Donella Meadows’s twelve places to intervene in a system, ranked from adjusting its numbers, the weakest, to changing the paradigm the system rests on, the strongest.
Extended definition
Donella Meadows set out the list in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1999), expanding a shorter version first published in Whole Earth in 1997. In rising order of leverage, the places are:
- 12. Constants, parameters and numbers, such as taxes and standards.
- 11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
- 10. The structure of material stocks and flows.
- 9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
- 8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they correct.
- 7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
- 6. The structure of information flows: who has access to information and who does not.
- 5. The rules of the system, such as incentives and constraints.
- 4. The power to add, change, evolve or self-organize system structure.
- 3. The goals of the system.
- 2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.
- 1. The power to transcend paradigms.
Meadows observed that people push hardest on the places near the bottom of the list, where leverage is least, and that the places near the top often work against intuition.
Her treatment of structure as the source of behavior runs through the wiki’s System Determines Behavior.
Related terms
Sources
- Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute.
Provenance
Stub entry created 27 September 2026 in the Quartz Sanitation run, to give a page to links from the Donella Meadows page that pointed at no page. Written from Meadows’s published essay. First-pass entry: sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents.