Use of Leverage Points in Teams to Increase
Productivity
and Reduce Stress
By Marie J. Kane
What is a leverage point and why should you care? A leverage point is that point in a work process that has a disproportionate effect on the points downstream from it. It is the point that when it works properly, the majority of the next steps will work well and the number of problems will be significantly reduced. Leverage points may be within a team or company or outside of the control of the team or company, but still susceptible to influence. Leverage points can be related to more concrete work processes or to relationships or both. Understanding and using leverage points and loops can put you in the driver's seat of your team's work processes and significantly reduce stress, problems, emergencies and rework.
You discover leverage points by diagramming your work process showing what the sequence of steps is and showing what leads to what (cause and effect) for both desirable and undesirable scenarios. When you do this you see that the cause and effect connections begin to make loops, that is A causes B which causes C which causes D which in turn causes more of A or B. When the loops are the undesirable scenario, these are called vicious circles because there are always more problems and you spend so much time fire fighting that you don't stop to determine or fix the basic causes. When you figure out the leverage point(s) then you can concentrate your resources on improving them. When you do, things downstream get better and you have many fewer problems. As a result, the stress factor gets lower and you create more time so you can find even more of the things that cause most of your problems. Over time your quality of work life and productivity improve.
Of course, to get this benefit you have to make the time now, even while dealing with the fires, to determine what your leverage points are and how to make them work better. There is no "free lunch", but the investment on the front end to discover and work leverage points for a team or department or company pays off handsomely in the final analysis. This is only one aspect of the systems kind of approach that is necessary to create real and enduring organization transformation.
©1998, Marie J. Kane
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