Overview
Hosted by the Generative Learning & Complexity Lab , the purpose of this re-imagined graduate level certificate program is to develop leaders who can respond to complex challenges with adaptive solutions. Based on current and cutting-edge practice and scholarship, this program is informed by UGA’s faculty research on adult development along with adaptive and complexity leadership.
The vision for this certificate program is to inspire leaders to approach “wicked” problems with a complexity and adaptive mindset. The mission of this certificate is to operationalize the leadership practices of learners as they enact real-time strategic change and innovation within their organizations, community, and the world.
This certificate program “reframes” leadership through the lens of complexity. Leadership is viewed as more than a role, position, set of traits, characteristics and capacities that are inhabited by one person. Both the parts and the whole matter in the context of complexity. Complexity is used to describe the interconnected, always evolving, in motion relations between human and more than human intra-actions in a multi-contextual reality. This reframing is illustrated by this quote:
“We may learn more about leadership if we study it as an entrustment of context, and not as a twinkle bestowed upon a few select individuals from the heavens above. To trust the context requires a second order shift in purposing our agendas. Instead of being activists for this or that cause, we need to tend to the contextual capacity for those changes we would like to see.”¹
Coupled with complexity, adaptive leadership is taught to expand the capacities of leaders as they cultivate in themselves, with those around them, and the contexts they serve to “enable leadership by enabling the conditions that effectively support and sustain adaptive space.”² Adaptive space is a space of possibility, where response-ability grows and takes shape just in time. Through this certificate on complexity and adaptive leadership, program participants will develop the leadership capacities necessary to address wicked problems.
Who will benefit from this certificate are those seeking to update their graduate level credentials or enhance their current graduate degree program. This program is appropriate for those who regularly face complex and adaptive challenges in their organization, such as:
- Professionals who are working in or aspiring toward leadership roles,
- High potentials,
- Mid- to upper-level managers, and
- Senior leaders.
Alumni of UGA (or other higher education institutions) with bachelors and graduate degrees (or are matriculating) are invited to apply.
The learning goals of this complexity leadership certificate are to:
- Understand and discern the theory and practices of leader formation and leadership development
- Explore how to thrive in complexity and employ an adaptive leader mindsets
- Understand how to develop sustainable systems of leadership development that are agile, dynamic, and capable of ethical responses to 21st century challenges
- Develop and enact complexity and/or adaptive leadership in an action project of their own design
REFERENCES
- Nora Basteson, (2019). Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns. p. 85-86
- Uhl-Bien & Arena, (2017). Complexity leadership: Enabling people and organizations for adaptability, p.14, (quote is a paraphrase)
