What Challenge Are You Facing?
Break through intractable issues for yourself and your clients
Complex environments create sticky problems. Change makes yesterday’s answers irrelevant today. Human systems dynamics offers powerful theory and practice to transform intractable problems into patterns of possibility.
Contact a HSD Professional Associate in your area on HumanSystemsDynamics Plaza to begin Adaptive Action on your complex challenges!
Leading in Complexity
Traditional leadership approaches, grounded in twentieth-century reality, focused on the leader as courageous person of action and power. Current approaches speak to leaders’ abilities to see patterns, listen to weak signals, and support the emotions and cultures of teams. HSD recognizes that a healthy, growing organization needs both of these leadership approaches. The real challenge is to know which is the best choice in the here-and-now.
HSD prepares leaders for wise action in complex and turbulent times. Based in complexity science and chaos theory, human systems dynamics welcomes the command-and-control path of leadership just as much as the observe-and-adapt approach. We help leaders make decisions and take action that are “fit for function,” whatever challenges they face.
Use the power of self-organizing systems to lead your team or your institution into the future.
See your environments with clarity and minimal bias
Create patterns and make meaning, even in the most chaotic contexts
Seize the freedom and power to take a “next wise action”
Test and learn in the next cycle of observation, understanding, and action
Managing Strategic Change
Some people think change is hard, but we think it is easy. Change is happening all the time, all around us. If you pay attention, you will see that everything around you is moving, from the tension in your muscles to the traffic on the highway and the flow of information passing from person to person and place to place.
What is hard is to engage in change as it happens and to influence it toward a strategy you and your organization intend. This is what we call “managing strategic change.”
See, understand, and leverage today’s challenges to create tomorrow’s opportunities.
HSD models and methods support you as you manage strategic change because they help you and your team see patterns emerge in real time, understand those patterns in surprising and useful ways, and take action to influence change in those patterns as it is happening.
Adaptive Action Labs invite leaders at all levels in an organization or community to learn the tools and practice the skills that will help them manage strategic change in themselves and all the human systems that surround them.
Building Adaptive Capacity
Adaptation may be the most important survival strategy for the twenty-first century. Economic, political, social, technological, and cultural change accelerate, and anyone who hesitates to adapt will die or become obsolete.
Forget the idea of risky action. The most high-risk strategy in the coming decade will be refusing to act. But not all action is created equal. Wise action that fuels adaptation requires a range of skills and tools, from mindfulness to objective observation; from innovation to relationship.
Develop people, organizations, and communities to be their best and to do their best.
Adaptation leverages the power of individuals and groups in complex systems to help you see opportunity, understand options for action, choose wisely, assess results, and repeat. And that is the essence of Adaptive Capacity.
In Adaptive Action Labs, you will learn simple concepts and distinctions that help you see patterns quickly and influence them efficiently. Working with others, you will practice what you learn. Focusing on your own most sticky issues, you will reap the benefits of adaptation as you learn Adaptive Action.
Planning in Uncertainty
In simple times, when change is slow, you can use the past to predict the future. Long-term goals, milestones, task lists, and unchanging assumptions make perfect sense. Few of us live in those times these days. Our futures are complex and fast changing, so our processes for preparing for them have to be, too.
Adaptive Action offers the structure you need and the flexibility your environment demands. Check out how Adaptive Action planning can meet your needs.
Prepare for a future you cannot predict or control.
HSD helps clients design customized Adaptive Action planning processes, because it’s understood that no two groups will travel the same path into the future. All of these processes are based on the fundamental principles of HSD: Adaptive Action and Pattern Logic, but no two are ever the same.
HSD adaptive planning processes help you see the differences that make a difference for, so you can create a planning process that fits you and your organization.
Collaborating To Create Community
Everyone talks about collaboration. Public and private organizations, communities, social groups, and families dream of working together in harmony. But a massive chasm too often separates collaborative talk and action. HSD believes that three conditions are key for successful collaboration: common purpose, various interests and dialogue. Together, they build the scaffold that is required for productive and sustainable collaboration.
Use conflict as a resource and difference as an engine for change.
Collaboration is a powerful tool for action and an absolute requirement in response to sticky issues. HSD has many paths and patterns that support collaboration in business and community. We assist you in creating the three key conditions necessary to shape the patterns of collaboration in human systems:
Crafting a compelling purpose that holds people together
Combining significant differences that bring energy into the engagement
Finding useful ways to engage with each other in co-creative work
“Leadership in HSD is an invitation to work with adaptive and emerging patterns.”
- Jess Tansutat, Executive Coach, Singapore & Southeast Asia