Artifact One

Narrative

In 2021, the United States Naval Academy hosted its first annual Diversity Conference amid a season of social impact issues, a global pandemic, and a service academy full of students who continued their preparation for commission as officers in the Armed Forces. During this time, I had the opportunity to serve as the senior officer mentor for the proposal, preparation, and execution of this historic event.  

Aligning with Doctor of Executive Leadership (DEL) program outcome one, I used my ability to sense the conditions and environment amongst the students at the Naval Academy and utilized the relationships built with midshipmen to shape an opportunity we felt was necessary and needed to assist students in their leader development by broadening perspectives and exposing individuals to new ways of learning and evaluating their own leadership styles. A Boin et al (2013) noted that effective sensemaking requires a leader to possess the ability to understand processes and information in order to predict possible futures to determine results. This is significant for this narrative because without a solid sensemaking ability, the entire process would be at risk of failure due to lack of experience and inability to gameplan multiple paths to success.  

Cultivating a culture of inquiry directly assisted my mentorship capacity to fulfill DEL outcome number four by providing a framework for the model, design, and processes that assisted the midshipmen in executing a successful conference in a way that was collaborative and productive. Creating an environment where discourse encouraged dissent and the sharing of ideas made it possible for the development of procedural knowledge and created an avenue for a sustainable product (Lawson et al., 2014). It was important to ensure a concrete understanding by the core midshipman leadership team in the ‘why’ behind the conference and how a curriculum could be built through a structured model with specific outcomes for each attendee. Because faculty would also be invited to the event, it was especially important to drive learning outcomes from each seminar portion of the day-long event.  

Our team overcame extreme adversity in its proposal phase which required extra emphasis from myself and my team of officer mentors to advocate from a faculty level to the senior leadership of the Academy. The process required many approvals for which day the event could be held, if midshipmen would be granted excusals from class which require the Dean of Academics’ approval, the reserving of the building locations, and an open date to host it. Previous dates that were approved were cancelled a week before and we had to find new dates causing a lot of friction for the logistics of guest speakers and VIP members of panels. Eventually we were able to gain approval four days before the event’s execution and we were able to execute our goal. As a result of this direct leadership, the United States Naval Academy now hosts an annual Diversity Conference to expand leader and leadership development amongst its student-body.