Month: December 2022

Christopher Bramley – The Tautai of Leading

Posted on by agile-to-agility

Christopher Bramley

The Tautai of Leading – Navigating complex environments together
January 11, 2023
TRACK C

1:15 PM to 2:15 PM EST

The Tautai of Leading – Navigating complex environments together
It’s hard to navigate when you’re too close to the sun, but all too easy to forget that we cannot effectively explore and influence a journey unless we are part of it – so how can we pull all these concepts together to help find our way in a meta-complex world?
 

Without the agents within, a CAS ceases to meaningfully exist. In human terms, we are so much more than mere components set to a task of specialisation in a rigid system, and we know this isn’t how the real world works. The most successful navigators we have known have used the human elements of song and story to evolve and bring entire cultures from one shore to another in a vast, unknown and sometimes dangerous ocean; navigating the shifting waters of complexity can be harder than ever in the modern world. It can be even harder when concepts and ideas seem in turn complex or inaccessible, so how can we all become part of the journey?

When we have taught ourselves to learn poorly, and wilfully ignore the boundaries and signifiers offered to us by our environment, it’s easy to lose our way. Here, we explore a more abstracted, connected view of many concepts – culture, language, agility, complexity, collaboration, tools, and lenses and scaffolds amongst them – not to provide an answer today, but to see if we can seed change in the way we think about how these things – and each other – are interconnected… and perhaps when and how to use (or not use) them.

It’s very hard to keep multiple resolutions in our view as we try to find our way, and very easy to focus on only one, but navigating this complex world together – in waters both corporeal and metaphysical – can offer better and more numerous opportunities for success.

 

About Christopher Bramley

Chris moonlights as a TEDx and conference speaker, coach, and advisor for c-suite executives and organisations down through to individuals and teams, in complexity, agility, distributed workflow and interactions, and human learning. He writes articles and books in non-fiction and business as well as critically-acclaimed multiple fantasy and sci-fi novels. The value of people and balance is a key focus for strategy and flow explorations, and he has worked across private and public sectors at all strata to inspire people in learning to truly lead through clearer intent and language. He is a storyteller, seeing and exploring patterns and linkages others don’t often see; Chris is atypically autistic (ASD 1/2 and ADHD), and has differences in sensory and emotional input, as well as increased sensitivity in all of them, and works to advocate equitable inclusion, diversity, and health physically and mentally.

Connect with Christopher Bramley on LinkedIn

 

Dr. Sharon Varney – Dynamic patterning: Slow down to speed up

Posted on by agile-to-agility

Sharon Varney

Dynamic patterning: Slow down to speed up!

January 11, 2023
TRACK B

1:15 PM to 2:15 PM EST

Dynamic patterning: Slow down to speed up!
If you want to ride on the coat tails of natural agility in organisational life, then pay close attention to the dynamic patterning.


Complexity and change come as a package. Many people forget that. They rush after change, never catching up with their changing world, leaving a host of unintended consequences in their wake. They brush off emerging problems and missed opportunities in their race to the next big thing … and so it goes on. That’s not agility, it’s agilitis!

Yet, being fully aware of the entangled nature of the world also brings practical challenges. When the implications of what we say and do are unclear, and the holistic view is overwhelming, it’s tempting to retreat to familiar patterns such as ‘all talk’ and ‘analysis paralysis’. Meanwhile, the world is changing.

In this session, Sharon unpicks the ‘Complexity Conundrum’. She explains why speeding up is the wrong response in a complex world that’s in constant motion. She introduces the idea of dynamic patterning and explains why spotting the ‘vital signs of change’ can reveal opportunities for action – tipping the balance to help us in grasping emerging opportunities and heading off emerging problems sooner. That’s real agility!

 

About Sharon Varney

Dr Sharon Varney is a leadership and change consultant, author and educator. She works internationally helping her clients to successfully manage their leadership and change challenges in a complex world that’s in constant motion. Sharon is known for making complexity science insights accessible and useful, without dumbing them down. Insights from her award-winning doctoral research have been successfully applied by managers and professionals in many sectors. They are now available to all in her highly-acclaimed book ‘Leadership in Complexity and Change: For a world in constant motion’, De Gruyter’s business book of the month in October 2021. Sharon runs boutique organisational consulting practice space for learning ltd and has a long association with triple-accredited Henley Business School.

Connect with Dr Sharon Varney on LinkedIn

 

Sonja Blignaut – Demystifying Complexity

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Sonja Blignaut

Demystifying Complexity

January 11, 2023
TRACK A

12:15 PM to 1:00 PM EST

Demystifying Complexity

Complexity is often shrouded in jargon and theory, but it has always been part of the human experience and we already know how to navigate it.


It’s hard to survive in the jungle if you were trained in the zoo.

This analogy has worked well to articulate the dilemma that many of us feel in the seemingly overwhelming complexity of modern times. Truth is, we all have jungle skills … we tend to forget about them when we need to lead. Complexity is not new; it wasn’t invented along with the VUCA acronym. We’ve been navigating complexity our entire lives.

It is easy to get lost in the jargon and theory that pervade the field of complexity, and people are often left with a sense of “so what”? As philosopher Edgar Morin says, we must go beyond a conceptual understanding of complexity to an embodied or lived experience. That is what we will explore together in this session.

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About Sonja Blignaut 

Sonja Blignaut has been working in the field of applied complexity for two decades, helping leaders, teams and organisations navigate uncertainty and cultivate complexity fitness. Sonja is the cofounder of Complexity Fit, focused on developing learning platforms that make the wisdom of complexity available accesibly and at scale. She’s consulted widely with multi-national clients across multiple industries and is a sought-after speaker and teacher. Sonja lives in South Africa with her husband and three dogs. She is a self-professed coffee snob and an avid photographer.

Connect with Sonja Blignaut on LinkedIn

 

Ian Macdonald – Entangled Agility. Complexity in Praxis

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Ian Macdonald

Entangled Agility. Complexity in Praxis

January 11, 2023

2:30 PM to 3:15 PM EST

Entangled Agility. Complexity in Praxis

How can we design within and for corporate systems for an emergent entanglement of people, their ideas, roles and constraints into a more conscious and aware human network that promotes much greater resilience and adaptability in the service of both business and planet?


The current mix of VUCA, BANI and DELA contexts brings us ever closer to urgent demands on expanding our skills into consciously and purposefully designing for the entanglement within corporate structures. This shift seems paradoxical in relation to what we understand of efficiency and agility yet we are facing challenges that demand a form of hybrid system management (including ourselves as integral parts of these systems) that recognize and ride the waves of our hyper-integrated and connected state of affairs (rather than tumble or wipe-out beneath them). Both individually and collectively, we need to develop the skills and awareness in first, second and third-person perspectives to interact, make sense of, shift, manage and respond to these systems to achieve any degree of success or sustainable development. Designing for an emergent entanglement of people within and across their corporate systems is a significant step towards creating a highly adaptive and resilient team of teams that can deliver significant results for their people, investments and the planet.
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About Ian Macdonald

With over 25 years of experience, Ian has worked in areas of entrepreneurship, communication, leadership development and strategy. Since 2014, he has been a bi-lingual executive coach, consultant and facilitator in complex adaptive systems. Based physically in Brazil, he has worked with a wide range of individual students, governments and corporate organizations from varying sectors and sizes in Latin America, USA, Canada, Europe and the Middle East. Ian has co-facilitated the design and implementation of SenseMaker® projects, Cynefin training courses, Masterclasses and digital complex facilitation as well the design and implementation of Complexity Labs. He is currently part of the Digital Transformation and Business Agility Design team and head of the Complexity Labs at Itaú Bank in Brazil.

Connect with Ian Macdonald on LinkedIn

 

Jason Frasca – Iain Kerr – Innovation Led Leadership with Complex Adaptive Systems

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Jason Frasca

Iain Kerr

Innovation Led Leadership with Complex Adaptive Systems

January 11, 2023

12:15 PM to 1:00 PM EST

Innovation Led Leadership with Complex Adaptive Systems
This talk seeks to provide a broad overview of how innovation itself might lead without “leadership” in co-emergent contexts with different practices and approaches that can assist in this effort.

Does innovation require leaders to lead? Innovation — the emergence of novelty within organizational ecosystems is resolutely non-linear, distributed and relation dependent — as such it is irreducible to the specific actions of any particular individual or leader. From the perspective of innovation that is emerging in the context of complex adaptive systems, is there a better way to approach both innovation and leadership by focusing on the agency (and ultimately leadership) of the system itself? This talk seeks to provide a broad overview of how innovation itself might lead without “leadership” in such co-emergent contexts and how different practices and approaches can assist in this effort.
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About Jason Frasca and Iain Kerr

Emergent Futures Lab is a strategic innovation consulting firm. We’ve pioneered award-winning innovation processes, frameworks, methods, tools, and practices that transform organizations into disruptive innovators to thrive in our changing world.

Jason Frasca is an entrepreneur focused on leveraging emerging technologies for meaningful social transformation and whose ventures have taken him into a wide variety of spaces from health to law. His expertise in entrepreneurship and innovation led him to be hired as the first full-time faculty of the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Montclair State University, where he co-founded and co-directs the MIXLab – the campus innovation and research center, in addition to being a founding partner of Emergent Futures Lab.

Iain Kerr is a designer and innovation researcher working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems to make disruptive changes possible. His unique approach evolves from over twenty-plus years of experimenting across and beyond the zones of industry, the arts, and ecology. He co-directs the MIXLab at MSU and is a founding partner of Emergent Futures Lab.

Connect with Jason on LinkedIn

Connect with Iain on LinkedIn

 

Glenda Eoyang – Seven Dragons of Complexity

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Glenda Eoyang

Seven Dragons of Complexity

January 11, 2023

3:30 PM to 4:15 PM EST

Seven Dragons of Complexity
Complexity challenges basic assumptions about cause and effect, time and power, autonomy and responsibility. In this session, we will explore seven of the most “dangerous” paradigm shifts and how they can inform and reform leadership and management.

Ancient maps showed sea monsters and dragons beyond the edge of the known world. Today, we face emergent and unpredictable challenges of planning, innovation, leadership, and performance management that challenge many of our long-held assumptions about the worlds of work and life. We engage with open, high-dimension, nonlinear systems that challenge our capacity to understand and influence change as it happens. Current conditions open the door to a whole new generation of dragons at the edge of the post-modern world. In this session, we will introduce seven of the most dangerous of those dragons, explore how they expand and constrain options for action, and provide simple models and methods to help you see, understand, and influence a world beyond certainty and control. Bring your most wicked issues and leave with options for effective action to shape the emergent future for yourself and your team, organization, and community.
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About Glenda Eoyang

Glenda Eoyang helps people and organizations thrive in the face of overwhelming complexity and uncertainty. She is a pioneer in the applications of complexity science to human systems, and she founded the field of human systems dynamics (HSD) in 2001. As founding executive director of the HSD Institute she leads a global network of scholar-practitioners. Across disciplines and sectors, they use her models and methods to see patterns in the chaos that surrounds them, understand the patterns in simple and powerful ways, and take practical steps to shift chaos toward coherence. Her recent clients include the Finnish Research Institute (VTT), US Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, British Columbia Ministry of Health, Oxfam International, The International Baccalaureate Organization, The Sustainability Consortium, the Association for Medical Education in Europe, UK National Health Service, and Roffey Park Institute. For more information about Glenda and HSD, visit www.hsdinstitute.org.

Connect with Glenda Eoyang on LinkedIn