Reclaim Roundup: August 2023

One of the things I looked at in my OU work was 'points of leverage' - "what leverage point or type of action the initiative is making use of". The point being to identify what point of leverage different initiatives make use of. To help ICT workers find the initiatives that they are best placed to work on. I said 'types of action' as well as 'leverage points'. The types of action I listed were resist, regulate and recode, taken from Platform Socialism. As well as some of the leverage points referenced from Digitalization in the Anthropocene (who took them from Donella Meadows). These are rules and feedback, structures, goal setting and mindset shifts. I need to delve further into these.

So I enjoyed reading the article It's not about your footprint, it's about your point of leverage. I like this idea. I've been aware for a while that carbon footprint isn't a great measure. This article reiterates that, and suggests that its better to think about your leverage points instead. Which obviously resonates with idea of leverage points in systems thinking. It breaks leverage points into individual, organisational, and country levels.

The same authors also talk about super-leverage points:

In any individual sector, we can identify leverage points: actions that are relatively low cost or low difficulty but that have a high impact in accelerating the transition. In the whole system, we can identify super-leverage points: we define these as actions that are high leverage in the sectors where they are taken, and that influence transitions in other sectors in a way that is positive in direction, high in impact, and reasonably high in probability.

It would be interesting to investigte if there are any super leverage points in the ICT sector. And just what the ICT leverage points are in general.