Stimulus Package:

Lots of thinking about stimulus these days thought I would offer my own.

There is no managing without understanding the connection between thought and action, between stimulus and response. Everything that I am as a Manager is informed by the continuous duality of need for thought and the need for action. Success requires that I get them in the right order.

To accomplish this I use a variation of an action-learning model. There is nothing really new about this thinking, it came out of the UK in the 1940’s, and continues to be applied

Whenever I reflect on what it is I am managing I find myself at some stage of this process. What is the stimulus, the idea or need that motivates my push to action? Then is the question what skills or resources do I kneed to take that action? This is followed by action and its results and then by learning. Learning is then captured and applied to my new thinking. The end product is learning from experience.



The message here is that none of us ever goes straight to action; every action is preceded by a stimulus. Between stimulus and response resides choice. Thinking about our processes by identifying the stimulus that precedes our action provides us with insight about who we are and how we operate. It also allows us to narrow the difference between what we thought we wanted and what we ended up with. This is an example of making better choices to get better results.