Resources

HSD releases the power and possibility that lie at the heart of your human systems.  When you work and play, in your public and private lives, individually or with a group, you interact with others to make meaning and take action.  You couldn’t live without these complex interactions, even if you wanted to, but why would you want to?

One thing is the source of the greatest goods and the most vile evils.

The HSD Institute thrives because of our long-term relationships with clients.  Learners come back and continue to build knowledge and skills.  Long-time organizational partners invite us into new and ever more interesting projects because they see success in the past, and they expect overwhelming challenges in the future.

The “attractor” is not the thing that “attracts”. It is the pattern of relationships that emerge over time in a complex system. When I first encountered attractors—strange and other kinds—I thought they were cool. Even more than that, I thought they were the key to the next generation of change paradigms. I still think that may be true, but I seldom talk about them anymore. I almost never teach them because it is so hard to understand them well and very easy to understand them badly. The only reason I am talking about them now is that I cannot think of a better way to explain what I see in this emerging present. So, here goes.

In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown defines vulnerability as risk, uncertainty, and emotional exposure. Through her research on the topic and examination of her own struggles, she provides provocative and promising stories on why understanding and working with vulnerability can remove constraints and lead to great personal transformation.

I am finally able to get a moment to respond to an emerging conversation in which Dave Snowden critiques one of my tweets and the rest of human systems dynamics as if it were captured in the same 140 characters.  It is always interesting to read a critique of my work, if only to tease out what it says about the critic from what it says about me and the work my colleagues and I do.  Our practice in human systems dynamics (www.hsdinstitute.org) and adaptive action encourages us to turn judgment into curiosity; turn defensiveness into self-reflection; and turn conflict into shared exploration.