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SYSC 418/518: System Sustainability and Organization Resilience
Instructor: Wayne Wakeland
Description
Organizations are complex adaptive systems coupled with their environment, supply chains, strategic partners, and competitors. Survival depends on structural resilience and the turbulence of the markets, environment, and political climate. Ideas and principles of emergent leadership and living systems are applied in the context of strategic management. These ideas are relevant to health and public administration, systems science, business, and many other fields.
Primary Student Outcomes
Clearly articulate definitions of resilience and sustainability and apply them across sectors and disciplines.
Identify and apply systems theories and frameworks to the practice of sustainability in public/private service leadership, management and policy.
Respond to and engage collaboratively with diverse local and global cultures and communities to address challenges of sustainability in the public interest.
Create and manage resilient systems and processes to assess and improve organizational performance.
Offer recommendations for resilient practices, operations and structures that increase the practice of sustainability within and across organizations and society.
Topical Summary
System & organization basics: stocks & flows, feedback, self-organization
Assumptions of Newtonian organizations
Resilience thinking and sustainability
Describing systems and their dynamics
Opportunities and pitfalls: non-linearity, bounded rationality, tragedy of the commons, chaos, strange attractors
Assessing resilience
Change in systems and organizations, cooperation, diversity
Managing resilience
Practicing resilience, a resilience world, community resilience