Article: Places to Intervene in a System - Full Text
source: http://www.wiserearth.org/article/e657d10b1202a6f03bb6548baa3a022a
if you want to know how the world really works you have to read this... it's a bit long but the reason it is because it has allot to say... "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.
The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have absorbed one of his favorite stories. "People know intuitively where leverage points are. Time after time I've done an analysis of a company, and I've figured out a leverage point. Then I've gone to the company and discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong direction !"
The classic example of that backward intuition was Forrester's first world model. 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 came out with a clear leverage point: Growth. Both population and economic growth. Growth has costs-among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction-the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth!
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. "
The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have absorbed one of his favorite stories. "People know intuitively where leverage points are. Time after time I've done an analysis of a company, and I've figured out a leverage point. Then I've gone to the company and discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong direction !"
The classic example of that backward intuition was Forrester's first world model. 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 came out with a clear leverage point: Growth. Both population and economic growth. Growth has costs-among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction-the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth!
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. "
