Systems thinking Systemic leadership
Systems thinking Systemic leadership
Featured projects
Instrumental in the design, launch, and delivery of a unique MSc program for civil servants in the UK in systems thinking and leadership at the Birmingham Leadership Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. This program responds to the UK government's endeavor to support civil servants build their systems thinking capabilities.
Led the conceptualization, design, launch, and delivery of the brand-new Young Leaders Program at ILSS. This program aims to develop the knowledge, skills, and mindsets required to be cultivated by young private sector professionals to contribute meaningfully to the social sector.
Led the project for the launch of two XPRIZEs in India, the only ones to be launched outside of the US. The first focused on women's safety using digital technology; the second focused on water conservation and regeneration. This project involved several elements spanning organizational alignment, stakeholder engagement, and PR.
Multi-year leadership development for the top management of Honda India using a holistic competency model design and deployment. This work involved designing and implementing development centers, leadership coaching, and managerial development cycles. Later, the project evolved into employee engagement interventions using systems thinking approaches.
Capacity building in systems thinking and systemic leadership for senior civil servants of the Department for Business & Trade (UK Government). Advisory on systems approaches to the DBT's focus on enhancing entrepreneurship and productivity in the UK economy. This is aligned to the UK Government's vision of integrating a systemic lens into the modus-operandi of civil servants.
HR transformation across 27 bottling units across India for Coca-Cola. The project involved closely working with all levels of the organization to craft an HR solution and platform that align to the ethos of the global Coca-Cola organization and that delivers to the people-related nuances of India.
Point of View
The current socio-economic malaise created by a simplistic and linear approach to management has put in question fundamental assumptions of modern businesses and the way social/organizational institutions are managed. In the last 50 years, the amount of damage we, as a race, have inflicted on the planet, on peoples and on our personal selves is more severe than what was done in the previous 3000 years.
We need a profound shift from linear thinking to systems thinking.
Systems thinking enables us to understand dynamic boundaries in social and organizational situations, appreciate interrelationships and recognize emergent patterns. It offers an alternative understanding to the dominant worldviews that have surfaced in the nineteenth century onwards that separate mind-&-matter, cause-&-effect, and profit-&-responsibility with a dualist standpoint.
Systems thinking needs to be a state of mind.
Systems thinking as a state of mind can serve as an inspiration for business managers, policy makers and change agents to thread disparate strands with analysis and logic, and yet transcend the same in the passage through lateral thinking and connected rationality.