Change What Matters

Insight

High-leverage points are places in a system (a process or an organization) where small, strategic shifts can unlock outsized, lasting change.

When you use them, it feels like turning a tiny key that opens a heavy door.

While many leaders try to find high-leverage points while strategizing, they often hide in the way strategies are put into practice—in what we actually do and how.

When you find them, you’ll know exactly what to do when:

• Programs plateau
• New data challenges assumptions
• You’re forming cross-sector partnerships
• A policy window opens

Insight in Action

Here are three practical strategies for identifying high leverage points as a social impact leader:

• Follow the flows.
  You can use Sankey diagrams to visualize where money, power, and information get stuck. These ‘bottlenecks’ reveal high-leverage points. For example, if most of a company’s training budget is spent on just one department but performance issues keep showing up elsewhere, that’s a sign the flow isn’t balanced.
  
  In the fictional example below, you can see how each flow narrows after passing through a node: this can point to untracked spending that isn’t clearly tied to outcomes, or reserves that are sitting idle instead of being actively allocated. These gaps reveal inefficiencies or missed opportunities. Even a small adjustment here can unlock much greater impact.

• Ask those who tried before.
  ‍Conduct After Action Reviews (AAR) with people who've worked on this problem before. Their insights reveal resistance points and patterns where one change—such as involving a specific group earlier or allocating more resources to solving a problem— could have made a big difference. The key questions of an AAR are:
  • What was supposed to happen?
  • What actually happened?
  • Why was there a difference?
  • What can we learn from this?
• Address assumptions.
  Outdated assumptions may be driving strategic decisions and covering up potential high leverage points. You can ask yourself questions like, “Why do we reward what we reward?” or, “How free do team members feel to express opinions?” If you change how people think, it will change what they do.

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Case Study

Making Social Impact Visible in Rail Infrastructure

While the Great Britain rail industry can measure economic value well, it’s difficult to show how their projects support social goals.

When the Wessex Capacity Alliance (WCA) set out to expand capacity at London Waterloo—Europe’s busiest train station—they wanted to make the social value of the project visible, measurable, and actionable.

WCA used a structured tool they’ve developed for the purpose: the Common Social Impact Framework (CSIF), to assess and score 41 potential areas of social impact. This helped them narrow focus to five key domains—such as local employment, health, and procurement practices—and promote those to get stakeholder buy-in.

If WCA had chosen to promote social impact more broadly instead of finding and using leverage points, this might have led to problems such as:

• Public resistance.
  Promoting a broader impact agenda might have led to more skepticism. Not all communities value the same outcomes, and pushing too many messages usually leads to mixed reception or pushback.
• Loss of resources.
  Investing to promote less impactful social domains would’ve led to unnecessary expenses.

You can read the full case study here.

Question to Consider

What’s the smallest change we could make that would reshape how things work?

Quote of The Week

"Small changes can produce big results—but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious."

- Peter Senge