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Post-graduate 2008: Designing and Leading Emergent Change

Description of the program

Designing and Leading Emergent Change is grounded in an approach to change that was developed in the context of two generations of intensive research and is described in Sensing and Shaping Our Future by Mitch Saunders, download pdf.

However, the heart of this program involves learning from participants’ actual experience associated with endeavoring to design and lead systemic change. Participants and instructors work together on real issues, applying the Sensing and Shaping principles, concepts and practical tools for discovering and influencing what is needed.

Each session

• We explore participants’ most sensitive questions and dilemmas, or exciting opportunities, and together all of us explore the associated patterns and energies in the case.
• We tap the extraordinary talents and diversity of experience in the group, yet we go beyond talking about the issues and merely sharing opinions.
• We use simulation and modeling to conduct fast-cycle experiments so we can test the likely consequences of proposed ideas, decisions and actions.

Because in each session we work on cases from different organizational contexts, we also learn how to make productive responses and take responsible action across diverse organizational ecosystems.

Course goals

As a result of taking part in this unique learning environment you will be able to:

• Enter into any system and assess the challenge or opportunity the system is addressing.
• Assess your own capabilities and resources for meeting these challenges and opportunities.
• Sense what is emerging within a system in response to environment and to assist the system to see and sense its own emerging characteristics.
• Translate that sense into practical and concrete actions, steps and shapes  corresponding to what the system requires as it evolves.
• Work with other learners in a dynamic community and nurture your network of organizational development practitioners.