Andreas Hieronymi lives in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Currently he serves as the Executive Director for an international MBA exchange program at the University of St. Gallen where he also conducts research related to visual thinking and complex problem solving. He has a Major in Work and Organizational Psychology, and has been working in fields of consulting, training, coaching and educational curriculum design. He has given presentations and workshops on communication, leadership and complex problem solving for private companies, MBA students, Engineering and Sustainability students, members of the Swiss army and employees of the Swiss government.
During his studies in history and philosophy of science, he came across the early work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy on systems theory and interdisciplinarity. This led him to the integrative theories and frameworks of Kenneth Boulding, James Grier Miller and other members of today’s International Society for the Systems Sciences. During a research visit at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, supervised by Stuart Kauffman, he learned about the current concepts and unsolved questions related to complex adaptive systems and emergence.
There is a need for improved systemic sense making to enhance the quality of analysis, design and decision-making in complex multi-stakeholder settings. Andreas Hieronymi wants to put his efforts into linking the competencies of systems thinkers from various fields and collaborate towards making systems thinking more accessible, interlinked and user-friendly. Still there are many barriers to overcome in order to better link the academic fields of systems and complexity science with the applied needs in schools, companies and political communities. The goal is to identify and strengthen the common conceptual and methodic foundations of the many streams of systems thinking and complexity research and bridge the gap between academia and practitioners