Pecks Theory

Peck's Theory is a four stage development of true authentic community. The first stage is pseudocommunity. The word pseudo means not genuine or a sham. As the book describes the issues with the community to be people showing a fake face acting like everything will be okay when in all honesty nothing is okay. The second stage is chaos, where everybody is asserting their perspectives on the different problems. The third stage is realization. This stage is everybody coming to the conclusion that their different perspectives are creating this wall. Understanding that you won't be able to move further until you have the ability to listen. Lastly, the fourth stage, true authentic community, is being able come to a consensus when conflict arises. I have seen all of these stages come together in my volleyball team to make us a better team.

My volleyball team just ended this years nationals and we placed very poorly for what we are used to. We have been putting on this fake face that we like our coach. We just don't think he is the right coach for us. We believe that we could be a great team if we were led in the right direction. The second stage is chaos. After we came in ranked 14th in the tournament and got 36th this brought out a flurry of emotions on the team. What we really think of his coaching ability and habits. As we are losing some strong players next year we want to be able to still succeed. He is great at teaching developing skills but not at coaching great players to be amazing players. After the chaotic part of everybody going on rants and what we think could be beneficial for next year we finally came to listen to each other. This would be stage three of Peck's theory. We started to actually talk to each other rather than just keep it inside and letting it fester. I have never had such a great and productive conversation as I did this weekend. It really had me thinking a lot about the future and how we could become a great team. Lastly, true authentic community, came into play after we were able to figure out what we should do looking into the future. We came to a consensus that night that we should do what we think is best for our team to succeed. We decided that a coach is definently needed for us to reach that next level. We are waiting to see how I heal. If I can play it will be hard for the older players to respect me as a coach and a player, because I obviously have a biased opinion. So I if am not going to play I will coach but I can play we are going to look into other options and see where this leads.