In the social impact space, busyness is often worn like a badge of honour. More workshops. More campaigns. More posts. More meetings. More activity.
But what if the real question isn’t “How can we do more?”
What if it’s “Where is the leverage?”
Leveraging change is about increasing your impact while reducing unnecessary effort. It’s not about lowering ambition. It’s about aligning effort with the highest-impact points in a system so that your inputs produce disproportionate outcomes.
In other words: less motion, more movement.
If you don’t want to listen to the HCN update in this episode, skip to 12:35!
Rethinking Productivity: Inputs vs Outputs
Most of us think about productivity in absolute terms. We count how much we produced — how many events we ran, how many emails we sent, how many people we reached.
But true productivity is relative. It’s the relationship between inputs and outputs.
If one team works 10 hours to produce 20 “outputs” and another works 6 hours to produce 18, who is more productive? The second team has a stronger input-to-output ratio. They used less energy and generated almost the same result.
Leverage begins when we stop optimising for visible activity and start optimising for outcomes. It asks a simple but uncomfortable question:
Are we measuring what matters, or just what’s easy to count?
Shift From Activity to Outcome Logic
One of the biggest traps in social change work is confusing motion with impact.
We track activity metrics:
- Workshops delivered
- Social media posts published
- Stakeholders contacted
- Petitions signed
These are not meaningless — but they are not impact.
Leveraging change requires clarity about your causal pathway. What specific change are you trying to produce? What must be true for that change to occur? And which actions directly contribute to that chain of causality?
If you can’t clearly trace a line from what you are doing today to the outcome you want tomorrow, you may be optimising for busyness rather than leverage.
High-leverage strategy is ruthless about alignment.
Find the Bottleneck
In systems thinking, leverage often sits at the constraint — the bottleneck that limits everything else.
Until that constraint shifts, additional effort elsewhere produces only marginal gains.
In an organisation, bottlenecks can look like:
- A lack of clarity about priorities
- Low trust between stakeholders
- Structural funding restrictions
- One overextended team member doing everything
- Inefficient internal processes
A powerful diagnostic question is:
If this one thing changed, would everything else move more easily?
If the answer is yes, you’ve likely found your leverage point.
Instead of adding more activity, shift the constraint.
Design for Leverage, Not Coverage
Another common mistake in the impact space is trying to reach everyone.
Broad reach feels impressive. But shallow engagement rarely creates lasting change.
High-leverage strategies often go deep rather than wide. They focus on key nodes in a system — influential intermediaries, community leaders, multipliers — rather than end users alone.
This might look like:
- Training trainers instead of serving individuals one by one
- Creating evergreen tools instead of one-off workshops
- Strengthening infrastructure rather than expanding program volume
- Building leadership capacity that cascades impact outward
Coverage feels expansive.
Leverage feels strategic.
Eliminate Hidden Friction
Sometimes leverage isn’t about adding something new — it’s about removing invisible drag.
Hidden friction shows up as:
- Overcomplicated approval processes
- Recreating materials from scratch each time
- Manual tasks that could be automated
- Meetings that don’t move decisions forward
- Constant context switching between competing priorities
This kind of friction consumes energy without increasing impact.
Standard operating procedures, templates, automation tools and clearer decision pathways are not glamorous — but they are leverage multipliers. When systems run smoothly, creative and strategic energy can be directed where it matters most.
Stop Doing What No Longer Serves
This is perhaps the hardest leverage shift of all.
In theory, organisations are meant to monitor and evaluate their interventions, adapt when necessary, and pivot if something isn’t working. In practice, projects often continue simply because they were funded or promised.
But if you know something isn’t working, continuing out of inertia wastes both energy and opportunity.
Leveraging change requires the discipline to ask:
- What is working and should continue?
- What needs to be strengthened?
- What needs to be intentionally wound down?
Letting go is leverage.
Shedding misaligned work creates space for aligned work to grow.
Measure What Actually Matters
There’s a reason the phrase exists: what gets measured gets managed.
If you are not measuring meaningful indicators — behavioural shifts, system responses, replication, long-term outcomes — you cannot optimise for them.
If you are not tracking how your time is spent, you cannot improve how it is allocated.
Leverage requires feedback loops. Without feedback, effort becomes guesswork.
When you measure what truly matters, you can manage effort strategically instead of reactively.
Doing Less Is Not About Caring Less
In a culture that equates effort with virtue, choosing to do less can feel uncomfortable.
But leverage is not laziness. It is intelligence applied to effort.
It is the recognition that energy is finite and should be directed toward the points in a system where it produces the greatest transformation.
Doing less busy work creates space for deeper work.
Eliminating friction creates space for creativity.
Focusing on constraints creates space for acceleration.
Leveraging change is not about shrinking your ambition. It is about sharpening it.
The question is no longer, “How can I do more?”
It becomes, “Where does my effort actually move the system?”
That is where real change begins.
