Essay: Your Own Experiences with “Management Initiative”
Focus on the key concepts and lessons learned from Kirton’s Management Initiative (Adaption-Innovation theory) and how they have manifested themselves in your own professional lives. In particular, reflect on, share, and discuss experiences you have had that illustrate the phenomena observed and the concepts identified by Kirton. There are many to choose from, including (among others):
1. Misperceiving people as ‘resistant to all change’
2. Precipitating events
3. Spin-off problems
4. Objections to a change (and reasons for them)
5. Varying timescales of acceptance (and the corresponding outcomes)
6. Status of various initiators of ideas
7. Different types of proposed change (paradigm-cracking vs. paradigm-consistent)
8. The impact of the “establishment” group
9. … and there are many more possibilities!
As you discuss your experiences in writting the Essay, use your knowledge to shed new light on those events, striving to find a clearer explanation of what happened and considering how you might handle a similar situation more effectively the next time you are faced with it.