This is my MAGL cohort at Fuller. MAGL stands for Masters of Arts in Global Leadership, which is somewhat of an arrogant title, if you ask me. It's just a couple of notches below an M.A. in Benevolent Dictatorship, I think. We've all spent the last 2 years together in a learning and praxis community. Praxis is a fancy word for reflection and action... All of the people in this group are in ministry somewhere in the world - from Turkey to Chicago to Israel to Cambodia. What a phenomenal group of people!

The last week of classes went well. I've also got a couple of 30 page papers to write between now and December, as well as a few book reviews to complete.

Here's a picture of the books I've either read or will read and review for the classes that I'll be finishing up over the next few months. The stack on the left is for the course called Global Leadership: Implications for Ministry, and the stack on the right is for a course called Organizational Dynamics. The stack in the middle is my beautiful wife on the computer...

We have to write a 30-40 page paper for each course, and I'm actually a little excited about both (don't tell anyone I said that)... I think I'm going to write my paper for Org. Dynamics on how to apply Emotional Intelligence theory to the organizational change process, and specifically use the Austin Stone Community Church as my reference and case study. Since we're going through a church-wide change process, I thought this would be the best use of time and energy. My second paper is an integration paper - I have to integrate everything I've learned so far in the last 2 years, so I think I'm going to write on what it will take to build a movement of missional communities. You know... fun stuff.

Labels: leadership, missional, missional church, organizational dynamics

I'm in a 2 week intensive course at Fuller Seminary as part of the MAGL (M.A. in Global Leadership) degree. The first week is a course called Understanding Organizational Dynamics, so I'll be blogging about the highlights from this course this week.

The Fifth Discipline, a book by Peter Senge, is a book about how organizations can grow and develop through learning. He asserts that an organization achieves its goals by providing an environment conducive to the CONTINUOUS LEARNING and development of individuals,teams, and the organization. He says that a learning organization is one in which people at all levels individually and collectively are continually increasing their capacity to produce the results they really care about. It is an organization that, when a mistake is made, notices the mistake, fixes it, figures out what caused the problem and corrects the root cause, with an emphasis on the root and not the symptom.

He goes on to list the core of learning organization work is based on five "learning disciplines"—lifelong programs of study and practice:

Personal Mastery--learning to expand our PERSONAL CAPACITY to create results we most desire and creating an ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENT which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

Mental Models--reflecting upon, continually clarifying and improving our internal pictures of the world and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions. Knowing the paradigms out of which we operate.

Shared Vision--building a sense of commitment in a group, developing SHARED IMAGES OF THE FUTURE we seek to create, and developing the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

Team Learning--transforming conversational and collective thinking skills so that groups of people can develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members' talents.

Systems Thinking--a way of thinking about and a language for describing and understanding forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.

Labels: leadership, organizational dynamics