COURSE OBJECTIVES
Why, despite the best efforts of many smart, compassionate, and determined people and organizations, are we unable to affect real change on the issues that matter most?

Due to our limited capacity for engaging with complexity -- especially dynamic complexity -- people tend to narrow their focus and intervene to “solve problems” with a limited understanding of the broader system. All too often, our organizational designs reinforce this silo perspective by cutting us off from our colleagues in other departments or business units.

The solutions we enact create unintended consequences in the long run and we recognize that today’s problems often come from yesterday’s solutions. The harder we push, the harder the system pushes back.

How do we break this cycle? In his seminal book: The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, MIT Sloan School professor Peter Senge calls systems thinking, “the core discipline of a learning organization.” It is a critical leadership capability that enables us to look at a problem holistically, identify root causes, and design high-leverage solutions.

In this intensive course, conducted in four, half-day, interactive sessions, we will learn the core concepts and tools of systems thinking and learning organizations. These tools will allow you to:

1. graphically depict your understanding of a particular social system's behavior and its underlying structure,

2. communicate with others about your understandings explicitly, and

3. design high-leverage interventions to address root causes of a problem.

TARGET AUDIENCE

The course is open to all graduate students and a limited number of year 3 and 4 undergraduate students from any college at NTU.

As the project will ask you to reflect upon and analyze a real life problem, ideally from your own life or work, it is ideally suited to those with current/previous work, student club, or volunteer organization leadership experience.