BELMONT ABBEY
Assignment Scenario
Assume that you are a formal or informal leader in your organization. You, along with your supervisor (or the rest of your leadership team) are engaged in a study of your organization’s challenges and strategic position with the intention of developing and implementing a series of improvement initiatives. You have shared some of the ideas in this course in casual conversation with others on the team and stimulated their interest. As a result, you have been asked to present the course’s concepts to everyone on the team so they, too, can begin to broaden and deepen their thinking organizational learning, change, and improvement.
You decide to use a teaching case, Belmont Abbey, to help your team develop an understanding of the key course concepts. For this task you’ll develop a set of teaching materials in the form of a PowerPoint presentation and corresponding script that convey the course concepts. Using examples from the case, you’ll enable your team to develop understanding of systems thinking, systems archetypes, and change and action research inquiry processes. In developing these teaching materials, you will be synthesizing course concepts and gaining a deeper understanding of their application to problems of practice.
Instructions
Create a PowerPoint presentation and corresponding script (or speaker’s notes) that consists of the following bolded components:
Introduce the case.
Preliminary Introduction of the Case: Summarize the case for your team. Provide a synopsis of the Belmont Abbey case that enables the intended audience to understand the case, including events, stakeholders, and challenges that will be analyzed.
Use disciplines of learning organizations to analyze problems of practice.
Disciplines: Apply the lens of the four core disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, team learning, shared vision) to the case, and provide an analysis of the extent to which the discipline(s) reveals organizational dynamics and contributes either to organizational learning or to the organization’s problems.
Analyze the organizational disabilities and systems archetypes present in the case.
Systems Archetypes: Explain and map at least one example of a systems archetype can be seen in the case. Include at least one systems map as part of your presentation.
Recommend change management strategies for the organization based on the case.
Critical-Thinking Tools: Prior to suggesting change management strategies, demonstrate critical thinking tools to identify assumptions the stakeholders in the case may have made, and develop a set of questions you would ask to help the stakeholders in the case uncover their assumptions and clarify the steps needed for future progress. Reference Paul and Elder’s Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life text in your comments.
Four-Stage Change Process: Describe and explain how the four-stage process could be used by the Belmont Abbey leaders to improve the strategic planning process that enhances the chances of success for one of the college’s initiatives. Explain how your set of questions would help uncover stakeholder assumptions and clarify steps needed for future progress. Refer to Stroh’s Thinking for Social Change text.
Propose an inquiry model to plan for next phase of organizational improvement.
Inquiry Cycle: Demonstrate and explain how an inquiry model such as ARPP/action research could be use by the college leadership to plan the next phase of improvement or change.
Recommendations: Provide a set of specific practical recommendations about how the president should proceed. Demonstrate how your recommendations align with the college’s mission, vision, and values.
Questions: Conclude with at least 3 discussion questions you would pose to help uncover team members’ assumptions and facilitate their inquiry into and understanding of the key concepts you have presented.
