 Systems
thinking is an interesting and disciplined way to look at how things
work, and how to bring about change. Peter Senge may be the guru of
systems thinking, but Dana Meadows was its master. The late Ms.
Meadows, author of The Limits to
Growth, founder of the Sustainability
Institute and writer of The Global Citizen column
until her death two years ago, wrote a remarkable
paper for Whole Earth magazine in 1997 that described how to change
anything by using one of
ten system leverage points, which she listed in increasing order of
power (and also increasing order of difficulty). Here is a summary of
these points in layman's terms, with some examples of how they could be
used to bring about remarkable change.
- Change the
Measurements & Formulas: What gets measured gets done, and
formulas powerfully affect human behaviour. Examples: Ecological
taxation, which would measure and tax resource consumption and
waste, replacing taxes on employment and clean production, would
radically alter our economy. Higher prices for energy would produce
cleaner cars and less commuter-dependent communities. Metrics like a Well-being
Index instead of GDP would change how we assess government
performance and hence what governments do.
- Change the
Inventories and Flow Rates of Resources: When you increase
inventories, you create surpluses and buffers against future loss; when
you decrease them, you increase agility and openness to innovation.
When you speed up the flow, the impact, for better or worse, increases
accordingly. Examples: Greater inventory of perpetually-protected lands
would halt biodiversity decline. Faster flow of weapons exports would
increase capacity for terrorism.
- Regulate Negative
Impacts and Vicious Cycles: You can slow down, or even reverse,
a vicious cycle by regulating what feeds it. Slowdown in approval for
GM foods would, in the system chart above, slow the vicious cycle of
food production, population, and land use degradation. In Story of B, Daniel Quinn makes a
compelling argument that curtailing human food production would quickly
and humanely solve the
problems of human overpopulation, poverty and famine. And regulating
maximum work hours would reduce unemployment, family alienation and
stress-related work problems.
- Sustain Virtous
Cycles: A virtuous cycle, like a vicious cycle, is two or more
forces that reinforce and perpetuate each other, except that the
results of a virtuous cycle are desirable. For example, a falling birth
rate will produce fewer women of child-bearing age and hence lead to a
further reduction in birth rate, in a self-perpetuating manner.
Providing further incentives to have smaller families, instead of
larger families as many governments now do, could sustain this virtuous
cycle instead of undermining it.
- Provide New
Information: Many problems are due to lack of awareness of
problems or their causes rather than lack of will to change them.
Despite the loony Lomborgians and the Bush head-in-the-sand denyers,
the scientific information showing how human activity has caused global
warming, and showing the future impact of its continuance, has been
essential to achieving consensus like the Kyoto Accord, the first small
step to solving the problem. If every community was required to send a
list of its top polluters to every resident, and publish it in the
local paper, much more action would be taken against them.
- Change the Rules, or
Who Makes and Enforces Them: Laws and regulation, incentives,
and moral codes powerfully affect behaviour. If so-called 'free trade'
rules were set in open-door sessions by representative citizen groups
instead of closeted business pressure groups and the governments they
fund, and if these rules specified that 'free trade' was only allowed
in products and services that cannot reasonably be produced locally,
then WTO and NAFTA would be forces for the public good instead of
creators of massive inequity, insane economic policy, environmental
destruction, unemployment, misery and social unrest.
- Create a New System
That Makes the Old One Obsolete: What Ms. Meadows called self-organization entails walking
away, opting out of an old dysfunctional system and building something
completely new. This is the essence of human ingenuity and innovation,
and is consistent with the model I have suggested for New Collaborative
Enterprises. When the entertainment industry attempted to price-gouge
consumers and sell them less, lower quality product, many consumers,
especially the young who were most able to see the dysfunction, simply
opted out and traded among themselves, employing new technology and
vastly increasing the quantity of content available to them by
including independent artists and even home made product in their
self-organized production and distribution system.
- Change the Goals:
If the objective of the system is changed, and provided the new
objective is clearly articulated, understood, accepted and achievable,
massive buy-in can be achieved quickly and everything mobilized in new
ways. Hitler's restatement of the objective of the German state is an
example. Walmart's restatement of the objective of a retailer from
selling products to leasing shelf-space is a more positive one. The
Reagan-Bush I restatement of the role of government from providing
service to doing only what is absolutely necessary is arguably the
cultural underpinning that hads allowed the Bush II damage that now
threatens irreparable damage to America's institutions and its very
social fabric. If corporate charters were changed to make their
objective the well-being of their employees and communities, instead of
the maximization of profits for their shareholders, our whole economy
would be transformed.
- Change the Mindset:
All of the other elements of systems listed above are driven by what is
perceived by the system's stakeholders as 'fair', 'good', 'reasonable',
or 'right'. If you can change that mindset, everything else changes as
a result. If people equated taxes with services (something that
provides a 'good') rather than something inherently bad, or if people
were to begin to see 'growth' as dangerous, unsustainable, instead of
good and necessary, if people changed their mindset and saw land as a
shared resource for all life on the planet, instead of something that
belongs to humans, if people began to recognize that animals are
living, feeling, sentient creatures and not 'property' to be enslaved
by man, then that would change the goals, the rules, the whole system
by which we live. It would change everything.
How do you change the mindset? In the words of Ms. Meadows, citing
Thomas Kuhn for her inspiration:
You keep pointing at the
anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you come yourself, loudly,
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.
The tenth and final leverage point requires a bit of a leap of faith
(at least it did for me). It says: Be open, yourself,
to new ideas and ways of thinking. Be able to change.
Acquire an ability to let go of things that no longer work, no longer
make sense. Perhaps she's paraphrasing Ghandi when he said, simply, Be the Change.
(Thanks to Professor Jim McGee -- who I cited earlier this week for his excellent article on KM -- for
bringing this to my attention)
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MADE IN CANADA
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