Training

Introduction: CIESD takes pride in its demonstrated ability to work with diverse clients to recognize the leverage points for changing the behavior of complex systems and for devising and evaluating policies with which to effect those changes. A second focus for CIESD, potentially even more rewarding for clients, involves providing the training with which the organization can build its capacity to pursue its own effective policy design and evaluation in the future.

Problem Statement: Organizations face repeated challenges in dealing with complex systems. The tools of systems dynamics and of our Ladder of Engagement are powerful aids to meeting those challenges. If members of the organization, however, can learn themselves to use these tools comfortably and almost intuitively as “habits of mind,” their overall efficiency and effectiveness will be greatly enhanced.

Approach: Our preferred way of working with clients is through a process of open and transparent collaboration where we describe and then apply the tools of system dynamics and our Ladder of Engagement to collectively explore and model the system in question. Each project then becomes a practical opportunity for our clients to observe and practice the approach and tools we advocate. In addition to this generalized “learning-by-doing” approach, we also offer specific opportunities to work in a variety of training settings to explicitly focus on the sort of organizational capacity building that can be achieved through training in system dynamics and its application.

Over the past fifteen years, we have collaborated in developing a variety of training materials and approaches. This work began with our earliest work with pre-college educators. Much of what we describe below is based on those efforts and uses, for convenience, the organizational structure that we developed for those colleagues. Recent experiences utilizing these materials with other government or social change agencies, however, underscore their generalized value as a training approach to the type of creative problem solving we utilize.

Perhaps the most ambitious training program we have developed is a 5-unit sequence of graduate education courses designed to constitute a Certificate in System Dynamics for Educators. This was designed to facilitate a mixed audience of elementary, middle-grades, and high school teachers as well as school and district administrators. While the detailed content of that program is not appropriate for every possible student, nor will its time commitment be necessary or feasible, the conceptual design of the program is fundamental to how we see effective training being pursued. Specific training programs can and should be fine-tuned to emphasize organizationally relevant portions of the whole sequence and to accommodate time or resource constraints that prevent devoting a 40-hour course to each particular topic. Please feel free to contact us to explore how we can meet your training needs within your time and resource constraints. We have extensive experience in tailoring programs to specific audiences.

Overview of a 5-Course Graduate Certificate in System Dynamics for Educators:

The package of courses described below is intended to provide the practicing educator (classroom teacher or administrator) with a structured introduction to the tools of system dynamics and the varied ways and configurations in which those tools can be wielded to support enhanced student learning and more productive and collaborative organizational dynamics.

Please Note: Apart from school systems, enhanced individual learning and and more effective organization dynamics are goals of many organizations; this training can support those goals for a wide range of such groups.

Training Program Components:

The Certificate Program is not strictly ‘lock-step’ in its progression, but it does have a distinct beginning component and a clear final project.

Please Note: The sequence presented here:

• Introduction to the Ladder of Engagement as a problem-solving approach and to the specific tools of system dynamics;
• Training in building and manipulating computer simulations; and
• Practice in using the tools (including computer simulation) for problem solving (including organizational dynamics);

is the basic prototype on which we would base other training programs, ranging from 2+ hour introductions to sequences of multi-day workshops. Specific scope, sequence, and organizational focus or illustrations would be adjusted to meet the organization’s needs.

1. Introduction to Systems Thinking and Systems Tools: This is prerequisite for all the courses that follow. Use of the Ladder of Engagement is explained and illustrated with the development of the basic system dynamics tools (behavior over time graphs, causal loop diagrams, stock-flow concept maps, and the use and simple modification of existing simulation models). These are defined, explored, and applied to both group and individually relevant scenarios. Uses of these tools to foster clearer communication, to enhance the development and critical analysis of one’s mental models, and to predict change as a result of modifying the underlying dynamics, are all emphasized.

2. Introduction to Dynamic Modeling: This course develops the participants’ facility in building and utilizing simple computer simulation models to meet classroom or organizational needs. Independent tutorial software, available through CIESD, provides the main instruction on becoming skilled in the technical model construction aspects of the course.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Systems Thinking and Systems Tools

3. Curriculum Design on a System Dynamics Foundation: This course presents a significant undergraduate-level interdisciplinary curriculum that was built explicitly on a system dynamics foundation. Each curricular unit consciously builds a basic understanding of one or more simple generic systems (e.g. population growth, infection, resource usage). Complexity is then gradually added to enhance understanding and to facilitate “better questions.” Participants will work through the course material as the undergraduate students did while consciously and explicitly dissecting and critiquing how the use of system dynamics tools supported and enhanced student learning and how even greater enhancement could have been achieved.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Systems Thinking and Systems Tools.

Please Note: For non-educator groups, curriculum design is not likely to be the challenge of interest, but relevant case-studies from CIESD’s consulting experience or from other system dynamics projects and publications can provide the foundation for critically dissecting best practice in a relevant field. If that relevant field is organizational dynamics, the following element of the sequence might become superfluous.

4. Organizational Dynamics: This course explores ways and means by which application of system dynamic tools can foster better understanding and more effective alteration of the organizational system in which we each live and work. Participants in this course will be the primary sources for generating the organizational scenarios that we will explore in an essentially seminar format. How is the system actually behaving? How do you wish it to behave? What is controlling its current behavior? Are there leverage points we can use to shift the current behavior toward the desired behavior? By exposing and exploring our (your) “mental models” and using systems tools to facilitate conversation, each participant should be better able to engage in the process of organizational change at the conclusion of the course.

Prerequisite: Introduction to Systems Thinking and Systems Tools.

5. Independent Project: Each participant, as a culminating activity, chooses a topic, issue, or problem of professional interest and applies the relevant system dynamics tools to achieve greater insight, improve the learning of his/her students, and/or affect organizational change. .

Prerequisite: all the preceding 4 courses.

Again, Please Note: The preceding is an illustrative sequence. Specific topics and time commitments can be adjusted to meet a variety of needs and constraints. Please contact us to discuss your needs and our ability to help you meet those needs.