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PLUS TWO MORE QUESTIONS: When? and Where?
After puzzling over Donella Meadows' famous Leverage Points paper 
for more than a decade I distilled it to four powerful nested questions:
Why?
Who?
How?
What?
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source to open in a webpage.
While these questions are common enough, Meadows' insight was in distinguishing different levels of power-to-change-systems, particularly human complex systems. My modest addition is to explicitly state that the more powerful levels always provide necessary context for the less powerful levels.
Practically this means that one should always answer these four questions in the given order, inferred by Meadow's twelve leverage points.
Having answered these questions on must find ways to keep the answers in mind or at hand. It is this context setting that makes the order so important and that requires a recursiveness to all lower questions--always referring to the next higher question.
In my experience groups enjoy answering three of the four questions. With gentle facilitation they are able to keep to the sequence with the consequence that answers to lower questions are informed naturally by their answers to higher questions.
Four flip charts each labeled with one of the questions and placed in order is all that is needed to begin to benefit from Meadows' gift.
Admittedly the third question, How does it work?, can be tough and can require time and may require consulting special expertise.
Bonus: Even the top question, and Meadows' twelfth leverage point, allow a higher and more powerful question. I will leave that question to you, just as Meadows did.
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In the last year I have realized that there are two superordenant questions missing. They are contextual and important: **When?**: Time (history) and **Where?**: Space (place).
> I should add something on: Recursion Scale Complementary.
When Profit Taking becomes the dominant determinant of policy each of these questions are answered in the following destructive ways: When—Ahistorical, atemporal decisions Where—Anti ecological decisions Why—Immoral decisions Who—Antisocial decisions How—Anti systemic decisions (certain to fail) What—Wasteful and error prone decisions
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**The relatively non-generative sequence of exploring problems and opportunities: ** 1. What is going on? 2. How does it work? 3. Who does it affect? 4. Why does it matter? 5. Where does it have impact? 6. When does it have relevance?
A more generative sequence:
4--Why does it matter? 5--Where does it have impact? 6--When does it have relevance? 3--Who does it affect? 2--How does it work? 1--What is going one?
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Here is another way to explore the compact wisdom in Meadows' leverage points paper.
**Going up this cascade** is a problem solving approach which is hard and perilous work.
**Coming down from the top** is much much more fun, more powerful, sometimes easier, and sure the make things easier to understand.
1. Power to transcend paradigms 2. Mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises out of 3. Goal of the system 4. Power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure 5. Rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints) 6. Structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information) 7. Gain around driving positive feedback loop s 8. Strength of negative feedback loops , relative to the effect they are trying to correct against 9. Length of delays , relative to the rate of system changes 10. Structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport network, population age structures) 12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards) 11. The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows OPERATING MANAGING ORGANIZING IMAGINING
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