VIRTUAL COURSES TO BUILD CAPACITY

learn with us in three systems informed courses

1.

systems practice

we are very excited to share our new course on systems practices which we will be co-teaching with our colleague dana shen.

in this course we’ll explore what we do, when we do systems thinking. the course will be framed by our newly developed systems practices framework, which will be introduced in week 1. in each week following we will introduce a practice, and then working in small groups you’ll have the opportunity to apply the systems practice to a system of interest. to complement our 'doing', dana will also lead us through a 'being' exercise, a mindfulness practice that complements the systems practice introduced in the session.

the course is highly participatory and will invite you to engage with learning about a system of interest in a small group with others, and to reflect and evolve your practice as we move through. you will also have the opportunity to engage with a self assessment at the start and end of the course to mark your own progress.

this course if for you if you:

• want to hold time to ‘practice’ systems thinking and develop your own capacity
• enjoy learning with others and appreciate diverse perspectives
• value a learning and growing mindset over having the ‘right’ answers quickly
• you are open to mindfulness practice and how it can support you to think and be systemic
• you can attend all sessions live 

this course is NOT for you if you:

• prefer reading and figuring out problems on your own
  don’t see your own role and perspective in a 
• expect the course to make you an expert in systems thinking
• plan to watch recordings at a later date and not participate in live sessions 

outcomes

• build capacity to apply over 10 systems thinking methods
• gain insight on key systems concepts including complexity, boundaries, power, agency, time and scale, systems purpose
• engage in group sensemaking processes including visual modeling
• develop a baseline of your own systems capacity and evaluate change over time
• practice mindfulness with peers to support your own journey working in complex systems
• gain insight and understanding into a system of interest as part of a collective learning inquiry
• learning how to integrate systems thinking tools and practices into your everyday work
   

details

• weekly 2 hr virtual sessions for 9 weeks
• short lectures on key ideas and concepts
• small group work,  personal reflection, mindfulness 
• practice guides, readings, slides and recordings shared via learning platform

next sessions starts may 10th 9am AEST check your timezone

• offered in australiasia and americas friendly time zones
• sliding scale pricing starting at $725.00 AUD (incl. gst)
  

*tickets available for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. please get in touch for more details.

*juggling your finances? let us know, we can offer instalment payment options

weekly session topics:

• week 1 - we'll begin by exploring the question ‘what are we practicing when we practice systems thinking?’ we’ll introduce the systems practice framework and form small groups to select a system of interest.
• week 2 - we’ll begin building our learning space together. first we’ll mapping our individual systems learning journeys and later surfacing and reflecting on our mental models of our system of interest.
• week 3 - we’ll recall the properties of complex systems and some of the truths that systems thinking offers us in understanding a system. we’ll then focus on defining some of the system boundaries for our system of interest
• week 4 - we’ll return to our system of interest and interrogate the systems purpose supported by insight from applying the ‘6 conditions of system change model’.
• week 5 - we’ll bring the lens of time and scale to our system of interest by building a journey map to consider how the system has arrived to be what it is. reflecting across the learning of the past weeks we’ll then seek to define a systems purpose that supports a collective good.
• week 6 - we’ll turn to understanding power in the system, where and how it might be showing up and influencing different dynamics of the system.
• week 7 - we’ll dig deeper into system dynamics to ask how we might move towards better system outcomes. what system relationships need repair in order to move towards the collective good? what enabling conditions are required in order for this relational repair to be possible? what agency and influence we do have to support these shifts?
• week 8 - we’ll turn to explore what it means to ‘sensemake’ as a cognitive process in systems thinking and then introduce developmental evaluation as a tool to support sensemaking. we’ll then apply this process to our systems learning so far in the system.
• week 9 - we’ll explore how we might visually model what we’ve been learning about our system of interest to support creative ways of engaging and communicating about systems. we’ll close our time together by returning to our self-assessments to mark progress and engage with reflection on the learning journey as a whole.