I’m very happy to meet another Donella Meadows fan 😄 I first came across her “points of leverage in a system” concept, and the mental model of the lever, a few years back, and I love it. But one thing I’ve been pondering as Ive gotten older and slightly less Quixotic is about those two juicy points at the end of the lever- mindset shifts and paradigm shifts. I think a lot of us put a lot of effort in the mindset shift space based on our own paradigmatic understanding of the system we’re attempting to change. But if our model of the system is even slightly off, our actions can have immense unintended consequences- who knows where that boulder will roll off to 😂 So maybe there is value in focusing on the leverage points closer to the fulcrum, to more accurately understanding the (ever-shifting!) nature of the system itself. Often, the people whose minds you are attempting to change have a completely different paradigm, and it’s not necessarily wrong- they often understand aspects of the system we share with them that we do not yet.
I’m very happy to meet another Donella Meadows fan 😄 I first came across her “points of leverage in a system” concept, and the mental model of the lever, a few years back, and I love it. But one thing I’ve been pondering as Ive gotten older and slightly less Quixotic is about those two juicy points at the end of the lever- mindset shifts and paradigm shifts. I think a lot of us put a lot of effort in the mindset shift space based on our own paradigmatic understanding of the system we’re attempting to change. But if our model of the system is even slightly off, our actions can have immense unintended consequences- who knows where that boulder will roll off to 😂 So maybe there is value in focusing on the leverage points closer to the fulcrum, to more accurately understanding the (ever-shifting!) nature of the system itself. Often, the people whose minds you are attempting to change have a completely different paradigm, and it’s not necessarily wrong- they often understand aspects of the system we share with them that we do not yet.