How systems affect growth, of a virus and a business
One of the most impactful principles in mitigating the net effect of the COIVD-19 virus is the same principle affecting growth in your business: leverage points.
According to scientist and author of Systems Based Thinking, Donella Meadows, leverage points are places in a system where "a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything."
Systems aren't merely an engineering concept and are more common than we think. Systems as a "set of principles or procedures according to which something is done" broadly describes governments, cultures, and populations.
In that light, when the NBA suspends their season and SXSW is cancelled, it's an example of using leverage points. The cancellation of a single event has a disproportionately high impact on slowing the spread of the virus because tens or hundreds of thousands of human connections that would have occurred, and presumably helped spread the disease more quickly, are no longer happening. These single events slow the spread of the virus considerably.
So, what the hell does this have to do with your business?
Whether you use the systems definition above or it's alternative, "a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network," your business is also a system. A set of things is working together in your organization, according to a set of procedures, to get something done. For most of us, we hope that "something" is generating revenue.
Within this system are leverage points you can use to create results disproportionate to the change itself. Every business is unique, so identifying the leverage points can be more of an art than a science, and is something I frequently work with businesses to do. Sometimes these leverage points are constraints preventing growth. Other times they are opportunities representing growth. In either case, identifying and addressing them leads to "big changes in everything."
If your goal is growth, specifically sustainable and scalable growth, there may not be a template to identify leverage points in your business, but there is a framework I developed to guide the process. I'll be releasing this framework in a book in couple weeks and if you'd like to receive it for free, feel free to give me a heads up here.
In the interim, I do recommend reading this article (#flattenthecurve) on how the decisions being made about event cancellations affect the spread of the virus and save lives. I was astounded by how changes made to these leverage points slow the spread of the virus, utilize the capacity of the healthcare system more efficiently, and save lives.
Whether you are thinking about the spread of COVID-19, the growth of your business, or even which of your to-do items should get completed today, one this is certain: by focusing on leverage points, you'll have the maximum impact possible.
