#leverage points

"The consolidation of fossil fuel firms is creating an ever more fragile and exposed system... Every delay, lawsuit, blockade, loan cancellation, insurance exit, regulatory pushback, or community opposition recalibrates the arithmetic of risk... The more disruption occurs, the more financial models adapt to expect it. This means that every disruption is effective, whether or not it stops a project outright. Even when it looks like we’re losing, we’re shifting the risk landscape.

Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. This idea is not unique to systems analysis — it’s embedded in legend. The silver bullet, the trimtab, the miracle cure, the secret passage, the magic password, the single hero who turns the tide of history. The nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles. We not only want to believe that there are leverage points, we want to know where they are and how to get our hands on them. Leverage points are points of power.

The bill, called the REINS Act, requires that any future major regulation adopted by an Executive Agency — say a new toxic chemical standard required by the recently enacted Chemical Safety Act, or a new consumer protection rule about some innovative but untested kind of food additive — must be approved by a specific resolution in each House of Congress within 70 days to take effect.

When Did Complexity Change Its Meaning?

"Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System" by Donella Meadows

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.