Selected Presentations
Frequently requested presentations are shared below.
The individual discovers his strength as an individual because he has, along the way,
discovered others share his feelings—he is not alone, and thus a community is formed. Studs Terkel
Simple Ethnogrpahy 123
Toronto PD Network Meeting
How can ethnography skills add to the Positive Deviance approach? Participants in this meeting practice simple observational methods that help reveal "solutions right before your eyes." Handout materials PPT file
The End of Leaderhip and Consultancy As We Know It
Held Saturday, June 28th, 8am-5pm @ Seattle University, OSR Third Annual Conference. handout materials PDF
This session will build your confidence as a leader and change agent working creatively with uncertainty, diverse participants, less ego and more surprise. A wonderful, challenging flip of conventional wisdom and logic. Hold on to your hats! We will:
1. explore how we use our power to shape change without over-control, moving toward self-organizing participation and interdependence
2. share stories and hard results from a successful effort to eliminate MRSA infections in hospitals using Positive Deviance, improv, and other complexity-science-inspired methods
3. introduce and immediately use Discovery and Action Dialogue
4. specify much-touted practices that we have stopped using
The workshop will include small-group and whole-group conversations that explore how leadership and consultative behaviors are changing (both what is ending and what is beginning). Participants will practice using a process called "Discovery and Action Dialogue" to practice unleashing more self organization without conventional behaviors that attempt to control the outcome. The dialogue process is deeply reflective and action-oriented.
Participants will discover useful behaviors for leaders and consultants and apply concepts of complexity science, improv, social network mapping, and Positive Deviance to their own practices.
Inspiring Slide Shows with a Complexity Twist
Every year or two, I take all the quotes I have collected and compose a theme. Then, I add images and make a PPT slide show. The slides and music play during conferences and workshops. They are often more popular than the formal (erudite?) materials I share.
)) Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity PPT file
)) On Purpose
)) Let's Talk
)) Belonging Together (in progress)
Introductory Course to Complexity and Management
These learning materails have been used over the last 10 years in workshops to introduce complexity science to managers, clinicians, scholars, and policy-makers.
One-, two- and three-day courses are offered in lively, learn-as-you-apply formats. Participants are asked to bring their massively entangled challenges to work through.
PPT file
Innovation Themes: Design, Spread, Measurement, Leadership 
Integrated-Autonomous Organizing
We are riding on a wave of more integrated-AND-autonomous organizations. They are far more distributed and self-ordering in their functioning than conventional centralized hierarchies. Think Wikipedia, Amazon, Linux and Google. The dynamic attributes of centralized, decentralized, and distributed organizations are animated in the slides below. Distributed systems have a greater capacity to generate novelty, creatively adapt, and scale up innovations.
Progressive Evaluation for Complex Innovation Challenges Conventional measures of outcome and process are often not robust enough for bold innovation projects, particularly social innovation efforts. Here are a few suggestions for progressive evaluation useful for NGOs, philanthropy and business. Progressive evaluators ask, "What seems possible now!?"
more coming soon...
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent
and well informed just to be undecided about them.
Laurence J. Peter