The Center for Understanding Change is a private, not-for-profit, independent research center founded in 2011. We are a neutral, apolitical group, not beholden to any viewpoint. We serve as a trusted advisor with a systems engineering view of global industry and infrastructure. We use dynamic world models and advanced analytical methods to explore ideas, actions, planned decisions, and “what ifs,” with a focus on engineering, operational, and sustainable perspectives of complexity across disciplines. These complex systems are critical to understanding impacts of environmental, technological, economic, and political events.

Renowned scientists and engineers from universities, government agencies, research institutes, and private industry collaborate with C4UC to reveal drivers that control the cascade of impacts triggered by political, economic, or natural events.

Our primary mission is to collect or connect to the nine major models that characterize the interconnectedness of critical industries and resources, in order to build a useable model that will allow us to explore scenarios of constraints, disasters, et cetera so that we can understand otherwise hidden implications of proposed actions or events. Eventually, we hope to reach the point where drivers become apparent enough that we can predict, with some accuracy, the course of actions that will best achieve a goal while at the same time mitigating any undesirable side effects.

The inspiration for C4UC came from John Voeller's call to action at his keynote address he gave at COFES 2011. In the two-minute clip below, Voeller lays down the gauntlet: