Between the Lines

Yesterday I had to attend a lecture on Academic Writing. The organizers of our courses say that students in the past have requested this so that they could be clearer on what was expected of them in the essays we'll have later in the quarter. But most of us were quite bored... wondering how anyone would have gotten into the course without knowing what was presented.

So my notebook didn't exactly fill up with notes, but with doodles...along the bottom you'll notice my signature and printed name with the "R" hand, then the "L" hand. ;)



But that would give the wrong impression of how my notebook mostly looks. Usually my pages are full of notes and summaries from the chapters and articles we have to read, with notes from class added in between lines and in the margins. It's interesting stuff... I want to commit it to my mind and use it later, not have it go in and promptly leave after finals, like some of my GE classes did in college.






The second page contains some of the concepts I've been thinking about the most recently... like two different theories on change in organizations. Some researchers believe organizations go through either Episodic or Continuous Change...

If you are in the camp that believes that most change is Episodic, you therefore see change as something that is infrequent and that can only happen when you do this to an organization: Unfreeze ---> Transition ---> Refreeze.
But those who say that change is more Continuous say that an entity is usually undergoing endless modifications and that change is affected this way: Freeze ---> Rebalance ---> Unfreeze.

So I naturally want to take this to a personal level. To affect change in our lives, are we unfreezing the static condition that we've been in to modify the situation and then freezing it back to be stationary again?
Or are we pressing pause, adjusting and tinkering, and then pressing play again to watch as things move on in a new and hopefully better way? Like at soccer practice... we scrimmage for quite awhile, but our coach then has us stop moving completely and listen carefully while he gives us some feedback, wanting to redirect and bring us up a level. Then he "unfreezes" and we get back to kicking the ball. Or how about relationships... when you think change needs to happen, sometimes you take a break... hoping you can "rebalance" and move on afterwards.

I really think that most of the time... change works in the shape of Continuous change theory. As I wrote at the top of one page "It Always Seems That to Make Change Happen, the Action Must Pause."

Back to the notebook...let's be honest, I do have some other stuff on those pages. Notes to friends a lot of times, and when we're lucky, pretty funny quotes from Mats, our professor... This one's my favorite so far:

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