- Structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport network, population age structures)
- Length of delays, relative to the rate of system changes
- Strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the effect they are trying to correct against
- Gain around driving positive feedback loops
- Structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
- Rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints)
- Power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
- Goal of the system
- Mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises from
- Power to transcend paradigms (paradigms are incredibly resilient, though: Max Planck said that paradigms change one death at a time, that only as generations pass do paradigms change)