CIPA526 - Becoming a Systems Leader

Course Description

For organizations to succeed, they need to develop individuals who are constantly learning and adapting according to information on the ground. Sharing key mental models—at the organizational, team, and individual levels—is critical to creating a culture of learning that enables the organization to survive and thrive through chaos and complexity.

In this course, Professors Derek and Laura Cabrera demonstrate how to become a systems leader; that is, someone who can use systems thinking at the organizational level, at the team level, and at the individual level. You will create a culture for your organization that is built on shared mental models and develop techniques to incentivize thought leaders to support the culture based on your vision, mission, capacity, and learning. At the team level, where the real work of the organization gets done, you will explore the process of building, sharing and evolving mental models through collaborative mapping and feedback processes. And finally, you will turn your own thinking into doing, to ensure that your actions are aligned with key organizational mental models. With tools, techniques, and expert guidance, you can begin to implement systems thinking at all levels of the organization, creating teams and individuals upon which organizational culture, values, and success are built.

These courses are required to be completed prior to starting this course:

• Framing Complex Problems with Systems Thinking
• Using the Four Simple Rules of Systems Thinking
• Visualizing and Modeling Complex Systems
• Building Analytical and Emotional Intelligence with Systems Thinking
• Designing Organizations for Systems Thinking

Faculty Author

Benefits to the Learner

• Build your organizational culture around the shared mental models of your vision and mission using internal marketing campaigns and creative incentives
• Create a visual map of a critical team project or process and share and refine that map with other team members to optimize your collective work
• Develop an actionable list of assignments and work activities to ensure that your actions are aligned with critical team and organizational mental models

Target Audience

• Managers, leaders, decision makers, consultants, and anyone responsible for projects, complex processes, and the budgets and people involved with them. Learners will come from every continent and from a diverse range of organizations, including private sector companies large and small, nonprofits, governments, and NGOs.
• For people already interested in systems dynamics or soft systems methodologies, the core principles from this program can be applied to any systems-based models.

Accrediting Associations

• Project Management Institute (PMI) Approval Number 2646GDM81T 10.0 Units