Summary
Leverage points are places in a complex system where, in Donella Meadows’s words, “a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything”. Meadows, a systems analyst trained by Jay Forrester at MIT, ranked twelve in her 1999 essay ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’. Weakest are the numbers people argue over most, like taxes and subsidies; stronger are feedback loops, information flows and rules; near the top are a system’s goals and the paradigm it arises from.
She added caveats. The higher the point, the harder the system resists, and the list is “an invitation to think more broadly about system change”, not a recipe.
Rationale
Her ‘paradigm’ is near what we mean by deep disposition. But Part 1 prefers “making diverse moves” to “pulling one big lever and expecting predictable results”, as, in the end, does she.