Course overview
This course adopts a systems thinking perspective to explore the challenges and opportunities of managing in complex organisational and social environments. Building on skills and knowledge gained throughout the program, the course provides a framework in which to explore the essential messiness of living systems and the complexity and unpredictability of outcomes. Assessment will focus on the use of environmental and organisational information to diagnose problems, to propose alternative solutions and then to consider possible outcomes to complex business problems.
Course learning outcomes
- Demonstrate an understanding of the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the issues we face, locally and globally, and the role of connectedness and diversity;
- Explicate the structural components of systems and how they shape system behaviour;
- Explain how different kinds of ‘leverage point’ affect the outcome of systemic interventions;
- Identify and address the standard patterns (‘archetypes’) of system dynamics that may give rise to the unintended and perverse consequences of our interventions in systems; and
- Engage effectively with ‘messy’, uncertain environments and the apparently intractable problems that emerge from complex, ‘living’ systems
Degree list
The following degrees include this course