Resources

What were you doing in 1977? I was a new assistant professor of anatomy at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. It was the only medical school in a poor and medically underserved State with 23 indigenous Native American tribes and tens of thousands of people living at or below the poverty level along its border with Mexico. The state legislature asked the medical school to address these issues.

What? This month’s Live Virtual Workshop was about using HSD to spread new ideas across a system. Leaders around the world are challenged as they try to spread new ideas across organizations or throughout communities. They have found how difficult it is to get a whole system engaged to implement initiatives. Over time, different approaches have been tried to shape deep engagement for change. Most approaches asked each person or team to follow a “recipe” to implement the latest initiative. Often, however the recipe was not enough to bring about lasting change.

In July, I wrote a blog post about the need to tell the “bigger story” by using narratives that explore the dynamics of interactions between and among humans. In HSD we teach people to see, understand, and influence those dynamics. We constantly seek to use engaging and accessible narrative to share stories that help people leverage the complexity around them to find their next wise action. I believe that if narrative includes an exploration of the complexity in our interactions, it can also help us, individually and as a group, share our stories in more relevant and compelling ways. I also am caught up in the question of whether it can also help us to reach across the differences that divide us to create greater understanding and empathy.

We believe that using principles of HSD to engage in Adaptive Action strengthens adaptive capacity of systems. In our experience, at the individual level, people who use Adaptive Action are better prepared to understand their challenges and adapt in an uncertain and emergent world. At greater scales, groups, teams, and organizations work together more effectively as they interact with each other and their environments by engaging in ongoing and multiple cycles of Adaptive Action.

Racism and Othering continue to be wicked and controversial patterns to discuss and navigate, particularly for those deeply and directly affected by these patterns. Although there isn’t an easy, universally-accepted method for eliminating racism and othering yet, there’s something about the freedom to share authentic stories and impacts that makes it a more realistic/attainable possibility.