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04 Oct 08

Social Leverage Points :: Blog :: Headshift

It's an explanation - crystal clear, and from the point of view of systems theory - about what leverage points are, and how they can be used to influence systems. And it's a paper that should be compulsory reading for anyone in any kind of a position of power - and preferably tattooed on the inside of politicians' eyelids.

Reading through it, I got to wondering about which of the 12 leverage points described social media would fall into. The basic concept is that small shifts in one thing can produce big changes in everything - and we often use the terminology of small, incremental changes in behaviour when talking about social media.

www.headshift.com/...social-leverage-points.php - Preview

socialmedia leverage system change informationflows information selforganization

The point here is that the more rapid the feedback, the more effective at reducing oscillations.
Where social media fits in is surfacing that information. Very often, key information is buried, whether it's in emails, spreadsheets, report documents and so on.
2 more annotations...
- Now we social media types have to be careful here - it's very easy to make grandiose claims about the ability of social tools to change the world, and the reality is that their effect is often less than we'd like them to be.
- Small-scale social tools - small pieces, loosely joined - can react far quicker and far more flexibly. Rather than trying to bend content into an organisational taxonomy, an emergent tagging structure will adapt to the material rather than the other way around.