Before removing a rule, a process or a line item, find out why it was put there. Apparent waste in a business, a balance sheet or a regulation is often absorbing a cost you cannot see from outside. The model is a discipline of humility toward decisions made by people who knew something you do not.
How a search for a philosophy of his own led him to Christian theology.
Why complex, tightly coupled systems such as Three Mile Island will fail regardless.
Why large state plans fail when they override local, practical knowledge.
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Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.
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