Understanding the multiple aspects of governance and their particular challenges is often seen as one of the most difficult tasks committed to governments and their main actors. Governing does not allow having time to think, analyze, prepare, discuss and design. It is often about quick overviews and trust in available information and fast decision making. However, contemporary societal challenges require adequate tools from governments and demand leaders to be equipped with new arrays of competencies. These are particularly demanding regarding, precisely, how the broader governance context is understood and dealt with. In this module a framework to grasp the wider picture of governance, including its different aspects, and the ways in which it can be dealt with in an integrated manner will be suggested. Within a context where contemporary policy challenges require multi-level, multi-agent and multi-sectoral approached, discussing the advantages and problems of an integrated perspective on governance, its usefulness and intrinsic challenges will be at the core of the module.

Leaders need to make decisions in real time based on the best available information. Yet data and information available to decision-makers are usually anything but real time. Data that are generated and analyzed are often misaligned with the information needs of key decision-makers and the timeframes whereby they need to make real world decisions. This not only operates as a constraint on specific decisions that need to be made – whether on policy and strategy, financing, service delivery, community engagement and responsiveness, or other matters – but hinders the overall ability of country leaders to deliver on the full potential of their stewardship of the health sector. Better aligning the feedback loops whereby data are generated, analyzed and used with country-led processes through which key decisions are made can help unlock this potential, and significantly enhance individual leadership and how it is applied to strengthen stewardship for improved health of populations. In this module, participants will explore a pragmatic framework and key principles for strengthening leadership through generation, analysis and use of data, and overcoming commonly experienced challenges in different settings. Participants will then explore how they can further learn from each other and apply new approaches in context of their own work to enhance individual leadership and how it is applied to strengthen overall stewardship of the sector.

The complexity and speed of change of our world requires new forms of individual and collective leadership. The old ways of trying to predict the future and control our way towards it are ill-suited to our current reality. We need to develop new qualities and competencies as leaders, build resilient cultures, and create adaptive structures and processes that allow us to dynamically steer our way forward. This module will share some of the personal leadership qualities needed and also show how other modules will be contributing to building transformative leadership in our communities and organizations.

This module serves as an introduction to systems thinking methods and technical tools that are foundational to answering three essential questions: 1. Why does systems thinking exist (i.e., its promise and popularity)? 2. What is systems thinking? 3. How do we do systems thinking? We also explore two subsequent questions: 1. How do we apply systems thinking to everyday and wicked problems? 2. How do we apply systems thinking to the social and policy challenges we face? At its core, systems thinking attempts to better align how we think things work with how the real world actually works. The real world works in systems—complex networks of many interacting variables. Often nonlinear, complex, and unpredictable, real-world systems seldom correspond with our desire for simplistic, hierarchical, and linear explanations. Systems thinking is the field of study that attempts to better understand how to think better about real-world systems, and the complex problems we face.

Most organizational transformations falter because they don’t address the mindset changes necessary to carry out new ways of working. Through a highly structured, research-based method, this module invites participants to uncover the underlying, and otherwise invisible, individual barriers (limiting assumptions and competing commitments) that actively, automatically and powerfully work against desired transformational change. Participants will be introduced to a reliable process for addressing and overcoming these barriers at their core.