Ashford EXP 105 Text Book Chapter 5
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CHAPTER FIVE: REFLECTION AND RENEWAL
Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference—Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Courage to Grow and Change
• Transformational Change Learning begins again with reflection—if you allow reflection to lead to action. In other words, when learning is applied and assessed (reflected upon), you can expect to find seeds of renewal and chance as you think about what you’ve learned: new ideas, new passions, new possibilities—even new behaviors, like changing hats. Here’s how a hardheaded rationalist might go about adapting a rigid lifestyle into a more flexible (and possibly more creative) one: Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right‐angle triangles. If they tried rhomboids,
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Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As for example, the ellipse of the half moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
—Wallace Stevens (1916)
Courage to Grow and Change
You can view growth and change with apprehension, or you can choose to face both courageously. Annie
Dillard (1999) describes the remarkable courage of a person in a tribal mountain village in New Guinea where no contacts with the modern world had been made. It happened in the 1930s when a British officer had flown his small plane into the tribal territory, landing above three thousand feet on a hacked‐open space. When the officer was preparing to take off, one villager cut vines and tied himself to a wing of the plane, explaining that “no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.”
Less dramatically, Douglas McGregor’s
(1960) research in organizational management documented the significant relationship between motivation and change. He found that workers, when treated consistently,
CHAPTER FIVE: REFLECTION AND RENEWAL
Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference—Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari
CHAPTER CONTENTS
• Courage to Grow and Change
• Transformational Change Learning begins again with reflection—if you allow reflection to lead to action. In other words, when learning is applied and assessed (reflected upon), you can expect to find seeds of renewal and chance as you think about what you’ve learned: new ideas, new passions, new possibilities—even new behaviors, like changing hats. Here’s how a hardheaded rationalist might go about adapting a rigid lifestyle into a more flexible (and possibly more creative) one: Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right‐angle triangles. If they tried rhomboids,
127
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As for example, the ellipse of the half moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
—Wallace Stevens (1916)
Courage to Grow and Change
You can view growth and change with apprehension, or you can choose to face both courageously. Annie
Dillard (1999) describes the remarkable courage of a person in a tribal mountain village in New Guinea where no contacts with the modern world had been made. It happened in the 1930s when a British officer had flown his small plane into the tribal territory, landing above three thousand feet on a hacked‐open space. When the officer was preparing to take off, one villager cut vines and tied himself to a wing of the plane, explaining that “no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from.”
Less dramatically, Douglas McGregor’s
(1960) research in organizational management documented the significant relationship between motivation and change. He found that workers, when treated consistently,