Assessment

Integrate your understanding of change management and the use of the five disciplines for team development, based on your findings from your two team development sessions, to write an analysis of what you learned about change as a facilitator, and about yourself as a facilitator.

Include the following sections:

1. Theory of the five disciplines as a method of change: Describe a relevant theory of change management and two of the five disciplines. (You are not required to choose the same two theories that you used in your team sessions, but you may use them if you wish.)

• Consider your audience as you choose your theory, and decide how to discuss it and what to present. Ideally, this audience would be the larger organization in which the team functions, but it could also be to the session team itself, members of an educational forum, or another group. Make judgment calls about the audience's needs and setting. Note: After successfully completing this assessment, you may wish to actually present your paper to a professional audience at your organization, in order to demonstrate your own development.

• Invent your own unique metaphor and use it to explain your chosen theory. That is, develop a graphic or verbal image of something familiar to explain an unfamiliar thing or process. An important part of considering an audience is to provide a powerful metaphor to help audience members understand and remember the relevant information. Causal loops and the ladder of inference are examples of graphic metaphors.

2. Team development summary findings: Present your summary findings from the two team development sessions, in which you completed the team exercises.

• Use the best stories and quotes from your session experiences to illustrate the disciplines and how they support change.

• Synthesize your learning from the sessions about team dynamics and the value of the five disciplines for team development.

• Illustrate some action statements made by your team and the subsequent changes you observed.

3. What you have learned from facilitating both team-development sessions:

• Write a section on your learning as a facilitator for the team development sessions. What worked? What did not work? What would you do differently next time?

• How would you change your contract, your explanation of change management, the disciplines, the exercises, your exercise choices, or your behavior during the team sessions, in order to enhance the quality of the team learning?

4. Recommendations: Provide your recommendations for enhancing team development in the future in a way that is practical, justified, memorable, and actionable for your team and your audience (ideally, the larger organization to which the team belongs).

• Include some of your best quotes and stories from your session experiences as examples.
• Show how your recommendations for building more effective teams will help the audience move closer to its preferred future.
• Include some models from your learning about disciplines that support team learning.
• Describe the potential power of using the five disciplines to support team learning.

5. Learning resources: To assist your team in learning more about the change management process, list a selection of books, articles, Web resources, and organizations containing the most important resources you would recommend.

Additional Requirements

• Written communication: Written communication is free of errors that detract from the overall message.
• APA formatting: References and citations are formatted according to current APA style and formatting guidelines.
• Length of paper: 10 typed, double-spaced pages.
• Font and font size: Arial, 12 point.