System Leverage Point

CORE DEFINITION

The concept of leverage points comes from Donella Meadows, who argued that interventions in a system differ enormously in their power and arranged them in a hierarchy of roughly twelve levels. At the bottom sit parameters, subsidies, and buffer sizes, which are easy to change and rarely change behavior, while higher levels include information flows, rules, goals, and the paradigm from which the system arises. The core proposition is that effectiveness depends on the level chosen, so effort spent at the bottom produces little while modest effort at the top can restructure the system. The key qualification is that high-leverage interventions also provoke the strongest resistance.