Stop Using Leverage Points
(The Value of the Lever: American Newspaper Directory)
Stop Using Leverage Points
In the systems change community, a paper by Donella Meadows gets cited very often. The paper has the title “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System”. In this paper, Meadows outlines 12 leverage points that she has found to be effective for intervening in a system and ranks them by their effectiveness, starting from the least effective, constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards), and going down deep to the most effective, the power to transcend paradigms. Meadows defines leverage points as follows:
These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
This idea is not unique to systems analysis—it’s embedded in legend. The silver bullet, the trimtab, the miracle cure, the secret passage, the magic password, the single hero or villain who turns the tide of history. The nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles. We not only want to believe that there are leverage points, we want to know where they are and how to get our hands on them. Leverage points are points of power. (Meadows 1999, 1)
Meadows makes a key point right in the beginning of the paper: while leverage points might be intuitively easy to find, intuition often misleads us in terms of which direction we should push the lever. Indeed, she early on brings the example of economic growth as a leverage point, identified as such by Jar Forrester, a famous systems analyst. The problem is that you cannot tell intuitively in which direction growth should be pushed. Intuition would tell us that growth should be as large as possible and, of course, positive. Yet Meadows learned, when working with the Club of Rome, that growth sometimes needs to be slow, and in some cases no growth or negative growth is what we should be looking for. A second example Meadows uses based on Forrester’s work is subsidised low-cost housing. According to models, not more such housing is needed, but less because “subsidised housing without equivalent effort at job creation for the inhabitants [is] severely disrupting a city’s employment/housing ratio, effectively increasing unemployment and welfare costs and despair.” (Meadows 1999, 1-2)
I struggle with the idea of leverage points. Not because I don’t believe in what Meadows found – I respect her work a lot. I firstly struggle with the idea because I think its an inappropriate metaphor. It uses a concept of Newtonian physics to describe interventions in systems that are governed by a non-Newtonian logic. Secondly, because I think that the way most humans would set out using leverage is actually defeating the very idea of systems as collections of intricate circular structures or feedback loops. It seems that all we can conceptually grasp of these vast and intricately entangled circular structures are simple linear chains of cause and effect. Gregory Bateson formulated this point in the following way:
Purposive consciousness pulls out, from the total mind, sequences which do not have the loop structure which is characteristic of the whole systemic structure. (Bateson 1972a, 440)
A real-life example I recently came across is an international development agency that uses intricate causal loop diagrams to model interventions in various systems in an African country. They hired a university to develop the methodology and elaborate the models. The models have lots of variables and lots of feedback loops. Out of these maps, the researchers defined a number of leverage points – variables with a high degree of influence on the whole system. Yet in order to operationalise these leverage points, what they do is to cut out parts of the map and show it in the form of a results chain – a linear chain of subsequent causal effects starting from the leverage point. For me, this very step defeats the whole exercise (not that I think causal loop diagrams are very useful to develop interventions into a complex societal system, but that is for another time.)
And this is not a unique example, indeed, it is inbuilt in the way consciousness focused by purpose is making sense of the world. To quote Bateson again:
Our conscious sampling of data will not disclose whole circuits but only arcs of circuits, cut off from their matrix by our selective attention. Specifically, the attempt to achieve a change in a given variable, located either in self or environment, is likely to be undertaken without comprehension of the homeostatic network surrounding that variable. (Bateson 1972b, 451)
So, my point: while I appreciate Meadows’ work and think that her paper is a useful way to understand why systems work the way they work, I would not call the 12 ideas she identified leverage points. Because what happens is that in our conscious human mind we turn them into places where we can apply our crowbar, aiming to force a system to behave the way we think it should behave as we want to achieve our self-defined goals and purpose.
To wrap up, the two in my view most important points Meadows makes in her paper:
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. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment. (Meadows 1999, 19)
In the end, it seems that power has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go. (Meadows 1999, 19)
Let me know what you think about leverage points by simply replying to this message.
References:
- Bateson, Gregory. 1972a. “Conscious Purpose versus Nature.” In_Steps to an Ecology of Mind_, by Gregory Bateson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
- ———. 1972b. “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation.” In_Steps to an Ecology of Mind_, by Gregory Bateson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
- Meadows, Donella. 1999. “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” The Sustainability Insitute.http://www.donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf.
The Paper Museum
This week, a section from a piece from Aeon, which links nicely with Meadows’ point that our paradigms are fundamental for we percieve systems:
[Richard] Dawkins assembles genetics’ dry materials and abstract maths into a rich but orderly landscape through which he guides you with grace, charm, urbanity, and humour. He replicates in prose the process he describes. He gives agency to chemical chains, logic to confounding behaviour. He takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it almost impossible to misunderstand. He reveals the gene as not just the centre of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour. By the time you’ve finished his book, or well before that, Dawkins has made of the tiny gene — this replicator, this strip of chemicals little more than an abstraction — a huge, relentlessly turning gearwheel of steel, its teeth driving smaller cogs to make all of life happen.
It’s a gorgeous story. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits, it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple. It has inspired countless biologists and geneticists to plumb the gene’s wonders and do brilliant work. Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and many others, the selfish-gene story is so focused on the gene’s singular role in natural selection that in an age when it’s ever more clear that evolution works in ways far more clever and complex than we realise, the selfish-gene model increasingly impoverishes both scientific and popular views of genetics and evolution. As both conceptual framework and metaphor, the selfish-gene has helped us see the gene as it revealed itself over the 20th century. But as a new age and new tools reveal a more complicated genome, the selfish-gene is blinding us. (Dobbs 2013)
Why have I added this? The gene-centred view on evolution is a brilliant example of a theory that has grown over a century, been polished by many and supported by lots of scientific evidence – and dominated the popular understanding of evolutions thanks to people like Richard Dawkins. Yet as it turns out, as elegant as it is, evolution is not just that and nothing more. While large parts of the theory are not wrong, the narrative that has been built around it shows one particular way of seeing things, of interpreting the theory, which was in line with the wider societal narrative of the time (or to use Donella Meadows’ words, the dominant paradigm of the time) - individualism, self-centredness, selfishness, competition, capitalism. As we are moving into a new narrative that champions things like community, interconnectedness, wholeness, or cooperation, we also realise that we can tell a different story about evolution. Now the question is whether the one is more true than the other? Or just more in line with our wider societal narrative so it is easier for us to believe? I think it is probably truer as we now have more experimental methods that we can use to give us more data. At the same time, it will probably also be again replaced by a different theory when there will be another paradigm shift in society happening. Or, to again refer to Meadows above: “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.”
Reference: Dobbs, David. 2013. “The Selfish Gene Is a Great Meme. Too Bad It’s so Wrong – David Dobbs | Aeon Essays.”Aeon, December 3, 2013. https://aeon.co/essays/the-selfish-gene-is-a-great-meme-too-bad-it-s-so-wrong.
More for you to enjoy
I enjoyed reading an article by Rebecca Freeth and Guido Caniglia titled “Learning to collaborate while collaborating: advancing interdisciplinary sustainability research” (link to PDF). I particularly liked the idea that you learn to collaborate while collaborating – this links strongly with the idea of symmathesy or constant mutual learning.