Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in "Leverage points." These are places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
Attach your account to a thousand others and let the bank create loans as a function of your combined and fluctuating deposits, link a thousand of those banks into a federal reserve system - and you begin to see how simple stocks and flows, plumbed together, make up systems way too complex to figure out.
Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which the faucets turn, but if they're the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information and goals and rules, the system isn't going to change much.
The most stunning thing living systems and some social systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors.
The diversity-destroying consequence of the push for control, that demonstrates why the goal of a system is a leverage point superior to the self-organizing ability of a system.
From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems.
Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole.
Contexts
- Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, donellameadows.org
- Shared with us by 📝Danielle Diamond