Intervening in a system's goals, rules, and paradigms changes far more than adjusting its parameters.
Meadows's 1999 list ranks twelve leverage points, with parameters weakest and paradigms strongest. Her point is that everyone intervenes at the weak end because that is where the levers are visible.
In practice
- A charity that changes its funding formula changes more than one that doubles its budget.
- A team that changes what counts as done changes more than one that adds two engineers.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Design & Systems
- Essay
- Why systems behave against intuition