Dragons of Change is our name for the small handful of “big” problem-statements that tend to pop out of a community Problem Tree workshop, when you stop listing everything that is wrong and start asking “which few things should we face first.”.
In many real PCM sessions, the tree will contain dozens of causes and effects, but the group will usually converge on around four or five major upstream problems that feel both powerful and arguable as priorities, because they sit in the right place between “too small to matter” and “too cosmic to act on.”.
# Wyrms and Dragons If we want the fantasy vocabulary to actually *mean* something, we can separate two kinds of “big thing.”. A Wyrm is in the substrate: a root-cause that lives in habits, incentives, infrastructure, policy, culture, or ecology, and keeps reproducing problems even when you treat the symptoms. A Dragon is in the crown: a high-level, more abstract “state of the world” that everyone can see (loss of trust, chronic shortage, exclusion, instability), which often appears near the trunk or upper branches because it is the felt experience of many underlying causes. This makes a useful rule of thumb: wyrms are what you dig for, dragons are what you notice from a distance, and the craft is choosing which wyrms you can realistically disturb to change which dragons.
# The scientific Pareto language for “four or five big dragons”
If you treat each candidate priority as a “choice” (what we focus on first), and you judge each choice against multiple values (cost, speed, fairness, political feasibility, safety, legitimacy, sustainability, learning value), you have a multi-objective decision problem.
The scientific name for the set of “best trade-off” options is the Pareto-optimal set (also called the non-dominated set), and the picture of those trade-offs is the Pareto front or Pareto frontier - wikipedia.org 
- wikipedia.org
If you want a term for a *small* number of especially good compromise points on that front (the ones that feel like obvious candidates for “the main four or five”), a widely used technical term is knee points on the Pareto front: points where improving one objective further would require a disproportionately large sacrifice in others - egr.msu.edu
So, in strict terms, the “four or five big dragons” are often your workshop’s informal knee points (and sometimes the extreme boundary points too), drawn from a larger non-dominated set that the group does not have time to fully explore.
# How Dragons of Change are derived from a Problem Tree
The Problem Tree gives you a causal map: what causes what, as the community currently understands it - wikis.ec.europa.eu
Dragons of Change are not simply “the worst problems.” They are the problems that look like high leverage *and* high legitimacy inside the group’s shared map.
A practical way to find them is.
Start with the roots and trunk, not the branches.
Circle the causes that have many downstream links (they feed multiple effects).
Filter for influence: keep causes the group can plausibly change, directly or via allies, within the likely project horizon.
Cluster near-duplicates: workshops produce synonyms; dragons should be few, memorable, and non-overlapping.
Name each dragon as a condition in the world, not a proposed action, so you don’t smuggle solutions in too early.
# Using Pareto thinking without doing maths
You can get most of the Pareto benefit with a whiteboard.
Pick a small set of values the group truly cares about (five to eight).
For each dragon candidate, do a rough “better / worse” comparison on each value, and make assumptions explicit.
Drop dominated candidates (those that are worse than another candidate on everything important).
What remains is your non-dominated set, and the “obvious” four or five are usually the knee points the group can explain and defend in plain language - wikipedia.org - egr.msu.edu
# Turning dragons into quests Once the group chooses which dragons (and which wyrms beneath them) to tackle first, the next move is to flip those negative conditions into positive conditions and build the Quest Tree (our name for the Objective Tree). In this translation. The chosen dragon becomes a “big quest condition” (the future state you want to help bring about). The key wyrms become enabling quest conditions (the deeper shifts that make the big quest plausible). The uncomfortable outside-your-control roots become assumptions and risks, instead of hidden sabotage. This keeps the mythic framing, while still landing in a plan that PCM can manage.
# Failure modes Everything becomes a dragon. If your list grows beyond a handful, you have not prioritised; you have renamed the whole tree. Dragons become actions. If your dragons start with “create, deliver, build, train,” you have jumped into activities and lost the causal discipline of PCM. The group confuses dragons with wyrms. If you only name crown-level abstractions, you will struggle to design leverage; if you only name soil-level details, you may lose the shared story that holds the coalition together.
# See - Project Cycle Management - Problem Tree and Quest Tree - Pareto Front and Pareto-optimal Set - Knee Point - Causal Map - Wyrms of Change