Leverage (Systems Thinking)

8. Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.

Some have called systems thinking the “new dismal science” because it teaches that most obvious solutions don’t work—at best, they improve matters in the short run, only to make things worse in the long run. But there is another side to the story. For systems thinking also shows that small, well-focused actions can sometimes produce significant, enduring improvements, if they’re in the right place. Systems thinkers refer to this principle as “leverage.”

Tackling a difficult problem is often a matter of seeing where the high leverage lies, a change which—with a minimum of effort—would lead to lasting, significant improvement.

The only problem is that high-leverage changes are usually highly nonobvious to most participants in the system. They are not “close in time and space” to obvious problem symptoms. This is what makes life interesting.

Buckminster Fuller had a wonderful illustration of leverage that also served as his metaphor for the principle of leverage—the “trim tab.” A trim tab is a small “rudder on the rudder” of a ship. It is only a fraction the size of the rudder. Its function is to make it easier to turn the rudder, which, then, makes it easier to turn the ship. The larger the ship, the more important is the trim tab because a large volume of water flowing around the rudder can make it difficult to turn.

But what makes the trim tab such a marvelous metaphor for leverage is not just its effectiveness, but its nonobviousness. If you knew absolutely nothing about hydrodynamics and you saw a large oil tanker plowing through the high seas, where would you push if you wanted the tanker to turn left? You would probably go to the bow and try to push it to the left. Do you have any idea how much force it requires to turn an oil tanker going fifteen knots by pushing on its bow? The leverage lies in going to the stern and pushing the tail end of the tanker to the right, in order to turn the front to the left. This, of course, is the job of the rudder. But in what direction does the rudder turn in order to get the ship’s stern to turn to the right? Why, to the left, of course.

You see, ships turn because their rear end is “sucked around.” The rudder, by being turned into the oncoming water, compresses the water flow and creates a pressure differential. The pressure differential pulls the stern in the opposite direction as the rudder is turned. This is exactly the same way that an airplane flies: the airplane’s wing creates a pressure differential and the airplane is “sucked” upward.

The trim tab—this very small device that has an enormous effect on the huge ship—does the same for the rudder. When it is turned to one side or the other, it compresses the water flowing around the rudder and creates a small pressure differential that “sucks the rudder” in the desired direction. But, if you want the rudder to turn to the left, what direction do you turn the trim tab?—to the right, naturally.

The entire system—the ship, the rudder, and the trim tab—is marvelously engineered through the principle of leverage. Yet, its functioning is totally nonobvious if you do not understand the force of hydrodynamics.

So, too, are the high-leverage changes in human systems nonobvious until we understand the forces at play in those systems.

There are no simple rules for finding high-leverage changes, but there are ways of thinking that make it more likely. Learning to see underlying structures rather than events is a starting point; each of the systems archetypes developed below suggests areas of high-and low-leverage change.

Thinking in terms of processes of change rather than snapshots is another.