Donella Meadows - Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

Converted into the Mnemonic medium by Issa Rice: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project (archived locally)

Comments on medium-ization

• I see that Issa had to do a great deal of creative interpretation, even in the first section, to determine what to convert.
• I notice that I feel supported as I read this dense text. Like, there’s a lot going on, and I have some low-grade anxiety that I’m not really “getting” it, but knowing that a review is coming up (and not too long from now) helps me feel confidence that I’ll end up knowing the main points.
• Issa seems to have made an explicit choice to avoid providing context in the question text, knowing that Orbit will provide the context above. It’s a natural choice to make, but it still makes me slightly uncomfortable! This suggests that I’m not yet confident in the context labels doing their jobs.
• There’s an interesting key question about an objection to the text’s arguments in the section on parameters. A case where the prompt is sort of editorializing (though also sort of just underlining an explicit response to that objection given in the text).
• I feel myself wanting to add two key prompts in the parameters section:

Q. Where are parameters/constants/values on Meadows’s list of leverage points? (in terms of efficacy)
A. Dead last.

Q. Why is it counter-cultural that parameters/constants/values are dead last on Meadows’s list of leverage points?
A. Because they’re what people spend almost all their time arguing about in system design.

This strikes me as the heart of what the section claims! But that’s really a personal interpretation. An important limitation for the medium.

• Prompts I found myself wanting to add in the delays section:

Q. What counter-intuitive solution does Meadows propose to the difficulty of changing delay length?
A. Slow down the change rate, so the delay length becomes smaller relative to it!

Q. Why does Forrester’s world model suggest that slowing economic growth a greater leverage point than e.g. faster technological development or freer market prices?
A. Those would attempt to slow delays in adjusting our economic system, but there are too many other points where slow delays can’t be adjusted (e.g. global physical plant), so he proposes it’s better to actually slow down growth so that forces of adjustment can keep pace!

• And in the information flow section:

Q. Give an example of a place where changing the structure of information flow has been a powerful leverage point in a system.
A. (e.g. publishing factory pollutants, showing people their resource utilization or calorie consumption, organic food labeling, etc)

• Reflecting at the end of the piece: what are the high-level claims here? The big pieces that I definitely want to take away? Do I have prompts for them? In most cases, yes, but some of the most important ideas here are encoded in the relative positions of the items in this list
  • i.e. X is surprisingly higher-leverage than Y, X is generally low-leverage, Y is generally high-leverage. I think I have prompts which represent some of these key relationships, but that in six months I may not remember e.g. where adjusting positive feedback loop gain sits relative to adjusting delay time. Maybe that’s fine? I’m not sure! This is part of the problem, of course.