Your organization’s environment gets more challenging every day, as rapidly changing markets, policies, demographics, and environmental realities make it difficult to see the best path forward. These challenges also affect the needs of your stakeholders, clients, and customers. Whatever sector you work in, the challenges are shaped by the uncertainty and unpredictability of the 21st century.
Collaboration across organizations, disciplines, and even markets has been a response to these ever increasing challenges. Potential partners invite you to connect for collective action, information sharing, and community-level impact. These kinds of connections are essential, but they are not easy. They bring the tension and conflict of different missions, histories, cultures, priorities, and stakeholder communities. What does it mean to reach across those differences to relate, collaborate, and co-create?
Human systems dynamics (HSD) offers a path for supporting and sustaining deep collaboration. In this HSD Adaptive Action Lab, we invite you to discover that path by bringing your toughest collaboration issue to work on in real time. You will:
- Learn to share resources by leveraging all contributions, rather than building on a few.
- Use the energy of different perspectives and talents to co-create organizational structures, agreements, and outreach.
- Use HSD to shape patterns of collaboration for powerful action.
- Create connections that sustain those collaborations over time and then shift gracefully when the work is done.
Nothing is intractable. Join us to step into a new path toward collaboration, co-creation, and sustainable impact that can lead to thriving in the 21st century. We’ll meet online for 3, two-hour sessions on December 17, 18, and 20, at 12n - 2p CST. And we look forward to having you there with us.
Faculty & Coaches
Laura Williams first encountered the early seeds of human systems dynamics when, as a young professional, she was given a wicked problem. Serendipitously, she met Dr. Eoyang early in her project and made quick and frequent use of her consulting and coaching to innovate a ground-breaking approach to improving systems' responses to sexual assault. Later, as a founder and former program manager of the Sexual Violence Justice Institute, Laura wove human systems dynamics into her coaching, writing, and teaching with multi-agency, multi-disciplinary response teams across the United States.
Today, Laura supports other leaders of local, state, and national initiatives with the concepts and methods they need to influence change within complex systems. Her consulting focuses in the areas of human systems dynamics, institutional change, sexual violence intervention and prevention, youth resiliency, adaptive action and social justice. In addition to this consulting, Laura is the Director of Strategy at the International Institute for Community and Adolescent Resilience (ICAR-US, LLC). This rapidly growing enterprise translates youth development research into a framework that provides both teens and adults pathways to enriching their developmental ecology. In addition to designing client initiatives and supporting the Institute’s growth and reach, she loves the time she spends in classrooms, church basements, conference rooms, and around campfires with youth and adults building webs of support.
Laura holds a Master of Public Affairs in public and non-profit leadership and management from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton College.
Royce Holladay has been working to support people as they navigate change for over 30 years. With a Masters degree in counseling, she began learning about the dynamics of personal change and has been using those skills in multiple areas of her work and personal life since that time. She has worked with individuals of all ages, supporting them to find their own path through the challenges of their complex lives. Over the past decade, Royce has co-authored five books based on Human Systems Dynamics. Her most recent books are a series of brief guides designed to help people apply HSD principles to specific areas of work in human systems. Examples include coaching, instructional design, and facilitation.
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