Dancing With Systems: Understanding Leverage Points in the Permaculture Garden

“Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned… We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!” – Donella Meadows.

So what is a system? Basically, it’s an interconnected set of elements coherently organised in a way that achieves something. Your body is a system, composed of various organs including your heart, lungs, intestines, kidneys and muscles, working together to keep you alive. Food distribution networks, global weather patterns, woodlands and human communities are all systems, and so is the permaculture garden.

The environmental scientist, farmer and systems-thinker Donella Meadows argued that most of the big problems we experience in our world arise from how our systems are structured, be they economic, social or ecological. Utilising her life-long understanding of feedback loops, delays, and the behavioural properties of elements and relationships within complex systems, Meadows’ seminal essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System explains how carefully targeted interventions – the different ways in which we are able to push or influence a system – can have powerful impacts when bringing about systemic change. She ranks these on a scale of least to most effective as follows.

10. Adjusting numbers and parameters: smallest impact; whilst often beneficial in the short term, tweaking the numbers rarely shifts deep systemic behaviour.

9. Redesigning material stocks and flows: how elements are physically arranged affects the system’s dynamics. However, the only way to fix a system that is badly laid out is to rebuild it, if you can. Often, you can’t, because altering existing infrastructure is too difficult and expensive.

8. Regulating negative feedback loops: the strength of self-correcting mechanisms. For example, a thermostat built into your domestic water boiler prevents damage caused by overheating.

7. Driving positive feedback loops: reinforcing loops that can cause systems to grow exponentially (and eventually collapse if unchecked).

6. Information flows: who has access to what information? Knowledge is power and enables better decision making, whilst missing feedback is a common cause of system malfunction.

5. The rules of the system: applying incentives and constraints to govern behaviours.

4. The power of self-organisation: a system’s ability to evolve, adapt, and create new structures.

3. The goals of the system: a shared purpose drives behaviour more than rules or numbers.

2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules and feedback structures arise: one of the highest leverage points is to transform our fundamental shared beliefs about how the system is perceived.

1. Transcending paradigms: the ability to see and imagine beyond existing frameworks and truly innovate.

In summary, the most powerful solutions come from changing goals, rules and mindsets – ie, from conscious design and intent – rather than just fixing symptoms; “Putting different hands on the taps may change the rate at which they turn, but if they’re the same old taps, plumbed into the same system, turned according to the same information and rules and goals, the system isn’t going to change much.”ⁱⁱⁱ These insights can be applied to any systems context, ranging from the Big Stuff, like how to design sustainable communities or develop strategies to tackle climate change, right down to the level of effectively managing your own personal health and well-being. And they can also inform a regenerative approach to garden design and management. Because here’s the thing: permaculture is systems thinking. It’s just systems thinking with your hands in the soil. If you understand where leverage actually exists in a system, you stop wasting effort on things that don’t matter and start working with a smarter designer’s mind.

Seeing the Garden as a Whole System

The permaculture garden is a living system – complex, adaptive, and full of feedback loops. It’s shaped by the dynamic interactions between soil, plants, bacteria, insects, birds, mammals and amphibians through the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles; photosynthesis; the soil food web; predator/prey relationships; fungal networks and a myriad of other nutrient and fertility flows.

Rather than trying to control nature, Meadows suggests we instead learn to dance with systems by observing, learning, respecting limits, and intervening with humility. It’s an approach that aligns deeply with the permaculture ethics of caring for the earth, caring for people, and setting limits to consumption. When applied thoughtfully, Meadows’ leverage points can guide us to decide where, when and how to act to maximise ecological benefit for the least effort. She also reminds us that systems often behave in counter-intuitive ways, and that even well-intentioned actions may have unintended consequences.

An edible garden cannot be forced into productivity; it must be invited. Each season is a conversation between soil, seed, and steward. As a starting point, it helps to think of the garden as not just a collection of beds, plants and structures like polytunnels, sheds and ponds, but rather as a series of

Stocks (soil, organic matter, water in the soil, plant biomass)
Flows (sunlight, wind, rainfall, nutrients, labour, compost inputs)
Feedback loops (adding compost increases soil moisture, which increases plant growth, which produces more compost material)
Delays (years between planting a tree and harvesting fruit) and
Overarching goals and paradigms (yield vs resilience, control vs cooperation)

Permaculture gardens are particularly suited to this kind of analysis. They’re deliberately designed as systems, with multiple elements supporting multiple functions and diversity encouraged by making beneficial connections. Understanding where leverage exists can mean the difference between expending overwhelming effort and working with elegant efficiency.

1. Adjusting numbers and parameters (point of least leverage)

These are the things you can measure and adjust: the amount of compost you add to the soil, the number of plants per bed and the frequency with which you water or weed them. What’s the optimum spacing between your brassica seedlings? How often do you turn your compost and what’s its ideal carbon-to-nitrogen ratio? These parameters matter, of course, and can mean the difference between harvest and failure. But if you are constantly fine-tuning such details yet still end up with a struggling garden, it’s likely the underlying structure is wrong. Whilst helpful (and very often our default intervention point), simply adjusting the numbers won’t fundamentally address any underlying dysfunction or transform the garden as a system.

2. Designing the structures of material stocks and flows

The arrangement of physical elements affects dynamics and the relationships between stocks (accumulations of matter or energy) and flows (movements between stocks). In a permaculture garden, this is where conscious design really starts to show its power, emphasising the importance of thinking carefully about optimum placement. Tools like Zones & Sectors and Input/Output Analysis enable us to make connections between existing landscape elements, as well as considering the incorporation of new elements. How might things be placed in order to maximise mutual benefits? For example, if you decide to introduce new fruit trees, a pond or a new classroom building into your community garden, how could you use design thinking to make sure that the inputs and outputs – the needs and yields – of each of these feed into and support each other? Perhaps you could site the pond so that as well as effectively capturing water run-off it will reflect sunlight into the classroom windows at certain times of the year thus increasing natural light, or locate the classroom near to the orchard so that it can be both a learning resource as well as a place to conveniently store fruit during the winter months when the building tends not to be used so much for courses and workshops?

It’s important to get the physical design right from the start, however. This is why permaculturists often talk about “making their mistakes on paper” rather than on the land, as any infrastructure errors can be very difficult or costly to put right later. It’s an awful lot of work changing the location of a poorly-sited pond or timber-framed building, or digging up and moving twenty apple trees when you discover that they’ve all been planted in an area you didn’t realise was prone to late spring frosts…

3. Feedback loops, delays and information flows

Your broad beans get aphids. That’s feedback. The question is: when do you find out? If you discover it when the plants are already collapsing, the feedback loop is too slow to be useful. But if your beans are interplanted with poached egg flowers, calendula and tagettes the ladybirds and hoverflies will arrive while aphid populations are still small, and the system will correct itself before you even know there’s a problem.

Much of what we call “companion planting” is really about tightening these feedback loops. Plant diversity means pest problems trigger faster predator responses. Indicator plants mean you see nutrient deficiencies before your main crops suffer.

Observe daily and strengthen feedback loops: keep an eye on potential pests and plant growth, adjusting interventions only when needed so that the garden maintains itself rather than relying on external inputs. Plant things that attract beneficial insects before the pests arrive. Create conditions where problems become visible while they’re still small. Intentionally create reinforcing cycles, for example, more cover crops → richer soil → bigger harvest → more seeds → more cover crops.

4. The rules of the system

Incentives and constraints are limiting factors that define how participants are expected to behave or interact, and who has the power to add, change, or evolve structures. These might be external rules imposed from outside that encourage or inhibit certain courses of action, for example, Local Authority planning regulations prohibiting the construction of certain buildings without permission, or allotment society by-laws insisting that paths are regularly mowed and plots kept tidy at all times. Or maybe the rules are group decisions generated through consensus, such as community garden membership agreements or workers co-operative articles of association. They might include rules about how meetings are conducted (“the role of the chair is regularly rotated, everybody takes their turn to speak, no interrupting others…”), or establishing clear rules reflecting vegan-organic principles (“no synthetic fertilisers, animal manures or blood, fish and bone-based soil amendments to be used on growing beds…”). In fact the core vegan permaculture ethics of Earth Care (are we honouring, protecting and regenerating biodiversity?), People Care (do our actions support the well-being and needs of individuals and communities?), Fair Shares (are we considering the equitable distribution of resources and setting limits to consumption?) and Do Least Harm (do we recognise non-human animals as self-willed beings with an intrinsic right to exist free from unnecessary exploitation?) could be interpreted as a set of self-imposed rules guiding all of our moral choices and actions as designers.

Other ‘rules’ might be more abstract, such as what might be considered a “weed.” In a conventional garden, the rule is simple: anything unplanned is unwanted. In a permaculture garden, the rule might be: observe volunteer plants, identify them, and evaluate their function before making a decision about how to deal with them. “Rules change behaviour. Power over rules is real power.”^iv

5. The power of self-organisation

The system’s ability to learn, diversify, and evolve is one of the highest leverage points, and where permaculture philosophy and systems thinking truly converge. In Meadows’ words, “the most stunning thing living systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviours.”^v

The gardener’s role shifts from manager to collaborator, relinquishing control by establishing initial conditions and boundaries, then stepping back and allowing complexity to emerge. This might mean:

Encouraging biodiversity and polycultures over monocultures.
Establishing guilds and allowing the relationships between plants to develop organically.
Creating habitats for beneficial organisms and letting populations self-regulate.
Observing emergent patterns before intervening to “fix” them.

6. The goals of the system

The goal or purpose of the system drives behaviour more than rules or numbers. A garden designed primarily to maximise food production looks entirely different from one intended mainly as a wildlife habitat, or to grow medicinal herbs, or as a children’s playground or a therapeutic space for people struggling with mental health challenges. The overarching goal in each case will determine your design priorities, including site layout, plant choices and management regimes (the structures, stocks, feedback loops and flows lower down the list).

The power of goals as a leverage point becomes clear when you shift them. Imagine a gardener whose goal shifts from “grow the maximum amount of food” to “create a resilient, low-input system that produces abundant food.” Tree crops and perennials become more of a priority than annuals, wildlife habitat becomes integral rather than optional, and beauty becomes strategic, because gardens people love to spend time in receive greater levels of observation and attention.

Many permaculture practitioners operate with a meta-goal: “work with natural systems rather than against them.” This generates different designs than “achieve control over natural processes,” even if the surface-level goal in both cases is “grow more food.”

7. Shifting paradigms (changing mindsets and belief systems)

“We must bend nature to our will”, “Pests are our enemies”, “Control ensures success”, “Animals are ours to use as we see fit” – such ideas dominate conventional thinking around how we relate to the natural world and the non-human species we share it with. Everybody knows these things; they are simply common sense!

Paradigms are the world-views, assumptions, and cultural frameworks from which goals and rules emerge. Altering the paradigm is one of the most powerful leverage points available, precisely because it’s so difficult to achieve and because it changes everything downstream.

Permaculture is fundamentally a shift in mindset, moving from:

Nature as adversary to nature as model
Competition to mutual aid
Scarcity thinking to abundance thinking
Linear systems to cyclical systems
Specialisation to integration
Maximum yield to optimal yield
Problem-solving to pattern recognition
Control to collaboration

A new paradigm – the garden is a cooperative living system – changes everything, including our relationship with time. Industrial agriculture’s paradigm emphasises maximum short-term yield. Permaculture’s paradigm embraces longer time horizons: plant fruit trees that won’t bear a harvest for five years, establish perennials that will outlive you, and build soil for future generations. This shift in temporal paradigm generates completely different design choices.

8. The power to transcend paradigms

According to Donella Meadows, the highest leverage point of all is the ability to step outside any single belief system – to keep oneself unattached to any single paradigm and recognise that ultimately, all paradigms (“even the one that sweetly shapes one’s comfortable worldview”^vi) are limited representations of reality, and to move fluidly between them as needed.

In permaculture terms, this might mean recognising that the core principle of “working with nature” is itself a paradigm, not an ultimate truth, and being willing to question it when appropriate. In practice, this might mean holding a scientific understanding of nutrient cycling, and at the same time honouring indigenous plant knowledge and wisdom, or having the ecological viewpoint and the aesthetic perspective; the production goal and the conservation goal. It’s the ability to hold multiple valid perspectives simultaneously. It’s knowing when to think like a scientist, when to think like an artist, when to think like an ecosystem, and when to stop thinking and just simply be.

Graham Burnett, February 2026