“We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”
~Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
What do you think of Donella Meadows’ leverage points for systems change?
Donella Meadows is formidable. Nevertheless, my perpetual concern with any model is - how to implement it? How to put it to work for some useful purpose?
What that in mind, an inventory of potential leverage points is certainly useful. But nothing much can come of it until particular systems are defined and specified. For anything complex, this will generally require decomposition into subsystems.
For example, I generally consider changing “modernity” as a comprehensive system to be overly vague and not affording leverage for any specific change. It’s tempting to just escalate to the extreme end of Meadows’s scale and set out to change the modern “paradigm” or “mindset”, but what would that look like really? If any one of us trades in “modernity” for some other paradigm or mindset, how exactly will our lives then be? (Will we still be posting on the 2R online forum, for example?)
My interest is more in human-scaled systems changes. Things like how do we eat? How do we travel? How do we construct dwellings? How do we conduct conversations? What do we plant in our gardens? How do we educate children? And so on. Any one of these topics might be mapped in systems terms, and if change is desired in any of those systems, then exploring Meadows’s leverage points may be of use.
On the larger topic of metacrisis or polycrisis response, there is another thread going already. My question there again was human-scaled - who is the responder?