Change agents lead a way towards changes for better. We support change agents who want to create positive changes that are desirable for people and societies.

We live in a turbulent age that is coined with the term "VUCA", standing for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. In Japan and elsewhere in the world, many people are at the mercy of changing environments and struggling to keep up the pace of changes in their businesses and lives. Many people attempt to adapt to those changes as fast as they can; sometimes they succeed and other times they fail, experiencing difficulties of assessing how futures unfold.

How can we hold reins in changing environments and create desirable changes?

Despite such fast paces of changes, what has not changed much are our perspectives and our way of thinking. Both as an individual and an organization, our thinking and actions are mostly controlled by old habits and successful experiences of the past. The first step toward creating a desirable change often begins with reflecting inner aspect of ourselves.

Systems thinking is a methodology to observe interrelations among elements of humans and their activities in a bigger picture. It allows us to understand why changes do or don't happen and to think holistically. By questioning our conscious and unconscious assumptions, we can broaden our perspectives, modify our thinking and behaviors that are not effective, and intervene to alter structures of connection to transform a system and create changes that can last longer.

Among many schools of systems thinking, we deploy the methodology based on system dynamics, which has a history of over 60 years and has been utilized by many government organizations, civil organizations, and corporations across the world. The methodology allows you to formulate effective measures within contexts of organization silos, sub-optimized decision making and symptomatic measures causing policy resistance. System thinking also enables you to transform your team or company into a leaning organization that can sustainably and authentically fulfill needs of the society in our turbulent age.

Learning organization is one that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself. This concept is advocated by Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer at MIT, who regards that learning organization is a group of people working together collectively to enhance their capacities to create results they really care about. It has been practiced by many business organizations such as BP, Shell, World Bank, Nissan and Recruit. It has also been applied beyond business organizations, leading to such concepts as "learning schools", "learning communities", and "learning nations".

The core capabilities of a learning organization are expressed in three pillars: fostering aspirations, understanding complexity, and dialoguing in a reflective and co-creative manner. By enhancing and integrating these three capabilities, people and organizations are capable of being aware of and adapt to changing environments swiftly, and have resilience that allow us to absorb or recover shocks arising from turbulent flows. It also means that learning organizations continue to evolve itself.

We practices the methods of systems thinking and learning organization to support national and local policy-making, business strategies, social innovation, international cooperation, and community buildings. The current socio-economic system has expanded population and economy and brought prosperity such as advancements in science, technologies, education and healthcare in the past at the expense of sustainability of natural, human and social capitals. Its inevitable consequence is our civilization has become extremely volatile and it could collapse anytime. Our intention is to create visions and strategies to transform the current socio-economic system into a sustainable one for many generations to come.

Based on the knowledge and experiences acquired in those endeavors, we provide training programs on systems thinking and learning organizations and nurture current and future leaders and social entrepreneurs. The first step towards social transformation is to change ourselves. Would you care to join us in networks of change agents, who makes a vision and creates a desirable future that we care about collectively?

Riichiro Oda
President & CEO, Change Agent Inc.