by Had a fascinating discussion last night with a team advising Lumina Foundation on its compelling and ambitious Goal 2025 — to increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality college degrees, certificates or other credentials to 60% by 2025 — on the heels of a day spent participating in the inspiring BIF10.
Listening to the arguments being made (quite eloquently, I might add) about strategies for achieving Goal 2025, I kept returning to Donella Meadow’s masterful piece “Places to Intervene in a System.” I was literally categorizing some of the arguments into the leverage points. So, I thought it would be fun to actually organize and align the strategies along Meadow’s nine intervention points (the strategies/tactics are my words, interpretations, and additions, but contributors might notice their arguments).
I briefly characterize each of the intervention points with a quote from Meadow’s piece. They are listed from lowest to highest, that is, leverage point #9 is the weakest, and #1 is the strongest.
| Meadow’s Systems Interventions | Intervention Point in Higher Ed |
“Numbers are last on my list of leverage points. Diddling with details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably ninety-five percent of our attention goes to numbers, but there’s not a lot of power in them.” |
Adjust tuition & fees, test scores, entrance requirements, # of credits, etc. |
“There’s leverage, sometimes magical, in changing the size of buffers. But buffers are usually physical entities, not easy to change.” |
Increase capacity of system to handle more students; build more schools, increase online capabilities, hire more teachers, etc. |
“Nature evolves negative feedback loops and humans invent them to keep system states within safe bounds.” E.g., a thermostat loop |
Support systems for “non-traditional” students, e.g., mentoring to enhance completion rates |
“Positive feedback loops drive growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself.” |
Financial aid reform to check rising costs/student loan debt |
“Delivering feedback to a place where it wasn’t going before.” |
Restore missing feedback on how money is being spent/mis-spent |
If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them. |
Policy-making, laws, regulations |
The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience, the ability to survive change by changing. |
Enable “self-assembly,” start-up, pilots, and conditions for new ways of doing things |
“…changing the players in a system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system. The exception to that rule is…if a single player can change the system’s goal. |
Persuade power brokers to adopt Goal 2025 |
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system… But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. |
Current paradigm favors what it is getting (despite lip service to the contrary); thought leadership to influence what behavior the system should actually be designed to produce |
| Source: A Hines, based on D. Meadows, “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth, Winter 1997. | |
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