Series: Thinking in Systems for Digital Marketers | Article 6 of 6 (Series Finale)
This series applies the core concepts of Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer to the realities of digital marketing. Each article draws directly from the book and translates its frameworks into practical tools for mid-level marketers. If you’re just joining us, we recommend starting with Article 1.
“Leverage points are places within a complex system — a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem — where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.” — Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
You’ve been there. Quarter after quarter, the team works hard. Budgets get optimized. Creative gets refreshed. Audiences get refined. Reports get generated, reviewed, and acted upon. And yet the overall trajectory of the business barely shifts. Effort goes in. Results stay roughly flat. Everyone is busy. Nothing fundamental changes.
Meanwhile, somewhere else — sometimes in a different company entirely — a single decision gets made, and the entire trajectory shifts. Not because that team worked harder. Because they found a different kind of intervention — one that didn’t just move a number, but changed what the system was capable of producing in the first place.
This is the final and most important idea in Thinking in Systems: not all interventions are created equal. Some changes ripple through a system with enormous force. Others barely register no matter how much effort goes into them. Meadows spent her career mapping where the high-leverage points are — and, just as importantly, why most people gravitate toward the low-leverage ones.
For digital marketers, this isn’t an abstract idea. It’s the difference between a career spent optimizing and a career spent transforming.
What we’ve built up to this point
Before we get to leverage points, it’s worth pausing on what the first five articles in this series have actually been arguing — because leverage points is where it all converges.
Article 1 established that campaigns are systems made of elements, interconnections, and purpose — and that elements (the things marketers fixate on) are the least powerful part of the system. Article 2 showed that changing the rules — interconnections — produces far more change than changing creative. Article 3 revealed that pipelines are stock-and-flow systems where the visible state today is the lagging result of flows set in motion weeks ago. Article 4 demonstrated that ad platforms run on feedback loops — and that the marketers who work with those loops outperform those who fight them. Article 5 explained why marketing keeps surprising us: because our models are incomplete, our timelines are compressed, our assumptions are linear in a nonlinear system, and our fixes often treat symptoms instead of structures.
Every one of these ideas has been quietly building toward a single question: if some parts of a system matter more than others, where exactly should you focus your limited time, budget, and attention?
That is precisely the question Meadows answers with leverage points.
Meadows’ hierarchy — and why marketers live at the bottom of it
In one of the most cited passages in systems thinking, Meadows lays out twelve places to intervene in a system, ordered from least to most effective. The full list is dense and was written for systems far larger than a marketing department — economies, ecosystems, governments. But the underlying hierarchy translates with remarkable precision. We can group it into four tiers that map directly onto how marketing teams actually operate.
“The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it… That’s why societies generally don’t want to talk about changing paradigms or goals. It’s much easier to discuss subsidies, taxes, and other parameters.”
Replace “societies” with “marketing teams,” and “subsidies, taxes” with “budgets, bid caps, creative” — and you have an accurate description of why most marketing effort concentrates at the bottom of the leverage hierarchy.
Tier 1 (Lowest leverage): Numbers — budgets, bids, targets
The lowest leverage points in any system are what Meadows calls parameters — the numbers that can be adjusted without changing how the system fundamentally operates.
“Numbers are the least effective leverage point. Adjusting them rarely changes the behavior of the system — it just changes how fast or how much the existing behavior occurs.”
In marketing, this tier includes: budget allocations, bid caps, target CPAs, audience size, ad frequency caps, posting schedules. These are the levers marketers pull most often — and Meadows would tell you they’re the ones least likely to change anything fundamental.
This doesn’t mean they’re useless. Parameters are real, and getting them wrong has real costs. But Meadows’ point is about ceiling, not value. No amount of budget reallocation will fix a campaign whose underlying targeting logic is wrong. No bid adjustment will fix a funnel whose conversion tracking is broken. Parameters operate within the system as it currently exists — they cannot change what the system is capable of.
This is the tier where most marketing time is spent, and it’s also the tier with the lowest ceiling on impact. It’s not that this work is wrong. It’s that it’s incomplete.
Tier 2: Structure — how information and incentives flow
The next tier up is structural — and this is where Article 2’s discussion of interconnections lives.
“The structure of a system — its rules, its information flows, its feedback loops — is a much higher leverage point than the parameters that operate within that structure.”
In marketing, structural leverage points include: campaign architecture (how budgets, audiences, and creative are organized across campaigns and ad sets), attribution models (which determine what the organization believes “worked”), incentive structures (how marketing performance is measured and rewarded), and the information flows between teams (how sales feedback reaches marketing, how campaign data reaches strategy).
Changing a structure doesn’t just adjust how much of something happens — it changes the rules the system operates under going forward. A new attribution model doesn’t just produce different reports. It changes which channels get investment, which campaigns get killed, and which strategies get credit — for as long as that model is in place. A new campaign architecture doesn’t just reorganize budgets. It changes how the algorithm learns, how data flows, and what the system optimizes toward.
This is the tier Article 2 lived in — and it’s where marketers who understand systems thinking start to separate from those who don’t. The shift from “what should we spend more on?” to “what rule is determining what gets spent on?” is the shift from Tier 1 to Tier 2.
Tier 3: Goals — what the system is actually trying to do
Higher still are goals — and this is where Article 1’s discussion of stated versus actual purpose returns with full force.
“The goal of a system is a high leverage point. Changing the goal changes everything that follows from it — every rule, every structure, every parameter reorganizes around the new goal.”
In marketing, this tier asks: what is the campaign, the channel, the team, or the entire marketing function actually optimizing for? Not what the mission statement says — what does the system, in practice, treat as success?
A marketing team optimizing for marketing-qualified leads will build campaigns, structures, and incentives that maximize MQL volume — even if MQL quality is poor and sales conversion is low. Every parameter and structure beneath that goal will faithfully serve it. The campaigns aren’t broken. The goal is producing exactly the system it’s designed to produce.
Change the goal to sales-qualified pipeline contribution, and watch what happens. Campaign targeting changes. Attribution models change. Content strategy changes. Channel investment shifts. Nothing about the “execution layer” needed to be touched directly — because everything in that layer reorganizes around the new goal.
This is why goal-setting is dramatically higher leverage than campaign optimization — and also why it’s so rarely where marketing leaders spend their energy. Changing a goal is uncomfortable. It implies that everything built under the old goal may need to change. It’s organizationally easier to optimize within an existing goal than to question whether the goal is right.
Tier 4 (Highest leverage): Paradigm — the unquestioned assumptions underneath everything
At the very top of Meadows’ hierarchy is the paradigm — the deep, often unstated beliefs that shape what goals seem reasonable, what structures seem natural, and what parameters seem worth adjusting in the first place.
“The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — these are the sources of systems. Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them… come goals, structures, rules, delays, parameters.”
In marketing, paradigms are the assumptions so foundational that they’re rarely articulated, let alone questioned: that growth means acquiring new customers rather than deepening existing relationships; that attention is the scarce resource worth optimizing for, rather than trust; that more channels and more touchpoints are inherently better than fewer, deeper ones; that marketing’s job is to generate demand, rather than to clarify and communicate value that already exists.
These paradigms shape everything downstream — which goals seem sensible, which structures get built, which parameters get tuned. A marketing function operating under the paradigm “growth means new customer acquisition” will set acquisition-oriented goals, build acquisition-oriented structures, and optimize acquisition-oriented parameters — and will likely never seriously evaluate whether retention, expansion, or community-building might produce more durable growth at lower cost.
Meadows is careful to note that paradigm shifts are rare, difficult, and often resisted fiercely — precisely because they invalidate so much of what came before:
“Paradigms are tremendously hard to dislodge… but there’s nothing physical or expensive about paradigm change. It happens in the minds of people. And there’s no cost to anyone in dislodging an old paradigm — except for the people who benefit from it.”
For a mid-level marketer, paradigm-level leverage is rarely something you can change unilaterally. But recognizing that a paradigm is operating — naming the unstated assumption that’s shaping every goal, structure, and decision above it — is itself a high-leverage act. It’s often the first step toward someone, eventually, choosing to question it.
Why marketers default to the bottom of the hierarchy
If high-leverage interventions are so much more powerful, why does so much marketing effort concentrate on budgets, bids, and creative — the lowest tier?
Meadows offers a clear answer, and it isn’t flattering:
“Low leverage points, although they are not the most powerful, are usually the most accessible. High leverage points are not only harder to find — they are harder to act on, because they often require us to let go of something we believe.”
Parameters are visible, measurable, and within an individual marketer’s authority to change. You can adjust a budget this afternoon. You can launch new creative this week. These actions produce a feeling of progress — something was done — even when the system’s underlying behavior remains unchanged.
Structure, goals, and paradigms are harder to access. They often sit above an individual’s authority. They require cross-functional alignment, organizational change, or simply the willingness to ask a question that implies the current approach might be fundamentally — not just tactically — wrong.
This is not a character flaw in marketers. It’s a predictable feature of how organizations and individuals allocate effort: toward what’s accessible, measurable, and within their control. But it means that most marketing effort operates at the tier with the lowest ceiling — producing the visible busyness of campaigns being optimized, while the system’s actual trajectory remains largely unchanged.
A leverage audit for your next strategy conversation
The next time you’re planning a campaign, a quarter, or a strategic shift, run through these four questions — moving from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top.
1. What parameters are we adjusting — and what’s the realistic ceiling on their impact? Be honest about what budget, bid, and targeting adjustments can and cannot do. They can improve efficiency within the current system. They cannot change what the system is capable of producing.
2. What structures — campaign architecture, attribution, incentives, information flows — are shaping these results? Before optimizing within a structure, ask whether the structure itself is the constraint. Is your attribution model hiding the channels that actually drive value? Is your campaign architecture starving the algorithm of the data it needs?
3. What goal is this system actually optimizing for — and is that the right goal? Look past the stated objective to the goal embedded in your metrics, incentives, and structures. If the system is producing exactly what it’s designed to produce, and that’s not what you need — the goal is the problem, not the execution.
4. What unstated assumption is shaping everything above this? This is the hardest question, and you won’t always have the authority to act on the answer. But naming the paradigm — the assumption so foundational it was never discussed — is often the first move in a much larger shift. Sometimes the most valuable thing a mid-level marketer can do is simply ask the question that makes an unexamined assumption visible.
Closing the series: from optimizer to systems thinker
Six articles ago, we opened with a quote from Meadows that set the premise for everything that followed:
“The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological — social — psychological — economic system. We treat it as if it were not.”
Across this series, we’ve tried to treat your marketing — your campaigns, your platforms, your pipelines, your strategies — as the system it actually is. Elements and interconnections. Stocks and flows. Balancing loops and reinforcing loops. Delays that hide consequences until they’re unavoidable. Surprises that are really just gaps in our models. And now, leverage points — the recognition that where you intervene matters more than how hard you intervene.
Meadows closes Thinking in Systems with a reflection that feels like the right note to end on:
“We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them.”
That’s the shift this series has been building toward. Not control — campaigns will always surprise you, platforms will always evolve, algorithms will always have their own logic. But partnership: understanding the system well enough to work with its structure, anticipate its delays, respect its feedback loops, and — when you have the opportunity — reach for the leverage points that don’t just move a number, but change what the system is capable of.
Most marketing careers are spent in Tier 1 — adjusting parameters, chasing efficiency, optimizing within a system that was never examined. The marketers who build the most durable results are the ones who occasionally look up from the dashboard and ask the questions Meadows spent her life asking: not “how do I make this number bigger?” but “what kind of system am I actually operating — and is it built to produce what I actually need?”
That question is available to you in your very next strategy meeting. It costs nothing to ask. And it might be the highest-leverage thing you do all quarter.
This concludes our 6-part series, Thinking in Systems for Digital Marketers, based on Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008). Thank you for reading along — if you found this series useful, we’d encourage you to read the book itself. It will change how you see your work, and likely much more than your work.
