Social Innovation and Leadership for Complex Challenges
A Continuing Education course through Lakehead University
Course Description:
The executive leadership of today’s social-benefit organization is faced with an increasingly complex environment. In order to make people’s lives better and to address community issues, more of the same-old solutions are no longer adequate. Leaders are being called upon to mobilize engagement through all levels of their organizations, identify and grow innovation, adapt quickly to change, and collaborate across sectors to enhance the resilience of their organization and the community as a whole. These requirements demand a unique set of capacities and a mindset that embraces complexity. In this course, community leaders and university faculty with expertise in complexity science will work together to build understanding of the complex dynamics of organizations and communities. Through conversational learning techniques and practical exercises we will develop the capacities to perceive, reason, and manage within complexity, to nurture an ecology of innovation, and to discover the simple solutions that often lie on the other side of complex problems.
