Non-fiction
The Leverage Illusion
What Systems Thinking Promised, and What the Evidence Delivered
Abdul Jaleel Kavungal
About this book
About this book
Systems thinking promised that once you can see a system's structure, you can find the lever that moves it. The Leverage Illusion tests that promise against the published evidence, grades every major claim from A to D, and finds the field's diagnosis of human judgment far better supported than its cure.
Donella Meadows wrote that people who do systems analysis have a great belief in leverage points. This book calls that belief the leverage illusion and tests both of its halves: that we can see a system's structure, and that seeing it tells us where to act. Part I examines the laboratory evidence on how people reason about stocks, flows, delay and feedback, from the bathtub problems to the Beer Game and Dörner's simulations. Part II returns to the primary sources of the promise in cybernetics, general systems theory, Forrester's system dynamics and the soft systems turn. Part III puts the toolkit on trial: causal loop diagrams, group model building, Meadows's list of places to intervene, the archetypes and attempts to teach and measure systems thinking. Part IV follows four attempts to pull big levers, including The Limits to Growth, Cybersyn, whole-systems public health and Ostrom's work on the commons. Part V shows what systems thinking looks like once the illusion is set aside. Every major claim carries a grade with its reasons written into the sentence.
Take a pencil and a scrap of paper. The two problems below reproduce the logic of tasks that researchers have given to many hundreds of people in several countries.
Contents
Chapters
- A Note Before We Begin
- Part IWhat We Fail to See
- Chapter 1The Bathtub Test
- Chapter 2Why Clever People Fail: The Anatomy of Stock-Flow Failure
- Chapter 3The Beer Game: Oscillation in the Laboratory
- Chapter 4Lohhausen and Tanaland: Dörner's Laboratory of Failure
- Chapter 5Can Experience Teach Us? Learning in and About Dynamic Systems
- Part IIWhere the Promise Came From
- Chapter 6The Cybernetic Moment: Feedback, Regulation and the First Promise of Control
- Chapter 7General Systems and the Architecture of Complexity
- Chapter 8Forrester's Wager: System Dynamics and the Idea of the Hidden Lever
- Chapter 9The Soft Turn: When There Is No Single System to See
- Part IIIThe Toolkit on Trial
- Chapter 10Loops on Paper: What Causal Loop Diagrams Show and Hide
- Chapter 11Building Models Together: What Group Model Building Delivers
- Chapter 12Twelve Places to Intervene? Meadows's List and the Search for Levers
- Chapter 13The Archetype Library and the Learning Organisation
- Chapter 14Can Systems Thinking Be Taught, or Even Measured?
- Part IVPulling the Big Levers
- Chapter 15The Limits to Growth at Fifty: A Trial in Three Acts
- Chapter 16Cybersyn: Viable Systems and the Dream of Real-Time Control
- Chapter 17Whole Systems for Public Health: From the Foresight Map to the STOPS Trial
- Chapter 18The Commons Are Not Tragic: Ostrom's Evidence and the Misperception Twist
- Part VSystems Thinking Without the Illusion
- Chapter 19After the Accident: Safety Science and the Systems Turn
- Chapter 20Levers Without Illusions: Capability Traps and a Practitioner's Code
- Appendices
- Appendix AEvidence Grades Table
- Appendix BGlossary
- Appendix CA Reading Path
- Appendix DMethods Toolkit
- Appendix EA Note on Sources and Verification
- References
Details
The edition
- Author
- Abdul Jaleel Kavungal
- Publisher
- AWC · Award Winning Creations
- Category
- Non-fiction
- Year
- 2026
- Pages
- 328
- Language
- English
- Status
- Published
108,953 words.
Read an excerpt
Chapter 1: The Bathtub Test
Take a pencil and a scrap of paper. The two problems below reproduce the logic of tasks that researchers have given to many hundreds of people in several countries. They are my own illustrative versions, with round numbers chosen for convenience, and they are not the published test items, but they ask the same kind of question. Neither needs anything beyond addition and subtraction. Please answer them before reading the rest of the chapter, and write your answers down rather than holding them in your head.
The first problem concerns a department store. The table shows how many people entered the store and how many left it during each of eight consecutive ten-minute intervals on a Saturday morning. Assume, purely for the purpose of the exercise, that 50 people were already inside when the first interval began.
Answer four questions. In which interval did the most people enter the store? In which interval did the most people leave? At what point during the morning were the most people inside the store? At what point were the fewest people inside? Try to answer the last two by looking at the table rather than by adding up every row, and note which answer you reach first.
The second problem concerns the atmosphere. Think of the carbon dioxide in the air as water in a bathtub. Burning fossil fuels pours carbon dioxide in through the tap, and natural processes, chiefly uptake by the oceans and by plants, drain some of it out through the plughole. Suppose, for the sake of the problem, that the tap is currently running considerably faster than the drain is emptying. Now suppose that the world's emissions stop growing and are held steady, from today onward, at exactly their current rate. What happens to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the following decades? Does it keep rising, level off soon, or start to fall? And what would have to happen to emissions for the amount in the atmosphere to stop rising? Write down both sets of answers before you read on.
Sweeney and Sterman (2000) published the first results of what they called a systems thinking inventory, a set of short problems that included a bathtub task and a department-store task built on the same logic as the one above.