The Castlebury Tales, A Frame-Story Of My Reflections On Organizational Dynamics Learnings

This Capstone is written in the portfolio paper format, and strives to synthesize key lessons learned over my three year journey as a Masters in Philosophy student in the Organizational Dynamics program at The University of Pennsylvania. Main themes and key learnings are presented, supported and interpreted through a series of stories inside a larger story, the former being told in the style of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and the latter as a dialogue between an older man and his grandson. The stories themselves, included in the fictional title The Castlebury Tales, each exemplify a value/ key lesson learned in my journey through the OD program. Key themes were selected through combining key themes identified during an exhaustive literature review and through something I’m calling the PennVenn, an artifact that identifies key themes from each course I’ve taken and where/how such themes overlap. A copy of the PennVenn can be found in the Appendix. The Castlebury Tales are read by an older character to a much younger character. The younger character (the “grandson”) exemplifies the version of myself before I started my Penn journey in January of 2018; the older character (the “grandfather”) from the perspective of one who has had time to reflect on the value of his education at Penn. As the grandfather fields questions from the grandson or finishes an individual story, he takes time to reflect on what he has learned and experienced in life and it is here where supporting literature is entered into the Capstone. Diagrams in the Appendix serve to aid the reader in both the Capstone’s construction and as an aid to understanding the flow of the document overall.