ORGL 620: Leadership Seminar

STATED OBJECTIVE:

The purpose of this course is to serve as the capstone experience of the master's program in Organizational Leadership. Students create a research portfolio, project, or thesis as evidence of a synthesis of the program. Students will develop advanced leadership practices, project management, conflict resolution, team building, and communication abilities. Graduates can better perform in leadership roles, improve interpersonal relationships, and develop fruitful and thriving organizations. The Organizational Leadership program drives students to establish and refine their leadership style while taking actions in their workplace and their community and challenge the status quo. Students come from different areas of the world, work in a multitude of professions, and are employees in a variety of career levels. This course challenges students to learn from each other and expand their repertoire of skills.

IMPACT QUOTE:

“Lorenz’s butterfly effect is a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of complexity— not “complexity” in the sense that we use the term in daily life, a catchall for things that are not simple or intuitive, but complexity in a more restrictive, technical, and baffling sense. This kind of complexity is difficult to define; those who study it often fall back on Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s comment on obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” Things that are complex— living organisms, ecosystems, national economies— have a diverse array of connected elements that interact frequently.

Because of this density of linkages, complex systems fluctuate extremely and exhibit unpredictability. In the case of weather, a small disturbance in one place could trigger a series of responses that build into unexpected and severe outcomes in another place, because of the billions of tiny interactions that link the origin and the outcome. In an ecosystem, one slightly mutated virus may spread like wildfire, causing a huge population depletion that, in turn, propagates through the food chain, transforming the local biological order. In the case of economies, the capsizing of a single bank can have no effect at all, or cause cascading failure throughout the system.

Being complex is different from being complicated. Things that are complicated may have many parts, but those parts are joined, one to the next, in relatively simple ways: one cog turns, causing the next one to turn as well, and so on. The workings of a complicated device like an internal combustion engine might be confusing, but they ultimately can be broken down into a series of neat and tidy deterministic relationships; by the end, you will be able to predict with relative certainty what will happen when one part of the device is activated or altered. Complexity, on the other hand, occurs when the number of interactions between components increases dramatically— the interdependencies that allow viruses and bank runs to spread; this is where things quickly become unpredictable.

Think of the “break” in a pool game— the first forceful strike of the colored balls with the white cue ball. Although there are only sixteen balls on the table and the physics is that of simple mechanics, it is almost impossible to predict where everything will end up. In a perfect world, with an impossibly level table, balls that were identical down to the micron, and a player who could strike with the precision of one millionth of a degree, a computer could foresee where the balls would slow to a halt. However, introduce even the slightest deviation in the trajectory of a single ball, and quickly all the balls that it touches, and all the balls that they touch, will diverge. The density of interactions means that even a relatively small number of elements can quickly defy prediction. Because of these dense interactions, complex systems exhibit nonlinear change.

Linear phenomena are those whose output is proportional to input: you can put $ 100 or $ 200 into a set of bonds that will give you a 5 percent return in five years; doubling your input will double your eventual profit from $ 5 to $ 10. The change in outcome is proportional to the change in income. Such a function could be represented mathematically as: Y = 1.05x. Human minds feel at home with linear functions. Nonlinear functions, on the other hand, make us uncomfortable. They come in many forms, including exponential functions like Y = 5x, and they quickly defy our intuitive understandings of growth and scale. Initial differences in the base or slight increases or decreases in x have massive consequences. When we invest money in a risky stock, we are resigning ourselves to the nonlinear capriciousness of a complex system (the stock market), where a single news story or a rogue trader across the world can cause a stock to plummet, skyrocket, or flatline.

To grasp how quickly nonlinear situations can spiral beyond our capacity to comprehend or predict, consider a game of chess: Chess is rule bound and the number of possible moves is limited, but it is interdependent— what happens to one piece changes the relationships between, and the behavior of, the others. Jonathan Schaeffer has calculated that there are 197,742 different ways for the players’ first two turns to transpire. By the third move, the number of possibilities has risen to 121 million. Within twenty moves, it is more than likely that you are playing a game that has never been played before. Nobody knows exactly how many games of chess potentially exist because, according to Schaeffer, the figure “is so huge that no one will invest the effort to calculate the exact number.” A small change at the start of a chess game— say, moving a pawn to A3 instead of A4— can lead to a completely different result, just as the flapping of one of Lorenz’s butterflies might create huge, nonlinear havoc down the line. A reductionist instruction card would be useless for playing chess— the interactions generate too many possibilities” -- Gen. Stanley McChrystal, from Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.

Competencies Gained:

The Leadership Seminar is a capstone course that requires “additional reflection and discernment, isolating various competencies developed throughout this program, and integrating those competencies to design, propose, potentially implementing (put into practice), and evaluating a leadership project.” Consequently, the project was conceived specifically to “show our capacity to transfer, scaffold, and apply knowledge to everyday practice in the organizational setting.” Instantiating, the Ignatian principle of contemplatives in action, the seminar provides the time and structure to integrate the latest proven organizational leadership strategies and increased level of awareness.

Course Instructor:

Adrian Popa, Ph.D.

Reference Materials:

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Creswell, J. W. (2013). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage publications.
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Miller, J. H., & Page, S. E. (2009). Complex adaptive systems: An introduction to computational models of social life. Princeton University Press.
Epstein, J. M. (2006). Generative social science: Studies in agent-based computational modeling. Princeton University Press.
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Dershowitz, A. M. (2009). The advocate's devil. Grand Central Publishing.
Diamond, J. (2012). The world until yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies? Penguin.
Diamond, J. M., & Ordunio, D. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel (pp. 178-183). Books on Tape.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Penguin.
Diamond, J. (2014). The third chimpanzee. Oneworld Publications.
Dershowitz, A. M. (2011). The best defense. Vintage.
Bolden, R., Hawkins, B., Gosling, J., & Taylor, S. (2011). Exploring leadership: Individual, organizational, and societal perspectives. Oxford University Press.