In this first unit, you step into Maya’s role as incoming Regional Director for Blue Harbour Systems, looking down on the coastal city of Port Aurora from the plane window and then riding through it in a taxi. You will frame this not as a narrow “flood protection project,” but as a complex socio-ecological system with conflicting purposes, blind spots, and contested narratives. Using concise ideas from Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Humberto Maturana, and Carol Anne Hilton, you will define what “system” you think you’re leading, where you draw its boundaries, and what success means—before you ever walk into the mayor’s office.
In this unit, you step with Maya into the mayor’s conference room and see Port Aurora as many overlapping systems at once: a political system, an economic system, a social system, an ecological system—and a global company system (Blue Harbour) entering that mix. You will meet the core actors around the table, surface their “microcosms” (Senge’s term for partial mental models that feel complete), and begin to map internal and external stakeholders into a single system view. You’ll also clarify your own system boundary: what—and who—you are choosing to include in “the problem” you’re here to lead.
In this unit, you move with Maya into Blue Harbour’s marketing office and onto a public plaza in Port Aurora. You’ll see how a single choice about framing—“Future-Proofed City” vs. “Living Coast, Shared Journey”—can either reinforce the dominant pattern of short-term, infrastructure-only fixes or open space for a deeper socio-ecological transformation. You will examine narrative as a systems lever: how public stories encode goals, rules, and paradigms; how over-promising can destabilize reinforcing loops of growth and trust; and how Indigenous and equity-centered narratives shift who and what is recognized as part of the system.
In this unit, you follow the consequences of Port Aurora’s public launch back inside Blue Harbour. The “Living Coast, Shared Journey” campaign works: other coastal cities call, and the sales pipeline surges. You will examine this as a reinforcing feedback loop connecting marketing, sales, capacity, quality, reputation, and future demand. You’ll also see the beginnings of a “Limits to Growth” structure and explore how leadership decisions about rules and boundaries—when to say “no” or “not yet”—determine whether growth strengthens or undermines Blue Harbour’s ability to deliver real resilience.
In this unit, you join Amina in a repurposed warehouse where Port Aurora’s coast is spread across a giant map on the wall. With city leaders, business, NGOs, community representatives, and Indigenous leaders all in the room, you will translate abstract system thinking into concrete proposal design. You’ll work with stocks and flows (people in harm’s way, critical infrastructure, ecosystems, trust), see how different groups mark “what matters” on the map, and confront spatial and temporal trade-offs: who and what gets protected first, with which mix of hard infrastructure and nature-based solutions. You will practice designing blended options that are technically robust and socially, legally, and ecologically legitimate.
In this unit, you move with Jonas from design to implementation planning. The focus shifts from “what” to build to “when, with what, and alongside whom.” You’ll see Blue Harbour’s own stocks and flows—engineering capacity, project backlog, public goodwill—and explore different types of delays: technical (permits, construction), social (community resistance, political shifts), ecological (mangroves maturing), and cultural (ceremonies, fishing seasons). You’ll watch Jonas expand his mental system boundary to include Indigenous calendars and community rhythms, and you’ll practice designing project sequences that respect these timing structures rather than crashing into them.
In this unit, design and planning meet reality. A major storm bears down on Port Aurora and the systems you’ve helped shape are put to the test: seawalls, drains, mangroves, shelters, political narratives, community trust, and Blue Harbour’s own internal capacity. You will follow real-time feedback loops as water rises and recedes, then sit in on a multi-stakeholder debrief where leaders choose between single-loop learning (just “make the wall higher”) and double-loop learning (change goals, rules, and priorities). You’ll see how performance maps expose inequities, and how new rules and information flows are created—or not—in response.
In this final unit, you zoom out over Port Aurora and Blue Harbour “one year later.” The skyline looks familiar, but underlying patterns have shifted: who gets protected and when, how ecosystems are valued, which voices shape rules, how Blue Harbour defines success. You will synthesize the entire narrative—Units 1–7—through key systems lenses: archetypes (Limits to Growth, Fixes that Fail, Shifting the Burden), leverage points (information flows, rules, goals, paradigms), and mental models. You’ll also turn the mirror onto your own work, designing a concrete systems-aware leadership commitment and Monday-morning practices.
