Find the feedback
Moves attention from the latest event to the loops that amplify or stabilize behavior over time.
unofficial source-built lens · v1
Donella Meadows on leverage
Look past visible events toward feedback, information flows, rules, goals, and the paradigms that keep a system behaving as it does.
A lens never answers for you. It helps you see the question that your perspective alone might miss.
01 / attention
What this lens helps you notice.
These are the visible attention shifts projected into ask’s Question Genome.
Inspect the rules
Looks for incentives, delays, information access, and rules that make the current outcome rational inside the system.
Question the goal
Tests whether optimizing the current target merely makes the wrong system more efficient.
02 / question moves
How it changes the next question.
The lens influences where ask looks. The question still belongs to you.
- 01Clarify the territory
What feedback loop keeps recreating this outcome?
Moves attention from the latest event to the loops that amplify or stabilize behavior over time.
- 02Test the frame
Which rule or information flow makes the current behavior make sense?
Looks for incentives, delays, information access, and rules that make the current outcome rational inside the system.
- 03Open a next move
What is this system actually optimizing—and should it be?
Tests whether optimizing the current target merely makes the wrong system more efficient.
03 / genome projection
No mystery score.
The translation layer is inspectable: source patterns become attention territories, then question moves.
Named, linked, and open to inspection.
Find the feedback · Inspect the rules · Question the goal
Three movements, each changed by the lens.
04 / boundaries
What this lens does not claim.
Trust begins where the interpretation stops pretending to be total.
- 01
This is a source-grounded interpretation, not a simulation of a person or a claim to know what they would say.
- 02
The lens changes what ask notices and tests; it does not supply an answer or override your judgment.
- 03
Sources are bounded and visible. Missing work, context, and disagreement remain part of the lens.
05 / source index
Inspect the material.
Every lens should show what shaped it, what is missing, and when it changed.
- S1Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System ↗
Donella Meadows Project
- S2Dana’s Writing ↗
Donella Meadows Project
bring it into ask