Seascape Beach Resort on Monterey Bay
Aptos, California, USA
Facilitated by Peter Senge, Robert Hanig and Mette Boell
Offered by SoL, the Society for Organizational Learning North America
The overall aim of the Systems Leadership Institute is to advance systems leadership in preK-12 education – leaders who foster collaboration for systemic change. We believe such leadership is crucial in an era of ongoing profound changes needed for schools to become truly relevant for today’s students and society. Transforming systems is, ultimately, about transforming relationships among the people and institutions that shape how those systems function. This has never been more important in education, such as in the growing need for school districts to reach out and build multi-stakeholder partnerships in ways never required in the past. Becoming a systems thinker is no longer just desirable – it is now an essential skill for collaboration and coordination working in complex systems such as education.
The program will be co-facilitated by Peter Senge, SoL’s Founding Chair and Senior Lecturer at MIT, and Robert Hanig, SoL Senior Consultant and Managing Director of RLH Consulting, and Dr. Mette Boell of The Garrison Collaborative for Integrative Learning. It is based on the leadership development process originally described in The Fifth Discipline. The program delves deeply into both the personal and collective aspects of leadership. Special attention is given to the domains of personal mastery, mental models, systems thinking 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;
- Help yourself and others explore underlying beliefs and assumptions and their impact;
- Begin to see how we co-shape the systems we are embedded in and how they in return co-shape us;
- 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.
Format
The workshop is both deeply personal and pragmatic. Much of the time will be in small group practice, using a variety of your own practical change challenges to focus the capacity building. We invite you to participate 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 systems change. Participants in the workshop will come from a variety of school districts and organizations that work with districts.
We will be happy to confer with you regarding what might make a good workshop team. The key ingredients are genuine openness to the sort of deep developmental work the workshop enables and being in a role to help in addressing important practical challenges in your organization. Again, we are happy to confer with you regarding suitable challenges to focus on – the main criteria are that the challenge is real, on people’s minds, and will require both external (e.g., roles, rules, formal procedures and systems) and internal (mental and emotional models) change.
Commencing after the workshop for those who opt in will be a series of one-on-one coaching sessions to support the translation of the tools and approaches back into your work setting. The coaching, which has proven very useful for our participants and for our overall research, has a separate fee.
This foundation workshop is not an isolated event but part of an ongoing research, capacity- and community–building process. Working with Stuart and other funders, we are coming to a deeper understanding of the how and why of systems leadership. Graduates of the foundation workshop will be invited to follow-on clinics focused on particular systems change issues and to further community-building activities. Through all of this, we hope to nurture a vibrant community of practitioners and researchers gradually developing a rich base grounded understanding of the developmental journey of systems leaders, and the consequences for deep change in schools and school districts.
To commence this action research, there will be some reflective questions we will ask you to ponder in advance of the workshop. In the workshop there is an invitation for participants to co-design how they can support one another working on their systemic change challenges going forward. Over the coming years we hope to significantly advance practical know-how in fostering collaborative networks of system leaders who can shepherd our education system through the complex, disruptive changes that lay ahead.
Facilitators
Peter Senge
Author, Senior Lecturer at MIT
Peter is the author of the widely acclaimed The Fifth Discipline, considered by Harvard Business Review to be the seminal management book of the previous 75 years. Peter continues to push the boundaries of our understanding of organizational learning to elicit what new might be possible. Continue...
Robert Hanig
Consultant/Trainer
Robert Hanig currently maintains a private consulting practice. He was formerly a partner with Dialogos International, LLC., as well as a Vice President with Innovation Associates, Inc. and Arthur D. Little, and the Director of the Leadership Practice. Continue...
Mette Boell
Research Affiliate, MIT
Mette Miriam Boell is a biologist by training, specializing in the evolution of complex social systems, play behavior and philosophy of nature. Mette has a Ph.D. in organizational ethology from the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University, and holds additional degrees in leadership by heart, systemic constellation... Continue...
Panelists
Duane Coleman
Superintendent of Schools, Oceanside Unified School District
Michael Funk
Director, California Department of Education
Nedra Ginwright
Chief Flourish Office, Flourish Agenda
We are delighted to have with us a group of alumni from the program who are systems leaders in diverse facets of California’s institutional ecosystem in education. All three work to shift the structures of education away from producing outcomes that are unhealthy for society, students and communities. Tuesday afternoon, March 27th, will be dedicated to reflecting together on what we are all learning about bringing the tools and practices of systems leadership into our most challenging settings.
Cost of Attendance
$3,500/person (includes lodging, breakfast, lunch and a reception) with discounts for groups of four or more and partial scholarships based on need.
Optional 3 follow-on coaching sessions and embedded research: $1500.
Registration deadline is February 26, 2018. Registrations after February 26 will be accepted depending on space.
Workshop Logistics
Start and End Times
The registration starts at 8:00 AM on the first day (March 26). The first two days of the course (March 26-27) are scheduled from 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM; the last day (March 28) will end at 5:00 PM .
Please plan your travel accordingly. It is a condition of registration that you plan to attend the entire program.
If you have any questions or concerns about this requirement, please contact Julia Ross at jross@solonline.org.
Location
Seascape Beach Resort on Monterey Bay
One Seascape Resort Drive
Aptos, CA 95003-5854
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Julia Ross.