Levers of control: what you can actually change in a business

"We need profit. We have to do something."

Andrew, the coffee shop owner in Steer, Don't Guess, says this at a morning briefing, staring at a red number. His senior barista, Sara, asks the only reasonable question: "Do what, exactly?" He does not know. They talk for ten minutes and part with the feeling that they have been discussing the weather.

If you have ever sat through that meeting, possibly as the person running it, this page is for you. It is about levers of control: the short list of things you can actually move, and the much longer list of things you only wish you could.

Staring at a red number and vowing to "do something" is how good weeks get wasted. The Jirgenson Model gives you the answer: a short list of levers you control, each tested before you pull it. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).

Levers of control: the wheel and the heading

A helmsman does not turn the ship with his bare hands. He turns the wheel, and the heading follows. That image opens the chapter, and the whole lesson is inside it: between the wish ("sail north") and the result (the ship moving north) sits a mechanism within reach. You do not push on the result. You move the mechanism.

Simons' levers of control vs the levers you pull

If you searched for Robert Simons' Levers of Control (Harvard Business School Press, 1995), here is the short version. Simons names four systems a large organisation uses to steer its people: beliefs systems (the values everyone shares), boundary systems (what nobody may do), diagnostic control systems (targets and the reports that watch them) and interactive control systems (the few numbers top management discusses face to face).

That is control of a company from above. This page is about the other meaning of the phrase: the short list of things you, the owner, can change by your own decision this week. The two fit together. A diagnostic system tells you that margin is red. It does not tell you which lever to pull.

Business levers vs results: the mistake behind most "we must do something" meetings

The chapter's simplest table is also its most useful. On the left, what you want; on the right, what you can actually do about it:

"We need profit!" and "We need sales!" are pushes on the left column. Nothing moves, because nothing on the left obeys you. You see the result; you move the lever. As long as the lever goes unnamed, you get ten minutes of talk about the weather.

How to focus on what you can control: Andrew's line

The most satisfying scene in the chapter is a clean sheet of paper. Andrew writes down everything that comes to mind, then starts crossing out. The weather? An environmental factor. Rent and taxes? Given conditions. Foot traffic in the street? Not his lever. What remains is four lines:

• the prices of lattes and cappuccinos;
• the menu: drop the items that sell poorly and cost a lot;
• purchasing: talk to the milk supplier;
• portion size.

He rereads the list and feels noticeably calmer. Until then he had spent his nerves on everything at once: the rent, the weather, the customers' mood. Now he has four things he can tackle tomorrow morning. That, I think, is the most honest description of how to focus on what you can control that I have read in a business book. Not a mindset. A crossed-out list.

The same move works anywhere. Elena, a freelance designer, first wrote "more social media, increase sales, be more visible". Every item sounded businesslike; not one could be done tomorrow. Her second list: write three chapters, prepare the book's page, collect the first hundred addresses. Those are business levers. Alex, thirteen and saving for a bicycle, crossed out "get money for my birthday" when his mother pointed out it depended on his uncle.

Three questions before you pull any lever

Not every lever is equally good. Before pulling one, ask three questions: Can I move it myself, today? How long before the effect shows? Can I undo it if it does not work? Here are Andrew's four levers through that filter:

The table tells you where to start: fast and reversible first, slow or irreversible later. It also explains something owners often get wrong: why the first honest check of a plan comes in the second month. Some levers simply cannot work sooner.

Testing a lever in euros: will a 5% price rise pay off?

Here is where the chapter turns from good advice into a tool. Andrew's numbers: revenue €30,000, ingredients €9,000 (they move with customer numbers), other costs €18,300, profit €2,700, a margin of 9%. He raises prices by 5% and assumes 2% of customers leave.

One lever delivers about three of the six percentage points he needs. Then comes the better question: where is the limit? The rise pays off as long as fewer than 6.7% of customers leave. "Raise the margin" has become something you can test: how many customers will leave? And the test is cheap, because a leading indicator answers it early: the number of receipts in the first two weeks after the change.

When there is no lever

Sometimes you write down a goal and cannot find a single lever. The book treats that as a signal with two possible meanings. Either the goal is worded so it cannot be controlled directly ("readers' trust" is not a lever; publications, examples and reviews are, and trust follows), or the lever exists and you have not spotted it. The question that finds it: what has to be done for this to happen, and who does it? If the honest answer is "nobody", no effort will solve the task, and you need to revisit the goal or who is responsible for it. If two goals reach for the same lever, you have competing priorities, and you set their order before you pull it.

Where this does not reach

A lever list tells you what you can move, not how hard to push or in what combination. Strength varies, effects take time, and causes other than your lever keep acting, which is why it pays to start with one lever at a time so you can see its effect. And when an environmental factor is stronger than all your levers combined, no list will save you; that is a different problem, covered in why business plans fail.

The ten-minute exercise that ends the weather talk

Here is the exercise for anyone who feels stuck: pick one goal in trouble, write four or five actions you can take yourself in the next few days, then cross out everything that depends on others, the weather, the market or luck. It takes about ten minutes. What remains is short, a little humbling and enormously calming.

You have two choices. Hold another meeting about the weather. Or spend those ten minutes on a list of levers and pull one of them on Monday.

The list is one step. It does not say when a number is bad enough to act on; that is the zones, Chapter 4. It does not turn a lever into a plan with a deadline and an indicator; that is the control concept, Chapter 6.

Test the logic for free: Chapter 1, the goals that levers serve. Or get the full control system on Kindle, on Amazon.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

• Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
• Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
• Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
• GitHub: experiment folder
• Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
• ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552