SEE WHAT YOU MISSED & JOIN THE NEXT PROGRAMME

As we conclude the delivery of the first executive programme, An Introduction to Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity, Mike Jackson and I would like to thank the participants and the people who helped make it happen.

The programme would not have been possible without the assistance of Max Wyllie for video recording, editing and technical support and Andy Wilkins and Geoff Marlow for moderating the live dialogue Q&A sessions.

We would also like to thank the guests who took part in the live dialogues with Mike. We ran 16 live sessions over the course of 8 weeks to make sessions on each topic accessible to our global audience regardless of the time zone they lived in. For the first programme our guests included:

John Kay

John is one of the UK’s leading economists, the author of several books, and someone whose career has spanned academic work and think tanks, business schools, company directorships, consultancies, and investment companies. John also writes for the Financial Times and other leading publications, and he was the first Dean of Oxford University’s Said Business School. And has held chairs at London Business School, the University of Oxford, and the London School of Economics.

Mark Goyder

Mark founded Tomorrow’s Company, a London-based business think tank which has worked with business leaders, investors and policymakers and partners to inspire and enable business to be a force for good in society. He describes himself as a champion of a better capitalism. And he is an award-winning public speaker, writer, and broadcaster with over 15 years’ experience as a manager in manufacturing businesses.

Erin Evans

Erin is an entrepreneur and internationally experienced executive, educator, consultant and Board Chair. She is an adaptive and transformational leader who brings a system thinking approach to help organisations work in complex environments, manage change and develop agile, resilient outcomes. She has a passion for governance, strategy and excellence in people development and leadership. She is recently appointed to lead Life Sciences Queensland, a biotechnology peak body.

Martin Reeves

Martin is a Managing Director & Senior Partner of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute. The institute is BCG’s think tank dedicated to exploring and developing valuable new insights from business, technology, economics, and science by embracing the powerful technology of ideas. Martin is also a member of the BCG Henderson Institute's Innovation Sounding Board, which is dedicated to supporting, inspiring, and guiding upstream innovation at BCG. Martin is a regular contributor to HBR, MIT SMR, Fortune and other management journals on business strategy and management.

John Seddon

John is a British occupational psychologist and author, specialising in change in the service industry. He is the managing director of Vanguard, a consultancy company he formed in 1985 and the inventor of 'The Vanguard Method'. Vanguard currently operates in eleven countries. John is a visiting professor at Buckingham University Business School. John has published seven books. In his 2008 book, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, he provided a criticism of the UK Government reform programme and advocated its replacement by systems thinking.

Angela Espinoza

Angela has been an international leader in developing Organisational Cybernetics, a theory for effective organisation and complexity management in organisations pioneered by Professor Stafford Beer. She worked closely with S Beer and funded and co-led the Metaphorum, an NGO to develop his legacy, when he passed away in 2002. She has advised governments, businesses and communities in more effective ways of self-organising and being socially and environmentally responsible. Angela is now an Emeritus Fellow from the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull, and an invited Professor in several Universities worldwide.

Amanda Gregory

Amanda started her research career by working on a national project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to design evaluation procedures for Councils for Voluntary Service (CVS). This work provided the basis for her doctorate, awarded in 1995. Since achieving her PhD, Amanda has held several prestigious academic positions. They included roles as Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching, and Head of the Management Systems Subject Group at Hull University Business School, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Systems Research, and the Director of the Community Operational Research Unit at Lincoln School of Management.

Geoff Marlow

Geoff began his career as a digital systems engineer with British Aerospace and the BBC, before moving in the early 1980’s to the open innovation services lab Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL). The firm helped clients not just with new technologies but also with removing barriers between internal fiefdoms, factions, and silos. CCL’s parent company Arthur D. Little (ADL) acquired Innovation Associates, the organisational learning consulting firm established by Peter Senge in 1995 and Geoff joined the ADL+IA team as Corporate Director, Organisational Learning & Innovation Leadership. He worked with Arie de Geus on the Board of the UK Society for Organisational Learning (SoL) and with Peter Senge on the Global SoL Leadership Team. Today he helps clients create future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.

Martin Reynolds

Martin is Senior Lecturer at The Open University and founding designer and Qualifications Director for the postgraduate programme in Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP). He is lead academic liaison for the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice (ASTiP) Group at the OU. And his teaching and research focus on issues of (critical) systems thinking and (developmental) evaluation in relation to international development, environmental management, health systems support, public sector management, business administration, and educational studies. Martin has published widely in these fields and co-authored two books: Systems Approaches to Making Change and The Environmental Responsibility Reader.

Bill Baue

Bill is an internationally recognized expert on ThriveAbility, Sustainability Context, and Online Stakeholder Engagement. He designs systemic transformation at global, company, and community levels. Bill is also a serial entrepreneur, plus the co-founder of a number of companies and initiatives including r3:0 which promotes Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration. Others include: ThriveAbility Foundation, Sustainability Context Group, Convetit and Sea Change Radio. He works with organizations across the sustainability ecosystem, including AccountAbility, Audubon, Ceres, GE, Global Compact, Harvard, UNCTAD, UNEP, Walmart, and Worldwatch Institute. Most recently Bill contributed significantly to the work of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) work resulting in the just published report, Authentic Sustainability Assessment A User Manual for the Sustainable Development Performance Indicators. It represents a "new sustainability assessment paradigm.”

Kim Warren

Kim was the originator of Strategy Dynamics. He is an experienced strategy professional, teacher and writer. His work now focuses entirely on the practical, rigorous method known as Strategy Dynamics which he developed to help businesses and other organisations of any kind or size radically improve their planning and implementation of strategy. After 15 years in senior strategy roles in business, Kim joined the Strategy faculty at London Business School, teaching on MBA and Executive programs. Realising serious limitations with the strategy methods available – see The Trouble with strategy … (Kindle, 2012) he developed the powerful strategy dynamics frameworks. He is author of the prize- winning Competitive Strategy Dynamics (Wiley, 2002), a major strategy textbook Strategic Management Dynamics (Wiley, 2008), and e-book summary of the method – Strategy Dynamics Essentials (Kindle, 2011).

Aku Kwamie

Aku is a health systems researcher. Her work has focused on applying complexity theory to health systems governance, management and leadership. She is particularly interested in district health systems, as well as learning and mentorship in health policy and systems research (HPSR). She leads the Alliance’s portfolios on systems thinking and capacity strengthening for the conduct of HPSR. Aku holds degrees from the University of Toronto, Kings College London, and Wageningen University. She is a Next Einstein Fellow, a commissioner on the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission A future for the world’s children?, a working group member for Children in all Policies 2030, and a former Board member of Health Systems Global. Aku is from Ghana.

Rajneesh Chowdhury

Rajneesh currently serves as a faculty member at the Birmingham Leadership Institute (University of Birmingham, UK), where he works towards building capacity of senior leaders in the UK public sector on systems thinking and systems leadership. He has worked as a management researcher and consultant with focus on organization development, social impact and corporate reputation applying a systems thinking approach in complex problem solving. He has advised and worked with some of the foremost organizations in the private, public and third sectors in several countries. He has been appointed Fellow at the Centre for Systems Studies (UK) for his continued contribution to systems thinking in academia and practice.

Luis Sambo

Luis is a specialist in Public Health, holds a PhD on Critical Systems Thinking by the Faculty of Law, Business and Politics of the University of Hull, UK. Former appointments include Regional Director for Africa of the World Health Organization, Director of Human Resources of the Ministry of Health and Minister of Health of Angola. Currently, he is invited Professor of Public Health at the University Nova de Lisboa and at the University Agostinho Neto, Angola. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Centre of Systems Studies, University of Hull and Member of the editorial board of the Global Library of Women’s Medicine based in UK.

This remarkable group of guests made a huge contribution to the programme, as a result the feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive. Their insights will also help Mike in the further refinement of his next publication, "A Practitioner Guide to Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity", due to be published in 2023.

APPLY FOR THE SECOND PROGRAMME

You may have missed the first programme, but we are now taking applications for the second programme which will start on February 21st 2023. Again the 8 modules of one week each will be presented over eight weeks, with a short break for the Easter holiday. GET THE DETAILS AND APPLY NOW.

And read why A SERIOUS LONG-TERM INVESTOR WANTS YOU TO ATTEND THIS PROGRAMME