This analytical approach to dealing with complex situations, decision making and intervention pretty much runs on the material presented in the different weeks. We intended to make a course of roughly 4 hours per week that introduces you in the most useful approaches to complex situations.

However, many of you have asked if there is a practical book that you can read alongside the course.

Well, there are many. However, to stay completely in line with what I am teaching in this course, I will in this case suggest the book that Pauline de Heer and I wrote a few years ago.

It is called Solving Complex Problems and it can be ordered in hard copy as well as an e-book. Despite the word ‘problems’ in the title, the book focuses on dealing with complex situations and making changes on a systems level, so it is just as well applicable to any situation that you want to intervene in, even if it is not experienced as being a ‘problem’.

The topics of the weeks 1 through 3 of this course are mainly covered in the second chapter of that book (‘Making the problem explicit’), the topic of system interventions is covered in chapter 3 (‘Identifying alternatives’), the topic of scenarios is covered in chapter 4 (‘Dealing with uncertainty’) and the topic of multi-criteria tables and estimates is covered in chapter 5 of that book (‘Rationalizing the problem’).

The ebook can be purchased using this link: Buy Solving Complex Problems ebook

The hard copy is available from the publisher’s website. The website is mostly in Dutch, however, they have an ‘how to order’ tab in English to help you out if you don’t speak Dutch: Buy Solving Complex Problems on Boom Hoger Onderwijs