Chapter 16 Writing Assignment

Your final required blog assignment is to comment on Chapter 16. As this chapter has no Expedition Log at the end to provide prompts for responses, you can respond to any of the points raised.

I wish to respond to the first point, the suggestion that we  "Cultivate Poised Incompetence." The idea here is that learning anything new involves a period of ignorance, and that we must be comfortable with this stage. As Perkins puts it,

"You have to be willing to be incompetent in order to learn. Just because you don't know what you are doing doesn't mean you have to be embarrassed or upset or convinced something's wrong with you."

I remember my grandfather telling me about one of his business associates, a person named J. R. Simplot. My grandfather was big in the potato business in Idaho when he began doing business with Simplot. Simplot was younger, and in the beginning he knew nothing. My grandfather said Simplot asked a lot of questions, and a lot of them were really "stupid" questions. But Simplot never forgot any of the answers. He remembered everything and with time got smarter and smarter. Soon Simplot rose above my grandfather and the other potato businessmen. Then Simplot secured a contract with McDonalds to provide all the potatoes for their french fries. This is how Idaho became famous for potatoes, and Simplot became fabulously wealthy. Eventually Simplot moved beyond potatoes to computer memory chips, and became one of the wealthiest men in America. But he started with a lot of stupid questions in the potato business.

I have taken this same approach with computer technology. I'm not a computer person, like, say, Rab, or Sylvan. But I have forced myself to learn by volunteering to teach CM class. It has been embarrassing, and I feel sorry for the students that have suffered through my classes, but I am getting better, and I am not so afraid of computers anymore, and it has helped my overall confidence knowing that I can take on something like computer technology and gain some level of competence.

Mission Statement Example — Ken's

This was a more difficult assignment than I might have thought. What helped was looking around a bit on the web and seeing that there are many different ways to write a mission (or vision statement). It can be very short (50 words or less) or longer (a couple hundred words). It can be written as a paragraph or two, or as a list, as I have done. You can see mine if you click here.

There are several sights out there that seem to be able to do it for you—all you have to do is enter the information. I tried this with the FranklinCovey site, but the result was very strange and I found it easier to write my own.

Writing mine was a great exercise as it forced me to think about my life and what I want from it. I hope this proves a good exercise for you as well (if you choose to do one).

Antarctic Awakening—Ken's Personal Narrative Example

     This wasn’t what was supposed to happen: unsuccessful with our climb, pinned down in our tent with this wild storm raging outside, radio not working, the ice shelf beneath us cracking and moaning, food and fuel running low, and the temperature a brutal 40 degrees below zero. Nope. By now we were supposed to be safely back at the station with no one but ourselves knowing that we had just climbed Mt. Erebus, Antarctica’s most famous mountain.

No one was supposed to know because climbing a mountain wasn’t why we were in Antarctica. As members of the first ever winter-over construction crew, we were there to work. Our job was to rebuild a dormitory and a couple of other structures, work that wasn’t possible during the busy summer months. But wintering in the Antarctic is an adventure in itself: a long eight months isolated from the rest of the world, with no mail, no fresh food, and no way out if something went wrong.

And things had gone terribly wrong. As three members of the station search and rescue (SAR) team, we had been given permission to do some winter training over the weekend. We said we would camp for one night, near the station. But our real goal was Erebus, an active volcano looming in the distance some 50 kilometers away. Over a series of weeks, we planned our climb in secret, meeting late at night and preparing our gear. With the help of a couple of snowmobiles, we felt we could get to the base of Erebus, then use skis to climb to the lower reaches of the mountain, and up high use ice climbing gear to reach the summit. If all went well we would be back to the station in time for work on Monday, with no one knowing we had done the climb.

Just shy of the summit, however, a huge storm came rolling down from the polar plateau, obscuring our vision and very nearly preventing us from getting back to our tent halfway down the mountain. There we hunkered down for the night, exhausted and cold, hoping the storm would clear by morning. When it hadn’t, we knew we had to try and get off the mountain anyway. With one person out in front trying to find our tracks from the day before, we slowly crept down the mountain. Eventually we met the frozen sea and set up camp. But it was a restless night as the sea ice below us scraped against the rocky shore. When the storm hadn’t cleared the next morning we moved again, this time away from shore out on to the frozen sea where the ice was more stable.

Now we started to worry whether we would get through the storm alive. The cold had sapped our strength and we were each suffering from frostbite: on our faces, fingers, toes, most of one of my feet. Inside our tent, each exhaled breath condensed and froze on the inside walls, and each time we moved it came crashing down, soon enveloping us in frost. We had food and fuel for one more day, but if the storm lasted longer than that, our survival was in doubt.

But the next day the storm cleared and we began our trek back to the station. We soon met other members of the SAR team who had been out looking for us over the last three days. Back at the station there was a general sigh of relief that we were safe, but there was anger as well: from the administrators for breaking the rules and causing a major search effort to find us, and from our friends for making them worry that we might have perished in the storm.

As foolish as we had been, or perhaps because of our foolishness, there was much that I learned from this venture. One thing I learned was to not be so selfish in my desires. I learned that I have responsibility to others, and that I cannot selfishly choose to climb a mountain because it is what I want to do. To my family, to my friends, and to my employer, I have obligations, and these obligations must override my personal desires. Another thing I learned is that I can get through the most challenging situations. The three of us worked together and well to keep ourselves alive. Even when it seemed we might die, we never lost faith in ourselves. When I have faced tough situations since then—in outdoor situations, or with my work, or in relationships—I know I have the strength to survive.

Week Seven Writing Assignment

Chapter 9 "Risk" features Shackleton's epic sailing adventure from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island, some 1400 kilometers in a tiny, open boat across the most dangerous (and cold) seas in the world. It is very difficult for us to imagine the difficulty, danger, and misery of such a journey. Because of this, I found this chapter a little difficult to relate to my own life, especially as I have never had to take a huge "necessary" risk such as he took. I have, however, taken many, many risks: as a climber, as a kayaker and rafter, as a driver, as a traveler. But the risks have always been of my own choosing, and many of them were careless, thoughtless risks, and it has been only because I have enjoyed a certain amount of luck that I have survived.

I am thinking of a time in which I took a big risk that wasn't absolutely necessary, but it was for the benefit of others. When I have an extra moment I will share this with you on this blog, or I will just tell it in class.

Week Six Writing Assignment

For this assignment, I will focus on Chapter 7 "Conflict." Not only have we started on the topic of conflict resolution in class, but it is a very relevant topic for me personally with my administrative work within the ELP.

This is because the ELP has been undergoing a great deal of conflict over the last couple of years due to differing views on how we should conduct a curricular reform.

While the majority of the instructors have supported a particular set of curricular reforms, a minority of senior instructors are against the reforms. Due to feelings of not feeling respected, of accusations that have been made against them, and due to a considerable amount of "groupness" (a sense of "us" vs. "them" that has magnified the importance of the issues), this group has had great difficulty accepting the reform.

So, what can I "take away" from this chapter on Shackleton?

First, we should have "Deal[t] with Anger in Small Doses" better than we did. Legitimate concerns were expressed by the dissenting group early on that were not addressed. Efforts should have been made to have had extensive discussion and debate over these concerns, and perhaps some compromises needed to have been made. Better yet, we needed more of a conflict positive environment in which open discussion might have led to some "win-win" negotiations. Instead, the minority group felt marginalized and disenfranchised which subsequently led to feelings of intense frustration and ultimately aggression.

Secondly, we needed to have "Engage[d] Dissidents." The reform dissidents were essentially ignored. What we needed to have done is brought the dissenting voices and members "into the tent." I have always loved this notion from Shackleton, that he took the members that might pose the greatest threat to his leadership and made them members of his tent. This way he could consult with them and keep them feeling listened to and wanted, and prevent them from joining forces with others. There is an expression in English, "Keep your enemies closer and your enemies closer" which is attributed to the great Chinese military commander Sun Tsu which expresses a similar concept. We needed to have done something like this by better including our dissidents in the reform process so that they could have more of a say and be part of the reform. Not doing so has led to a lot of problems.

My efforts over the last year have been to try and make up for the past. Giving the opposition an opportunity to express themselves has been one approach. We have had several open meetings in which opposition views could be presented and discussed. More recently, opposing members have been given roles in which they could contribute in ways in which they were uniquely suited. Whether these efforts will bear fruit is still unclear, but it is hoped that some of the division and distrust and anger can be reduced as we move forward.

Our Sentences!

See our video clip here. Watch your performance and consider how you can improve: louder voice, better visual (if you want one), etc.
We will film again on Monday.

The Superpower of Smiling

Sylvan just sent me this great TED video of Ron Gutman making a clever presentation about the power of smiling. He mentions Paul Ekman. It's just seven minutes, and you can choose to have English subtitles to make it easier to understand. Check it out—it will make you smile!