Complexity based design

This training is designed for people who work in constantly changing and unpredictable environments and have to make decisions.

• Do you find yourself working in messy situations that are constantly changing?

• Where your standard solutions don’t work anymore?

• Where decision making becomes difficult because there are no clear solutions and experts do not have answers?

• Where your biggest issue to planning is your uncertainty about the future?

• Where the present situation can be understood from many and sometimes conflicting perspectives?

• This training is designed for people who work in constantly changing and unpredictable environments and have to make decisions.

You could be public sector, business, NGO, project and process designers and managers, community organisations, consultants, facilitators, team managers and leaders.

This 2-day training will offer alternative ways of thinking about complex challenges.

We will explore:

• The difference between simple, complex, and chaotic situations and the different approaches needed for each one using the Cynefin Framework.

• The key principles for working in complexity to generate actions for your context.

• How our own human complexity and cognitive bias adds another layer to the complexity already out there.

• Specific methods for seeing, understanding, and influencing action in uncertain environments including Future Backwards, Ritual Dissent, Safe-To-Fail Probes, Adaptive Action.

Please bring your challenges, sticky issues, intractable problems, and yourself of course!

There are no pre-defined recipes that we can learn and apply to guarantee success in a complex situation. However, complexity theory offers principles and practices that allow us to make enough sense to take action in messy situations, to move beyond feeling lost or hopeless.

The training content draws on the work of Cognitive Edge and Human Systems Dynamics. It is designed in a way that will allow you to apply what you are learning to your own questions, challenges, opportunities.

The training typically runs from 08:30-16:30 for two consecutive days:

• With a one-hour break for lunch.

• Two 30-minute breaks.

The training is based on participatory learning. We advise participants to sleep and check emails before they arrive, because they will not get a chance during the training.

Bhavesh Patel has over 20 years' experience facilitating and training onsite and online with groups of 5-350 with private and civil society organisations in 30 countries.