A leverage point is a place where an intervention can change a system’s behavior. Leverage may lie in parameters, capacities, delays, information flows, feedback structures, rules, goals, or underlying paradigms.
High leverage is not synonymous with easy, cheap, or safe. Deep changes can be politically difficult and can create broad unintended effects. A candidate should be evaluated through its causal mechanism, delay, reversibility, distributional effects, and interaction with other feedback loops.
Example
Adding staff to a recurring backlog changes capacity. Revealing repeat demand, changing incentives that reward incomplete work, or redesigning the service goal may change deeper structures.
See Leverage Points in Systems for a practical selection method.