 Leadership
& Organizational Development
CNRED outreach and research efforts are supported by a number
of campus and county based experts. This programming is focused
on enhancing local economic health, business development, stable
employment and quality of life.
These programs and services are reflected in centers
of excellence, self-directed issue teams
and a variety of statewide regional and/or county initiatives.
Below are some of our statewide self-directed issue teams working
on leadership and organizational development.
Community-Based
Leadership Program Development Team  - Strong leadership is essential to community development, vigorous economies, strong organizations and healthy businesses. Leaders are needed who understand the social, economic, and political dimensions of changing local, state, national and global environments. Formed in fall 2004, the team connects leadership programs within Wisconsin, providing access to collective resources, and developing new resources designed top impact the development of community leaders.
The team uses a broad definition for community-based leadership, including in its focus geographically defined communities as well as interest-based communities. In addition to the county and municipality specific leadership programs (i.e. Sauk Conty Institute of Leadership) public profession-focused leadership programs (i.e. Zoning Administr4ators Leadership Program), and student leadership programs within the State's higher education institutions.
Systems Thinking Team  -We know our world is highly interdependent, dynamic and complex. Yet we live in a culture of independence and competition which races to place blame and grasp for a quick fix. Our team learns and applies ideas from systems thinking (ST) and organizational learning (OL) to help communities and organizations understand the issues before them within broader social, political, economic and environmental contexts.
The core purpose of our team is to build our capacity to help communities and organizations learn to work with complex situations, to appreciate the longer view of how situations develop, to understand how our short term fixes can make things worse, to understand how our own ideas (mental models) about the world shape our response, to understand how organizations can use processes which bring many ideas and perspectives into conversations about the nature of the situation and alternate courses of action and how organizations can use reflection to learn from their actions
Systems Thinking- In this discipline, people learn to better understand interdependency and change, and thereby to deal more effectively with the forces that shape the consequences of our actions. Systems Thinking is based upon a growing body of theory about the behavior of feedback and complexity-the innate tendencies of a system that lead to growth or stability over time. (Society for Organizational Learning)
. Overview & Accomplishments of the UW-Extension Systems Thinking Team November 2006 
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