Why does the world suffer from financial, political, and economic crises? Why do decision-makers fail to manage crises effectively? Why do some organizations grow while others stagnate? Why do the value chains witness fluctuations and disruptions? How can decision-makers identify and design high-leverage policies that can embrace unanticipated side effects? What can decision-makers do to make the world more balanced and immune to disruptions?

Economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenges decision-makers to learn at increasing rates. Today’s world requires us to design and manage systems where complexity is unavoidable because of multiple feedback effects, long-time delays, and nonlinear responses to our actions. Learning in such environments is difficult because we never confront many of the consequences of our most important decisions. Effective learning in a complex environment requires methods to develop systems thinking by representing and assessing complexity and its implications. It also requires tools like causal loop diagrams and stocks and flows diagrams decision-makers can use to accelerate learning.

Lecturer: Sławomir Wyciślak, PhD, Jagiellonian University (Poland)