“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin

Imagine trying to move one strand in a spider’s web. It’s impossible to do so without impacting the entire structure.

Peter Senge (author of The Fifth Discipline) calls systems thinking “a discipline for seeing wholes.” Systems thinking tools were developed to understand how complex interactions in nature cause the outcomes – sometimes unexpected – that we observe in the real world. These same tools can be applied to your organization to help you build a highly adaptable culture.

The Fifth Discipline prepares you for generating an adaptive organization that derives competitive advantage from continuous learning, both individual and collective. The five disciplines are systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning.

This interactive workshop is designed to help you put aside your habitual ways of thinking (mental models), learn to be open with others (personal mastery), understand how your organization really works (systems thinking), design a desired future state that everyone can agree on (shared vision), and then work to enact systemic changes that empower you to adapt to ongoing business challenges more effectively (team learning).

Through case studies, engaging games and teamwork sessions, you will learn how to design an adaptive framework for systems thinking and apply proven techniques for driving systematic, focused and stress-free results in your company.

To maximize the benefits, you will be guided to create your own desired future state for your organization with practical tips and exercises on different learning strategies that you can use to identify and apply appropriate process, technology and policy improvement initiatives in your company from day to day.

The workshop is ideal for mid- to senior-level team-leaders, managers, planners, project heads, design and business consultants responsible for new product/services development, functional heads of all business specializations - R&D, industrial/design/value engineering, business development, HR or project management, training, supply chain, marketing, production, IT/technology strategy and corporate planning.

1. Personal Mastery. Practices conducive to developing one’s own abilities – systemic worldview, reflective thinking (double loop learning), expressing vision, joint inquiry into assumptions of current reality – ladder of inference
2. Mental models.Altering one’s patterns of thinking – leaps of abstraction, surfacing hidden assumptions, balancing inquiry and advocacy, espoused and applied theory
3. Shared Vision. Shifting from event-based reaction to creation – openness, enrollment, commitment - anchoring vision in governing ideas – what, why and how?
4. Team learning. Tools and techniques to manage complex issues – dialogue and a shared language of archetypes
5. Applied Systems Thinking.Recognizing and applying the tools of systems thinking – causal loops – leverage points – archetypes
6. Key Learnings & Personal Plan.Review of systems thinking

T. A. Balasubramanian (named Tabby for life by well-meaning friends at IIT) is an engineering graduate from IIT, Madras and an alumnus of IIM, Calcutta. He has worked for over 15 years in the corporate sector (ASCI and HPCL, managing computer systems), before starting Maxigen Communications, a marcom consultancy service.

For the past two decades, Tabby has been engaged in the strategic and creative management aspects of communication across a range of business domains including IT, BPO, Technology, Hospitality, Engineering Consultancy and Retailing. He has conducted Open Public Programs since 2007 on 'Creativity and Innovation' as well as in-company training programs for leading global companies.

He is currently exploring new ideas in 'Content Marketing', 'Virtual Worlds' and the 'Power of Visual Thinking'. He has written columns, serious and light, for magazines such as Business World, Computers Today and Express Computer.

NR Performance EDGE Consultants Pvt. Ltd.