In the era of global and local destabilization, becoming a systems thinker is an essential skill for collaboration and coordination in working in a complex system such as education. Foundations for Systems Leadership will provide you with the tools and frameworks to see the system you operate in more clearly and be more effective leveraging resources and investing in collaborative systems change efforts towards greater individual and collective well-being

The program will be co-facilitated by Dr. Peter Senge and Dr. Mette Boell, both of MIT J-WEL and The Center for Systems Awareness.

This program is based, in part, on the leadership development process originally described in The Fifth Discipline, integrating elements of the recently developed compassionate systems framework that draws on the science of well-being, on social- emotional and contemplative learning strategies, and on various approaches to understanding the complexity of educational systems. The program delves deeply into both the personal and collective aspects of leadership and well-being.

Special attention is given to the domains of personal mastery, mental models, systems thinking, cultivating compassion and fostering more productive conversations around the complex issues that education leaders must regularly face.

Through the interplay of personal and interpersonal work, you’ll come to see how systems leadership is ultimately about the capacity of a human community to shape its future and to bring forth realities aligned with people’s deepest aspirations – and to discover your own abilities to contribute as such a leader, both within your organization and in your personal life.

Learning Objectives

Specific learning objectives for the participants include:

• Understand how underlying systemic structures shape behavior and how to recognize and work together to shift those structures;
• Clarify your personal vision and expand your capacity to make strategic choices shaped by that vision;
• Be more able to nurture a common sense of purpose and shared commitment;
• Cultivate care and emotional literacy;
• Help yourself and others explore underlying beliefs and assumptions and their impact;
• Develop routines that support growth of well-being skills;
• Better enable conversations that promote learning and collaboration; and
• Practice with a variety of learning tools and processes that you can take back to develop shared practices within your organization.

The style of the workshop is personal and exploratory, and you will use a variety of your own practical change challenge to focus the capacity building. We invite you to participate and come as teams. Although the focus is personal capacity building and not team problem solving, the workshop lays a foundation for developing better learning teams through the shared experience of working together with common tools and building a shared language and understanding for leading deep systems change.

Participants in the workshop will come from a broad variety of the education systems, primarily in California but with a few selected guests from elsewhere who are on a similar journey as the one unfolding in several places in California today. Since most will come as teams, key ingredients of a good workshop team are genuine openness to the sort of deep developmental work the workshop enables and peoples’ role in addressing important practical challenges in your organization. The main criteria for challenges to focus on are that they are real, demand people working together well who normally do not do so,  and require both “external” (e.g., roles, rules, formal procedures and systems) and “internal” (mental models) change.

Start and End Times

The registration opens at 8:00 AM on the first day.

The first two days of the course (March 2 and 3) are scheduled from 8:30 AM – 6:00PM; the last day (March 4) will end at around 5:00 PM .

Please plan your travel accordingly.

It is a requirement of registration that you plan to attend the entire program.

If you have any questions or concerns about this requirement, please contact Miho Kito at mkito@systemsawareness.org.

Location

Lake Natoma Inn

Cost of Attendance

Tuition: $2,000

(including 3 nights overnight accommodations, 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches, and Tuesday evening reception.)

Billing

An invoice with billing instructions will be sent separately once registration is complete.

Cancellations

All cancellations must be received in writing to mkito@systemsawareness.org.

A cancellation fee of $300 will be incurred for all cancellations received in writing before February 3 (4 weeks prior).

A cancellation fee of $1,400 will be incurred for cancellations between February 3 and February 17. (2 weeks prior)

NO refunds will be granted for cancellations received after February 17.

You may arrange for a substitute participant at least two weeks before the program.

Should Center for Systems Awareness need to cancel the program, participants will receive a refund of their tuition, but no reimbursement for booked flights or other travel or program-related expenses.