Whether you are part of a family, organizational team or business in a supply chain, systems thinking is a valuable approach to understanding the complexity of today’s world. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, Senior lecturer at MIT and Founder of the Society for Organizational Learning shares his perspectives on leadership and systems thinking with IBM. Senge focuses on the problems that are most difficult to solve and the mental models today’s leaders need in order to build a smarter planet. Leaders today need to be able to be prepared reassess their strategies, work across multiple groups to find solutions and have the vision to work through high leverage solutions over time. Working smarter means working in ways that are collective and are based on collective intelligence across cities and supply chains to produce social, ecological and economic well being.

Visualizing complexity helps us find the best leverage points. There are a number of ways of working with complexity that can make it visible and enable perspective taking that enhances understanding and clarifies the implications of various relationship dynamics and choices.

Developing mastery in understanding relationship dynamics between many elements and their impacts in complex systems is becoming more and more critical in a world of increasing interdependency. Learning how to work with this and have meaningful dialogue in the presence of these ambiguous dynamics requires an evolved form of leadership capability.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States after being absent nearly 70 years, the most remarkable “trophic cascade” occurred. What is a trophic cascade and how exactly do wolves change rivers? George Monbiot explains in this movie remix.

Talk by Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer at MIT, at Wisdom 2.0 Business 2014

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake explains how all social animals, including humans, are connected by fields of information that are shared by all members. A therapeutic application of morphic fields in humans is an experiential process called Systemic Family Constellations.

Changing habits, such as leadership behaviours, is extremely difficult. And if we surface the beliefs and assumptions behind our behaviours, change becomes more accessible. When we do this collectively and support each other we are changing the nature of our conversations. By creating a safe way of speaking about the challenges of change and supporting each other to change we improve faster and we become more adaptable.