This week I’ve re-read Donella Meadows’ essay on the 12 Leverage Points of a System which looks at the places we can try to intervene in a complex adaptive system and compares the efficacy of each.

We all encounter complex adaptive systems every day - our societies, our workplaces, and online social networks. Often our attempts to improve a system by intervening in one way or another will have unintended consequences (just look at how often government intervention in social or economic sphere tends to backfire).

I’ve written up a piece where I’m looking at how Donella Meadows’ thinking might be applied to the software engineering ecosystem - but the principles of the 12 Leverage Points apply everywhere so there is hopefully something here for those outside of the software domain: