Course Description

There are many changes happening in our world at the environmental, social, economic and cultural levels. We have approached many of these challenges from a “technical approach”-working to fix the problems, implement structural approaches and manage these changes. These approaches often left people compliant but not committed, and therefore less resilient to future change. To build change hardiness, leaders are using more systemic approaches to understanding interconnected relationships and support the human transition.

This course will give you practical tools and approaches to develop your capacity to lead other people and organizations to become more resilient and change hardy. You will develop the personal capacity to look at patterns, ask different questions, look for possibilities and increase your ability to live with complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course you will be able to:

– Identify elements of change resilience and use personal change experiences to identify predictable patterns of organizational change.
– Apply key elements of resilience to building change implementation plans.
– Understand the neuroscience of social threat and apply that to reducing resistance to change.
– Distinguish between problem focused and context focused approaches and identify the most effective approaches to accelerate change adoption.
– Identify personal and team reactive patterns and learn ways to respond in more generative ways.

Your Instructor – Cynthia Scott PhD

Cynthia Scott is a Professor at Presidio Graduate School and teaches the Leadership for Sustainability Course for MBA, MPA and Executive Certificate students. As a founding partner of Changeworks, she designed, lead and coached leaders facing a broad range of social innovation and organizational changes. She uses her background as an anthropologist, psychologist and designer to create mission driven, high engagement approaches to creating sustainability initiatives. Cynthia is co-author of 14 books including Leadership for Sustainability and Change. She completed her BS in Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, her M.P.H. in Health Planning and Administration at University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in Psychology at the Fielding Graduate School.