Trip to Abilene

This semester I learned many useful and necessary techniques that will help lead me to success in the future. A few of the ideas this class opened my eyes up to were: the bad apple, good communication and bad communication, the five stages of a team, and strengths. The idea that has stuck with me the most and really had an impact on me is the “Road to Abilene”.

The “Road to Abilene” refers to a short film in which a group of people made a decision to go eat dinner in Abilene even though no one in the group actually wanted to go. This came about one afternoon when this group of people was all together drinking lemonade and swapping stories. When a dull moment in conversation came about, one of the men asked the rest of the group if they would like to go have dinner in Abilene. Although the other three people in the group were content with what they were doing no body disagreed, because they didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings. Once they were at dinner in Abilene, through conversation, they realized that even the man who asked the question didn’t even want to be there. So, this story depicts how it is important to speak your mind and not worry about how other group members might feel. This tends to happen quite a bit in the real world and my group is not excluded.

My group took the “Road to Abilene” early on the semester when we trying to decide upon our group name. During one of our meetings, when we were trying to decide on a group name, one of the girls in our group shared a story about a recent breakup. The story turned out to be pretty funny and so we decided to make our team name the “Break-Up”. Some of the group members realized that this was not the best option but no one said anything. A couple days later it was brought to our attention that this was probably not the best name for our team. The reason it may not have been the best option for our team is because we would maybe be working with kids who come