Month: December 2022

Mary Uhl-Bien – Leading in Complexity: Enabling the Adaptive Process

Posted on by agile-to-agility

Mary Uhl-Bien

Leading in Complexity: Enabling the Adaptive Process


January 11, 2023

3:30 PM to 4:15 PM EST

Leading in Complexity: Enabling the Adaptive Process
The world of leadership has changed–have you changed with it?

All who have experienced the global pandemic of 2020 can tell you that we live in a changed world. People no longer question whether we are in complexity, that reality has been made explicitly clear. What they want to know now is, what do we do about it, and what does it mean for how we need to lead differently? In this talk Prof. Uhl-Bien discusses leading in complexity from the standpoint of how to enable the adaptive process in people and organizations. The adaptive process happens when individuals and systems engage tensions between pressures for change (e.g., innovation, novelty, learning, growth) and pressures for stability (e.g., current performance, short-term results, status quo) through conflicting and connecting to generate adaptive outcomes. It is a fractal dynamic, meaning that the same process occurs across any level. The good news is that once you know the process, you can enact it in any situation that requires adaptability. The talk begins by focusing on the adaptive process at the individual level (cognitive process) and then applies it to the organizational level (system-level change). It concludes by discussing implications of the adaptive process model for leadership and followership behaviors, skills and mindsets.
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About Mary Uhl-Bien

Mary Uhl-Bien is the BNSF Railway Endowed Professor of Leadership in the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University (TCU). Her research focuses on complexity leadership, relational leadership, and followership. Mary was ranked the #6 Most Influential Leadership Scholar from 1990-2017 and recognized by Poets and Quants as a Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor. She is active in executive education nationally and internationally and has been a visiting scholar in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe, including Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Spain. Mary also has been a regular commentator on CNBC and Squawk Box.

Connect with Mary Uhl-Bien on LinkedIn

 

Jacqueline Conway – Embracing paradox in executive leadership

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Jacqueline Conway

Embracing paradox in executive leadership

 

January 11, 2023

12:15 PM to 1:00 PM EST

Embracing paradox in executive leadership
If executive leaders want to be agile and responsive in a disrupted world, they must learn to work with paradox. But which paradoxes trip them up and what can they do about it?

Executive leaders want to be agile and responsive in a disrupted world. But to do so, they must reconcile seemingly contradictory approaches to meet competing workplace demands. These show up as paradoxes: the relevance of which is increasingly recognised as central to the success of executive leaders.


What are the four fundamental paradoxes facing every executive leadership team operating in a complex environment? And how can leaders learn to work effectively with them? That’s what Jacqueline outlines in this enlivening presentation.

Jacqueline presents the three fundamental paradoxes that executive leaders are confronted with. outlines the impact their ability to develop agility and resilience in their organisations. These are: functional/enterprise leadership, incremental/discontinuous change, and control/empowerment management. For each one, Jacqueline outlines the conundrums that executives are confronted with and the habitual ways these leaders typically respond. She then outlines a way to hold these in a dynamic balance, respecting the organisation as a complex adaptive system that a leader works in rather and on.

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About Jacqueline Conway

Jacqueline is a ExCo advisor and coach, working with progressive CEOs and their top teams to develop their collective enterprise leadership: the advanced capacity to anticipate, navigate and lead in the age of complexity.

She is the founder and Managing Director of Waldencroft, a consulting practice based in Edinburgh and working internationally.

Her work combines academic rigour with deep practicality. She has a PhD in executive team functioning from the Adam Smith Business School and is a professional Futurist.

Jacqueline is also the host of the Advanced Executive Leadership podcast and author of The Perilous Peak, a digest for executives leading in a disrupted world.

Connect with Jacqueline Conway on LinkedIn

 

Geoff Marlow – Making sense of sense making

Posted on by agile-to-agility

Geoff Marlow

Making sense of sense-making
 
January 11, 2023

2:30 PM to 3:15 PM EST

Making sense of sense making
In an increasingly complex, uncertain, and unpredictable world sense making, decision making, and action taking must become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout an organisation.

Human communities are inherently adaptive – unless rigidly constrained, which is precisely what Western organisations have been designed to be for more than a century. Rigid constraints proved adequately fit for purpose for the many decades when the world was relatively stable and predictable. Organisations designed in this way are now buckling as they seek unattainable stability and predictability in an ever more VUCA world. To thrive in the future, organisations require cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, where sense making, decision making & action taking are tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation. This requires a much clearer understanding of the role of sense making, and how it can be coupled most effectively effectively to decision making and action taking. Creating such a future-fit culture is the primary responsibility of senior executives, whose role is no longer making decisions, but creating conditions – in which good decisions get made, implemented, and iterated as part of everyday business as usual throughout the organisation. Come along to the session to find out what this entails.
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About Geoff Marlow

Geoff began his career as a digital systems engineer with British Aerospace and the BBC, before moving in 1983 to the open innovation services lab Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL). CCL helped clients not just with new technologies, but also with removing barriers between internal fiefdoms, factions, and silos. When a client asked Geoff if he could “come and help our people behave more like your people” it established the career path he’s been on ever since, helping client organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US create future-fit organisational cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.

Connect with Geoff Marlow on LinkedIn

 

Gene Bellinger – The Essence of And?

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Gene Bellinger

The Essence of And?

January 11, 2023

3:30 PM to 4:15 PM EST

The Essence of And?
Understanding Relationships & Their Implications

When I first started creating models my greatest impediment was a blank sheet of paper. Having it pounded into me from early in life that it wasn’t good to make mistakes I wanted to make sure I started in the right place. Not knowing where the right place was, I just couldn’t get started. As depicted in the image the blank page detracted from getting started, and not starting resulted in a blank page. Thus I was caught in a vicious reinforcing loop. * https://systemswiki.substack.com/p/and

About Gene Bellinger

Gene has been a passionate Systems Thinker for over four decades. He is a highly respected member of the systems thinking community, authored hundreds of models and articles, created over 1,500 videos about relationships and their implications, and from time to time, is a member of the System Dynamics Society. Gene spent several years working with the developers of both Insight Maker and Kumu. In 2013 Gene co-authored “Beyond Connecting the Dots: Modeling for Meaningful Results” with Scott Fortmann-Roe, the developer of Insight Maker. Gene shepherded the Systems Thinking World discussion group on LinkedIn to 20,000+ members focused on developing a better understanding of and employing systems thinking principles. Gene is also the developer of the Systems-Thinking website. Presently Gene is actively developing SystemsWiki’s Musings, understanding relationships, and their implications.

Connect with Gene Bellinger on LinkedIn

 

Dave Snowden – Distributed leadership – process over psycho-paternalism

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Dave Snowden

Distributed leadership – process over psycho-paternalism

January 11, 2023

1:15 PM to 2:15 PM EST

Distributed leadership – process over psycho-paternalism

Most behaviour associated with good leadership emerged from the circumstances that created those leaders, it doesn’t have causality of itself. Interactions between people matter more than the innate qualities of those people – what we need a processes that can create distributed leadership at scale

 

The EU field Guide on managing in Complexity (and Chaos) established that most leadership is about co-ordination and connections rather than decision making. Other than in a crisis where decision making needs to focus on decisive action to keep options open. This presentation will look at new methods for distributed (not delegated) leadership, the creation of human sensor networks for decision support and the role or roles in managing complex environments. It will challenge maturity, competence and behavioural models of leadership.

About Dave Snowden 

Prof Snowden is the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co (formerly Cognitive Edge). He is the creator of the Cynefin Framework along with a significant body of frameworks and methods. He originated and designed the worlds first distributed ethnographic software. His article on Leadership (Cover HBR) is one of the most cited in the field and he was the prime author of the EU Field Guide to Complexity.

Connect with Dave Snowden on LinkedIn

 

Dr. Derek Cabrera – Leading Complex Adaptive Systems

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Dr. Derek Cabrera

Leading Complex Adaptive Systems
 
January 11, 2023

2:30 PM to 3:15 PM EST

Leading Complex Adaptive Systems
All human organizations are complex adaptive systems (CAS) but we lead them as if they were mechanical machines.

To lead CASs, one must understand their underlying structure and dynamics. In this talk, Dr. Cabrera of Cornell University explains the four functions of complex adaptive organizations and shares what leaders and managers must do to nudge them to behave differently.

About Dr. Derek Cabrera 

Derek Cabrera (PhD, Cornell) is an internationally known systems scientist who in 2021 was inducted as a Member of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS) for outstanding contributions to the field. Derek serves on the faculty of Cornell University, is Faculty Director for the Graduate Certification Program in Systems Thinking, Modeling, and Leadership (STML) and is senior scientist at Cabrera Research Lab. He serves on the United States Military Academy at West Point’s Systems Engineering Advisory Board. He has given two TED Talks, holds two US patents, written and produced a rap song, a children’s book on cognition, and numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. His research has been profiled in peer-reviewed journals, trade magazines, and popular publications. His work in public schools was documented in the full-length documentary film, RE:Thinking. He was Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) for the Study of Complex Systems and National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow in Nonlinear Systems in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University.

In 2018, he received the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) for his work in cognitive mapping. He is author of ten books including, The Origin of Ideas: Empirical Studies in Cognitive Complexity (forthcoming 2022), Systems Thinking Made Simple (winner of the 2017 AECT outstanding book award), Thinking at Every Desk, and Flock Not Clock. He is credited with discovering universal organizing rules of systems and systems thinking (DSRP Theory) and organizations (VMCL Theory). He was invited by LinkedIn Learning and eCornell to deliver online courses in Systems Thinking and Leadership. He was Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Plectica (since sold to Frameable) where he invented several software applications including Plectica systems mapping and virtual whiteboard. Cabrera is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking (forthcoming 2022) and on the editorial board of the international, peer-reviewed journal, Systems. He is the Editor in Chief of the peer-reviewed Journal of Systems Thinking. As a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, he developed new techniques to model systems approaches in the evaluation of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Cabrera was awarded the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ K. Patricia Cross Future Educational Leaders Award. His contributions to the field of systems thinking have been integrated into NSF, NIH, and USDA-NIFA programs, K-12, higher education, NGOs, federal agencies, corporations, and business schools. His systems models are used by many of Silicon Valley’s most innovative companies.

His books are used as introductory text for undergraduate and graduate students in numerous colleges and universities including Cornell University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and the US Army War College. Cabrera has developed a suite of systems thinking tools for use in academia, business, and beyond including the first validated personal inventory of systems thinking. Prior to becoming a scientist, Cabrera worked for fifteen years around the world as a mountain guide and experiential educator for Outward Bound and other organizations and has climbed many of the world’s highest mountains. He also worked extensively with the Conservation Corps and Restorative Justice movements. He holds a PhD from Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife, Laura Cabrera, three children, and four dogs.

Connect with Dr. Derek Cabrera on LinkedIn