Systems Leadership Guide for civil servants
Practical guidance for senior civil servants and team leaders applying systems approaches to complex policy problems
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The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has responsibility for several complex and interacting policy challenges: for example, our net zero portfolio must deliver rapid decarbonisation, infrastructure change, energy security, and job opportunities in a growth economy under environmental stress.
Complex issues such as these require systems approaches, and systems approaches require good leadership. Systems approaches are a framework for seeing the interconnections in a system and a discipline for seeing and understanding the ‘structures’ that underlie complex situations.
The Systems Leadership Guide introduces senior civil servants and team leaders to systems thinking, and gives practical guidance for implementing systems approaches and shifting the culture to more systemic ways of working.
It is part of the suite of guidance on systems thinking for civil servants across government, regardless of grade, department, background or profession, which includes:
- an introduction to systems thinking, a short summary of what systems thinking is, when it is useful and why it can be beneficial to your work
- the systems thinking journey, which expands on the content within the introduction to systems thinking and maps 5 systems thinking principles to different stages of the policy design process
- the systems thinking toolkit, which contains step-by-step instructions on how to use 11 systems thinking tools
- the systems thinking case study bank, which contains a collection of 14 personal testimonials from civil servants on their experiences of using systems thinking in their work