Finding (a theory of) Leverage for Systemic Change: A systemic design research agenda
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To search for leverage is to use systemic design to find ways to accelerate progressive systemic change. The theory of leverage was first conceptualized by Donella Meadows with “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” in 1997. Yet while Meadows’s typology of leverage points is popular and influential, little has been done to critique or substantially advance her ideas since they were first published. As a result, we lack a modern theory of leverage. In this article, I relate systemic change to the search for leverage and outline why leverage matters. I present a brief overview of Meadows’s original work. Then, I synthesize the major contributions that have built on Meadows’s theory of leverage in the last 25 years. Next, I present a critique of Meadows’s original work, highlighting what we know about leverage and what we have yet to learn. This includes the development of a framework identifying how the degree of leverage relates to the acceleration of progressive (or retrograde) systemic change. Finally, I organize these ideas into a research agenda featuring four areas: dimensions of leverage, methods for leverage, strategy with leverage, and execution on leverage. Meadows wrote about the metaphor of “dancing with systems.” By advancing leverage theory, I believe we can better learn to “dance with systemic change.”
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.165 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it