Purpose of the System Change Leader Award:
Being true to its vision of “people using systems thinking and collaboration to imagine, plan, transform, achieve, and continuously improve learning and human performance in diverse organizations”, the Systems Thinking and Change Division has created the System Change Leader Award. This Award is the Division’s way of acknowledging individuals or groups that are making significant contributions to the evolution of learning, demonstrating systems thinking and positive impacts which are aligned to 21st century needs.
Characterization of System Change Leaders:
The Division envisions System Change Leaders as committed individuals or groups who have a deep understanding of the system that they belong to and the systems that they interact with. These individuals or groups lead with strategies that help people effectively navigate complexity, build synergies, and learn and transform themselves constantly. These leaders are instructional designers, K-12 and higher education teachers, K-12 and higher education administrators, or non-formal education program leaders and facilitators who are committed to education that promotes integral development of learners. Over the years, their work has generated changes at different levels.
Potential Levels of Change:
The influence of System Change Leaders can be observed at different levels.
The first level of change may have been at a “self” level by using a systems approach to reorganizing his or her own practice. Doing things different within a community takes courage. Persisting-in-that-practice requires conviction that the change is worth the cost, a belief that the impact is desirable, as well as internal discipline to assess the change over time, to make decisions about the direction that the system is taking. Individuals become system change leaders when they recognize their own value as changemakers and share their innovations and insights with others so that they can collaborate or follow their lead if they deem the changes valuable.
A second level of change may happen at a team level within the same organization, when system change leaders get together to carry out a new strategy following learner-centered approaches in the community of practice that they belong. They work as a team, interconnecting their own systems and demonstrating to others how the whole is more than the sum of its parts and how systems are always part of bigger systems.
A third level of change to be considered is the organizational, in which an entire organization moves toward a different system structure and starts embedding new paradigms for deep learning in its culture. The system change leader or leaders in such a scenario are the ones guiding stakeholders to design and implement the new structures and mental models for the whole organization and are thereby moving the organization in new directions.
Cross-organizational is a fourth-level system change where organizations start sharing system values and work together to leverage their practices towards integrated curricula, collaborative teaching, or systemic use of resources among the community.
Nomination:
Nominees for the System Change Leader Award may be individuals, teams or entire organizations.
To be considered for the award, nominees for the System Change Leader Award need to describe a) what was changed in their system, and b) how it was changed. Candidates need to present the following:
A. Description of the implementation of systems thinking for learning in a given context over multiple years. The implementation of systems thinking (and the beneficiaries of the impact) could be at any of the four levels described above:
1. Individual level - The candidate(s) for the award is a change agent that is connected to other individuals
2. Team Level - The candidate(s) for the award worked with a team to transform it as a system
3. Organizational level - The candidate(s) for the award worked with an organization to transform it
4. Cross-organizational level - The candidate(s) collaborated with stakeholders in one or more other organizations to transform the interrelationships among those organizations.
B. Evidence in the form of tables, diagrams, implementation plan overviews, executive summaries, etc. that clearly demonstrate systems thinking and/or systemic change that occurred as a result.
The documentation should provide evidence of key systemic concepts. These concepts could include integrated solutions, open systems, complex learning, self-regulation through feedback (learner, curriculum, or organizational level), personalization through just-in-time learning systems that support performance, network building and support, iterative designs, awareness of participating mental models, leveraging of resources, strategic planning, etc.
The System Change Leader Award will follow the same timelines for nominations and election as the other STC Division Awards.
Award:
The winner, whether an individual, team or organization, will receive recognition in Systems Thinking & Change Division media outlets, and a plaque with the engraved name of the recipient(s).
Evaluation of nominations:
A Committee with five evaluators will be formed from the STC Division Board and/or membership. They will have proven background in systems thinking and change and will be responsible for evaluating the proposals to select the best candidate. The evaluation will be carried out based on the following criteria:
- Learner-centered paradigm
- The systemic nature of the changes (comprehensiveness of changes required throughout the system)
- Impact due to the systemic changes