Other Training Programs

The following HSD courses are planned for 2010. Check back often for updates to course offerings.

Contact Royce Holladay for more information about any of these valuable workshops.

Journey from Conflict to Peace:  New Responses to Old Problems

How can we address conflict in complex systems? Human systems dynamics will give you new ways to think about this question and new options for action to make a difference in your family, community, company, nation, and world.

Learn to:

• Name your intuitions about conflict and its resolution.
• Adapt your own actions to shift toward constructive conflict.
• See and influence patterns in human systems at all levels - pairs, teams, communities, and beyond.
• Use emotions of self and others to support productive action and interaction.
• Ask key questions that shift a situation from conflict toward curiosity.
• Set the conditions that encourage constructive self-organizing processes.
• Develop a network of colleagues who share your passion about peace and your understanding of the dynamics of creating peace.
• Create a sustainable action plan for one area of your work.
• Let us customize a time of discovery for your group to unbraid the complex dynamics of conflict in human systems, and help you develop your own capacity for adaptive action.

Dynamical Leadership:  Not Just Another Leadership Class

The field of Human Systems Dynamics is showing us a new path for leaders who are looking for effective ways to deal with the challenges of today's work life. In two days of engaging, interactive work, participants will experience new insights, gain new skills, and engage in activities that will increase their repertoire for facing these challenges.  Learn to see the underlying dynamics at play in your organization and plan for facing those real-life challenges.

Content will include:

• Use a complexity approach to leadership;
• Sort out complex issues to find the simple interventions;
• Learn new theory and application that shifts the way leaders can look at complex issues;
• Identify strategies to work with people, and systems for maximum alignment;
• Identify patterns using complexity science to see and work with trends differently;
• Develop a new understanding of self-organizing and why it is an important concept to understand for successful leaders.
• Let us customize an engaging and highly informative training to increase your potential as a leader in today’s organization.

Introduction to Human Systems Dynamics

Rapid change and diverse constituencies bring an element of unpredictability to institutional life. Innovative theories from chaos and complexity provide new ways to think about organizations and the people who make them successful. This session provides an overview of the principles and patterns that shape emergent phenomena in complex adaptive environments.

You will learn how to:   

• Distinguish between the complex and the "merely" complicated.
• Explore options for responding in unpredictable situations.
  
• Think and talk about the unexpected without blaming it on others.
• Respond responsibly to change, even when it is impossible to predict the outcomes of your actions.
  

Facilitating Organization Change:  Lessons from Complexity Science

Traditional views of organizational change are based on machine models where a single cause has a single and predictable effect. Today's organizations seldom fit these traditional assumptions. Change in a complex environment depends on self-organizing processes that are neither predictable nor controllable. This session provides insights into a new, self-organizing model for change. 

In this session, you will learn:The conditions for self-organizing in a complex system.

• The conditions for self-organizing in a complex system.
  
• Guidelines for shaping change in unpredictable environments.
• Tips for planning for an unknowable future.  

Coping with Chaos:  Seven Simple Tools 

Each of us works in the midst of organizational patterns that shape and are shaped by individual choices. Some patterns are characteristic of complex environments, and people can be more effective when they recognize and respond to these patterns appropriately. 

This session presents:

• Seven common patterns that shape organizational behavior.
• Tips about how to recognize the patterns and their effects on productivity and employee satisfaction.
• Approaches that help you use these patterns to build more effective relationships and organizational structures.

Resilience in the Workplace:  Managing Personal Stress

Increasing workloads, performance expectations, technological developments, and customer expectations place new burdens on service delivery personnel. Individuals develop their own techniques for responding to these increased levels of stress, but these efforts are more effective when they incorporate shared understandings and strategies for a working group.  

In this session you will learn:

• Acknowledge the complex and emergent nature of your work.
• Recognize the sources of stress in your environment.
• Work together to shape organizational and individual responses. 

Leadership in a Complex Adaptive System

At one time, leadership was an art of prediction and control. In the complex environments of today, leaders cannot know what the future will hold, so their roles are changing. This session presents three modes of leadership and explains how all are required to respond to the challenges of today. In this session you will learn:

• Three dynamics that shape organizational performance.
• Leadership competencies that are required for each.
• Tips for leading effectively in self-organizing and emergent environments.

Team Work:  Building Generative Relationships

Today's work environments demand that individuals and groups coordinate to produce outcomes that they share. Working together requires more than frequent and unending meetings or policies and procedures for team work. This session presents a model for building relationships in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. During this session, you will learn:

• STAR Model for building generative relationships.
• Tools to evaluate the current strength of your teaming relationships.
• Tools and techniques for improving the energy and productivity of your team.
  

Excellence and Evaluation in Emerging Environments 

Outcome evaluation is all the rage in social service organizations these days. The problem is that outcomes are unknowable in systems that are changing to respond to emerging needs. How can an individual or group investigate the effectiveness of its work if long-term outcomes are unpredictable? This session provides:

• Principles of complex and emergent systems that interfere with traditional outcomes measures. 
• Adaptive alternative to outcomes measures.
• Tips, tools, and techniques to help design and implement measurement programs that respond to emerging environments.

Using the Energy in the Group:  Conditions for Self-Organizing

Complex systems generate their own patterns and structures. This process, called self-organization, gives life and energy to individuals and organizations. It also makes it difficult to design and implement new ways of working together. This session provides options for shaping the path, speed, and outcomes of self-organizing processes in teams and organizations. In this session, you will learn: 

• To define and recognize self-organizing processes in your organization.
• To identify the three conditions for self-organizing processes.
• To reflect on the conditions that produced current patterns and structures.
• To use the conditions of self-organizing to participate in shaping new, and more productive, patterns of behavior.