Four Approaches to Changing Systems

Where do you start to change a complex system? Even if it’s diagrammed out, the situation can be a baffling monolith without obvious entry points.

Donella Meadows suggests 12 different points where leverage can be applied in Chapter 6 of Thinking in Systems. I’ve grouped them into four categories for simplicity. The additional tips and detail she discusses well worth reading the book by themselves – although they’ll make more sense if you start at the beginning.

Either list is only for inspiration. Meadows admits that after decades of thinking about systems it still wasn’t easy finding the actual points in a real system, but this is a summary of the framework she came up with.

Change the details

These are the practical things that are easiest to geta hold on mentally, but they also have the least effect. Any particular number will generally fall in this category. Other basic things include whether you have a buffer and it’s neither too big nor to small, if there’s a bottleneck in a physical process, and in the length of the time you set a delay. For some systems one or more of these will be fixed instead of variable. 

Change the processes within the system

There is more leverage in the information and control portions of the system. One is to put in place, or properly maintain, emergency response mechanisms that actually provide balancing feedback, restraining runaway disasters. Changing the rate of growth, or any place where having more gives you more, can often have an effect. So can communicating more, or different, information about what is going on to the people involved.

Change the identity of the system

The way the system is defined makes a difference as well. What are the rules in place and has anyone tried to rethink them or find hidden ones? Can you increase or decrease how much the system organizes itself instead of being dependant on a controlling hand? How about checking the goal. Is it what you thnk it is?

Change the paradigms

The most powerful points of change involve mind-set. Unfortunately, these can also require the most effort to alter! What paradigm, what shared idea, does the entire system operate within? And once you answer that question, try moving beyond it to a place where no paradigm is correct and you can select which one is most useful at any given time.

Push in the right direction

Did these feel right to you? Then you had already developed some intuition about where to find leverage points. Now is when you need to be extra careful. Apparently many of them are counterintuitive. The direction you think you should push to make a change is the wrong one and will produce the opposite result that you intend.

Do you have a story about trying to change a system? How did it go?

This post is the eighth in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems. Also read my other posts:

1. Book Review: Thinking in Systems
2. What is a System?
3. Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
4. Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
5. Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
6. Why Systems Surprise Us
7. The Same Story Retold
8. Four Approaches to Changing Systems
9. Dancing with Living Systems