🎤 Untangled Live!

Overview

I’ve long written evergreen essays and hosted expert conversations to disentangle sociotechnical systems. But now, with the launch of Untangled Live, I will offer you the mindset shifts, strategies, and tools to change them.

Untangled Live will help you — mission-driven leaders, strategists, change-makers, analysts — make sense of the sociotechnical system you’re in, and change it. Untangled Live offers live online trainings and courses that teach the mindset shifts, strategies, and skills to do just that, and an interactive, lab-like environment to apply these new practices.

Course Offering #1: Sociotechnical Systems Change in Practice

This new chapter for Untangled starts with my first-course offering: Sociotechnical Systems Change in Practice. By the end of this live, online course, you'll learn new approaches for making sense of a sociotechnical system and changing it:

• Map and analyze sociotechnical systems.

• Identify complex dynamics within sociotechnical systems.

• Develop sociotechnical, system-aligned strategies — for yourself and your organization — that map backward from the future you want to create.

• Create a shared collective vision and facilitate collective action.

We’re experiencing rapid technological change, and the future feels inevitable, as if we can’t chart a new path, solve big collective problems, or change entrenched systems. But the work of changing systems — the actions we take as individuals, as leaders in organizations, and in collaboration with diverse stakeholders — starts with four mindset shifts:

• Problems are made, not found. Everything starts with a problem statement, but where do those problems start? I think we’re looking in the wrong place.

• Systems are sociotechnical and complex. There is no such thing as a ‘tech problem.’ All ‘tech problems’ are entangled in social systems, and the systems don’t behave like you think.

• There are no ‘tech solutions,’ only sociotechnical interventions with consequences for different communities, societal values, and how power is (or isn’t) redistributed. Our individual, organizational, and collective actions need to reflect this reality or else we become trapped in feedback loops of our own making, bringing the past into the future.

• Changing sociotechnical systems requires thinking backward, not forwards. The future isn’t a neat ‘theory of change’ away.

The course is organized around these mindset shifts, draws on the concepts and frameworks I use in Untangled — e.g. science and technology studies, complex adaptive systems, and future studies —and offers tools and exercises to help you turn them into practical strategies for sociotechnical systems change. You’ll practice applying these strategies in the context of AI and your working world. In short, you'll come out of this course with a new vision and draft strategy for how to transform the system you’re in, vetted by me and your fellow participants, and a workbook full of exercises so you can do it all again in the future.

Calling all sociotechnical leaders, strategists, change-makers, and analysts

This course is for anyone leading change at the intersection of technology and society. It's for mission-driven leaders, strategists, changemakers, and analysts who want to develop rigorous sociotechnical strategies that advance collective action. It’s for leaders who know systems change is key to the success of their mission. It’s for strategic doers collaborating with diverse stakeholders to advance their goals.

New sociotechnical futures might seem out of our reach. Systems might feel entrenched. Technology’s path might feel inevitable. But as Marshall McLuhan reminds us, “There is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” So let’s turn these inevitable seeming futures into concrete mindset shifts and practical strategies, shall we?

If you want to learn more about it and become eligible for early-bird pricing, fill out this survey:

I’ve also got a list of FAQs and a template that might help you get the course reimbursed by your organization on my website: