The mindset or paradigm out of which the system - its goals, power structure, rules, its culture - arises.Įveryone in the meeting blinked in surprise, including me. The distribution of power over the rules of the system.ġ. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).ģ. Material flows and nodes of material intersection.Ĥ. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).Ħ. Suddenly, without quite knowing what was happening, I got up, marched to the flip chart, tossed over to a clean page, and wrote: PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEMĩ. “It’s almost certainly an example of cranking the system in the wrong direction - it’s aimed at growth, growth at any price!! And the control measures these nice, liberal folks are talking about to combat it - small parameter adjustments, weak negative feedback loops - are PUNY!!!” “They haven’t the SLIGHTEST IDEA how this complex structure will behave,” myself said back to me. “This is a HUGE NEW SYSTEM people are inventing!” I said to myself. The more I listened, the more I began to simmer inside.
So one day I was sitting in a meeting about how to make the world work better - actually it was a meeting about how the new global trade regime, NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization, is likely to make the world work worse. Very frustrating, especially for those of us who yearn not just to understand complex systems, but to make the world work better. And we know from bitter experience that, because of counterintuitiveness, when we do discover the system’s leverage points, hardly anybody will believe us. Give us a few months or years and we’ll figure it out. But a new system we’ve never encountered? Well, our counterintuitions aren’t that well developed.
When we study a system, we usually learn where leverage points are. The systems analysts I know have come up with no quick or easy formulas for finding leverage points. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve. That’s Forrester’s word to describe complex systems. Now those projects are being torn down in city after city.Ĭounterintuitive. This model came out at a time when national policy dictated massive low-income housing projects, and Forrester was derided. 2 The less of it there is, the better off the city is - even the low-income folks in the city. 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.Īnother of Forrester’s classics was his urban dynamics study, published in 1969, which demonstrated that subsidized low-income housing is a leverage point. the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don’t count the costs - among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, etc. Not only population growth, but economic growth. 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 made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point 1: Growth. The classic example of that backward intuition was my own introduction to systems analysis, the world model. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”
Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point - in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. We not only want to believe that there are leverage points, we want to know where they are and how to get our hands on them. The nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles.
The silver bullet, the trimtab, the miracle cure, the secret passage, the magic password, the single hero who turns the tide of history. This idea is not unique to systems analysis - it’s embedded in legend. 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.