Creating Your Future: A Systems Dynamics Approach to Achieving Predictable Success
Creating Your Future: A Systems Dynamics Approachto Achieving Predictable Success
Ayo Akinremi | 2024
Abstract
There is an urgent need to help vulnerable young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds break free from the cycle of poverty, mediocrity, and failure. Helping them with a framework to enhance their personal development and leadership effectiveness that could influence their choices and transform their lives. Vulnerable young adults often indulge in paths of least resistance, failing to connect their choices with the delayed undesirable consequences. The lack of role models and mentors and the inadequacies of the school system to address their special needs contribute to this problem. The unique development needs of this population remain largely unmet. The inability to connect their adult development stage with their pattern of action and outcomes presents an opportunity to make a lasting impact on this population. Understanding how this connection systemically produces trends of undesirable outcomes could help them break free from negative sociocultural factors.
This project aims to fulfill this role by helping participants understand the concept of systems thinking and systems dynamics, apply it to enhance their personal development and leadership effectiveness and develop a template to guide their actions and decisions to produce positive outcomes. The workshop is premised on the 21st Century Skills Framework. The workshop focused on three objectives to help participants 1) appreciate the concepts of systems thinking and systems dynamics; 2) understand and apply the transformation framework by analyzing its elements, structure, connections, and interdependence and identify leverage points, and 3) develop a personalized success framework for achieving repeatable and sustainable success to create the desired future.
The workshop helped participants appreciate the systemic nature of the inner game (consciousness, inner identity, and maturity) that produces the outer game (pattern of results, competency, and mastery). It also helped them understand and appreciate a framework for transforming their inner game to produce predictable success. Following the workshop, all participants showed improved knowledge in all content areas evidenced by the summary of the findings: 1) the knowledge score on objective one increased from 0.625 to 5.875 (out of 7); 2) the knowledge score on objective two increased from 0.25 to 6.375 (out of 7) and 3) the knowledge score on objective three increased from 0.375 to 2.75 (out of 3). Overall, the mean knowledge score increased from 1.25 (out of 17) before the workshop to 15 after the workshop. A follow-up workshop was conducted to build on the foundational knowledge and assess the long-term impact of the first workshop.
Keywords: Systems dynamics, vulnerable young adults, personal development, leadership effectiveness