12 Levers for Systemic Change

The more I engage in civic life, the more I realize how important it is to think about things in terms of systems. We don’t live in this neat, machine-like world of compartmentalized rule and order but rather in a constantly evolving complex world of vast sophisticated interconnected and interrelated systems. There are at least 4 big meta-systems at play—Nature, the Economy, Politics, Culture—and if you want to understand how things really work you have to understand not only what these systems are doing but also how they are impacting each other. I’ve become convinced that just as it’s true that if you want to change the world, you need to start by changing yourself, it’s equally true that you must get serious about understanding systems thinking.

The other morning I came across the best framework I’ve ever seen for understanding systems change. I was reading “P.S. You Should Know…,” a newsletter which I highly recommend, written by my friend Pavel Sokolovsky. Pavel is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer with an interesting story, rather unique perspectives, and an expansive intellectual curiosity. Each week he curates a list of fascinating articles, essays, and links of all the things he’s been thinking about and researching. Pavel has such a wide-ranging mind, I always learn something new when I open “P.S. You Should Know….”

This past weekend, Pavel clued me into a thinker and writer I cannot believe I hadn’t come across already. He cited this famous article, The 12 Levers of Systems Change, by Donella Meadows and as soon as I started reading it, I knew I had found something very important for the evolution of my thinking. After a few hours of reading down the Donella Meadows rabbit hole, I realized what an incredibly important thinker she has been. She started writing in the 1970’s and was an early voice about our environmental problems, systems thinking, and the limits of pursuing GDP growth as the be-all end-all policy goal. She even wrote a regular column called the “Global Citizen,” which has long been the working title of one of my two books!

In The 12 Levers of Systems Change, Donella lays out an elegant framework for understanding how to think about pursuing systemic change. She starts with a basic diagram to help us see that systems work as a kind of bilateral or looping stock-flow model.

There’s the status quo at the center (the stock) and then various interacting inflows and outflows (flows) all influenced by things like goals, rules, laws, values, and incentives. When it comes to systems change, she envisions a kind of inverse pyramid where at the top you have the least effective systemic leverage points and at the bottom you have the most effective:

While we don’t have time to get into all the details for how this works, you can read more about it here and here. For the purposes of this article there are two points to keep in mind:

1. All public policy issues and problems are outcomes of systems

and

2. Not all policy responses count the same. 

As I was devouring Meadows’ articles it became so clear to me what our problem has been here in America: we’ve been spending way too much time focused on the top of this pyramid! This is true across every major policy fight. Whether its immigration or homelessness or healthcare, we’ve been battling in the shallow end of the systems pool change, when what we really need to do is take our discussion to the deep end.

Over the years, I’ve found myself incredibly frustrated in my work in the fight against homelessness, for example, because so much of the conversation has been in this top section of the pyramid—i.e. the shallow leverage zone. Here in Los Angeles, we’ve been focused on things like raising property taxes by a tiny amount to pay for the construction of homeless housing (HHH) or increasing sales taxes to pay for much-needed support services (Measure H). These are good, noble policies but they have precisely zero chance of actually solving the problem. Not only are they not large enough to meet the scale of the need but they are inadequate per se because they address only the stock and not the flow. Ultimately, they are shallow policies of incrementalism.

To effectively deal with a problem like homelessness we need to move way into the deep end. First of all, we have to decide that we actually want to solve this humanitarian crisis instead of just “make some progress.” Once we do that, then we can get busy doing hard, deep work like changing the rules of the system (i.e. giving some reasonable power back to the government to prevent people from doing things that are clearly against their self-interest) and designing appropriately sized policy response for the scale of the problem (i.e. a large enough flexible rental subsidy to meet the true need and enough mental health and substance abuse resources as necessary). In other words, we should be focused on the high leverage zones of Meadows’ framework.

Look, lest you all think I’m being too idealistic (or naïve) here, I recognize how difficult it is for a democratic society to wade into the deep end like this. To move the conversation to the bottom of Meadows’ pyramid not only do you need a sense of urgency large enough to foster the necessary political will but also that will needs to actually consolidate into the systems of power—i.e. the idea has to win. Sometimes it takes a whole lot to get there. Take, for instance, the problem of slavery in America. Even though large parts of the citizenry knew that slavery was wrong and wanted to end it, the real political debate didn’t move into the deep end until we were fully immersed in a protracted, bloody civil conflict.

What keeps me up at night these days is this: we live in an age where we have big systemic problems—arguably existential ones—but our politics are focused so far in the shallow end that we have no chance of solving them. There’s a sense even that we aren’t even in the water on some of these debates, for the culture wars have taken us far away from the field of effective policy debate. As we’ve been arguing about things like abortion and what books to ban or not, what have we missed?

Our systemic problems are literally on an existential collision course and if we don’t get our act together circumstance will force us into the deep end! It’s high time to dust off Meadows’ framework and get to work.

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