Bio
Frank Spencer holds a Masters in Strategic Foresight from the School of Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship at Regent University (Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA). He is the principal at Kedge, a futures and foresight, innovation, creativity, and strategic design consultancy, helping businesses and organizations to develop futures thinking, create foresight environments and divisions, develop robust strategy, and discover new opportunities. Frank teaches a course on utilizing futures and foresight for developing solutions to wicked problems at the Duke University Talent Identification Program (Durham, North Carolina, USA), as well as a graduate course in Design Futures for the Design Management program at the Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, Georgia, USA).
Course description : Advanced Futures Thinking
This course explores the importance of advanced “inner essence modeling” as a means to broaden belief systems and create platforms for critical and robust foresight and innovation within business, social, and governmental organizations. Part 1 covers the impact of social change theory on futures thinking across driving forces (i.e. markets, progress, ideas, technology, cycles, complexity, conflict, evolution, and chaos). Part 2 extends into various inner essence models that challenge individual and collective bias and assumption, worldviews, values, and cosmologies that impact futures thought and action (i.e. Spiral Dynamics Integral, Action Inquiry and Logics, Theory U, and Causal Layered Analysis). Students will develop a critical comparison of the theories and models, and create a working portfolio of the models based on real-world issues.
Course description : Large Scale Adaptive Systems: Resilience, Transformation, and Emerging Innovation.
This course covers large-scale adaptive systems and their role in building resilience within organizational and social innovation, architecture, and enterprise. Students will study resilience theory as it relates to the future of ecosystems (businesses, social initiatives, governmental institutions, NGOs, etc.), which includes systems thinking and complex adaptive systems (CAS), Panarchy (Adaptive Cycles, Capacity, and Management), natural growth curves (S-Curves), and the T-Mapping model (discovering organizational breakpoints – “breakthroughs” and “breakdowns” – and identifying opportunities for transformation). Students will synthesize the material by mapping the life-cycle, adaptive and resilient capacity, and aspirational future of an organizational entity, with the objective of guiding organizational transformation and innovation.
