Start Pushing The Right Buttons
Spoiler: they are not in the places most leaders spend their time.
In 1999, Donella Meadows published a list that made a lot of smart people feel quietly stupid.
It wasn’t complicated. Actually it was obvious in retrospect, and nobody had been able to articulate it so far.
She had spent decades studying complex systems like economies, ecosystems, organisations, cities, and kept noticing the same pattern: the interventions happened at the wrong place. People pull the levers closest to them without checking if it actually helps, feel productive, and then wonder why nothing ever changes.
Her list had twelve leverage points. Places to intervene in a system, ranked by how much they actually make a difference.
The least effective ones are where almost everyone spends their time.
The most effective ones are almost never where anyone first looks.
I read this for the first time and immediately thought about every strategic planning session I had ever attended. Then I needed to sit quietly for a few minutes and reconsider some of my life choices.
What a leverage point actually is
A leverage point is a place in a system where a small change produces a large shift in behavior.
A change in how the whole system operates.
We are quite good at finding places to intervene, but are considerably less good at finding places where intervention actually does something lasting or relevant.
We love tweaking, fiddling, changing things that will have absolutely no impact in the problems we’re dealing with, but we feel good about doing so. Instant gratification.
If we want to actually make something change, we have to act with precision, where we can force things to go the way we want them.
Meadows was precise about this: the higher the leverage, the more the system resists the change. Which explains why effective interventions are always painful, harder to make, harder to sustain, and considerably harder to get approved by your manager before lunch.
The four leverage points worth understanding
Meadows listed twelve. Most writing about her work covers the bottom half: numbers, flows, buffers, because they are concrete and comfortable and do not require anyone to have an uncomfortable conversation.
The ones that really impact systems are further up the list. Four of them deserve your attention.
Information flows
Meadows placed one of her sharpest observations here: missing information flows are among the most common causes of system failure.
Notice that we are not talking about wrong information, we are talking about missing information. The data that should exist and simply does not.
When you need to make a decision and cannot see its consequence in real time, the feedback loop that should correct your behavior never forms. You keep making the same call, and the system keeps producing the same outcome. Everyone looks confused because the decision actually looks good, but it’s blind. Yet hardly ever someone questions the structure underneath.
A concrete example: A Substack creator chasing posting frequency with no visibility into which content actually converts followers into buyers. They optimise for volume. Engagement looks fine but revenue stays flat. When reviewing the year’s results, the cost shows up as “grew an audience and built nothing with it”.
Meadows argued that delivering the right information to the right people at the moment they need it changes behavior faster and more durably than almost any rule or incentive you could design around it.
The leverage is not in the information itself, but it is in who receives it, when, and whether they are in a position to act on it.
I have watched teams build elaborate new processes to solve problems that would have disappeared entirely if one person had simply received a weekly number they were not previously seeing. The process was a monument to not asking where the signal was missing.
I have also been the person who built one of those processes. The monument was quite detailed.
Rules
Rules define the boundaries of what a system can do. They carry more leverage than most people give them credit for, which is exactly why changing them is so politically difficult.
Meadows was specific: the rules of a system define its degrees of freedom. Change the rules and you change what is possible inside the system, not just what is likely.
This is why regulatory change produces such enormous domino effects. It is not adjusting a dial. It is redrawing the whole boundary of the playing field.
Inside businesses, rules operate the same way. Who can approve what, what requires sign-off, what is allowed to fail and what absolutely cannot. These rules shape behavior more reliably than any culture initiative, because they operate whether or not anyone is paying attention to them.
The leverage point is in identifying which existing rules are producing unintended behavior and have become invisible because everyone stopped questioning them a long time ago.
Most businesses carry rules nobody remembers the origin of, that everybody works around, that are shaping behavior in ways nobody has mapped. Those are the ones worth finding. They are usually load-bearing in ways that will surprise you.
Incentives
Incentives tell the system what to optimise for. They are extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily easy to get wrong.
Meadows understood that incentives define what the system considers success. Change what the system rewards and you change what the system produces, often in ways that genuinely surprise the people who designed the incentive in the first place.
The classic failure: you measure what is easy to measure and reward what you can measure, which causes the system to optimise for the measure rather than the outcome the measure was supposed to represent.
Parents will optimise for getting the kid to sleep fast using whatever works tonight, with no visibility into the habit they are building over six months. The short-term metric is great, kid is asleep at 7:30pm. The 2am wake-up cycle is the bill arriving later.
Sales teams will game quarterly targets at the expense of customer relationships, hospitals will optimise for throughput metrics while care quality drifts, developers will close tickets faster by writing code that will create twice as many tickets in six months.
Meadows’ point was that incentives need to be designed at the level of the goal, not the activity. But goals are harder to measure and considerably easier to argue about in a room full of stakeholders, so we ignore that and design on the wrong level.
This is uncomfortable because redesigning incentives means admitting that the current incentives are producing the current results. The system is working exactly as designed.
I have sat in rooms where this realisation arrived visibly on someone's face mid-sentence. It is one of the more interesting things to witness as long as it is not your face.
Goals
This is the highest leverage point on the list that most people will realistically touch, and it is almost always the most underestimated.
The goal of a system is what the system actually optimises for when pressure arrives and trade-offs have to be made.
Meadows was direct about this: if you want to understand the real goal of a system, watch what it does, not what it says.
A company that says its goal is customer satisfaction but consistently trades customer experience for short-term margin when the two conflict has a real goal of short-term margin. The stated goal is just furniture.
Changing the real goal of a system is the highest leverage intervention most leaders can make, and the most resisted. Because the real goal is usually serving someone’s interest, and changing it means asking that someone to accept a different outcome. That conversation does not happen in a workshop, in a townhall, in an official meeting. It happens in a closed room with very few people and no slides.
This is why genuine strategic pivots are so rare and so difficult. They are are political exercises. Systems do not give up their goals without a fight, because goals belong to people before they belong to organisations.
Why people avoid high-leverage interventions
Meadows noticed something worth sitting with: the higher the leverage point, the harder the system pushes back against changing it.
Information flows are invisible and politically neutral until you make them visible, at which point someone always has a reason why that particular metric should not be shared with that particular person.
Rules feel settled until you question them. That’s the moment the person who benefits from the rule appears to explain, at some length, why it exists for very good reasons that trace back to an incident in 2004.
Incentives feel fair until you change them, at which point the people optimised for the current structure feel personally attacked. In a sense, they are.
Goals feel agreed upon until you challenge them, at which point you are no longer having a strategy conversation. You are having a power conversation, and the agenda does not reflect that.
That’s the system behaving exactly as Meadows predicted. It is the system protecting its current structure. Understanding that makes the resistance easier to work with, even if it does not make it easier to enjoy.
What to do with this
Before adding another process, launching another initiative, or writing another policy, ask four questions.
Who is missing a signal they need to make better decisions, and how quickly can you get it to them?
Which rules are producing behavior nobody intended, and how long has it been since anyone questioned them?
What is the system actually rewarding, and is that the same thing as what you want it to produce?
What does this system optimise for when a trade-off is forced, and is that the real goal or just an inherited one?
You do not need to answer all four. One honest answer to one of these questions will tell you more about where to intervene than a full strategic review conducted over two offsite days with a very expensive facilitator.
I say this as someone who has attended several of those offsites. The catering is usually good. The leverage points remain mostly untouched.
One next move
Take the most stubborn problem you’re dealing with right now. The one that survives every fix.
Ask which of the four it is: an information problem, a rules problem, an incentives problem, or a goals problem.
If you are genuinely not sure, it is probably a goals problem wearing one of the other three as a disguise. They usually are.
Happy building,
— R.