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October 4, 2018
You are encouraged to innovate, yet you are held to high standards. You are asked to stretch the boundaries, but then get second-guessed when you do. Goals about innovation are often outweighed by the culture of the organization. On the one side, you invite risk; on the other you avoid it. How can you resolve this conundrum that creates dissonance at all scales of your life?
HSD helps you balance rules and expectations with innovation to create workplaces and communities of the future.
Collaborate to Create Community
I have been distracted this week by the events in Washington, to say nothing about what is happening in London, on the Texas border, in Indonesia and North Carolina, and everywhere in between. These events challenge a set of fundamental beliefs I hold. I learned them from my parents, read them in classics of Western philosophy, observed them in communities of my youth, and vote to uphold them whenever the polls are open. The principles seem a bit naïve today, but they form the core of my relationship with personal, social, and political reality. I will be more specific.
September 20, 2018
Join us as HSD Professionals Sara and Dominic Swords, Bernadette Christiansen, and Mark Jefferey share their HSD stories about how they use HSD principles, models, and methods to change their worlds every day.
We always say that HSD is about good questions—the answers are up to you! Of course, that is because every complex system is unique, so the patterns of success will depend on local, immediate circumstances, more than the certainty of some evidence-based answer.
September 6, 2018
You play in many networks of friends, colleagues, neighbors, community members, and political allies. People join forces to face shared challenges or to enjoy shared interests. You know coalitions are necessary, and you know they are hard to create and sustain. How can you build adaptive coalitions?
HSD helps you create momentum for change across each network you touch.
Build Adaptive Capacity
In July, I wrote a blog post about the need to tell the “bigger story” by using narratives that explore the dynamics of interactions between and among humans. In HSD we teach people to see, understand, and influence those dynamics. We constantly seek to use engaging and accessible narrative to share stories that help people leverage the complexity around them to find their next wise action. I believe that if narrative includes an exploration of the complexity in our interactions, it can also help us, individually and as a group, share our stories in more relevant and compelling ways. I also am caught up in the question of whether it can also help us to reach across the differences that divide us to create greater understanding and empathy.
When is a change a real change? When it is a paradigm shift!
The term "paradigm shift" gets tossed around. Its meaning has become more and more hazy since 1962, when Thomas Kuhn first applied the term to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
In this short video, Glenda Eoyang explores four signs of a true paradigm shift. She looks for those signs in human systems dynamics and other complexity-informed disciplines in social sciences. In the process, she explains why teaching complexity is often much more difficult than understanding it.