Protocol
Look for incentives that reward the failure mode
Repeated behavior can be locally rewarded by the system.
When it fits
- When a recurring failure persists despite training and reminders.
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.
Why it matters
List what the actor gains or avoids by the failing behavior: time, metric performance, risk transfer, status or workload. Remove the perverse incentive or add a countervailing control.
Steps
- Name the recurring failure.
- Identify local benefits of that behavior.
- Identify who bears the delayed cost.
- Redesign the incentive or feedback path.
An example
Teams skip early documentation because delivery metrics count releases but not future support effort; reminders alone do not change the payoff.
Check your result
The corrective action changes the local payoff or information, not only the message.
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
Useful withPrefer interventions that alter feedback, not just output
Evidence and sources
Provides context
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