**\12. Numbers -- Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards** Probably 90—no 95, no 99 percent—of our attention goes to parameters, but there’s not a lot of leverage in them. People care deeply about such variables as taxes and the minimum wage, and so fight fierce battles over them. But changing these variables rarely changes the behavior of the national economy system. **\11. Buffers -- The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows** **\10. Stock-and-Flow Structures -- Physical systems and their nodes of intersection** The only way to fix a system that is laid out poorly is to rebuild it, if you can. But often physical rebuilding is the slowest and most expensive kind of change to make in a system. Physical structure is crucial in a system, but is rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple. The leverage point is in proper design in the first place. **\9. Delays -- The lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes** A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change in the stocks that the feedback loop is trying to control. I would list delay length as a high leverage point, except for the fact that delays are not often easily changeable. Things take as long as they take. **\8. Balancing Feedback Loops -- The strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct** One of the big mistakes we make is to strip away these “emergency” response mechanisms because they aren’t often used and they appear to be costly. In the short term, we see no effect from doing this. In the long term, we drastically narrow the range of conditions over which the system can survive. **\7. Reinforcing Feedback Loops -- The strength of the gain of driving loops** Reinforcing feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked reinforcing loop ultimately will destroy itself. Reducing the gain around a reinforcing loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening balancing loops, and far more preferable than letting the reinforcing loop run. It’s the same as slowing the car when you’re driving too fast, rather than calling for more responsive brakes or technical advances in steering. **\6. Information Flows -- The structure of who does and does not have access to information** Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure. There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. **\5. Rules -- Incentives, punishments, constraints** The rules of the system define its scope, its boundaries, its degrees of freedom. As we try to imagine restructured rules and what our behavior would be under them, we come to understand the power of rules. They are high leverage points. Power over the rules is real power. **\4. Self-Organization -- The power to add, change, or evolve system structure** The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. Self-organization is basically a matter of an evolutionary raw material—a highly variable stock of information from which to select possible patterns—and a means for experimentation, for selecting and testing new patterns. Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet. **\3. Goals -- The purpose or function of the system** Even people within systems don’t often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. **\2. Paradigms -- The mind-set out of which the system sets its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters-arises** "观念的水位" The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems. > Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to... their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day ... see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons.... It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas... would cause the most striking changes of external things. people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems. we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole. **\1. Transcending Paradigms** That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment. > Everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment.