🪜Leverage Points - Places to Intervene in a System

People who run complicated systems often know by instinct where the points of leverage are, and then push them the wrong way. Ranked honestly, the places we argue about most, the parameters, change behaviour least. More power sits in the feedback loops, more again in who gets what information and in the rules, and most of all in the goal of the system and the unexamined beliefs it grew out of. The higher the leverage, the harder the system resists.

• Started on Saturday 25 January after climbing, finished on Sunday morning and wrote the note before lunch. The day after finishing 📕 Thinking in Systems, because I was not ready to stop.
• The favourite essay of the year, and it was only January.
• Twelve places to push on a system, listed from the weakest to the strongest. The list began on a flip chart: she was in a meeting about trade rules, lost patience, and wrote it down more or less whole.
• The shock is the bottom of the list. Numbers, targets, budgets and dates are number twelve, the least powerful, and they are where I spend nearly all of my working week.
• She says herself that the order is rough and that she is not sure of it. I trust the list more for that.
• The rung I work on: mostly the bottom one. In the week I read this I had eleven meetings, and nine were about a date.
• Her top of the list, the beliefs a system grows out of, is where Marcus had already put the weight: 💬 The universe is transformation life is. That is a quote note of his, not of hers. The essay is paraphrased throughout.