Resources

Your story—your narrative—is your bridge between experience and action. It works like this:

We believe that using principles of HSD to engage in Adaptive Action strengthens adaptive capacity of systems. In our experience, at the individual level, people who use Adaptive Action are better prepared to understand their challenges and adapt in an uncertain and emergent world. At greater scales, groups, teams, and organizations work together more effectively as they interact with each other and their environments by engaging in ongoing and multiple cycles of Adaptive Action.

Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has at least 12 people who manage his personal Facebook page. And he’s not the only public figure or organization to have entire teams dedicated to social media. How can we possibly keep up and use the power of social media to advance our goals? This article explores how Human System Dynamics can help practitioners plan and leverage available resources to build a successful social media presence.

In July, I wrote a blog post about the need to tell the “bigger story” by using narratives that explore the dynamics of interactions between and among humans. In HSD we teach people to see, understand, and influence those dynamics. We constantly seek to use engaging and accessible narrative to share stories that help people leverage the complexity around them to find their next wise action. I believe that if narrative includes an exploration of the complexity in our interactions, it can also help us, individually and as a group, share our stories in more relevant and compelling ways. I also am caught up in the question of whether it can also help us to reach across the differences that divide us to create greater understanding and empathy.

Life is a constant adaption. —Carlos Gershenson

In HSD we believe that the tension in a system is what drives its decision making and action taking. For instance, individuals take action to relieve or shift tension as it builds in response to events around them. Harsh feedback creates tension as an individual balances that against a personal desire to perform well.

In HSD we understand that an individual—or group—narrative shapes the patterns of choices, actions, and decisions of the holder of that narrative. For example, the HSD vision is a statement of the narrative that guides our work today and as we move into an uncertain future. When we make decisions about our work, we use that vision to inform our thinking.