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Author: David Peter Stroh
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585818
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
"David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning—for everyone! Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like: ending homelessness improving public health strengthening education designing a system for early childhood development protecting child welfare developing rural economies facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society resolving identity-based conflicts and more! The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.
Author: David Peter Stroh
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603585818
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
"David Stroh has produced an elegant and cogent guide to what works. Research with early learners is showing that children are natural systems thinkers. This book will help to resuscitate these intuitive capabilities and strengthen them in the fire of facing our toughest problems."—Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning—for everyone! Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts on complex problems like: ending homelessness improving public health strengthening education designing a system for early childhood development protecting child welfare developing rural economies facilitating the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society resolving identity-based conflicts and more! The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.
Author: David Peter Stroh
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 160358580X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation. How do these unintended consequences come about and how can we avoid them? By applying conventional thinking to complex social problems, we often perpetuate the very problems we try so hard to solve, but it is possible to think differently, and get different results. Systems Thinking for Social Change enables readers to contribute more effectively to society by helping them understand what systems thinking is and why it is so important in their work. It also gives concrete guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking in problem solving, decision making, and strategic planning without becoming a technical expert. Systems thinking leader David Stroh walks readers through techniques he has used to help people improve their efforts to end homelessness, improve public health, strengthen education, design a system for early childhood development, protect child welfare, develop rural economies, facilitate the reentry of formerly incarcerated people into society, resolve identity-based conflicts, and more. The result is a highly readable, effective guide to understanding systems and using that knowledge to get the results you want.
Author: Cynthia Rayner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198857454
Category : Social change
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.
Author: Donella Meadows
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603581480
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.
Author: M. Aaron Bond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000513424
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Systems Thinking for Instructional Designers offers real-world cases that highlight how designers foster continuous improvement and manage change efforts across organizational contexts. Using a systems thinking approach, each case describes a holistic process that examines how a set of interdependent elements can be analyzed and coordinated to influence change. Instructional designers, faculty, program directors, digital learning leaders, and other development specialists will learn how systems thinking can solve authentic, real-world challenges. The book’s rich narratives cover both successes and failures of meaningful growth, paradigm shifts, and large-scale problem-solving in a variety of settings, including education and industry.
Author: Kathleen E. Allen
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
ISBN: 1683508505
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Can we design organizations in a way that creates a space where employees, the organization, and the larger community all thrive? And if so, where can we go for inspiration to help us achieve this goal? In a time of volatile and complex uncertainty, it is time to learn the lessons that nature has compiled from 3.8 billion years of research and development. Nature is an interdependent, dynamic and living system – just like today’s organizations and communities. Kathleen Allen uses nature as a model, mentor, and muse to rethink how leadership is practiced today. Leading from the Roots takes nature as a source of inspiration to help organizations see a new way of leading and designing workplace structure, applying the generous framework found in mature ecologies to human organizations. Kathleen Allen helps shift assumptions, practices, structures, and processes of organizations to become more resilient and nourishing for all, and, along the way, design the way out of workplace dysfunction and drama. “Leading from the Roots provides a powerful new way of thinking about organizations as living systems and delivers practical leadership frameworks for individuals to learn how to unleash the energy and create innovative, effective teams. -Anne Boneparte, CEO Appthority This book is a must read for organizational leaders who are not only committed to their mission, but equally to creating a workplace that attracts and retains the brightest and the best professionals fully enabled to meet that mission. -Caryl Stern, President & CEO UNICEF USA
Author: Bela H. Banathy
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475799810
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
In this original text/reference, Bela H. Banathy discusses a broad range of design approaches, models, methods, and tools, together with the theoretical and philosophical bases of social systems design. he explores the existing knowledge bases of systems design; introduces and integrates concepts from other fields that contribute to design thinking and practice; and thoroughly explains how competence in social systems design empowers people to direct their progress and create a truly participative democracy. Based on advanced learning theory and practice, the text's material is enhanced by helpful diagrams that illustrate novel concepts and problem sets that allow readers to apply these concepts.
Author: Kambiz E. Maani
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781877371035
Category : Management
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Systems Thinking, System Dynamics offers readers a comprehensive introduction to the growing field of systems thinking and dynamic modelling and its applications. The book provides a self-contained and unique blend of qualitative and quantitative tools, step-by-step methodology, numerous examples and mini-cases, as well as extensive real-life case studies. The content mix and presentation style make the otherwise technical tools of systems thinking and system dynamics accessible to a wide range of people. This book is intended as a text for students in diverse disciplines including business and management, as well as the social, environmental, health and applied sciences. It also has particular relevance for professionals from all backgrounds interested in understanding the dynamic behaviour of complex systems, change management, complex decision making, group problem solving and organisational learning. Systems thinking and system dynamics provide a scientific paradigm, a set of tools and computer technology which can help explain the forces and dynamics that underlie change and complexity in business, political, social, economic and environmental systems. Using systems thinking and system dynamics makes it possible to: examine and foresee the consequences of policy and strategic decisions implement fundamental solutions to chronic problems avoid mistakenly interpreting symptoms as causes test assumptions, hypotheses and scenarios boost staff morale and improve productivity improve the stability and performance of supply chains find long-term sustainable solutions and avoid ‘fire-fighting’ behaviour.
Author: Ray Ison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351026887
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency is a persuasive, lively book that shows how systems thinking can be harnessed to effect profound, complex change. In the age of the Anthropocene, the need for new ways of thinking and acting has become urgent. But patterns of obstacles are apparent in any action, be they corporate interests, lobbyists, or outdated political and government systems. Ison and Straw show how and why failure in governance is at the heart of the collective incapacity to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergencies. They go beyond analysis of the problem and demonstrate how incorporating systems thinking into governance at every level would enable us to break free of historical shackles. They propose 26 principles for systemic governance. This book will be inspiring reading for students applying their systemic methods, specialists in change management or public administration, activists for ‘whole system change’ and decision makers wanting to effect challenging transformations. It is for anyone with the ambition to create a sustainable and fair world.
Author: Dennis Meadows
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603586768
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
"The simple, interactive exercises in The Climate Change Playbook can help citizens better understand climate change, diagnose its causes, anticipate its future consequences, and effect constructive change. Adapted from The Systems Thinking Playbook, the twenty-two games are now specifically relevant to climate-change communications and crafted for use by experts, advocates, and educators. Illustrated guidelines walk leaders through setting each game up, facilitating it, and debriefing participants. Users will find games that are suitable for a variety of audiences--whether large and seated, as in a conference room, or smaller and mobile, as in a workshop, seminar, or meeting.
