Twelve leverage points | Peace Couple

After re-reading Donella Meadow‘s essay, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, I continued to her other wonderful essay, Dancing with systems. She describes why the best way to interact with a system is to dance with it:

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide-awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

But there it was, the message emerging from every computer model we made. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity–our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

Meadows provides a list of ways (with explanations) of how to dance with systems: Continue reading Dancing with systems →

At the time, I had already been following the writings of My recent post about Donnella Meadows books being on sale in January prompted me to re-read her essay, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. In the essay she explains in ascending order of effectiveness the ways to effect change in a system. I was particularly by her number 2 suggestion: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. I had to read the following paragraph from that section aloud to the Duchess:

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing out the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep speaking louder and 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 change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded. Continue reading How to change, or transcend, paradigms →