Cyprus Academy for Public Administration Training
Root Cause Mapping Training For Three Cohorts
During 2004 three cohorts of about ten people each were trained to become practitioners of the Root Cause Mapping Methodology and the new version of the CogniScope software developed in collaboration with Leading Design International (www.leadingdesign.org).
The first cohort training took place during the summer of 2004 and involved 10 Greek Cypriots representing different ministries of the Republic of Cyprus under the auspices of the Cyprus Academy for Public Administration (CAPA). CAPA for the last seven years has exercised a leadership role in applying the CogniScope process in a variety of complex public policy issues affecting public management of the island people. Because of the results obtained from these applications it was decided to expand the internal capacity of design expertise and train more people from different departments and disciplines in the methodology. An article about the applications and the training, written by the leader of the group Marios Michaelidis, was published in the CAPA magazine.
The second cohort consisted of a group of employees from the Oakland Schools in Michigan, under the leadership of Dr. Kathleen A. Golinski, the Director of Special Education of the Oakland Intermediate Schools District (ISD). Recognizing the complexity of the issues facing the ISD, Dr. Golinski and her staff spend three days in dedicated training to learn the roles of the facilitation team and master the latest version of the Root Cause Mapping software. This team has already applied the methodology in addressing some internal to the ISD complex issues.
The third cohort consisted of eight members of the Partner Educator team that has been recently formed in the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) under the leadership of David L. Smith. This team successfully completed the training during the month of December 2005, and has already applied Root Cause Mapping in the Flint Community Schools focusing on reducing the Dropout rate of students with disabilities, and the Hilbert Middle School focusing on improving the Average Yearly progress of students with disabilities in mathematics. Both these applications were extremely successful as reported by the customers.