January 10 – 14, 2011
Jean Boulton, Peter Senge (by videolink), Alex Haxeltine
This course is part of a three week series Systems Thinking in a Complex World.
Click here to book your place online.
Learning how to use systems thinking can be immensely inspiring and constructive for organisations, businesses and other collectives. Indeed, engaging with a whole complex system is essential in working through potential outcomes and dealing with those we cannot foresee. Yet education and training programmes rarely prepare us to operate this way. Therefore, we have to re-learn how we understand the world and our approach to it. This course provides an exciting introduction to systems thinking and its application to sustainability, ecodesign, organisational and social change, industry, business and enterprise with some of the most dynamic theorist and practitioners working in this area.
Working more with the systemic reality of our world Jean Boulton will explore how we can act differently, in a way that takes into account complexity and uncertainty. Planning and strategy take on new forms with this approach which can have massive, positive implications for the way we live and work. This week explores complexity in more depth, particularly in relation to the behaviour of individuals, organisations and communities.
If we understand the world as essentially complex, interconnected, where new patterns emerge and the future cannot be known in advance, how do we go about living our lives? How do we manage organisations? How does this thinking impact on governance, sustainable economics, political thinking? In this week, we will consider the theory of complexity. What is it? Is it new or re-packaged ancient thinking? How can we be sure it is useful and relevant? We’ll then go on to consider how these ideas are relevant for individuals, organisations and wider contexts. How should we develop strategy? What does it mean for leadership, for shaping organisations and facilitating change? What can we learn to help us live and work sustainably, ethically and successfully?
Peter Senge will join the course by videolink for a morning to talk about new skills and approaches that we need to develop in order to create a sustainable future. Unprecedented collaborations of many sorts between business, governments and civil society are developing around the world, but making such collaborative efforts successful is not easy. It requires sophistication in “the human domain” comparable to the technical sophistication (in engineering, finance, marketing and operations) that has driven globalization: deep listening and dialogue across very different viewpoints, learning how to see larger systems together, and moving beyond crisis reaction to co-creating alternative futures.
Alex Haxeltine will present a case study of a new community-led sustainability initiative (that originated in Totnes) known as the Transition movement. The session will provide students with an opportunity to apply what they have learnt during the first two weeks of the course to develop an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the approach being adopted in the Transition Movement. The overall objective of this session will be to stimulate students to think creatively about how systems thinking can be applied in practical contexts to achieve global change through local actions.
Jean Boulton, PhD, MBA is Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management and also at Bristol Business School. She has a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge and a first degree in physics from the University of Oxford. Since 1999 she has worked with the Complex Systems Research Centre at Cranfield and led the design and delivery of complexity teaching to MBA students for several years. Since 2006 she has also taught complexity theory on the MSc in Responsible Business Practice at the University of Bath. She is Chair of Sustain Ltd (www.sustain.co.uk) and Chair of Social Action for Health (www.safh.org.uk). Research interests include: policy development in times of uncertainty; action research as a grounded methodology for exploring complexity theory and complex problems in practice. Her consultancy work centres on strategy and organisation development in times of uncertainty (see www.embracingcomplexity.co.uk). Jean is currently co-authoring ‘Embracing Complexity’ with Professor Peter Allen, to be published by Oxford University Press in late 2010.
Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL), a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants dedicated to the “interdependent development of people and their institutions.” He is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization and his latest book, The Necessary Revolution, co-authored with Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur and Sara Schley was released in June, 2008. He has lectured extensively throughout the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding of economic and organizational change. His areas of special interest focus on decentralizing the role of leadership in organizations so as to enhance the capacity of all people to work productively toward common goals.
Alex Haxeltine is a Research Fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Deputy Leader of its International Policy research programme.
This course is part of a three week series Systems Thinking in a Complex World. Courses in this series are:
Systems thinking and eco-design for sustainability, Hardin Tibbs and Philip Franses (4 – 8 January)
Living and working in a complex world, Jean Boulton, Peter Senge (by videolink), Alex Haxeltine (10 – 14 January)
A Systemic Business Model: Industrial Ecology and the Blue Economy Gunter Pauli (15 – 21 January)
If you take more than one week you will pay less for each consecutive week.
Any One week £750
Any Two weeks £1,450 (Save £50 over weekly course price)
Three weeks £1,900 (Save £350 over the weekly course price)
You can select you the week(s) you require at the point of booking.
All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
Book your place now! – click here to access our on-line booking system
Book by fax or mail! – click here to find out how
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College
To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.
