Sensitivity traning in action

Abstract

What I want to do in this article is to capture the sense of community, of love, of learning, of struggle, of despair, that occurred during a weekend of laboratory training. I am conscious that this task has been attempted many times before, and not always with great success, but for some reason I cannot articulate, I need to try for myself. The incidents I wish to recount took place during a lab held for the first year group of the PhD program in Organisation Behaviour at Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio. This group had been together for about four weeks. It is important to place this lab in the context of the department's strong concern for creating a community in which the all‐round professional growth of its members could take place; thus one of the objectives of the weekend was to experiment with different ways of relating with each other and develop the kind of community relationships we thought would be most useful over the next three years. Another context of the weekend was that it was held as part of a class titled Personality Theories and Development Processes. Don Wolfe, who takes this class, and who was our trainer for the lab, is concerned that we should learn about personality and growth, both intellectually and through experience, so as to be in a position to develop our own personally meaningful theories as we experience our own processes of growth. Thus another objective of the lab was that it should facilitate our growth as people; it was to be oriented towards PERSONAL GROWTH.

Citation

REASON, P. (1972), "Sensitivity traning in action", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 22-25. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003188