Donella Meadows
“Thinking in Systems” and other work
Finding and expanding the supposed boundaries of systems
How to approach leverage points
I turn to chapter 4 of Thinking in Systems regularly, both to find language to advocate for systems thinking, and for techniques for intervening in systems. I find her writing style to be exceptionally readable, a remarkable accomplishment for this topic.
Here she returns to the stock and flow diagrams she sets up in chapter 1 as a means for visually documenting the behavior of systems, but calls our attention to the clouds that represents the before and after in whatever diagram we’re creating.
Those clouds are what other people are responsible for. They contain everything outside our perceived control, or outside our relevance. They are a representation for what is out of scope for any project.
“The mark the boundary of the system diagram. they rarely mark a real boundary, because systems rarely have real boundaries.” (95)
I find that when innovation teams hover on this point a bit, and integrate the design proposition that anything that is made can be remade, it packs an incredible punch for people who still have the energy to take truly transformative action.
“Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly.” (95)
People who have innovation fatigue sprint through the first sentence and land on the last bit of this next sentence. The lack of neatness really makes people sag in their chairs, because not neat things are harder, which historically has meant more expensive, and that turns green lights to red lights faster than anything in the world.
This is where the rest of the book comes in handy, because it offers truly useful language for stoking enthusiasm on the topic. She does this by reminding everyone how much more expensive it is to work on the wrong thing for longer and have it fail to bring us to a preferred future state. That bings people around.
One person on any innovation team should have a marked up copy of this book on their desk to turn to when innovation fatigued people are sitting back in their chairs.
I turn to the leverage points section of the book when the action presumed to be the most successful is summoned as the obvious response to an insight. These if/then relationships are everywhere, and strategic designers spend A LOT of time trying to decouple these kinds of causal claims. Meadows offers us a pretty elegant, but not exactly immediately easy to use, taxonomy of actions one can take to intervene in systems. She calls these leverage points.
You can call these actions anything you want, use whatever language is already in use in the room. Leverage points is typical to rooms where everyone is already bought in to systems thinking, and believe that this kind of approach to change is the preferred path forward. That said, this list works for any kind of theory of change, because everything behaves as a complex systems whether we want it to or not.
You’ll find this bit in chapter 6. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing because it contains the anecdote from which this taxonomy originates, a spontaneous lightbulb moment where a long career suddenly clicks into focus, and an iteration that demonstrates how all models are drafts waiting for the next iteration.
The first draft of the taxonomy is 9 steps, and I find it to be the easiest to absorb when visiting this topic for the first time. You can see that it’s written in increasing order of effectiveness, with the most effective intervention at the bottom. It’s so fun that she puts the least effective on the top, because it’s also the first causal claim that gets declared as the path forward. Every time that happens the list catches us and says, see, I told you so.
So how do you use the list? I find that when it’s first introduced there’s a drive to leap to the most effective intervention. My response is generally to treat the list like a ladder, because each rung on the ladder is like a phase of developing innovation infrastructure. Just because constants are the least effective, doesn’t mean we can work without them. It means they’re not enough, and we should step up to the next rung on the ladder to get what we want out of our efforts.