About this course

This is a practical, hands-on course to help you tackle everyday complexity. You will learn to take a complex news story, describe what makes the situation complex and identify opportunities for effective action or change.

Each chapter uses the online news to illustrate and practice working with complex situations:

In chapter 1 “Introducing complexity”, we define complexity and explore how complex situations require changes to the way we see the world;

In chapter 2 “Thinking in systems”, we describe and model how people, ideas or things interact over time and generate complexity;

In chapter 3 “Mapping the dynamics of complexity”, we learn the role of accumulations and nonlinearities and how they contribute to complexity and we also start working with free online simulation software;

In chapter 4 “Living with complexity”, we learn to accelerate our understanding and act with impact when faced with complex situations.