Resources

Historically, autumn has been considered the season of harvest. Summer’s stretch transforms water, sunlight, and nutrients to create the bounty of harvest. In autumn’s folding, we celebrate the abundance that will feed us during winter’s resting times. Autumn has been honored in many traditions as a time of thanksgiving for this abundance. A quick perusal of the Internet provided me insights about these kinds of celebrations around the world, at different times, in both the northern and the southern hemispheres.

When Glenda Eoyang, Founder and Executive Director of Human Systems Dynamics Institute, invited me to co-facilitate an HSD Adaption Action Lab focused on transcending racism and “othering,” I immediately said yes for a couple of irresistible reasons.

In re-reading Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown, Royce was reminded of the way fractal behaviors shape patterns at all scales in human systems. In today’s blog, she reviews the HSD Simple Rules and suggests tools that can be used to help frame and live out the fractals Ms. Brown describes.

In HSD, we think about resilience as “capacity to adapt and maintain system functioning in the face of the uncertainty and turbulence of complex change.” In this blog post, Royce explores three important lessons we’ve learned in talking with people about their need for and experiences with resilience in recent times.

HSD Associate, Leslie Patterson writes about responding to the complex challenges in life in the same way people deal with chronic illness. She sees this as a roadmap for building resilience at all scales. Her story in a powerful lesson in learning from life.

The HSD Vision is an aspirational description of future patterns where people use HSD to see, understand, and influence the world around them. Royce Holladay, HSD Institute Director of Services, explains who the “we” refers to in the vision statement. She describes how it takes each of us to set conditions for this pattern’s ultimate manifestation in reality. 

Adaptive Capacity is the critical attribute for individuals, teams, organizations, and communities as they deal with the uncertainty and emergence of complex systems. Thriving in those systems requires that you to see the world in ways that help you build resilience and fitness. The human systems dynamics vision is that people everywhere thrive because they build Adaptive Capacity. See how you, too, can build Adaptive Capacity in yourself, your family, your community, and your organization.