Waters Center for Systems Thinking

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Waters Center for Systems Thinking Our mission is to increase the capacity of educators to deliver student academic & lifetime benefits through the effective application of systems thinking.

We help people understand what systems thinking is and how to incorporate the Habits, tools and concepts of systems thinking into their work and life to achieve desired results.

Leadership coaches are trained to listen deeply. But what if we could expand what we’re listening for?Beyond the present...
10/05/2026

Leadership coaches are trained to listen deeply. But what if we could expand what we’re listening for?

Beyond the presenting issue, there may be patterns unfolding over time, assumptions shaping how a client sees the situation, relationships influencing what happens next, or perspectives that haven’t yet been considered.

Systems thinking gives us another lens for getting curious.

In The Systems-Informed Coach: New Tools for Expanding Awareness Through Systems Thinking, we’ll support leadership coaches to explore how the Habits of a Systems Thinker™ and practical systems-thinking tools can help us deepen our listening and develop questions that support clients in seeing their experiences from new perspectives.

The goal isn’t to analyze the client’s system or figure it out for them. It’s to strengthen our own curiosity so they can make new connections and generate their own insights.

📅 November 19 | 9:00 AM–12:00 PM PT
🎓 ICF CCEs will be provided.

Designed for executive and leadership coaches, including ICF-credentialed coaches and coaches in training.

Learn more and register:
https://waterscenterst.org/registrations/systems-informed-coach

09/28/2026

Join us for Open Studio this week!

What does systems thinking look like when applied to real-world challenges in public health and food systems?

This Thursday, October 1, we’re welcoming Anne Palmer, Director of Practice at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, to our next Open Studio.

Anne will share examples from her work and explore where systems thinking has strengthened public health and food systems efforts, as well as moments when a systems lens could have helped teams see more, ask different questions, or approach the work differently.

We’ll also hear how Anne uses the Habits of a Systems Thinker™ with graduate students and staff to build their capacity to navigate complexity.

📅 Thursday, October 1
⏰ 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
💻 Virtual

If you’re curious about how systems thinking translates from theory into practice, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Register here: https://waterscenterst.org/webinars

Wellbeing doesn’t exist outside the systems in which we work.Workload, relationships, expectations, organizational norms...
09/24/2026

Wellbeing doesn’t exist outside the systems in which we work.

Workload, relationships, expectations, organizational norms, competing priorities, personal circumstances, and the broader environments around us are constantly interacting. Yet conversations about wellbeing can easily become reduced to: What can the individual do differently?

Systems thinking invites a different question:

What is shaping the pattern we’re experiencing, and where do we have leverage to influence it?

We recently had the opportunity to explore this with the team at the Institute for Global To***co Control at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, using the Habits of a Systems Thinker™ to look beneath individual events, examine patterns over time, surface assumptions, and consider the interconnected dimensions of wellbeing.

The goal isn’t to take individual agency out of the equation. It’s to put that agency in context.

Because when we can see more of the system, we have more possibilities for deciding where and how to act.

Grateful to the Bloomberg IGTC team for bringing such curiosity and reflection to this work.

Johns Hopkins University

09/21/2026

📢 Announcing our October Open Studio: Applying Systems Thinking to Public Health & Food Systems

How can systems thinking help us better understand and respond to complex public health challenges?

Join us October 1 at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET for our next Open Studio, featuring Anne Palmer, Director of Practice at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Anne will explore how systems thinking can strengthen work in public health and food systems, sharing examples of where it has been applied effectively, as well as opportunities where a systems approach could have changed or strengthened the work.

She’ll also share how she brings systems thinking into her own practice, from teaching graduate students to supporting staff in applying the Habits of a Systems Thinker™.

If you work in public health, food systems, education, or simply want to see what systems thinking looks like in real-world practice, we’d love to have you join us.

📅 October 1
⏰ 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
💻 Virtual
Register now: https://waterscenterst.org/webinars

Come learn, connect, and explore with our community of systems thinkers!

We're sponsoring the Association for Talent Development - ATD Government Workforce conference on September 10 in Washin...
09/03/2026

We're sponsoring the Association for Talent Development - ATD Government Workforce conference on September 10 in Washington, DC, and we want to talk about a skill gap most competency models still miss.

Government talent development teams are being asked to build workforces that can handle constant change: cross-agency coordination, policy implementation, workforce transformation. None of that moves in straight lines, no matter what the org chart says. Traditional leadership training assumes stability. The environment doesn't offer any.

Systems thinking is how we close that gap. At Waters Center for Systems Thinking, we've spent years turning the Habits of a Systems Thinker into practical capacity building for government, private-sector, and nonprofit organizations. Leaders who develop these habits stop managing symptoms in isolation and start seeing the structures, patterns, and feedback loops actually driving results. That shift shows up in real performance: faster root-cause thinking, stronger cross-team collaboration, decisions that hold up under pressure instead of creating the next fire to put out.

If you're leading talent development for your agency, this is the work we'd love to talk through with you: how to build systems thinking capacity that starts with your people, extends into your leaders, and lives on inside your own talent development team long after any single workshop ends.

Come find us at our booth. We'll be talking systems leadership, sharing what we're seeing across government workforce development, and always up for a conversation about what your agency is navigating right now.

See you in DC.

AFC Alumni: We have something new for you!The AFC experience continues to grow and evolve—and we want our alumni to have...
09/01/2026

AFC Alumni: We have something new for you!

The AFC experience continues to grow and evolve—and we want our alumni to have the opportunity to experience what we’re adding for future cohorts, too.

Join us September 16 for:
Coaching for Systems Thinking: From Conversation to Systems Change

This interactive four-hour workshop will expand your AFC practice with a systems-informed coaching approach you can bring into conversations with individuals and groups—whether you lead, teach, facilitate, consult, coach, or convene others around complex challenges.

You’ll explore the Seven Practices of a Systems-Informed Coach, strengthen your deep listening and powerful questioning, practice coaching, and explore how coaching and your existing systems-thinking facilitation skills can work hand in hand.

The goal? More ways to help the thinkers in your context see more, understand more deeply, identify potential leverage, and design thoughtful action.

📅 September 16 | 8:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Pacific
💻 Virtual | Exclusively for AFC Alumni
To register: Log in to your AFC account and click the big orange button in the upper right hand corner.

Ready to add another powerful dimension to your AFC practice?

The system acts whether or not the leader does. Waiting for certainty isn't neutral — it's a choice, and usually the wro...
08/31/2026

The system acts whether or not the leader does. Waiting for certainty isn't neutral — it's a choice, and usually the wrong one.

Leaders that prioritize emergence don't wait for a perfect plan. They make deliberate moves, check them against real results, adjust, and repeat. They experiment and learn in order to act again.

That's exactly the posture we saw from the leaders at Butler University in our recent work together: a willingness to try, reflect, and adjust in real time, rather than wait for certainty that was never coming. It's a demonstration of what systems leadership looks like when it's actually practiced, not just discussed.

If you're ready to build that same capacity in your leaders, reach out — we'd love to talk about how we can support your team.

Today, we’re celebrating AFC Cohort 11 for completing their year-long Advanced Facilitator Credential journey! 🎉Over the...
08/27/2026

Today, we’re celebrating AFC Cohort 11 for completing their year-long Advanced Facilitator Credential journey! 🎉

Over the past year, this remarkable group has done so much more than learn systems thinking tools. They’ve practiced seeing differently. Asking different questions. Looking beneath events to understand the patterns, relationships, structures, and beliefs shaping the systems around them.

And most importantly, they’ve learned how to help others do the same.

That is at the heart of our mission at the Waters Center for Systems Thinking: building the capacity of people to think and act systemically so they can create positive change and improved performance in the systems that matter most.

Cohort 11, we have watched you stretch, experiment, facilitate, coach, reflect, challenge assumptions, learn from one another, and grow into an extraordinary community of systems thinkers. We are incredibly proud of what you’ve accomplished, but even more excited about the ripple effects of what you will do next.

Because every person you help see a system more clearly expands the possibility for thoughtful, lasting change.

Congratulations, Cohort 11. You did it! 🎉

And the community keeps growing. Cohort 12 launches in just a few weeks, welcoming our next group of systems thinkers into the AFC journey, and Cohort 13 will begin in April 2027.

Here’s to Cohort 11, and to all the systems you’ll help change by changing the way people see them. 💙

Transformative system change requires leaders to weave scattered ideas and experiments into a coherent picture for all s...
08/24/2026

Transformative system change requires leaders to weave scattered ideas and experiments into a coherent picture for all stakeholders and actors within the system.

That's the work of sense-making, and it's harder than it sounds. It requires seeing a system as it actually is, not as we wish it were, before we can help anyone else see it too. It also requires holding a vision for the direction the organization is headed without holding too tightly to a specific outcome.

During our recent facilitated session with the leaders at Butler University, we watched this happen in real time: individual observations turning into shared understanding, as leaders connected what they were each noticing into a picture none of them could see alone. That shift — from scattered to shared — is where systems leadership starts to accumulate into motivated action.

If your leaders are sitting on insight that hasn't yet become shared understanding, we can help unlock it.

Systems change doesn't move through the org chart. It moves through relationships.The strongest networks inside an organ...
08/18/2026

Systems change doesn't move through the org chart. It moves through relationships.

The strongest networks inside an organization can often be the informal ones, held together by shared purpose and leaders who learn to recognize and tend those networks. Those leaders create the conditions for innovation to emerge by seeing differences of perspective as a resource.

When we teach leaders to prioritize emergence in complexity, we emphasize enabling leaders at all levels of the organization to lead from where they are, and to create horizontal networks for ideas to flow. What stood out most in our recent session with the leaders at Butler University was this exact dynamic: leaders at every level of the organization engaging with equal depth, regardless of title or position.

Curious what that could look like in your organization? Let's connect.

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