Navigating Complexity by Sonja Blignaut.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the ways of thinking, learning, leading and doing that has brought humanity to this point in history will not take us to a sustainable future. The challenges we face, from obesity to climate change, to mental health and loneliness epidemics, AI and new ways of working all require us to be increasingly response-able and change-able.

Many of us feel like the so-called Red Queen in the Alice in Wonderland stories … running faster and faster to stay in the same place. We are busier and ever, many are more tired than ever … and yet the need for learning and adaptive capacity is also greater than ever.

How do we become skilled at continuous adaptation? Response-able agents in the complex systems we are part of?

In this DD, we’ll explore a insights from fields we don’t typically consider in organisational studies e.g. architecture, movement studies, and sports coaching.

• We’ll explore the affordances and how they shape our choices
• We’ll explore the notion of enskillment … how do we become skilled to find our way in ever-shifting affordance landscapes?
• What does this mean for our current approaching to learning and development?
• We may not come away with answers, but hopefully we will find, in David Whyte’s language, “more beautiful questions” to explore.

 
Sonja Blignaut is an internationally recognized complexity practitioner and sought-after speaker, teacher, and thinking partner. She’s been working in the field of applied complexity for two decades and is known for making the wisdom of complexity and other sciences accessible and practical. She works with individuals, teams and organisations to help them make sense of complexity and build the skills they need to find their way through ambiguity and uncertainty. Sonja is the founder of More Beyond and co-founder of Complexity Fit. Her clients include large multi-nationals like Ikea, Electrolux andMicrosoft as well as academic institutions and not-for-profits. She lives in South Africa and is a self-professed coffee snob and an avid photographer.