PUBPOL 5444

Systems Thinking for Executives II

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

This course explores the functional elements required to design, develop, lead, and manage a complex adaptive organization (CAO) through the lens of Systems Thinking. Students will explore the essential importance of organizational learning and development of culture through shared mental models in order to perform a thorough analysis of mission-critical systems that yield capacity for carrying out coordinated daily tasks that subsequently achieve the vision of the organization.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) students.

Distribution Category (KCM-HE, SBA-HE)

• Students will use the Systems Leadership Framework (VMCL) to design, align, and lead an adaptive learning organization, and Diagnose Plan, Command, Control, and Utilize (PCCU) organizational design thinking errors and differentiate PCCU from VMCL.
• Students will use checks to analyze the implicit Mission of an existing organization using the underlying simple rules of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS), analyze system behavior to identify system structure failures (aka, "system structure determines behavior," or SSDB), and map an organization's Capacity Systems for organizational understanding (CapMap).
• Students will demonstrate fractal use of VMCL across levels of scale in organizations (individual, team, department, and whole organization).

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