Weaving support networks from leverage points
Fires, floods, women, immigrants, mental health and climate change - they're all connected.
When I began Regenerative Conversations I had planned out my first few editions. I had this one mostly written in advance. But the last few weeks have been tough for me, and the confidence in what I’d previously written was no longer there. A long time friend suddenly died tragically, my state is on fire, friends in New York are flooded, COVID is not slowing, I ponder what more I can do to support Afghan refugees, and I can’t begin to describe my anger towards the rights being taken from women in the US and around the world. I found myself rewriting and rewriting and rewriting this edition. This is a reminder to us as designers - it is our responsibility to listen, respond, and revise as things change. It’s also a reminder to ourselves to practice self-compassion, as I have to tell myself that it will be OK if this is posted a week after I had hoped. While everything I just listed may seem like an overwhelming amount of unrelated events, they are all connected.
Our world is overwhelming, and sometimes it’s hard to know where to put our energy. In shifting from sustainable to regenerative we look for ways to restore, to rejuvenate, to increase the positive energy in ourselves and our communities. In our everyday lives and in design, we often look for what we can do or create to have the most impact. Identifying leverage points is one framework for knowing where to intervene in a system that will have the most impact. Donella Meadows eloquently argued for systems thinking throughout her career and introduced the 12 leverage points to intervene on a system back in 1997. Her work has always been part of how I teach designers to think about systems. If we think of all of our systems, our planet, being on the left of this teeter-totter pictured below, leverage points are the places we can apply pressure, trying to create change, to move the teeter-totter to be in balance. The levers immediately to the right of the pivot point, while much easier to implement, have the least impact and are the least likely to put us in balance. The levers at the other end, while much harder to implement, are the ones that can have greater impact.
The first levers (which Meadows numbers in descending order starting with 12) are described as constants, parameters, buffers, stocks, and flows. If we think about this in design terms, it’s the easy fixes of swapping virgin paper for recycled paper, or compostable packaging in place of plastic. Choosing the “less bad” option. The next group of levers addresses information flows, patterns, and behavior. Designers here are often in the UX/ UI space - getting us to change how we use things or designing products for longevity. Here better behaviors with better products are making a change. The next group of levers looks at rules and social norms. Thinking about this in terms of sustainability, it is where we see policies and regulations. Changing what a large corporation/ municipality/ state can or can’t do (or can and can not make) will have a far bigger impact if the change is made at the source and we don’t rely on the individual consumer. This is also the thinking behind Maines’ recent legislation shifting recycling costs from individuals to manufacturers. We can see examples of social norms driving a push for legislative changes, that then in return have regenerated more social norms on behaviors; the levers all working together. These social levers are all harder to change than simply swapping a number. And also, they aren’t the end solution. On the far end of the teeter-totter, we see where the real power to change the system lies - changing mindsets and eventually paradigms, to an entirely different way of interacting with the world. This is the space we need to work and design for - a mindset where reusable bags and recycling responsibility isn’t even necessary because we’ve cut our consumption, shifted to circular economies, and value self-worth instead of net worth. If we were in a paradigm that truly valued nature, humankind, and well-being, over wealth and status, then we wouldn’t be a place of fires and floods, famine and migration, pandemic and political upheaval. Our mindsets need to shift on a mass scale to be regenerative and restorative. 1
Meadows' leverage diagram falls short because it depicts a one-dimensional linear view of the convoluted intersectional society we live in. We can not change mindsets by looking only at one dimension. As I mention in Burning Ourselves Out is Burning the Planet Out, we live in an intersectional world - gender, sex, race, economic class, disability, ability, religion, location, and others all overlap and intersect with us as individuals, groups, and cultures. Every single one of these leverage points, insects with a plurality of other teeter-totters and leverage points.
I came to realize that part of my struggle in writing (and rewriting and rewriting) about leverage points and impact this week was because we can not look at anything in our current situation as unrelated issues, just as we can’t look at levers one at a time. Many have articulated that the recent hijacking of women's rights in Texas has little to do with where on the timeline from pre-conception to birth an abortion hypothetically takes place, but power and trust in a woman's ability to decide for herself, for her health, and her community. Taking away this right is not only detrimental to the individual and collective female population, but also the climate. Limiting a woman’s right to education, health care, and family planning has led to higher populations in many poorer countries (and also communities in the US). Many of those same countries are currently evacuating because of climate, humanitarian, or political disasters (often caused by our overconsumption and greed). They are seeking refugee status and here in the US, many people remain anti-immigrant, trying to pretend we didn’t play a part in the very reasons others are fleeing. These issues have strained mental health systems and stigmatized personal experiences. It’s an example of the interconnected mess our systems are tangled up in. Women's rights, education, immigration, mental health, climate change, sexism, racism - all connected.
In actuality we won’t fix the system by designing for a single leverage point or lever. Rather we need to connect leverage points, designing support structures and networks that lift each other up. We need to lift up women, immigrants, those struggling with mental illness, those who are suffering from sorting our trash, who are manufacturing our cheap goods and inhaling our pollution.
We need to look intersectionally, holistically at how these levers and leverage points are woven together. Project Drawdown is one example that has rigorously studied the holistic effects of our global socio-economics on the climate and come up with detailed solutions to “drawdown” our carbon emissions. The Drawdown Framework for Climate Solutions looks at reducing the sources of our consumption, supporting where we sink waste and improving society as a collective. If we look on a large scale for what would significantly have an impact on the climate crisis - it’s not shoes made from recycled bottles, tote bags from tires, clothes from recycled fibers, or any of the pretty things that we are sold as “sustainable design” (the products that only use those first levers in Meadows scale). It’s solutions like changing how we use cement, redesigning refrigeration and cooling mechanisms, global education to get people out of poverty, reducing food waste, and others. Last I checked, there aren’t many designers currently working to make alternative cement sexy or trying to market alternative cooling. Consistently at the top of Project Drawdown’s list in drawing down our carbon emissions is educating girls and family planning. Drawdown estimates that doing so could avoid “85.42 gigatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions from 2020 to 2050. It is assumed that this impact is a result of a combination of providing voluntary reproductive health resources and universal access to an equal quality of education to boys and girls.” This is a far greater impact on the climate than any new trendy eco product. It’s also something that will take time, collective energy, and work across many levers.
Changing mindsets and shifting paradigms is hard, the change is slow, it takes mass buy-in and mass change. Educating girls and providing them with access to health care is a much larger task than simply redesigning some packaging to be more “sustainable”. For us educators, it’s not something that can neatly be packaged into a semester-long project. This work also can not be done alone (which sometimes disappoints those looking to be a design star). To do the work requires weaving multiple leverage points to support, to regenerate and to prosper.
If we are stuck thinking that sustainability is about turning lights off, mushroom packaging, designer jumpsuits made from hemp, and all the other small individual levers, then we are in trouble. We also can not leave the work to those in the middle levers of policy and regulation. We need to design for the intersectional leverage points that will have that will change behaviors, change cultures, and change mindsets. The levers that when woven together show us the direct correlation between providing women with education, health care, and choice; the swarms of migrants desperately seeking a new home; mental health and personal well-being; the fires and the floods. We need to empower people to understand that the climate crisis is deeply rooted in these convoluted intersectional systems and take action to leverage their power to move us all. The more people who can see this, can understand the connections, the greater chance we will have to balance the big giant lever holding us all.
Questions for next steps…
Consider what leverage points you can change in your own life and work? What are your constants & parameters, loops, rules and behaviors? How can they be more regenerative?
Who else can you connect with to work with you? How will they support you? How will you support them?
How can you add regenerative energy to your support system? Who and what are the people, places and things you depend on - both those you know personally and those you don’t.
What might a conversation to change mindsets look like? Invite some friends to have one.
I hear there’s a march coming up on October 2nd.
I cut this example for length, but if you’re still reading and want more, here’s another example that maps leverage points in the design process…
When I tell people I teach sustainable design, some think I teach how to make reusable tote bags, because this is one of the most popular images we are sold (literally at every checkout stand). This is not at all what I teach. But I came to use the bag as a metaphor to unpack leverage points in systems. Walking through a design process we can map different materials, uses, rules, and behaviors related to bags on Meadows’ scale. Thinking about the single-use plastic bag, if we change what it’s made out of or how it’s made we’re changing constants and parameters, material flows. But this only has a small impact as it doesn’t change our behavior. And in some cases, this can have a false sense of impact as well. Bioplastics in many instances aren’t composted, which is why some communities, including Marin California, recently introduced legislation to phase our bioplastics. If we start to reuse bags we can look at delays in the system. Designing it so it clips to your belt or backpack looks at user behavior in trying not to forget it. But even reusable bags have their convoluted problems, many of which were recently articulated by Grace Cook in her New York Times piece The Cotton Tote Crisis. Charging people to buy a bag vs discounting for bringing a bag can get into loops and information. Changing the rules so that single-use plastic bags are banned, can also try to address the problem. But here again, we can see this fail if we think that’s the end, and don’t keep going to get to mindsets. Many large stores in states that no longer allow single-use plastic bags have found loopholes. Stores can “sell” you a “reusable” bag each time you check out (which realistically looks a lot like simply charging 10 cents for a plastic bag). These bags are classified as “reusable” because they are thicker than a single-use bag. But because our behaviors and mindsets about shopping haven’t changed, people continue to use these bags as if they are single-use, and as a result, in some instances, we’re actually using more plastic than before. So maybe you just simply don’t need a bag at all. Maybe it’s rethinking what, when, why, where, how, from whom do we buy our goods? Designing to change mindsets and paradigms to live in a world where bags and recycling responsibility isn’t even necessary because we’ve cut our consumption, shifted to circular economies, and value self-worth instead of net worth.