Budding
Taking shape. Still actively developing.
The leverage points in a system
Where to push to get the most change with the least force.
Donella Meadows wrote about leverage points — places in a system where a small shift can produce big changes. The interesting insight is that the most obvious leverage points (like changing numbers or constants) are usually the weakest ones.
The strongest leverage points are things like:
- The goal of the system
- The rules of the system
- The power to change the rules
Most people fight over the numbers (budgets, targets, quotas). The real game is usually one level up: who gets to define what the system is optimizing for.
I'm still chewing on what this means for software systems specifically. A codebase has leverage points too — the data model, the abstraction boundaries, the deployment model. Changing the data model is expensive and high-leverage. Changing a feature flag is cheap and low-leverage.
This is a seedling — incomplete, probably wrong in parts, needs more thinking.