Board and Staff

Bela Antal Banathy, Ph.D. (Founding Board Member and Secretary)

Bela is former president ISSS and chair of ISSS special interest group for Information Systems Design; Research Fellow of International Systems Institute; faculty Saybrook Graduate School; member of the Research Group on the Foundations of Information Science as well as the General Evolution Research Group. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and serves on the editorial boards of Systems, Journal of Applied Systems Studies,Organizational Transformation &Social Change, and the International Journal of Information Technologies & the Systems Approach.

Kenneth Bausch, Ph.D. (Executive Director)

Renaissance scholar; one-time priest, teacher, organizer, counselor, social service administrator, real estate agent, homebuilder, contractor, university professor, research director, and organizational consultant. President OngoingEmergence, a consulting firm; fellow CWA Ltd; author of The Emerging Consensus in Social Systems Theory; Co-Chair of ISSS Crete 2003.

Alexander N. Christakis, Ph.D. (President and Founder)

Dr. Christakis has served on the faculties of Yale University, Georgetown University, University of Athens, and the University of Virginia. He also spent five years at George Mason University as the Director of the Center for Interactive Management. A keynote speaker at several international symposia, he is also the co-author of two books on “Technology Assessment,” and the co-founder of the Club of Rome. He has published over 100 papers on the management of complexity in refereed journals.  He serves on the Editorial Boards of Systems Research and Behavioral Sciences, Systems: Journal of Transdiscplinary Systems Science, and the Journal of Applied Systems Studies. He has received numerous awards and distinctions including the “DEMOSOPHIA Award,” the “Creative Programming Award” from the National University Continuing Education Association, to name a few. He is currently serving as an Advisor to the Ambassadors Program of the Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO).  In 2002, Dr. Christakis served as President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (www.ISSS.org). His latest best-selling book titled “ How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom to Create the Future,” was published in 2006. He also serves as President of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras (www.globalagoras.org), a Think Tank dedicated to the practice of Co-Laboratories of Democracy around the world.

Tom Flanagan, MS, MBA, PhD.

Tom is Director of the SouthCoast Community Collaborative Design Studio (SoCoDesign Studio) in Southeastern Massachusetts and is a part time lecturing professor on information management, group decision making, stakeholder analysis & management, and multicriteria decision making in the Charlton College of Business at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Tom Serves on a number of advisory boards, including the New Bedford Economic Development Council, the Barrington Dads Against Drinking and Driving, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Alumni Council, the Massachusetts Office of Dispute Resolution and Public Collaboration, and the Advisory Board of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. Tom's background includes a doctorate in neurobiology with research, publications and patents from work he has led within academic and corporate R&D groups. His management training from MIT's Sloan School focused on partnership development, and his current mission is to cultivate democratic design practices that have been validated in many organizations into broad civic use throughout the greater New Bedford area.

Jay Grossman, MS.

A corporate communications professional with 32 years experience. Expertise in strategy and organization, corporate reputation and positioning, media relations, employee communications, financial communications, branding, crisis management, culture change, campaigns and budgets, managing creative consultants and agencies, coordination with clients and business units. Strong writer and effective counselor to senior management.  He is the principal of The Grossman Group, a strategic communications consultancy. Previously, he was staff vice president-media relations for Unisys Corporation. Prior to that, he spent 29 years with Bell Atlantic Corporation, including assignments as the company's executive director of reputation management, executive director of corporate communications, director of corporate media relations and director of employee communications.

LaDonna Harris, (Founding Board Member)

Ms. LaDonna Harris is a national leader in the areas of civil rights, the women’s movement, environmental protection, and world peace. She is most well-known for her consistent and ardent advocacy on behalf of Native Americans. Harris is founder and President of Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO), a national Native American advocacy organization located in Albaquerque New Mexico, USA. For 35 years AIO has specialized in federal/tribal governmental relations and Native leadership development. Harris helped to develop the Indigenous Leaders Interactive System an SDDP-based process, to assist Native American communities in addressing complex contemporary issues as a means to developing future strategies.  Harris was a founding member of the National Urban Coalition and Common Cause. She was an original convener of the first Women’s Political Caucus and helped organize the Global Tomorrow Coalition and Women for Meaningful Summits. She also served on many U.S. Presidential commissions, including Carter’s Commission on Mental Health and Johnson’s National Council on Indian Opportunity. She was appointed by Vice President Gore to the Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure. In 1999, President Clinton appointed Harris to the Commission on the Contribution of Women to American History.  Harris has made numerous international presentations on the need for Indigenous peoples to maintain cultural and political autonomy in the face of globalization and to share the Native American experience of co-existence. Most recently, Harris was a key presenter regarding the importance of diversity in building civil society at the Civil Society and Durable Development Conference held in Fez, Morocco. Currently, she is engaged in the development of an international emerging Indigenous leaders exchange program which will help build an transnational alliance of Indigenous peoples. Harris looks forward to contributing Indigeniety (Indigenous values and philosophies) to the International Systems Institute 2003 Conference.

Peter Jones, Ph.D.

Peter Hayward Jones is principal of Redesign Research and a founding partner of Dialogic Design International, and he lives and works in both Dayton (US) and Toronto (Canada). Peter is a visiting scientist at University of Toronto in the Faculty of Pharmacy, in the emerging field of collaborative informatics. Redesign Research is a specialized research consultancy that focuses on information services design, improving the design of professional work practices and services, and organizational innovation. Dialogic Design is a new partnership dedicated to advancing structured dialogue solutions to complex sociotechnical problems and systems.  Peter authored Team Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to Collaborative Innovation in 1998 and revised it in 2002. His current management research interests focus on the socialization of knowledge practices in organizational transformation, strategic development of knowledge practices, and values leadership.

Marie J. Kane, M.S.W. (Board member)

Marie has been a corporate consultant and executive coach since 1981. Her areas of expertise include survey use in market research, leadership and management development, strategic thinking and planning, team development, change management and employee selection, retention and development. Marie has worked with organizations from small to Fortune 500 corporations in both the public and private sectors in a variety of industries. She also volunteers her professional services to specific non-profit organizations as a contribution to the community. Marie is creator of Marketplace Detective, a self study system that shows small and medium size businesses how to effectively use surveys in market research, not only to gather market intelligence, but also to build relationships, (2008) www.marketplacedetective.com. Author of The Crucial Difference Between Teams and Work Groups and How To Make Them More Effective, 2004. Creator of the "TEAMS" team assessment and development process (1997), published commercially and available from Marie with free consultation on application for your situation. Creator and Facilitator of "The Leader's Way - Discovering the Inner Art of Leadership" program (1997) A program based on lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of the Inca Empire, conducted on site in Peru

Yiannis Laouris

Yiannis is Senior Scientist and Chair of the Board of the Cyprus Neuroscience &Technology Institute (known also as the Future Worlds Center) where he and his teamioneer in the further development of the science and application of structured democratic dialogue to solve complex societal problems. He is prominent in the Cyprus Unification Project, and leads SDDP sessions for the EU on topics such as Accessibility to all Services, Safer Internet initiatives, and Youth Initiatives. His team’s current challenge is how to scale up structured dialogues to enable democratic deliberations of up to one thousand people. He has also pioneered an online version of SDDP.

David Loye, Ph.D. (Founding Board Member)

David is co-founder, with Ervin Laszlo, General Evolution Research Group; co-founder of Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences; co-founder with his wife Riane Eisler of The Center for Partnership Studies. Author of many books including: The Healing of a Nation, The Knowable Future, The Sphinx and the Rainbow, Darwin's Lost Theory of Love, An Arrow Through Chaos, and with Riane Eisler The Partnership Way. He has founded a progressive Internet publishing company, the Benjamin Franklin Press www.benjaminfranklinpress.com. His Darwin Anniversary Cycle books are acclaimed as “revolutionary” and a “work of genius” by leadingworld scientists. His Moral Evolution Cycle probes the corruption and degradation of the American ideal and how we may reclaim the high road for human evolution.

Roy Smith

In the year 2000, I retired from being an internal consultant in the Ford Motor Company Process Leadership Office. I have substantial and long-term experience in working with groups on complexity. For some years I gave an annual lecture at the City University School of Management, where I attracted a large crowd of students.  I am active in our local church and community.  In my view, SDDP and CS II are very helpful evolutionary steps from ISM (Interpretive Structural Modeling). In 2004 I wrote: "I learned of ISM in January 1995. Since then I have run some 150 workshops for about 1,400 participants. Ninety-five workshops have been in Industry and Commerce, and fifty-five in the Social Arena. Fifty-one have been with ISM preceded by NGT, and about ninety-nine have been with NGT alone. ISM preceded by NGT is the best method I know for dealing with the most troublesome situations that one might ever encounter."  Ken Bausch provided me CogniScope_2 in the hope that I could pilot it in the UK with some clients, and spread the news to my colleagues in the IM network. I am pleased to say that I am having some good results with mini-co-laboratories with my first clients.