Systems Thinking for Sustainable Enterprise
NRE 501
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: Graduate Standing

Challenges to sustainable human and corporate futures, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, mega-city explosion, and persistent poverty, are characterized by extraordinary detail and dynamic complexity, large uncertainties, non-linear causation, unknown thresholds and irreversibilities, significant time and space lags, and multiple scales, resolutions and rates of change. Comprehending (and leveraging for) sustainable development and associated enterprise thus necessitates DYNAMIC SYSTEMS THINKING, emphasizing wholes over parts, relationships over objects, feedback processes over linear cause-effect chains, etc. This course will develop an evolutionary, dynamic understanding of the role of business in relation to natural and social systems. Participants will learn to recognize dynamic complexity, think at the level of structure rather than events or behavior, test and develop their intuition systemically, build causal loop diagrams, uncover recurring systemic structures, and to see how to change systems with effective intervention. Using a mix of primers, simulations, games, videos, reading and exercises, the course will model a variety of global challenges in relation to business risk and opportunity.