You recognize that innovation is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. You know that it has become the required response to a quickly changing and highly diverse landscape. In-the-moment innovation is often key to organizational survival and success. To innovate, you must be insatiably curious, open to the next opportunity, and perpetually prepared. In every moment, you have to 1) see a need; 2) create a response; 3) implement; and 4) evaluate to learn from impacts. Then you have to keep moving because stopping is not an option.
Human Systems Dynamics (HSD) builds your adaptive capacity to see, understand, and influence your world in innovative and creative ways. Your understanding of patterns around you informs your decisions in new ways, pointing to the innovation you need. It prepares you to bring that innovation into your everyday decisions, actions, and relationships.
Faculty & Coaches
Laura Williams first encountered the early seeds of human systems dynamics when, as a young professional, she was given a wicked problem. Serendipitously, she met Dr. Eoyang early in her project and made quick and frequent use of her consulting and coaching to innovate a ground-breaking approach to improving systems' responses to sexual assault. Later, as a founder and former program manager of the Sexual Violence Justice Institute, Laura wove human systems dynamics into her coaching, writing, and teaching with multi-agency, multi-disciplinary response teams across the United States.
Today, Laura supports other leaders of local, state, and national initiatives with the concepts and methods they need to influence change within complex systems. Her consulting focuses in the areas of human systems dynamics, institutional change, sexual violence intervention and prevention, youth resiliency, adaptive action and social justice. In addition to this consulting, Laura is the Director of Strategy at the International Institute for Community and Adolescent Resilience (ICAR-US, LLC). This rapidly growing enterprise translates youth development research into a framework that provides both teens and adults pathways to enriching their developmental ecology. In addition to designing client initiatives and supporting the Institute’s growth and reach, she loves the time she spends in classrooms, church basements, conference rooms, and around campfires with youth and adults building webs of support.
Laura holds a Master of Public Affairs in public and non-profit leadership and management from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Carleton College.
Jennifer Jones-Patulli, MA, works with private and public organizations to facilitate constructive conflict and influence positive change. Jennifer helps organizations establish flexible conditions, within a solid framework, to confidently adapt to ongoing change.
As a skilled facilitator, mediator, and coach, Jennifer brings over a decade of practice in conflict resolution and application of conflict theory into her work with the Human Systems Dynamics Institute. Using human systems dynamics Models and Methods, Jennifer designs and delivers tailored approaches to support groups through complex challenges. Her work helps groups and individuals let go of non-productive ways of behaving, and brings them to a place of creativity.
Jennifer’s approach is innovative and creative. She believes that complex challenges require an adaptive, interdisciplinary approach to achieve lasting results.
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