Week One Assignment: Leadership Journal- Reflect on a Personal Leadership Challenge Instructions Reflect on a recent leadership decision or challenge you encountered within your organization, school, or personal life.

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09 Nov 2026 • 3 min read

Week One Assignment: Leadership Journal- Reflect on a Personal Leadership Challenge

Instructions

Reflect on a recent leadership decision or challenge you encountered within your organization, school, or personal life.

Describe how you applied systems thinking principles to analyze the situation and understand the interconnected elements at play.

Additionally, discuss how embracing the concept of organizational learning influenced your approach to the decision-making process.

Try to include specific lessons learned from your experience, and explain how you plan to incorporate these insights into your future leadership strategies to promote a learning culture and enhance the overall effectiveness and adaptability of your organization.

Your response should be 500-750 words (two-to-three pages excluding the title page, the reference page and the abstract page) and include at least two references. Peer-reviewed, journal articles are preferred. The text may be used as an additional reference (for a total of 3 minimum) to the latter two Peer reviewed articles / journals/ books.

Ensure your response complies with APA 7th Edition (October 2019) format.

Please submit this assignment as a Word document (PDFs will not be accepted).

FORMATTING NOTES: ENSURE APA 7TH EDITION IS ADHERED TO WITH ATTENTION TO:

PAGE NUMBERING

PAGE HEADERS FOR TITLE PAGE AND OTHER PAGES

TITLE PAGE CORRECTLY FORMATTED.

SHORT ABSTRACT, CORRECT FORMAT, NO MORE THAN 7 SENTENCES.

DOUBLE SPACING BETWEEN SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS.

REFERENCE PAGE, USE CORRECT HANGING FORMAT.

SUBTITLES ARE NOT REQUIRED BUT A FLOW OF THOUGHT WITHIN THE PAPER MAY FOLLOW THIS DELIVERY: AN

INTRODUCTION

OBSERVATIONS AND ANALYSIS

RECOMMENDATIONS

CONCLUSION

WEEK ONE READINGS:

BOOK:

Fifth Discipline : Art and Prac. of Lrn. Org.

Senge, Peter M.

ISBN: 9780307477644

https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/reader/books/9780307477644/epubcfi/6/2[%3Bvnd.vst.idref%3Dcvi]!/4/2/2%4051:4 (I WILL MESSAGE USERNAME AND PASSWORD)

Please read:
- Chapter 1: Give Me a Lever Long Enough...And Single-Handed I Can Move the World- “The organizations that will truly excel in the future will be the organizations that discover how to tap people’s commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization.” This chapter discusses the concept of learning organizations and introduces systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning (the five disciplines). Systems thinking is the “fifth discipline” because it “integrates the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice” (p. 24).
- Chapter 2: Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability?- “Most organizations learn poorly” (p. 32). This chapter introduces seven organizational learning disabilities and provides examples of each.
- Chapter 12: Foundations- This chapter discusses how organizations can shape culture to achieve success. Topics such as change through conversations, reflective openness, growing people, commitment, transformative relationships, and organizations as living systems are discussed.
- Chapter 15: The Leader’s New Work- this chapter answers the question “what do we mean by ‘leaders’?” and it gives examples of leaders as designers, organizations as IT infrastructures, leaders as teachers, and leaders as stewards.

Wheatley, M. J. (2006). Leadership and the new science: Discovering order in a chaotic world. Berrett Koehler.
- Please read:
  - Chapter 1: Discovering an Orderly World- “Organizations lack faith that they can accomplish their purposes in varied ways and that they do best when they focus on intent and vision, letting forms emerge and disappear” (p. 17). This chapter introduces the concept of organizational order, and it describes organizations as living systems within a chaotic and disordered environment.
  - Chapter 2: Newtonian Organizations in a Quantum Age- this chapter discusses the concept of organizations as complex machines and how science can be used to explain but not predict human behavior. The term enactment, strategy, and planning are also explained.
  - Chapter 3: Space is Not Empty: Invisible Fields that Shape Behavior- the author introduces the idea that there are multiple fields (invisible, non-material influences) that exert visible influences on people and organizations. Examples of non-material forces in organizations include culture, values, vision, and ethics.
  - Chapter 9: The New Scientific Management- this chapter emphasizes the importance of systems thinking or ecological thinking as it pertains to leading within organizations. Various paths between business thinking and scientific thinking are discussed.

ARTICLE:

Kegan, R., Lahey, L., Miller, M., & Fleming, A. (2014). Making business personal . Harvard Business Review.

VIDEO:

[Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)]. (2017, October 26). The value of systems thinking [Video]. YouTube. (10m 9s)

RESOURCES:

Dialogue Guidelines - Word Document (14.6 KB)

RUBRIC:

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