Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
August 2019: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. Whether you recognize it or not there are systems all around us. Even in places that you may not even realize at first glance.
Some places that we encounter that have systems which may not be so obvious at first are local government services such as sanitation, the ATM machine that spurts out your cash, the water that runs through your faucets, the daily operations of the company we work for, the distribution of produce to your local supermarket and how some of the macroeconomic decisions are made that affect your mortgage rate.
In this interesting article written by Donella Meadows who is known for her two influential books The Limits to Growth and Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella focuses on leverage points in systems. Leverage is a way of getting more with less so when Donella is discussing leverage points she is looking for ways to intervene in a system that give a larger output but have a smaller input.
