Courses
Leading in Complexity
What does it mean to be effective in a complex world? If you’re responsible for crafting strategic responses to a real-world challenge, this course is for you.
Most of us are trained in solving technical problems. Our old “muscles” are ill-suited to complexity. The nature of complexity means that we rapidly need to develop a new set of capacities or “muscles.” Participants are invited to join in cohorts, while bringing a real-world challenge to the course.
This cutting-edge course rapidly introduces you to the building blocks of effective strategic responses to complex challenges.
You will learn by doing. Cohorts will be guided through designing an effective strategic response to the challenge they bring.
The course will consist of a maximum of five cohorts, each working on a complex challenge.
Designed to support
- managers
- strategists
- consultants
- innovation officers
- analysts
- program managers
Sectors
- Climate change
- Early childhood development
- Economic inequality
- Food security
- Gender equality
- Mental health
- Peacebuilding
- Structural racism
- Youth development
Course Schedule
All sessions take place in Amsterdam on:
To be Confirmed soon.
Learning Outcomes:
You will leave with the following:
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- Learning a nine-step approach to designing effective strategic responses to complex challenges
- Understanding the distinctions between effective vs ineffective strategy
- Making the business case for effective strategic responses
- Framing and calculate ROI in complex situations
- Creating actionable challenges
- Avoiding the most common mistakes in designing strategies
- Understanding the key capacities required to ensure effective strategic responses
- Framing results and outputs in the language of multiple capitals
- Building multi-sectoral teams for tackling complex challenges
- Gaining and experience of learning by doing
- Getting experienced coaching support for your challenge
- Developing a fully designed strategic response to the challenge your cohort wants to work on
- Learning how to use AI tools to assist in the strategy development process
Sessions:
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- Session 1 : Getting to know each other and the challenges you are working on
- Session 2 : Introduction to Complexity and the building blocks of an effective strategy
- Session 3 : Designing an effective strategy – the preconditions
- Session 4 : Core elements of action, the inner game of a strategic response, and the importance of storytelling
- Session 5 : System change – the mimetic approach
Core Curriculum:
Our curriculum is based on two decades of practice. Click here to explore. For a deep dive, click here.
Course formats:
Plenary Sessions
Join Complexity University Faculty and course participants from around the globe to explore the theory and practice of working with complexity.
Break-out Sessions
Meet in smaller groups to examine real-world cases of applied complexity, and to reflect on how to apply these practices in your own context.
Community Platform
Collaborative learning and discussion will take place between sessions on a dedicated Basecamp forum throughout the course, and after it has ended.
Course Materials
Available to download – including session recordings, handouts, a completion certificate, and a digital course completion badge to display on your social media profiles.
Effort
All Sessions Are Mandatory
Course Lead
Zaid Hassan
Zaid is a strategist, facilitator and writer. He has spent over 20 years building a practice for responding effectively to complex challenges.
He is currently CEO and Co-Founder of 10-in-10, an organisation with a mission to demonstrate how to effectively tackle ten complex challenges in ten years.
Their first challenge is climate change and their strategic response is called Gigatonne. It emerged from work that Zaid did advising the Climate Action Network after the collapse of talks at the Copenhagen COP in 2009.
Zaid has had the privilege of working all around the world for governments, civil society, philanthropists and corporations. He has worked on issues such as agriculture, artificial intelligence, climate change, early childhood development, education, energy, financial systems, malnutrition, mental health, peace building and security, state collapse, sustainable development, and youth employment.
Some of the clients Zaid has worked with and advised over the years include the World Bank, the UN Foundation, WWF, Oxfam, the Governments of Canada, Germany, Liberia, and New Zealand.
Prior to co-founding 10in10 and Gigatonne, Zaid convened and co-founded Reos Partners in 2007, and Roller Strategies in 2014. He studied physics at Brunel University but dropped out to go into the .com boom.
Zaid teaches and guest lectures regularly. He has guest lectured at the University of Oxford, the California College of Arts, the New School in New York, New York University (Berlin) and the University of Bergen in Norway. Zaid was guest faculty for a decade at the Kaospilots, an innovative school for entrepreneurs in Denmark. He is currently a Social Innovation Fellow at Babson College.
Zaid is author of “The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach To Solving Our Most Complex Challenges” (Berret-Koehler, 2014) as well as many papers, articles and essays.
He is currently working on his second book, titled “How To Evolve: Using evolution to fix culture, politics, economics, stop the world from frying, & why it’s not that hard” (Forthcoming, 2024).
What do other students say about this course?
“In a short period of time, you’ll gain the most essential insights drawn from many years of experience on the ground and hands-on practice about operating strategically in complexity.”
“This course was invaluable for helping me to understand how the old paradigms and methods I had learned are no longer suitable for this quick changing uncertain landscape we are now facing.”
How much does it cost?
Group 4-6 = €10,000
Group 6-10 = €15,000
Individual Corporate + Government = €2,500
Individual Non-Profit = €1,500 [please contact us if finances are a barrier]
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Start creating strategies that actually work to tackle complex challenges effectively