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If you are a systems thinker, you might sometimes feel you are going a little crazy. We still live in command-and-control land and our assumptions haven't caught up to the realities of the world. If you have begun to act and talk like a systems thinker, you may be treated a little like the court jester. Actually, I'd say it was closer to the boy who declared the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. Nonetheless, this is what it's like being a systems thinker. You see and say things that others think are a little crazy. Alternatively, people hear your words, but you realise after a while that they are processing them with an analytical mindset and so misunderstand the whole thrust of thinking systemically. We are all prisoners of our own flat-earthisms, after all. So you are either side-lined because your ideas seem a little far-fetched ("If there is no hierarchy, how do you control people????") or what they think they understand is not what you intended.

We live in a world relentlessly pushed forward by the velocity, volatility, uncertainty, disruption, and disequilibrium of constant change.  As the pace of change accelerates, so does the shelf-life of our strategies, processes, frameworks, and systems.  The rapidity of change now requires an expanding and continuously evolving breadth and depth to our repertoire of problem-solving strategies and leadership skill-sets.  Yet, even in the face of this rapidity of change and the disequilibrium it creates, too often, we find ourselves as individuals and organizations siloed in and dedicated to only one way of doing and working.  

The choices we make can enhance the vitality of our habitat . . . or diminish it, in the same way as our choices can enhance or diminish the health of our bodies.  At the Livng Systems Institute we explore choices that can enhance the vitality of our habitat.  That begins with a deep mulch gardening system that creates a habitat for whole soil ecosystems in order to produce nutrient rich food.

Healing Living Systems drives climate stability through agroecology. Agroecology includes shared fulfillment, social justice, and food democracy.

sumApp is the front-end data-gathering tool we designed to enable us to make live, evergreen Social System Maps with a minimum of fuss. Works with the data-viz platform Kumu with no extra wrangling needed. Available by subscription to network leaders and sponsors.

At IDEO.org, we believe that the most potent weapon against global poverty is design. The solutions, systems, and social innovation that arise from truly understanding and designing alongside the poor are the most likely to offer hope and improve lives. And for us, if we can't see real impact, we haven't done our jobs.   Born in 2011 out of the global design and innovation firm IDEO, IDEO.org is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to applying human-centered design to alleviate poverty. We partner with nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and foundations, to directly address the needs of the poor in sectors like health, water and sanitation, financial inclusion, agriculture, and gender equity. We employ top-notch designers, an elite class of businesspeople, and development experts, making IDEO.org a flexible and creative organization uniquely situated to tackle poverty through design.   A key pillar of our mission is to spread human-centered design. Though we believe that our design process is crucial to arriving at innovative solutions, we don't think that we're the only ones who should be using it. We want everyone on board. By sharing, teaching, and empowering social-sector workers to practice human-centered design, we're elevating design as a poverty-fighting tool.   We work at home and abroad, on our own projects and promoting and supporting the work of others, spreading the practice and promise of human-centered design. IDEO.org is dedicated innovation, great design, and changing lives

The Planning and Community Health Center focuses its efforts into projects and policies that prioritize active living, food systems, and health in all planning policies.

In Slow Democracy, community leader Susan Clark and democracy scholar Woden Teachout describe how citizens around the country are breathing new life into their communities. Large institutions, centralized governments, and top-down thinking are no longer society's drivers. New decision-making techniques are ensuring that local communities-and the citizens who live there-are uniquely suited to meet today's challenges. In Slow Democracy, readers learn the stories of residents who gain community control of water systems and local forests, parents who find creative solutions to divisive and seemingly irreconcilable school-redistricting issues, and a host of other citizen-led actions that are reinvigorating local democracy and decision making.

Our national transportation policy has barely changed since the 1950s, when gas was 20 cents a gallon and President Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system. Today, we live in a very different world. The interstates have been built. Americans are paying record prices at the pump and feeling stuck with costly commutes and congestion. Bridges are crumbling. As our population becomes ever more urban, more are breathing dirty air. Our climate is threatened. Too many older, younger and rural Americans are stranded. Volatile areas of the world literally have us over a barrel - millions of barrels a day, in fact.

This is a living story of the process arts. Processes can relate to the individual (such as meditation), interpersonal dynamics (for example Nonviolent Communication), group processes (e.g. Open Space, World Cafe, unconference and wiki), on up to very large scale systems, such as economic, legal and political structures (e.g. Threebles, Restorative Circles, or Citizen Deliberative Councils). Even more than a list of particular processes though, the process arts are about an awareness that however we are doing something, that is simply one particular way, and we can and often do experiment with doing it any number of other ways.

We are living in the midst of humankind's manifold crises, in a time of unprecedented change. Some call this era The Big Shift, Jump Time or The Great Transition. Out of the turbulence of this transformation, the world that will emerge will most likely be very different from what we know. Whether what unfolds will be for better or worse is up to us. Not up to us individually, but up to all of us who care for it.

The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people. We seek to strengthen the rule of law; respect for human rights, minorities, and a diversity of opinions; democratically elected governments; and a civil society that helps keep government power in check. We help to shape public policies that assure greater fairness in political, legal, and economic systems and safeguard fundamental rights. We implement initiatives to advance justice, education, public health, and independent media. We build alliances across borders and continents on issues such as corruption and freedom of information. Working in every part of the world, the Open Society Foundations place a high priority on protecting and improving the lives of people in marginalized communities.

The RegenLab for Travel offers tools to help the tourism community to transit successfully towards Regeneration. By using a systemic approach, living organizations design and the co-creation of transcending experiences, we support and encourage tourism organizations to create more resilient communities and destinations, where man and nature coexist in parity.þff

We are technologists, community organizers, entrepreneurs, activists, and artists working for the greatest good of all beings. We amplify cooperation among people working to regenerate our communities and our planet. We do this by building systems and tools that foster trust and collaboration, starting in the Bay Area bioregion.

It's easy to confuse the merely complicated with the genuinely complex. Managers need to know the difference: If you manage a complex organization as if it were just a complicated one, you'll make serious, expensive mistakes.

Google version of the digital revolution. Far from being a bad thing, he argues that the potential for creativity, the ability to connect and communicate and the ability to have ones voice heard is driving fundamental societal change. So, is the digital revolution leading us to a more democratic, more environmentally and socially conscious future? And better business models?

The closing keynote at the Economist Conferences Event, "Creating tomorrow's liveable cities", presented byProfessor Jan Gehl, founding partner of Gehl Architects,Copenhagen. This video provides a good deal of information on the benefits bicycling and walking have on a livable community when integrated into the community landscape.