Cultivates systemic understanding as a holistic way of seeing and acting that stands in contrast with reductionist ways of knowing, focusing on interdependencies and interconnections. Develops systems concepts through investigation of patterns across human and organizational systems. Encourages a systemic practice addressing balancing stability/identity and change/transformation. Explores systemic leadership and systemic ethics in social systems ranging from organizational/community systems to ecological/world systems. Fosters understanding of concepts that form a ground for systemic understanding, such as feedback, complexity, chaos, self-organization, self-regulation, requisite variety, and mutual causality, always focusing on relationships and interaction. Topics also include context, process and emergence, inner and outer relationships, systems adaptation and flexibility, and organism/environment relationships.

The notion of trauma has evolved over the past century with increased awareness of how people experience loss, and hurt in physical, social, economic, emotional, and spiritual parts of their lives. The course begins with a conceptual exploration of trauma and its historical construction, from its early focus on the experience of war among veterans and civilians, to more contemporary concerns with various forms of abuse, loss, illness, social violence, and destruction from natural disasters. Trauma is framed in terms of the "loss of assumptive" worlds, resulting in fundamental loss of meaning. After this introduction, the focus shifts to the process of questioning assumptions about life, values, ideals, and goals in life often resulting in shock, despair, depression and much more. Scholars and practitioners have studied how survivors of trauma react in different ways, from gaining coping strength to exploring transformational processes. Students critically analyze different approaches to trauma from changes in cognitive and phenomenological structures, to narrative and transformational reconstruction of meaning. Trauma becomes a paradoxical catalyst for personal growth and transformation. The readings include theoretical and empirical work by Richard Tedeschi, Lawrence Calhoun, Kenneth Doka, and Jeffrey Kauffman.

Considers creativity and innovation from disciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives. Explores issues of creativity in organizational settings, and individual and professional life. Focuses on design thinking while extending creativity and innovation to organization design, including spaces in which organizational life takes place. Explores links between paradox and creativity, and social bases of creativity, as well as ways new media shape landscapes and soundscapes of creativity and innovation. Cultivates both a theory and practice of creativity and innovation, including use of metaphors that invite creativity in organization design, and how an organization might foster creative confidence. Connection with HOD-838 Media, Technology and Disruptive Innovation, is possible.

Over the past several decades, the various scholarly disciplines have turned their attention to the manner in which the body is an ever-present aspect of all we know. Somatics is about the body as experienced from within. What can and does our body tell us as? How do we integrate bodily knowing and being into textual forms of knowledge? How do we build this knowing into our scholarship and practice? This course reviews these literatures. We are investigating experience and learning as an embodied phenomenology and as such - the study of consciousness will be a key perspective. We cover somatics from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, social and human sciences, phenomenology and spirituality. Since we are attempting to interpret the meaning of texts about Somatics, hermeneutics is also a key discipline for our collaborative work.

Students are introduced to the range of quantitative inquiry methods, including survey, descriptive, quasi-experimental, correlational, and causal-comparative research. Students study the methodological topics, including structured data collection, sampling, design, basic data analysis strategies, procedures for assessing reliability and validity of quantitative studies, interpretation, and reporting. Students explore the range of quantitative approaches in application to their research interest, development of the research question, and creation of a quantitative proposal.