Question
Check whether the goal of the system is causing the symptom
People often optimize the objective they are given.
When it fits
- When every local fix is rational yet the overall outcome remains bad.
When to avoid it
- Leverage-point and information-value heuristics are prompts, not guaranteed effect sizes. Test interventions, monitor side effects and stop when evidence changes.
A question to ask
What behavior does the current metric reward? · What trade-offs does it ignore? · What would a person do to win the metric while harming the purpose? · Which goal or guardrail needs redesign?
Why it matters
Identify the effective goal revealed by rewards, dashboards and escalation behavior, then compare it with the stated purpose. Change measurement or authority if the two conflict.
An example
A support target rewards ticket closure speed, so difficult tickets are bounced instead of solved; the operating goal differs from customer resolution.
Check your result
The analysis explains how the effective goal can generate the symptom.
Keep this limit in mind
- Leverage-point and information-value heuristics are prompts, not guaranteed effect sizes. Test interventions, monitor side effects and stop when evidence changes.
Connected ideas
Use beforeLook for incentives that reward the failure mode
Evidence and sources
Meadows' leverage-points framework widens intervention search from parameters and buffers toward information flows, rules, goals and paradigms while explicitly cautioning that the list is not a recipe.
The proposed ordering is a systems-thinking heuristic, not a universal causal effect-size ranking.
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System · Places to intervene and concluding caveats