Why We Exist
We are a Network of individuals and organizations developing theory and practice in human systems dynamics - HSD.
HSD Institute is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation that invests profits in education, research, and services to increase adaptive capacity in individuals, organizations, and communities.
What is the need?
- Baby boomers are disappointed idealists. The world they grew up in no longer exists, with accelerating change, increasing diversity, and globalization. They recognize a need to find a better way to meet the challenges they face.
- Traditional fields (i.e. human resources, organization development, leadership, and peace) are in transition as they search for coherent responses to today’s challenges.
- Mid-career professionals know their theory and practice don’t match.
- Human systems are more complex than the mechanistic models traditionally used to inform theory and practice.
- People are willing to admit that human systems are complex.
- People perceive an urgency around change for survival at all levels.
How does HSD help?
- HSD offers hope, grounded in science and experience.
- HSD's principles and tools resolve or transcend long-standing dilemmas in various fields.
- HSD provides theory that is coherent with practice.
- HSD provides skills and tools to help individuals respond to complex, nonlinear dynamics.
- HSD introduces concepts, language, and action that are accessible and practical.
- HSD helps individuals and groups identify multiple options for action to improve fitness and performance.
To focus its energies and address existing and future needs, HSD Institute identified a strategy: to build, support, and maintain a network of scholar practitioners who develop and disseminate theory and practice in human systems dynamics.
How did the Human Systems Dynamics Institute Come To Be?
Richness of Diversity
In the beginning, the diversity of thought in the field of human systems dynamics stimulated new thought and action. Possibilities emerged when individuals who worked mostly as soloists found opportunities to play in ensemble. Organizations such as the Society of Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, as well as the Chaos Network, afforded annual opportunities to meet face-to-face and more frequent communication via newsletters, journals, and email or list-serves. Each of these venues provided opportunities for members of the emerging community to teach and learn together.
Over time, however, the dynamics of diversity have shifted. What previously were motivating differences within the field threaten to become containers that establish competition and animosity between and among the various threads of investigation. Those who study and work in the field have a choice. Applications of complexity to human systems could become as factional and internally vitriolic as other applied social sciences from which many of us emerged. Or, we can apply what we've learned about emergent system-wide patterns to influence the dynamics prospectively. We can work together to consciously establish the conditions for an interesting and diverse, yet coherent field at the shared edges of complexity and social sciences.
One Shared Space
To meet this challenge and establish a shared environment of learning and opportunity, we must become aware of the similarities that bind us as well as the differences that enrich us. We must articulate a shared landscape that holds us together in common work. A single field with a single name will help move us toward this goal. Rather than standing at the edges of natural science investigation into complexity or the edges of more traditional social sciences stretching to incorporate nonlinear dynamics, we should stand in the middle of the field as we build it.
Our Work
We must establish methods and modes of communication that will allow us to transform and be transformed as individuals, organizations, and a community of learners. These conversations must be frequent and fluid, allowing each of us to explore new ideas freely, trusting that our peers will provide encouragement, as well as fair and well-reasoned critique. Electronic, print, and face-to-face communications will be needed to establish the networks of learning rich and varied enough to carry the transforming exchanges as the field, and each of us, emerges.
We must explore our differences to establish a rich and flexible tapestry of principle and practice in applications of complexity to human systems. We must establish standards of quality for ourselves to ensure that the field moves toward increasing truth and usefulness. At the same time, we must be ready to learn from myriad approaches, tools, and techniques as they emerge and are tested by others and ourselves.
HSD Institute is founded to establish these conditions. Its original purpose remains and has grown: to facilitate development of theory and practice in human systems dynamics to increase adaptive capacity in individuals, organizations, and communities.
The following short list of simple rules is the foundation for the emerging system-wide patterns for the field of human systems dynamics and that of the Institute.
- Teach and learn in every interaction
- Reinforce strengths of self and other
- Search for the true and the useful
- Give and get value for value
- Attend to the part, the whole, and the greater whole
- Engage in joyful practice
We hope that you will join us on this journey of discovery. Each of us might search alone. Any one of us might find the 'better' answer, but it is not likely. The most likely path to productive system-wide patterns is through rich interaction of free agents. That is what HSD Institute is all about.