#leverage points

[cognitivejustice]

"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.

Merging to Survive

As the fossil fuel industry consolidates into an ever smaller number of vast firms, new strategic openings for disruption emerge.

[protoslacker]

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.

Donella Meadows at Donella Meadows Institute. Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Leverage points are important not only for understanding what is happening so quickly with this Trump Administration--corporate coup d'état--but also where we might intervene against it.

[protoslacker]

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.

Carl Pope in The Huffington Post.The Most Dangerous Bill You’ve Never Heard Of Just Passed The House

[censemaking]

When Did Complexity Change Its Meaning?

When did complexity change its meaning? #complexity #change

Saying something is complex was once an admission we didn’t have expertise, now it’s a cover for not committing to something. What does it mean when we undermine the meaningfulness of the term complexity? If you were involved in business operations or social innovation 15 years ago, you might remember when people rarely used “complex” or “complexity.” The reason was that, back then, saying…

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[asg-stuff]

The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction. (via Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project)

[bsahely]

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

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

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

By Donella Meadows~

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…

View On WordPress

[munsreadingmaterials]

[stelioverzera]

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.

Donella Meadows