Recently I read this great article. More engineering leaders should know about this. So I am sharing my notes.

leverage points to intervene in a system

https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long-term delays
Delays in feedback loops are critical determinants of system behavior. They are common causes of oscillations. If you’re trying to adjust a system state to your goal, but you only receive delayed information about what the system state is, you will overshoot and undershoot. Same if your information is timely, but your response isn’t.
The time it takes for a price to adjust to a supply-demand imbalance.
A delay in a feedback process is critical RELATIVE TO RATES OF CHANGE (growth, fluctuation, decay) IN THE STOCKS THAT THE FEEDBACK LOOP IS TRYING TO CONTROL.
And that’s why slowing economic growth is a greater leverage point in Forrester’s world model than faster technological development or freer market prices. Those are attempts to speed up the rate of adjustment. But the world’s physical capital plant, its factories and boilers, the concrete manifestations of its working technologies, can only change so fast, even in the face of new prices or new ideas — and prices and ideas don’t change instantly either, not through a whole global culture. There’s more leverage in slowing the system down so technologies and prices can keep up with it, than there is in wishing the delays away
The more the price — the central piece of information signaling both producers and consumers — is kept clear, unambiguous, timely, and truthful, the more smoothly markets will operate. Prices that reflect full costs will tell consumers how much they can actually afford and will reward efficient producers.
A negative feedback loop is self-correcting; a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing.
Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of system malfunction
There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions.
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.
For technology the raw material is the body of understanding science has accumulated and stored in libraries and in the brains of its practitioners. The source of variety is human creativity (whatever THAT is) and the selection mechanism can be whatever the market will reward, or whatever governments and foundations will fund, or whatever meets human needs.
When you understand the power of system self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than economists worship technology
Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning. Cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.
But the thoroughness with which the public discourse in the U.S. and even the world has been changed since Reagan is testimony to the high leverage of articulating, meaning, repeating, standing up for, insisting upon new system goals.
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.
Paradigms are the sources of systems.
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.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 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 don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.
It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

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