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Within personal leadership education courses, leadership educators should include experiences which help students develop themselves as leaders. In this article, the authors discuss results from a qualitative research study involving the analysis of Personal Growth Project (PGP) assignments in a personal leadership education collegiate course. The authors analyzed PGP assignments using the lens of the Leadership Identity Development model (Komives et al., 2005). All aspects of the developing self component of the model including deepening self-awareness, building self-confidence, establishing interpersonal efficacy, applying new skills, and expanding motivations were evident in student reflections about their PGP. The PGP assignment seems to be very effective in promoting the development of students’ leadership identity, especially in the “developing self” category of the Leadership Identity Model (Komives et al., 2005).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the SIE experiences of women over 50, its drivers, nature and outcomes.

The paper draws on participant data from in-depth life story interviews with 21 women who had undertaken SIE from New Zealand and later returned. From this sample two subgroups (aid volunteers and contract carers) are utilized as “vignette” exemplars, and common factors elicited.

SIE provided a desirable liberation from pressing mid-life issues. It was transformational for all participants, sometimes through serendipitous career development, but more commonly, after return, through personal development, changes in values, decreased emphasis on paid work, and simpler lifestyle.

The small sample size and qualitative methodology make the study exploratory rather than definitive and the specific location and small sample size limit transferability. The snowballing recruitment method may have disproportionately encouraged similar, and positively disposed, participants.

The availability and special characteristics of this expatriate and repatriate group for potential employing organizations are considered, as are the gains in human capital and individual well-being to society as a whole. The women studied provide excellent role models for older women considering independent overseas travel and employment.

By focusing on older women, this study extends the boundaries of the SIE literature. The findings highlight the limitations of work-centric theories of SIE, careers and older workers, the non-linear nature of women’s careers and the heterogeneity of later life pathways. The study is also original in demonstrating major positive transformational effects of expatriation on all its participants.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a retrospective reflection over unconscious, emergent learning among employees of an organization and to suggest how to capture these moments of experiential learning for future organizational learning.

Action research in organizations is undertaken in interaction with the employees of the organization studied. The outcome is characterized by a deep understanding of the individuals as well as of the course of events in the system. The paper therefore applies action research, focusing on the experiential learning from daily actions in the case organization at Volvo Cars’ production plant in Sweden.

The conclusion is that an evolution toward a learning organization, as exemplified by the case studied, is not identified until after it actually happens, i.e. in retrospect. It is suggested that the competence build‐up recognized in retrospect should become an integral part of future educational programs. The multidisciplinary competence established should also be considered when teams are set up for new projects.

Future strategies for capturing learning are provided and summarized, to structure the capturing of learning as it takes place in the daily operation, to identify the individuals who initiate changes and let them act as learning ambassadors, to integrate multidisciplinary competencies in the early stages of projects, and to facilitate multidisciplinary cooperation along organizational processes, within and between firms.

The paper's contribution is the identification of and reflection about emergent learning that takes place in daily work tasks. It also provides suggestions for future strategies of capturing these experiential learning occasions.

This paper aims to analyse student perspectives on the contribution that teaching anticipatory reflection can make to the development of their reflective practice. The project explores lived student experiences of anticipatory reflection and the value students attribute to these in helping them bridge the transfer gap between reflective learning and reflective practice.

An interpretivist approach is taken whereby student reflections on the students' experiences of practicing anticipatory reflection in a workshop setting were analysed using template analysis to understand the value attributed to these. Students were guided through a series of exercises including visualisation of future events and the nature of future practice as well as reflective writing.

Students identified multiple benefits of being taught and practising anticipatory reflection. Specifically, high levels of realism, personal relevance and engagement were reported, as well as increased confidence, self-efficacy and self-belief. In addition, the development of empathy and increases in self-awareness were common benefits of working through the process of anticipatory reflection.

In contrast to existing retrospective approaches, here the authors focus on the future, using anticipatory reflection to inform pedagogical approaches enabling students to experience anticipatory reflection in a classroom setting. The positive value attributed to experiencing anticipatory reflection suggests that the temporal focus in teaching reflection should evolve to incorporate prospective approaches which have a valuable role to play in bridging existing transfer gaps between reflective learning and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) impacts on the surprise aspects of designing.

The empirical case is a new hospital in the UK wherein a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) type of an IVR environment was used performing six design review sessions during the bid preparation stage. Drawing from a former video-based study, the authors conducted follow-up discussions with the participants to access their perspectives on design surprises emerging from their engagement with the IVR. The study developed a reflective methodology, interviewing participants about their experiences of doing design in the immersive environment. Retrospective discussions were conducted in a data review format, through playing back video clips of the IVR design sessions and asking the participants to reflect on their IVR design experience and on design surprises emerging from their engagement with the IVR.

The findings indicate that IVRs, such as the CAVE, are not only enhancing existing understandings of design but also challenging the participants' understanding of the design as they experience the immersive version of it, provoking ruptures in current procedures and driving unanticipated changes to the design.

This qualitative study of surprise in design work using IVRs (for a real-life design project) brings new insights into emerging practices of designing using immersive technology, such as the CAVE.

This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

The purpose of this paper is to review the formation and evolution of the “Making Projects Critical” movement in project management research.

Retrospective and discursive paper.

Reflections on tensions and challenges faced by the MPC movement.

The paper establishes the historical trajectory of this movement and clarifies the tensions and challenges faced by MPC.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the successful strategy formulation process of a new purchasing department at an international engineering group.

The strategy formulation was co-created by the department manager and employees at a storytelling workshop, facilitated with interview technique from narrative therapy, and later authorized by the business area director. The organizational intervention preceded the scholarly inquiry.

Employees’ retrospective storytelling about working at the company enabled them to formulate a joint mission statement using words and expressions from their own stories. Prospective storytelling enabled them to formulate a joint medium- and long-term vision and a corresponding action plan. This paper proposes interview technique from narrative therapy as a new practice-oriented strategic management tool and calls for further experimentation in rethinking best practices in strategy development.

Introducing narrative therapy interview technique in an organizational context is valuable because it may facilitate affinity of employees to strategy through storytelling thus contributing to contextualized strategy formulation and paving the way for subsequent implementation. This “from practice to research” approach can serve as inspiration for action researchers interested in driving organizational change.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale and use of subjective personal introspection (SPI) as a methodological approach.

SPI was utilised to develop a “narrative” of the author's own “action‐oriented” research experience within a multisector collaborative venture established by 13 partner organisations representing the academic, pharmaceutical industry and government sectors. The “confessional” stance that the study assumes describes some of the perceived tensions enacted during field work. The SPI approach is theoretical and reflective, as well as descriptive and analytical, in reporting the antecedents, actions, and outcomes in action‐oriented research.

Because the focus of the paper is subjective, personal, and introspective, it does not illustrate “findings” about multisector collaboration, but rather reflections and insights about the way the research was conducted.

The paper widens the forum for incorporating SPI beyond the consumer behaviour context to the context in which action‐oriented researchers incorporate introspection in their study of organisations.

The paper goes some way to bridging the gap between SPI and reflexivity (if there is indeed a gap) and it causes qualitative, action‐oriented organisational researchers to contemplate a number of questions: what is the role of the researcher; what is the source of their authority to narrate and what are they authorised to recount; and what are the consequences of this?

Most recent service experience research considers customers as sensemakers and sensemaking as a focal process in experience construction. Despite this, the sensemaking theory engendered in organization studies has not been applied in the quest for an in-depth understanding of the service experience. This study introduces a sensemaking perspective to the service experience and develops a conceptualization of how customers construct their experiences cognitively through sensemaking.

The service experience literature is dominated by a focus on firms implementing service experiences for customers. This study, in contrast, investigates service experience and its formation from the customers' viewpoint: how service experiences are formed as a part of customers' everyday life and sensemaking processes instead of under service providers' control.

Service experience is characterized as a mental picture – a collage of meanings created by a customer through the sensemaking processes. A sensemaking framework that characterizes service experience formation and its four seminal dimensions, including the self-related, sociomaterial, retrospective and prospective sensemaking, is introduced.

This article contributes to the service literature by introducing a new theoretical lens through which the service experience concept can be investigated and reframed.