W3: Critical Incident Report #1

Critical incidents are peer-to-peer discussions about significant events, happenings, occurrences, confrontations, or other experiences that have a strong impact on your project, provide you with an important learning experience associated with your project, give you new insights for your project, and/or offer you a change of perspective on your project. You are required to share 1 critical incident each week and respond to at least one of your peers. You can pull from this list, or create your own CI categories. Also, remember you are required to associate your learning from the CI to your capstone project and at least one Area of Management Practice.Links to an external site.

Requirements: no limit

Critical Incident Reports

As a requirement of MGMT-470, each participant will complete on-going Critical Incident Reports that summarize your identification, analysis, and reflection on one weekly critical incident. Since most of you are probably unfamiliar with the use of critical incidents as learning tools, what follows is some background on the technique.

Critical Incidents

The analysis of critical incidents has been used as an organizational learning tool for many years. In critical incident analyses, the word critical does not necessarily imply bad, unfavorable, unacceptable or any other negative connotation. Rather, in this context, the word critical means important, decisive, or significant. Critical incidents are significant events, happenings, occurrences, confrontations, or other experiences that have a strong impact upon you, provide you with an important learning experience, give you new insights, or offer you a change of perspective on your capstone project.

So, a critical incident is a noteworthy event (either good or bad) which you observed or participated in, and from this noteworthy event, you should be able to learn something — specifically a new insight into the nature of your capstone project. Thus, critical incident analyses are really tools for self-exploration and self-discovery, and that is why they can fit well into a project-based learning experience.

Some Background on CIs

The concept of identifying and evaluating critical incidents was first described in 1954 by a psychologist, Dr. John Flanagan. Originally, he saw them as a means of conducting performance appraisals. Flanagan envisioned that employees would be evaluated on the basis of how well or how poorly they performed during certain critical (significant) incidents, like serving customers, handling inventory, meeting deadlines, assembling a product, etc. To Flanagan, critical incident behaviors were good measurements or benchmarks of employee on-the-job performance.

Since Flanagan’s early work, the concept of critical incidents has evolved considerably. Now their analysis is also used as a way of encouraging new workers to assess their own assimilation into an organizational culture. The basic idea is this: Joining a new organization or even taking on a new role in a familiar organization involves assimilating new patterns of thinking, doing and behaving. This organizational entry (or repositioning) may include such important experiences as:

Sensemaking (What the #!*%# is going on here??)
Reality shock (Wow! Really? I didn’t know that!), and
Adaptation (OK, I realize and accept that I have to do things this new way.)

Organizational behavior experts tell us that recognizing and reporting these critical experiences is a way of measuring our progress in learning the ropes of an organization.

So…What Do I Need to Do?

It is this modern application of the critical incidents method that we want you to pursue. We want you to observe, record, reflect upon, analyze, and then document (write-up) those significant experiences from which you gained new knowledge, insights, understanding or perspective. These experiences could involve:

6 hours ago

Critical Incident Categories

Management Roles & Skills

Focus on the area in which you are working; do not try to define the entire organization.

– Are you involved in management or supervision in this organization? If so, who reports to you, and what is your role in managing them? Who do you report to, and what is that individual’s role?

– What skills make you, your manager/supervisor, and your boss’s boss well-suited to the role? If any of these individuals is not well-suited to the task, what skills do they lack or need to improve? (You do not have to use individuals’ names, but do make it clear what functional role each plays and where that person falls in the hierarchy of the organization)

Communication Process(es) and Effectiveness

This can be based on a single observation of particularly good or bad communication, or you may want to comment on the overall processes used and how well they work in your organization.

Decision-Making Processes

Again, this may reflect what you have seen in a particular instance or your observation of a pattern. Be specific; don’t say, “So-and-so makes good/bad decisions.” Why are the decisions good (or bad)? Why are the decisions readily adopted or do they routinely meet resistance (and does this tie back to something you observed about communication processes?)

Conflict Management/Human Relations

Although this can be based on a pattern of observed behavior, you may find it more meaningful if you choose a specific incident and really think about what you observed about the parties involved. What roles did they adopt? Did all the players recognize what was at stake for the others? Would you have handled the situation in a similar manner?

Time & Stress Management

These two topics can be approached from your personal perspective (a good opportunity to think about how well you handle stress and what you might do to reduce your stress level); they can reflect your observations about a specific incident or personality in the organization, or they might consider how well the organization itself manages or exacerbates employee stress. Is time management a strength of the managers, or does poor planning generate a consistent series of crises?

Legal Form (proprietorship, LLC, etc.) and Structure of Your Organization

In addition to reporting the legal form of the business, you may include a simple org chart (if you are part of a large organization, focus on your local unit).

– Is the structure flat, pyramidal, other?

– Is this legal form and structure the best choice for the organization in your view, or has it simply evolved that way with little thought to alternatives that may be superior?

Planning Activities

Do you have observations on how you, your mentor, or someone else at your organization approaches the planning of activities? How has this planning helped or not helped? How could the planning have gone better?

Innovation, Creativity, and Competition

Is there a sense of innovation, creativity, and/or competition at your organization? How has your own innovation, creativity, and/or competition helped or hurt your interactions with others or the development of your project?

Ethics, Diversity, and Social Responsibility

In your research or through your direct observation or experience, how have issues of ethics, diversity, and/or social responsibility come to light? Have you contributed in any way to these issues? Are other people in your organization being negatively impacted by ethical or social issues either directly or indirectly?

Customer Service