Places to Intervene in a System

Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella H. Meadows

Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in "leverage
points." 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.

The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those
of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have absorbed
one of his favorite stories. "People know intuitively where leverage
points are. Time after time I've done an analysis of a company, and
I've figured out a leverage point. Then I've gone to the company and
discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong direction!"

The classic example of that backward intuition was Forrester's first
world model. Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global
problems—poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource
depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment—are related and how they
might be solved, Forrester came out with a clear leverage point:
Growth. Both population and economic growth. Growth has costs—among
which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction—the whole list
of problems we are trying to solve with growth!

The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the
answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing with all their
might in the wrong direction.

Counterintuitive. That's Forrester's word to describe complex systems.
The systems analysts I know have come up with no quick or easy
formulas for finding leverage points. Our counterintuitions aren't
that well developed. Give us a few months or years and we'll model the
system and figure it out. We know from bitter experience that when we
do discover the system's leverage points, hardly anybody will believe
us.

Very frustrating. So one day I was sitting in a meeting about the new
global trade regime, NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization.
The more I listened, the more I began to simmer inside. "This is a
huge new system people are inventing!" I said to myself. "They haven't
the slightest idea how it will behave," myself said back to me. "It's
cranking the system in the wrong direction—growth, growth at any
price!! And the control measures these nice folks are talking
about—small parameter adjustments, weak negative feedback loops—are
puny!"

Suddenly, without quite knowing what was happening, I got up, marched
to the flip chart, tossed over a clean page, and wrote: "Places to
Intervene in a System," followed by nine items:

9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).

8. Material stocks and flows.

7. Regulating negative feedback loops.

6. Driving positive feedback loops.

5. Information flows.

4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).

3. The power of self-organization.

2. The goals of the system.

1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback
structure arise.

Everyone in the meeting blinked in surprise, including me. "That's
brilliant!" someone breathed. "Huh?" said someone else.

I realized that I had a lot of explaining to do.

In a minute I'll go through the list, translate the jargon, give
examples and exceptions. First I want to place the list in a context
of humility. What bubbled up in me that day was distilled from decades
of rigorous analysis of many different kinds of systems done by many
smart people. But complex systems are, well, complex. It's dangerous
to generalize about them. What you are about to read is not a recipe
for finding leverage points. Rather it's an invitation to think more
broadly about system change.

That's why leverage points are not intuitive.

9. Numbers.
Numbers ("parameters" in systems jargon) determine how much of a
discrepancy turns which faucet how fast. Maybe the faucet turns hard,
so it takes a while to get the water flowing. Maybe the drain is
blocked and can allow only a small flow, no matter how open it is.
Maybe the faucet can deliver with the force of a fire hose. These
considerations are a matter of numbers, some of which are physically
locked in, but most of which are popular intervention points.

Consider the national debt. It's a negative bathtub, a money hole. The
rate at which it sinks is the annual deficit. Tax income makes it
rise, government expenditures make it fall. Congress and the president
argue endlessly about the many parameters that open and close tax
faucets and spending drains. Since those faucets and drains are
connected to the voters, these are politically charged parameters.
But, despite all the fireworks, and no matter which party is in
charge, the money hole goes on sinking, just at different rates.

The amount of land we set aside for conservation. The minimum wage.
How much we spend on AIDS research or Stealth bombers. The service
charge the bank extracts from your account. All these are numbers,
adjustments to faucets. So, by the way, is firing people and getting
new ones. Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate
at which they turn, but if they're the same old faucets, plumbed into
the same system, turned according to the same information and rules
and goals, the system isn't going to change much. Bill Clinton is
different from George Bush, but not all that different.

Numbers are last on my list of leverage points. Diddling with details,
arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably ninety-five percent
of our attention goes to numbers, but there's not a lot of power in
them.

Not that parameters aren't important—they can be, especially in the
short term and to the individual who's standing directly in the flow.
But they rarely change behavior. If the system is chronically
stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it. If it's wildly
variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of
control, they don't brake it.

Whatever cap we put on campaign contributions, it doesn't clean up
politics. The Feds fiddling with the interest rate haven't made
business cycles go away. (We always forget that during upturns, and
are shocked, shocked by the downturns.) Spending more on police
doesn't make crime go away.

However, there are critical exceptions. Numbers become leverage points
when they go into ranges that kick off one of the items higher on this
list. Interest rates or birth rates control the gains around positive
feedback loops. System goals are parameters that can make big
differences. Sometimes a system gets onto a chaotic edge, where the
tiniest change in a number can drive it from order to what appears to
be wild disorder.

Probably the most common kind of critical number is the length of
delay in a feedback loop. Remember that bathtub on the fourth floor I
mentioned, with the water heater in the basement? I actually
experienced one of those once, in an old hotel in London. It wasn't
even a bathtub with buffering capacity; it was a shower. The water
temperature took at least a minute to respond to my faucet twists.
Guess what my shower was like. Right, oscillations from hot to cold
and back to hot, punctuated with expletives. Delays in negative
feedback loops cause oscillations. If you're trying to adjust a system
state to your goal, but you only receive delayed information about
what the system state is, you will overshoot and undershoot.

Same if your information is timely, but your response isn't. For
example, it takes several years to build an electric power plant, and
then that plant lasts, say, thirty years. Those delays make it
impossible to build exactly the right number of plants to supply a
rapidly changing demand. Even with immense effort at forecasting,
almost every electricity industry in the world experiences long
oscillations between overcapacity and undercapacity. A system just
can't respond to short-term changes when it has long-term delays.
That's why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union
or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.

A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change
(growth, fluctuation, decay) in the system state that the feedback
loop is trying to control. Delays that are too short cause
overreaction, oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response.
Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding
oscillations, depending on how much too long. At the extreme they
cause chaos. Delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a
range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and
collapse.

Delay length would be a high leverage point, except for the fact that
delays are not often easily changeable. Things take as long as they
take. You can't do a lot about the construction time of a major piece
of capital, or the maturation time of a child, or the growth rate of a
forest. It's usually easier to slow down the change rate (positive
feedback loops, higher on this list), so feedback delays won't cause
so much trouble. Critical numbers are not nearly as common as people
seem to think they are. Most systems have evolved or are designed to
stay out of sensitive parameter ranges. Mostly, the numbers are not
worth the sweat put into them.

8. Material stocks and flows.
The plumbing structure, the stocks and flows and their physical
arrangement, can have an enormous effect on how a system operates.

When the Hungarian road system was laid out so all traffic from one
side of the nation to the other had to pass through central Budapest,
that determined a lot about air pollution and commuting delays that
are not easily fixed by pollution control devices, traffic lights, or
speed limits. The only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong is
to rebuild it, if you can.

Often you can't, because physical building is a slow and expensive
kind of change. Some stock-and-flow structures are just plain
unchangeable.

The baby-boom swell in the US population first caused pressure on the
elementary school system, then high schools and colleges, then jobs
and housing, and now we're looking forward to supporting its
retirement. Not much to do about it, because five-year-olds become
six-year-olds, and sixty-four-year-olds become sixty-five-year-olds
predictably and unstoppably. The same can be said for the lifetime of
destructive CFC molecules in the ozone layer, for the rate at which
contaminants get washed out of aquifers, for the fact that an
inefficient car fleet takes ten to twenty years to turn over.

The possible exceptional leverage point here is in the size of stocks,
or buffers. Consider a huge bathtub with slow in and outflows. Now
think about a small one with fast flows. That's the difference between
a lake and a river. You hear about catastrophic river floods much more
often than catastrophic lake floods, because stocks that are big,
relative to their flows, are more stable than small ones. A big,
stabilizing stock is a buffer.

The stabilizing power of buffers is why you keep money in the bank
rather than living from the flow of change through your pocket. It's
why stores hold inventory instead of calling for new stock just as
customers carry the old stock out the door. It's why we need to
maintain more than the minimum breeding population of an endangered
species. Soils in the eastern US are more sensitive to acid rain than
soils in the west, because they haven't got big buffers of calcium to
neutralize acid. You can often stabilize a system by increasing the
capacity of a buffer. But if a buffer is too big, the system gets
inflexible. It reacts too slowly. Businesses invented just-in-time
inventories, because occasional vulnerability to fluctuations or
screw-ups is cheaper than certain, constant inventory costs—and
because small-to-vanishing inventories allow more flexible response to
shifting demand.

There's leverage, sometimes magical, in changing the size of buffers.
But buffers are usually physical entities, not easy to change.

The acid absorption capacity of eastern soils is not a leverage point
for alleviating acid rain damage. The storage capacity of a dam is
literally cast in concrete. Physical structure is crucial in a system,
but the leverage point is in proper design in the first place. After
the structure is built, the leverage is in understanding its
limitations and bottlenecks and refraining from fluctuations or
expansions that strain its capacity.

7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
Now we're beginning to move from the physical part of the system to
the information and control parts, where more leverage can be found.
Nature evolves negative feedback loops and humans invent them to keep
system states within safe bounds.

A thermostat loop is the classic example. Its purpose is to keep the
system state called "room temperature" fairly constant at a desired
level. Any negative feedback loop needs a goal (the thermostat
setting), a monitoring and signaling device to detect excursions from
the goal (the thermostat), and a response mechanism (the furnace
and/or air conditioner, fans, heat pipes, fuel, etc.).

A complex system usually has numerous negative feedback loops it can
bring into play, so it can self-correct under different conditions and
impacts. Some of those loops may be inactive much of the time—like the
emergency cooling system in a nuclear power plant, or your ability to
sweat or shiver to maintain your body temperature. One of the big
mistakes we make is to strip away these emergency response mechanisms
because they aren't often used and they appear to be costly. In the
short term we see no effect from doing this. In the long term, we
narrow the range of conditions over which the system can survive.

One of the most heartbreaking ways we do this is in encroaching on the
habitats of endangered species. Another is in encroaching on our own
time for rest, recreation, socialization, and meditation.

The "strength" of a negative loop—its ability to keep its appointed
stock at or near its goal—depends on the combination of all its
parameters and links—the accuracy and rapidity of monitoring, the
quickness and power of response, the directness and size of corrective
flows.

There can be leverage points here. Take markets, for example, the
negative feedback systems that are all but worshiped by economists—and
they can indeed be marvels of self-correction, as prices vary to keep
supply and demand in balance. The more the price—the central signal to
both producers and consumers—is kept clear, unambiguous, timely, and
truthful, the more smoothly markets will operate. Prices that reflect
full costs will tell consumers how much they can actually afford and
will reward efficient producers. Companies and governments are fatally
attracted to the price leverage point, of course, all of them pushing
in the wrong direction with subsidies, fixes, externalities, taxes,
and other forms of confusion. The REAL leverage here is to keep them
from doing it. Hence anti-trust laws, truth-in-advertising laws,
attempts to internalize costs (such as pollution taxes), the removal
of perverse subsidies, and other ways of leveling market playing
fields.

The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the
impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength,
the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.

A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all
the windows and its corrective power will fail. Democracy worked
better before the advent of the brainwashing power of centralized mass
communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until
radar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible
for a few actors to wipe out the fish. The power of big industry calls
for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy
makes necessary a global government.

Here are some other examples of strengthening negative feedback
controls to improve a system's self-correcting abilities: preventive
medicine, exercise, and good nutrition to bolster the body's ability
to fight disease, integrated pest management to encourage natural
predators of crop pests, the Freedom of Information Act to reduce
government secrecy, protection for whistle blowers, impact fees,
pollution taxes, and performance bonds to recapture the externalized
public costs of private benefits.

6. Driving positive feedback loops.
A positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the
more it gains power to work some more.

The more people catch the flu, the more they infect other people. The
more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies. The more
money you have in the bank, the more interest you earn, the more money
you have in the bank. The more the soil erodes, the less vegetation it
can support, the fewer roots and leaves to soften rain and runoff, the
more soil erodes. The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass,
the more they knock into nuclei and generate more.

Positive feedback loops drive growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse
in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will
destroy itself. That's why there are so few of them.

Usually a negative loop kicks in sooner or later. The epidemic runs
out of infectable people—or people take increasingly strong steps to
avoid being infected. The death rate rises to equal the birth rate—or
people see the consequences of unchecked population growth and have
fewer babies. The soil erodes away to bedrock, and after a million
years the bedrock crumbles into new soil—or people put up check dams
and plant trees.

In those examples, the first outcome is what happens if the positive
loop runs its course, the second is what happens if there's an
intervention to reduce its power.

Reducing the gain around a positive loop—slowing the growth—is usually
a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative
loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run.

Population and economic growth rates in the world model are leverage
points, because slowing them gives the many negative loops, through
technology and markets and other forms of adaptation, time to
function. It's the same as slowing the car when you're driving too
fast, rather than calling for more responsive brakes or technical
advances in steering.

The most interesting behavior that rapidly turning positive loops can
trigger is chaos. This wild, unpredictable, unreplicable, and yet
bounded behavior happens when a system starts changing much, much
faster than its negative loops can react to it.

For example, if you keep raising the capital growth rate in the world
model, eventually you get to a point where one tiny increase more will
shift the economy from exponential growth to oscillation. Another
nudge upward gives the oscillation a double beat. And just the tiniest
further nudge sends it into chaos.

I don't expect the world economy to turn chaotic any time soon (not
for that reason, anyway). That behavior occurs only in unrealistic
parameter ranges, equivalent to doubling the size of the economy
within a year. Real-world systems do turn chaotic, however, if
something in them can grow or decline very fast. Fast-replicating
bacteria or insect populations, very infectious epidemics, wild
speculative bubbles in money systems, neutron fluxes in the guts of
nuclear power plants. These systems are hard to control, and control
must involve slowing down the positive feedbacks.

In more ordinary systems, look for leverage points around birth rates,
interest rates, erosion rates, "success to the successful" loops, any
place where the more you have of something, the more you have the
possibility of having more.

5. Information flows.
There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except
that the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the
basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the
residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as
they used more or less electricity. Electricity consumption was 30
percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.

Systems-heads love that story because it's an example of a high
leverage point in the information structure of the system. It's not a
parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing
loop. It's a new loop, delivering feedback to a place where it wasn't
going before.

In 1986 the US government required that every factory releasing
hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly. Suddenly
everyone could find out precisely what was coming out of the
smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no
fines, no determination of "safe" levels, just information. But by
1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. One chemical company that found
itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90
percent, just to "get off that list."

Missing feedback is a common cause of system malfunction. Adding or
rerouting information can be a powerful intervention, usually easier
and cheaper than rebuilding physical structure.

The tragedy of the commons that is exhausting the world's commercial
fisheries occurs because there is no feedback from the state of the
fish population to the decision to invest in fishing vessels.
(Contrary to economic opinion, the price of fish doesn't provide that
feedback. As the fish get more scarce and hence more expensive, it
becomes all the more profitable to go out and catch them. That's a
perverse feedback, a positive loop that leads to collapse.)

It's important that the missing feedback be restored to the right
place and in compelling form. It's not enough to inform all the users
of an aquifer that the groundwater level is dropping. That could
trigger a race to the bottom. It would be more effective to set a
water price that rises steeply as the pumping rate exceeds the
recharge rate.

Suppose taxpayers got to specify on their return forms what government
services their tax payments must be spent on. (Radical democracy!)
Suppose any town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river
had to put it immediately downstream from its own outflow pipe.
Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest
in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on
his/her lawn.

There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid
accountability for their own decisions. That's why there are so many
missing feedback loops—and why this kind of leverage point is so often
popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and
effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen or
go around them and make it happen anyway.

4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).
The rules of the system define its scope, boundaries, degrees of
freedom. Thou shalt not kill. Everyone has the right of free speech.
Contracts are to be honored. The president serves four-year terms and
cannot serve more than two of them. Nine people on a team, you have to
touch every base, three strikes and you're out. If you get caught
robbing a bank, you go to jail.

Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR and opened information
flows (glasnost) and changed the economic rules (perestroika), and
look what happened.

Constitutions are strong social rules. Physical laws such as the
second law of thermodynamics are absolute rules, if we understand them
correctly. Laws, punishments, incentives, and informal social
agreements are progressively weaker rules.

To demonstrate the power of rules, I ask my students to imagine
different ones for a college. Suppose the students graded the
teachers. Suppose you come to college when you want to learn
something, and you leave when you've learned it. Suppose professors
were hired according to their ability to solve real-world problems,
rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as
a group, instead of as individuals.

Rules change behavior. Power over rules is real power.

That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the
Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution—the
rules for writing the rules—has even more power than Congress.

If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay
attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.

That's why my systems intuition was sending off alarm bells as the new
world trade system was explained to me. It is a system with rules
designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of
corporations. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from other sectors
of society. Most of its meetings are closed to the press (no
information, no feedback). It forces nations into positive loops,
competing with each other to weaken environmental and social
safeguards in order to attract corporate investment. It's a recipe for
unleashing "success to the successful" loops.

3. The power of self-organization.
The most stunning thing living systems can do is to change themselves
utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological
systems that power is called evolution. In human economies it's called
technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo it's called
self-organization.

Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this
list—adding or deleting new physical structure, adding or deleting
negative or positive loops or information flows or rules. The ability
to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience, the
ability to survive change by changing.

The human immune system can develop responses to (some kinds of)
insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in
new information and pop out completely new thoughts.

Self-organization seems so wondrous that we tend to regard it as
mysterious, miraculous. Economists often model technology as literal
manna from heaven—coming from nowhere, costing nothing, increasing the
productivity of an economy by some steady percent each year. For
centuries people have regarded the spectacular variety of nature with
the same awe. Only a divine creator could bring forth such a creation.

In fact the divine creator does not have to produce miracles. He, she,
or it just has to write clever rules for self-organization. These
rules govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract
from itself under what conditions.

Self-organizing computer models demonstrate that delightful,
mind-boggling patterns can evolve from simple evolutionary algorithms.
(That need not mean that real-world algorithms are simple, only that
they can be.) The genetic code that is the basis of all biological
evolution contains just four letters, combined into words of three
letters each. That code, and the rules for replicating and rearranging
it, has spewed out an unimaginable variety of creatures.

Self-organization is basically a matter of evolutionary raw material—a
stock of information from which to select possible patterns—and a
means for testing them. For biological evolution the raw material is
DNA, one source of variety is spontaneous mutation, and the testing
mechanism is something like punctuated Darwinian selection. For
technology the raw material is the body of understanding science has
accumulated. The source of variety is human creativity (whatever that
is) and the selection mechanism is whatever the market will reward or
whatever governments and foundations will fund or whatever tickles the
fancy of crazy inventors.

When you understand the power of self-organization, you begin to
understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than
economists worship technology. The wildly varied stock of DNA, evolved
and accumulated over billions of years, is the source of evolutionary
potential, just as science libraries and labs and scientists are the
source of technological potential. Allowing species to go extinct is a
systems crime, just as randomly eliminating all copies of particular
science journals, or particular kinds of scientists, would be.

The same could be said of human cultures, which are the store of
behavioral repertoires accumulated over not billions, but hundreds of
thousands of years. They are a stock out of which social evolution can
arise. Unfortunately, people appreciate the evolutionary potential of
cultures even less than they understand the potential of every genetic
variation in ground squirrels. I guess that's because one aspect of
almost every culture is a belief in the utter superiority of that
culture.

Any system, biological, economic, or social, that scorns
experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation is doomed
over the long term on this highly variable planet.

The intervention point here is obvious but unpopular. Encouraging
diversity means losing control. Let a thousand flowers bloom and
anything could happen!

Who wants that?

2. The goals of the system.
Right there, the push for control, is an example of why the goal of a
system is even more of a leverage point than the self-organizing
ability of a system.

If the goal is to bring more and more of the world under the control
of one central planning system (the empire of Genghis Khan, the world
of Islam, the People's Republic of China, Wal-Mart, Disney), then
everything further down the list, even self-organizing behavior, will
be pressured or weakened to conform to that goal.

That's why I can't get into arguments about whether genetic
engineering is a good or a bad thing. Like all technologies, it
depends upon who is wielding it, with what goal. The only thing one
can say is that if corporations wield it for the purpose of generating
marketable products, that is a very different goal, a different
direction for evolution than anything the planet has seen so far.

There is a hierarchy of goals in systems. Most negative feedback loops
have their own goals—to keep the bath water at the right level, to
keep the room temperature comfortable, to keep inventories stocked at
sufficient levels. They are small leverage points. The big leverage
points are the goals of entire systems.

People within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal
they are serving. To make profits, most corporations would say, but
that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is
the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the
world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more under the control of the
corporation, so that its operations become ever more shielded from
uncertainty. That's the goal of a cancer cell too and of every living
population. It's only a bad one when it isn't countered by
higher-level negative feedback loops with goals of keeping the system
in balance. The goal of keeping the market competitive has to trump
the goal of each corporation to eliminate its competitors. The goal of
keeping populations in balance and evolving has to trump the goal of
each population to commandeer all resources into its own metabolism.

I said a while back that changing the players in a system is a
low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old
system. The exception to that rule is at the top, if a single player
can change the system's goal.

I have watched in wonder as—only very occasionally—a new leader in an
organization, from Dartmouth College to Nazi Germany, comes in,
enunciates a new goal, and single-handedly changes the behavior of
hundreds or thousands or millions of perfectly rational people.

That's what Ronald Reagan did. Not long before he came to office, a
president could say, "Ask not what government can do for you, ask what
you can do for the government," and no one even laughed. Reagan said
the goal is not to get the people to help the government and not to
get government to help the people, but to get the government off our
backs. One can argue, and I would, that larger system changes let him
get away with that. But the thoroughness with which behavior in the US
and even the world has been changed since Reagan is testimony to the
high leverage of articulating, repeating, standing for, insisting upon
new system goals.

1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.
Another of Jay Forrester's systems sayings goes: It doesn't matter how
the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the
minds of the society about what a "fair" distribution of the tax load
is. Whatever the rules say, by fair means or foul, by complications,
cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules,
the actual distribution of taxes will push right up against the
accepted idea of "fairness."

The shared idea in the minds of society, the great unstated
assumptions—unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone knows
them—constitute that society's deepest set of beliefs about how the
world works. There is a difference between nouns and verbs. People who
are paid less are worth less. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of
resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with
the emergence of Homo sapiens . One can "own" land. Those are just a
few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our culture, all of which
utterly dumbfound people of other cultures.

Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them come goals,
information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows.

The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an
afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in
downtown cities is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces,
often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether
it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center
of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are
interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of
individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common
good.

People who manage to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm hit
a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about
a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not
the highest. But there's nothing physical or expensive or even slow
about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a
millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing.
Of course individuals and societies do resist challenges to their
paradigm harder than they resist any other kind of change.

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal
book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say
about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and
failures in the old paradigm, you come yourself, loudly, with
assurance, from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm
in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with
reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the
vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

Systems folks would say one way to change a paradigm is to model a
system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it
whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that
way.

0. The power to transcend paradigms.
Sorry, but to be truthful and complete, I have to add this kicker.

The highest leverage of all is to keep oneself unattached in the arena
of paradigms, to realize that NO paradigm is "true," that even the one
that sweetly shapes one's comfortable worldview is a tremendously
limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe.

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.

People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at
the spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be
nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is
no power, no control, not even a reason for being, much less acting,
in the experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But
everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a
lifetime, has found it a basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm
is right, you can choose one that will help achieve your purpose. If
you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the
universe (or put in the name of your favorite deity here) and do his,
her, its will, which is a lot better informed than your will.

It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off
addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or
burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last
for millennia.

Back from the sublime to the ridiculous, from enlightenment to
caveats. There is so much that has to be said to qualify this list. It
is tentative and its order is slithery. There are exceptions to every
item on it. Having the list percolating in my subconscious for years
has not transformed me into a Superwoman. I seem to spend my time
running up and down the list, trying out leverage points wherever I
can find them. The higher the leverage point, the more the system
resists changing it—that's why societies rub out truly enlightened
beings.

I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to
work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or
rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage
has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined
thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.