Practicing Organization Development: A Guide for Leading Change: A Third Edition

THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Journeys run the risk of seeming to be like corporate tourism. Thus, it is important to emphasize learning within and from the experience. My preferences are for “action” learning—whereby people first participate in an experience and then reflect on its meaning and implications. This means there is not much in the way of explanation or theorizing before we embark on an activity, and lots of individual and collecting reflecting afterward.

Managers typically have little time to reflect on experience individually, let alone collectively. One of the key elements of a journey is to build in time for people to reflect individually and collectively on who they are, where they want to go, and how they may get there. There ...