Steve Coffman
2018-01-26 17:31:53 UTC
In my struggle to understand what Michal Å tÄpánek has been trying to convey regarding his perspective of our effortsâŠor at least of mine, I decided to approach him *off-line* as I was becoming increasing frustrated (and somewhat embarrassed) at my inability to grasp what he was describing. This was partially due to some language barrier I suspect, but mostly due to my lack of understanding of the field/science of Systems Analysis, and likely as well (I think) to some reduced mental bandwidth issues on my part. :)
That said, Michal very patiently continued and recommended I read the following link.
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
Here are some tantalizing excerpts:
From: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella Meadows~
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except that for some reason the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. With no other change, with identical prices, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.
We systems-heads love that story because itâs an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system. Itâs not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing loop. Itâs a NEW LOOP, delivering feedback to a place where it wasnât going before.
A more recent example is the Toxic Release Inventory â the U.S. governmentâs requirement, instituted in 1986, that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly every year. Suddenly every community could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of âsafeâ levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. Theyâve continued to go down since, not so much because of citizen outrage as because of corporate shame. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to âget off that list.â
Compelling feedback. Suppose taxpayers got to specify on their return forms what government services their tax payments must be spent on. (Radical democracy!) Suppose any town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river had to put it immediately DOWNSTREAM from its own outflow pipe. Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on his/her lawn. Suppose (this is an old one) the politicians who declare war were required to spend that war in the front lines.
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
The most stunning thing living systems and some social systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological systems that power is called evolution. In human economies itâs called technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo itâs called self-organization.
Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list â adding completely new physical structures, such as brains or wings or computers â adding new negative or positive loops, or new rules. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. The human immune system has the power to develop new responses to (some kinds of ) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system â its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters â arises.
Another of Jay Forresterâs famous systems sayings goes: it doesnât matter how the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of the society about what a âfairâ distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the rules say, by fair means or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules, actual tax payments will push right up against the accepted idea of âfairness.â
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions â unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them â constitute that societyâs paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. There is a difference between nouns and verbs. Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can âownâ land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But thereâs nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter â they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 <http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/#seven> has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You donât waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.
A Final Caution
Back from the sublime to the ridiculous, from enlightenment to caveats. There is so much that has to be said to qualify this list. It is tentative and its order is slithery. There are exceptions to every item that can move it up or down the order of leverage. Having had the list percolating in my subconscious for years has not transformed me into a Superwoman. The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it â thatâs why societies have to rub out truly enlightened beings.
Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.
This helps a lot Michal. I imagine I'll be referring to this list for some time to come. Particularly # 1. (if you never hear from me again...youâll know why.)
Thanks so much,
Steve
That said, Michal very patiently continued and recommended I read the following link.
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
Here are some tantalizing excerpts:
From: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella Meadows~
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except that for some reason the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. With no other change, with identical prices, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.
We systems-heads love that story because itâs an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system. Itâs not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing loop. Itâs a NEW LOOP, delivering feedback to a place where it wasnât going before.
A more recent example is the Toxic Release Inventory â the U.S. governmentâs requirement, instituted in 1986, that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly every year. Suddenly every community could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of âsafeâ levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. Theyâve continued to go down since, not so much because of citizen outrage as because of corporate shame. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to âget off that list.â
Compelling feedback. Suppose taxpayers got to specify on their return forms what government services their tax payments must be spent on. (Radical democracy!) Suppose any town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river had to put it immediately DOWNSTREAM from its own outflow pipe. Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on his/her lawn. Suppose (this is an old one) the politicians who declare war were required to spend that war in the front lines.
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
The most stunning thing living systems and some social systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological systems that power is called evolution. In human economies itâs called technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo itâs called self-organization.
Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list â adding completely new physical structures, such as brains or wings or computers â adding new negative or positive loops, or new rules. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. The human immune system has the power to develop new responses to (some kinds of ) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system â its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters â arises.
Another of Jay Forresterâs famous systems sayings goes: it doesnât matter how the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of the society about what a âfairâ distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the rules say, by fair means or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules, actual tax payments will push right up against the accepted idea of âfairness.â
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions â unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them â constitute that societyâs paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. There is a difference between nouns and verbs. Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can âownâ land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good, people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But thereâs nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter â they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 <http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/#seven> has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You donât waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.
A Final Caution
Back from the sublime to the ridiculous, from enlightenment to caveats. There is so much that has to be said to qualify this list. It is tentative and its order is slithery. There are exceptions to every item that can move it up or down the order of leverage. Having had the list percolating in my subconscious for years has not transformed me into a Superwoman. The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it â thatâs why societies have to rub out truly enlightened beings.
Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.
This helps a lot Michal. I imagine I'll be referring to this list for some time to come. Particularly # 1. (if you never hear from me again...youâll know why.)
Thanks so much,
Steve