Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Eighth, Feedback.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Eighth: Feedback.

This posting makes some assumptions – that you have practised your interviewing technique and can be sure that you are not imposing your own framework on the interviewee; that you have absorbed the message of the importance of planning your analysis from the start, and that you realise that Grid isn’t a piece of paper or a computer print-out – it’s a conversation; and that you don’t need advice on the interpersonal skills needed to be a good listener and counsellor. In that case, there are three golden rules for feedback:

· give it;

· always relate it to the purpose;

· ask for it.

In good Grid feedback the principle is for the interviewer to act, as much as possible, as a skilled mirror: that is, to ask questions and give information which will encourage the interviewees to see things for themselves, rather than the interviewer offering an interpretation or judgment. This is why it’s important to be aware of when, and how, you offer your own thoughts. There may be a time when you need to; and there will certainly be a point where you have to make the connection between what the Grid tells you and the broad purpose which the Grid interview(s) is meant to address. But it’s best if you can guide the interviewee to the insight, rather than do it yourself.

This means that before you start interviewing, you need to be clear about the contract you have with your interviewee. Is it a counselling contract, or are you engaged in research? What will happen to the results of the interview? How long do you expect to take, and will you be available for further consultation?

The purpose of giving feedback, besides ordinary politeness, is that it will often facilitate the interviewee to give more information, or re-frame the issues. Unless you have decided to take the 80/20 rule – that is, to interview a number of people on the same topic and rely on the sample size to give you what you need – you can’t expect the interviewee to give you everything you both need in a nice neat orderly fashion, moving smoothly from elements to constructs to laddering and through the next stages until you’re done. Often the most important insights have to be winkled out, because the Grid interview may be the first time that your interviewee has done some systematic introspection. You should be ready to move around within the process itself, for instance by moving on to laddering for a while before going back to look for more constructs.

Also: you can expect many interviews to begin with a few propositional constructs – they usually come easily – which is why you need to ask the ‘in terms of’ question, to move the interviewee towards giving you more personal constructs. However, if they get ‘stuck’ on propositional constructs, it’s a sign that they’re uncomfortable. Remember that a Grid interview can’t be faked, so if someone feels uncomfortable with the process then retreating into propositional constructs (or silence) is their only available option. Maybe you didn’t explain the contract properly? Maybe they don’t trust your assurances about what will happen to the data? If they’re having trouble with the two-against-one comparison, then I suggest you use the Full Context presentation – that is, lay out your element cards in front of the subject, ask them to pick out the two that are most alike, and then ask for the one that’s most different. A few rounds like this ought to break the log-jam and you can go back to presenting triads – or you can stick with the Full Context presentation, as long as all the elements are used in the comparisons.

The constant which should run through all interviews is encouragement, especially at the beginning – I always advise interviewers to ‘let the works show.’ So if you can sit catty-corner round the table, so that your interviewee can read what you’re writing, once the interviewee has understood the two-against-one principle you can refer to the build-up of constructs and make a remark like ‘Now you see how it works, the more of these you can give me (add a phrase relevant to the purpose if appropriate) the better.’

The question which you’re likely to need most, for the interviewee and for yourself, is: Can you see any patterns in here? It’s a good idea if you can see some yourself, otherwise it’s a risky question, but as a general rule it’s best if the client can answer rather than your supplying it. (Patterns can be obvious surprisingly early, but you must use your judgement about when to raise them. I’ll give you a couple of examples later).

I don’t think I’d ever stop an interview simply to discuss patterns in the elements, because you could get stuck there. But it is often appropriate to stop and discuss patterns in the constructs, especially when the pattern relates to your purpose. Suppose for example that you were counselling someone who knew that they ought to get fit and take more exercise: you’d probably have an element set of ‘methods of getting fit’, like aerobics and swimming and tennis (NB. This element set would probably have been derived by your asking the client to name as many methods of getting fit as she could think of). Suppose furthermore that you could see a theme running through the constructs to do with not wanting to make a fool of herself in public, and another theme about not wanting to let the rest of the side down. You could ask her if she could spot any major themes running through her constructs. Or you could hand her the pack of construct cards and ask her to arrange them into themes; or you could ask her to sort them into high, medium, and low priority. If by that point she hasn’t grasped what’s obvious to you, you could try laddering up the high priority constructs and see if these themes emerged as you got closer to core constructs. If by that point she still hasn’t seen the theme, you have two choices: to go back to your non-interventionist role as a Grid interviewer, or to say ‘Well, I can see a couple of themes - would you like me to show you?’ and sort the cards yourself and pray for the insight to occur naturally, or you could come right out with it yourself. In making this decision, your guiding skills must be your skills as a counsellor – your reading of her body language and tone of voice, and the other ways you have learned of knowing when to speak and when to stay silent.

Another technique you can use when giving feedback is to invent a new element when you’ve got a list of constructs – as I showed in the previous posting. So if we go back to the lady who wants to get fit but has problems with feeling incompetent and letting the side down, you can use the constructs – in the Grid, or just on their own – to develop an element called MY IDEAL WAY OF GETTING FIT. Rating it on the constructs will give you the criteria, which you can put in priority order; the interviewee then has a shopping list of questions to ask, or you may be able to make a suggestion yourself.

I’ve referred already to the fact that I often use construct elicitation to measure corporate culture, usually as part of a change programme and/or to develop management competencies. The standard procedure is to ask people to name colleagues as element (keeping them anonymous) and then elicit constructs ‘in terms of how they behave at work’. The analysis is a simple content analysis into the categories which suggest themselves from the constructs - it is really helpful to enlist some people from the client organisation to help with the interviewing and subsequent analysis (it does wonders for their feelings of ownership and all that). I’ll then give feedback is then to the client who commissioned the work; I usually do it by getting the senior managers together in a workshop environment and begin with something which gets them to recall the goals for the business - covering flip-charts with a SWOT analysis, or Hopes, Fears, and Expectations. Then I present the construct groupings, starting with the largest group first; and the question is If these are your hopes for the business, and these are the terms in which your managers judge effectiveness, will this view of effectiveness support your achievement of the business plan? If so, fine; if not, we work on how it will have to change.

This is a very sweet and cost-effective intervention, and because Grid is interviewer bias-free it allows you to say ‘Fire me if you like, but they’ll continue to think like that.’ However, I did learn a salutary lesson when I did this work in a bank under severe threat. The main construct groupings were basically about being a nice guy and good at assessing credit. What struck me was that ‘sales effectiveness’ was largely equated with activity level, rather than skill, and I’d prepared myself to discuss that point. However, the Retail Manager pronounced himself delighted with that result, because – to quote him almost directly – ‘three months ago the little dears wouldn’t even have mentioned activity level.’ He said that he’d spent the last few months persuading them to put their boots on and get onto the playing field; skill in playing the game was the next item on his agenda. Slap hands, Valerie, and don’t go construing other people’s construing.

However, sometimes it can seem as if the interview is uncovering the issues so quickly that you want to slow down and take stock; it feels as if you’re hurtling towards a conclusion and you don’t want to interpose your own interpretation. When I did my first counselling Grids, I felt frightened by the speed with which the problem seemed to become obvious to me, though not necessarily for my client. Anxious not to fall into the trap of construing other people’s construing, I asked advice from more experienced practitioners. Their answers could be summed up as: You’re probably right; this is one consequence of the lack of redundancy in the Grid process, because the interviewee can’t woffle on; but hold yourself back in order to give the interviewee time to see things, and be prepared to be wrong.

Another story: I once did some work for a well-known High Street retailer with a reputation for excellence. They were worried about the turnover in their graduate trainees: a fair number didn’t last beyond the first month. I did a group construct elicitation session with (i) some of last year’s intake, (ii) some of this year’s intake, and (iii) some who’d been accepted but refused. For the elements, I asked each person to write (privately, of course) all the employers they’d applied to – and the problem had become apparent in the first ten minutes, because with very few exceptions, the other employers were ‘blue chip’ companies, but hardly any in the retail trade. I could have stopped the session there and reported back to the client that they were fishing in the wrong pond – they ought to be attracting the best of graduates interested in retailing, and not be in competition with ICI and BP and Shell. The constructs, and the group discussion afterwards, supported this insight. Sad to say, the client didn’t like the advice – and the subsequent travails of their share price gave me an opportunity (which I didn’t take) to say I told you so.


To summarise: feedback is an essential part of any Grid project, but as far as possible in the early stages you should try not to interpose your own interpretation; better to do it by open questions. At some point you will come to the action planning stage, which is where your own experience and wisdom will be in demand. Most important is to be able to know, yourself, when you have stepped out of the ‘I provide the structure, you provide the content’ role and started to share what you see … but it’s always best to share your data and use Grid as a shared adult-to-adult research or problem-solving project.

And Never Ever Forget That Grid Is A Conversation!!!!

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Seventh, Analysis (One).

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Seventh: Analysis (One).

I hope you enjoyed your homework … you should have generated some constructs (and maybe some insights) about careers, relationships, and motivation. I deliberately teased you a little, by leaving some loose ends – I hoped that some questions would form in your head, and in this posting I hope I can answer some of them.

One of the most important considerations when you are planning a Grid-based project is the question of where in the process you are going to find your most useful and insightful information – where’s the beef? I’ve already lamented the trend for rushing through an ill-thought-out ‘construct grab’ in haste to get some data that can be put through a computer program; you can actually do a good deal of work with Grid without going near a computer, and I personally wish that this stage played a larger part in the training of novice Grid practitioners – then I wouldn’t get so many questions saying ‘I’ve put it all through the computer but I still don’t know what it means,’ and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time thinking of variations on ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.’

So, and taking a guess at the experiences you may have had while doing the three suggested homework topics, let’s take a look at where in a Grid interview the important information is to be found. Of course, it depends on the purpose and therefore on the elements and the kind of constructs you elicit, but here are some typical – and simple – analyses:

1. The number of constructs generated.

Did you by any chance try the career choice interview on a passing teenager? Or on someone else who hasn’t much experience of the world of work? Because if you did, you might have been surprised at how few constructs – especially constructs that weren’t propositional – your interviewee could produce.

Or, if you missed that particular opportunity, try giving me some constructs about the following elements:

PRINT OF THE WAVE

TREE OF LIFE

TRINITY

Bet you can’t – unless you’re interested in the history of old Shetland knitting patterns, because they’re the names of three different patterns that womenfolk would knit into their men’s sweaters.

You can’t produce constructs about a subject about which you know nothing; and if someone can only produce a limited number of constructs – especially if they produce mainly propositional constructs – then you may, just may, be justified in coming to the conclusion that they haven’t much experience of the subject.

Obviously, this is a very coarse measure indeed, and you’d only be justified in taking any notice of it when you can be absolutely certain that your subject was comfortable with the process, that you’d tried several approaches to eliciting constructs, and that there really was nothing else left to say. But it can be a useful measure, especially when you want to compare and contrast – for example, I used a simple construct count as a before-and-after evaluation of a training course, because the least you’d expect after a successful training event is that the person has more constructs than they started out with; another example is a study of the construct systems of venture capitalists, where the least successful of the sample had less than half the number of constructs of anyone else.

Be careful with this measure. It’s more useful when used to measure difference than to draw conclusions from one single measure, and if you have to use statistics to ask whether the difference matters, you shouldn’t be asking the question – the contrast should hit you in the back of the neck. But in the appropriate circumstances, it’s a useful measure in its own right and can point you in the next direction you want to examine.

2. Content analysis of constructs.

The practice session on relationships ought to have given you an insight into the importance of analysing the actual content of the constructs, especially if you made the opportunity to interview one or two other people as well as yourself. Did you notice any particular themes emerging? and did you extract different themes from different people? I’d be very surprised if you didn’t – if not in the first round of constructs, then at the point when you started laddering up.

Remember, the Grid interview lets you eavesdrop on the language your subject has developed in order to navigate their way around the world. So if your subject felt that they’d had their trust broken rather too often, and perhaps found it hard to judge whether someone was trustworthy, you’d expect a lot of constructs that related to how trustworthy their people were. I’ve conducted interviews in which money and worldly success accounted for a good half of the subject’s constructs, and interviews where these didn’t figure at all; interviews in which religious belief and practice were important, and interviews where religion got no mention, and so on.

Again, before you think about analysing the results, you need to be certain that you’ve given the available constructs the best chance of coming to the surface (and I’ll say more about this in a later posting) and you should look for broad themes rather than fine distinctions.

I frequently use content analysis of constructs in projects where a group of people will be interviewed and their results pooled. Mostly I’ll be working on an organisation change project, where the first task is to determine the present culture of the organisation – in order to ask the question ‘how does it need to change?’ Mostly I’ll be asking managers to give me constructs about their colleagues and subordinates (whose identities are kept anonymous – I’m only interested in the constructs). I showed you a number of examples of this sort of study in the third posting, so I’ll not repeat myself here. What I do need to say is that when you’re doing a content analysis of the constructs, one of the most important skills to develop is that of recognising what’s been left out – observe that money hasn’t been mentioned in the constructs about your relationships ... observe that none of your managers mention innovation when thinking about their colleagues ... etc. Unfortunately there isn’t a Universal Directory of Constructs where you could look up the answer to the ‘what’s missing?’ question – though I will try to help you where I can – but let me say that if you’re aware of the need to develop this skill, and you practice before going ‘live’ on a new topic, then the skill usually develops at a good deliberate speed. (The only circumstances where it won’t are if the interviewer doesn’t listen; Grid interviewing is a great way to improve one’s listening skills).

3. Responses to Element Creation Questions:

Remember the example of using Grid to examine the reasons why doctors chose their specialties? There I used a set of element creation questions – asking for preferred and non-preferred specialties, etc. – and there were patterns in the answers to those questions, patterns which could themselves be analysed for useful information before we even got to construct elicitation. That’s one example of an application where the ‘beef’ begins to emerge in the very first stage of the interview.

The third practice session I gave you – on motivation, where you were asked to think about the high points and the down bits and the plateau times – was an example of what we call an unrehearsed element set. That is, you’re asking questions which most people may not formally have asked themselves before, and it’s unlikely that the responses will come tripping off the subject’s tongue. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been asked to draw an ‘emotional graph’ of your life-span, with its ups and downs – that’s a technique often used in counselling, and just looking at the highs and lows can be instructive even before you start asking for the reasons.

As a rough generalisation, unrehearsed element sets are more likely to be events or activities than things or people; usually, we’ve thought about the people in our lives and many of the ‘things’ that we have to choose between, so the ‘beef’ comes when you start to elicit constructs, or when you go on to laddering – or maybe even later. When you’ve had more practice in designing Grid sessions, I hope you’ll come to realise that many interview purposes can be achieved in two or three different ways, with different element sets: for example, you can do a very interesting ‘help me choose a car’ interview by creating element creation questions that single out various kinds of ‘critical incident’ while driving – now there’s an unrehearsed element set for almost anyone except a driving instructor, and if you feel like some more homework why not give that a try?

4. Using the constructs to create some new elements.

If you go back to the constructs you obtained in the career choice exercise, you could start to draw a profile of MY IDEAL CAREER or THE CAREER MOST LIKELY TO PROVE DISASTROUS, by deciding which pole of each construct you prefer and how strongly you feel about it. Then you’re part-way to preparing an aide-memoire to help you – or your interviewee – ask useful questions about potential job choices, or to understand why you might feel like a square peg in a round hole if you’re unhappy in the present job.

If you’d like to try something potentially more powerful, more rewarding, go back to your session on relationships and use the constructs to create some new elements. For example, if you’re in the habit of falling for people who turn out to be bad for you, try creating and rating the element I FALL FOR AND IT ENDS IN TEARS, or however you feel like phrasing it … one woman who did this had a huge Aha! moment and I realised that I had a habit of falling for the lonely hero whom only I could understand and accompany on his quest, but when the chips were down I’d be pushed aside … I require the Universe to bring me a thoughtful pipe-smoking historian who’ll absolutely adore me. Or there was the chap who realised that I keep falling for women who like being spoiled, treated with old-fashioned courtesy, made a fuss of … except that there are times when I want to be spoiled and given a treat, and it didn’t happen.

Experiment with various ‘created’ elements, getting a sense of how to create an element or elements that will be informative – for example:

WHAT S/HE SEEMED LIKE WHEN WE MET and WHAT S/HE SEEMED LIKE WHEN WE PARTED (where s/he represents a special relationship that went wrong);

MY IDEAL RELATIONSHIP;

THE RELATIONSHIP MY PARENTS WANT ME TO HAVE;

and so on. I’ll say more about creating elements part-way through in a later posting. I want to finish by raising a question, thus:

Who’s doing the analysis anyway?

So far, I’ve rather given the impression that the interviewer also does the analysis – look at what’s been generated in the interview and draw some conclusions from it. In fact, it’s much better if the interviewee is involved in the analysis also: better for the interviewee’s comfort, better for their trust in the process, but – crucially – because it’s their information they’ve generated and they’re interested in it, maybe more likely to see what’s important, to get involved. In fact, there’s a cardinal rule in good grid practice: Don’t construe other people’s construing, meaning ‘don’t you go drawing conclusions from the results – ask your interviewee.’ I’ll talk some more about feedback, ownership, and interviewee involvement in the next post – for the moment, may I just plant the seed that Grid isn’t something you do to people, it’s something you do with people.

Love,

Valerie.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Sixth, Getting Personal.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Sixth: Getting Personal.

The previous posts have been, inevitably, somewhat procedure-heavy. By now you should have a reasonable working knowledge of constructs and how to elicit them, laddering up to move towards core constructs, laddering down to move towards constructs that are less abstract and more operational; you’ve been introduced to elements, which are concrete representations of the domain you want to explore; how to create a good element set and the different options open to you; and the importance of having a purpose for your Grid session. You’ve come a long way, baby …

I think it might be a good idea to use this posting to offer you some examples of sessions that you can do with yourself, or with someone else, for purposes that offer the opportunity to gain important insights into topics that could matter to you personally. Also these sessions should develop your listening skills, and help you move from seeing Grid as a procedure towards using it as a structured conversation. I’ve also left a few questions unanswered – because I want you to feel the questions develop and to look inside yourself for the answers. (I don’t want you to just learn a procedure – I want you to achieve creative mastery of Repertory Grid and to grow your other skills as well).

One tip: I suggest that you use nine elements (because you can present the triads as 123, 456, 789, 147, and so on) and after you’ve got your nine elements on their separate cards, then shuffle the cards and number them after shuffling. This destroys any order effect, and it can be very useful later – see some of the later posts, where I give examples that use real people as elements but they need to be anonymous.

Please don’t forget to write each element on a separate card, and to place the group of three in front of your subject and physically shuffle them, two-against-one. (You may find yourself inventing new ways of phrasing the two-against-one question … just don’t suggest any of the content).

And don’t forget to ladder up and down. I’d like you to get a sense of when it’s appropriate to do some laddering, so I’m not going to suggest when you should do it; I’ll just say that it’s very, very rare to start laddering the first time you’re given a construct, nor do you have to wait until your subject is exhausted and seems to have run out of constructs.

A. Career Choice:

This is a useful session for anyone contemplating their choice of career – teenagers, people returning after a career break, people who’ve had a choice of careers forced upon them by redundancy, etc.

You should use element creation questions, and (unless the question states otherwise) the answers should be jobs that your subject might realistically expect to be within their range. If your subject wants to give the same answer to more than one question, re-phrase the question slightly so that you get a different answer.

1. Name a job that you’d really like to do;

2. And another one that you’d really like;

3. Now name one that you’d really dislike;

4. Your best friend’s job;

5. A job you’d like to do if money, qualifications, location, etc., were no object;

6. Another job you’d dislike;

7. Another job you’re familiar with;

8. Your present/most recent job (if applicable);

9. Your first job (if applicable);

(If the subject can’t answer 8 or 9, ask them to name two other jobs that they’ve been thinking about).

Then ask your construct creation questions thus:

Can you tell me something that any two of these have got in common that makes them different from the third, in terms of the knowledge and skills they need? and

… in terms of how you feel about them? and

… in terms of anything else that’s important to you?


B. Exploring Relationships:

Warning: this application of Grid gets in very deep very quickly. Don’t you dare do it with anyone else unless (i) you’ve first done it with yourself, and (ii) you really do have their permission to probe the depths of their personal history.

The purpose of this session is to gain insight into the reasons why some of the subject’s intimate relationships have been successful and some less so, with the overall aim of helping the subject try to make more informed choices in the future. You can use friends as elements, or people with whom the subject has had – or wanted to have – a romantic attachment, but don’t mix the two. By the way, I’ve used the word ‘lover’ in the element creation questions, but you might make a tactful enquiry about the most appropriate term for your subject.

Here’s a suggested element set:

1. Your current/most recent lover;

2. Your first lover;

3. A lover who hurt you badly;

4. Someone you know whom you’d have liked to have for a lover but didn’t;

5. Another lover with whom it didn’t work out;

6. Someone you know who wanted you as a lover but you didn’t fancy;

7, 8, 9. Now give me three more names of people who’ve played a significant part in your romantic life.

And the magic question:

Can you tell me how any two of these are like each other and different from the third, in terms of how they behaved towards you … and in terms of how you behaved towards them … and in terms of how you felt about them … and in terms of anything else that’s important to you?


C. Exploring Motivation:

This session can be used for a variety of purposes. The elements are events in the subject’s life – times where they’ve felt they’re on top form, times when they’ve hit a flat patch, times when they’ve been coasting, etc. Sometimes I’ve used this session to help the person make a career choice, reasoning that if they can identify the characteristics of the times when they’ve been on top form it would be a good idea to choose a career that offers more of these opportunities. At other times I’ve use it to help someone who’s hit a flat patch – maybe even sunk into a depression – and they find it helps to revisit the times when they have felt good about themselves and then we can talk about ways of trying to get more of the good times and fewer grotty ones.

Again, you’ll be using element creation questions, but this time you’re asking for events – actual times in the person’s life. And you need to have these events be as concrete, as time-bound, as possible. So, practice some phrases like ‘what could you have caught on film with a camera?’ and even ‘what could you post on YouTube to show this?’ So if your subject says ‘I was good at athletics,’ you need to make this more concrete: ‘And what would you post on YouTube to illustrate this?’ because you need an answer like ‘Winning the 800-metre hurdles when I was seventeen.’

Also, it’s a good idea to ask your subject to think about the whole of their adult life when they’re answering the questions, rather than concentrating on a particular period. Sometimes, with adults in mid-life, I’ve asked them to think of two or three elements from each decade. See how you get on:

Here’s the suggested element creation questions:

1. Name an event in your life when you felt that you were really achieving, performing at your peak;

2. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;

3. Name an event when you were afraid that you were about to fail, or failing;

4. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;

5. Name an event when you were doing OK, but you weren’t really being challenged;

6. And another event like that, but from a different period in your life;

7. One more event when you felt you were on top form;

8. One more event when you felt afraid of failing;

9. Finally, one more event that will help give a representative snapshot of the high and not-so-high spots on your life.


And your ‘in terms of’ questions:

in terms of my skills and experience; in terms of the relationships involved; in terms of the type of challenge they presented; and in terms of anything else that seems important to you.


When you’ve practised these sessions, I’ve got two more questions for you:

1. What can you learn from the results?

and

2. if you feel like it, try designing your own session and tell me about it by posting a comment to the blog. The door’s always open, of course, but I’d be very happy to hear about what you plan to do, or what you’ve tried and how it’s worked out.

Good luck,

Valerie.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Fifth, more on Elements.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Fifth: Working with Elements (Two).

I left you in suspense at the end of the last posting, by saying that you might suspect that there’s more to the creation of an element set than the four principles I’d already given you – i.e. that elements should be concrete, discrete, homogenous, and of equal weight. What I left out was the fact that there are three ways of getting an element set: by offering an element set, by naming the category, and by using element creation questions. Here they are, in more detail:

Offered element sets:

This is the term for when you as the interviewer determine the element set in advance of the interview, with no input from the interviewee. Use it when you are certain that it is these elements, and these alone, which you want to start the interview. For example, if you were doing market research to see how people construed nine different brands of soap powder, you would use those nine brands as your elements. Or if you were doing separate Grids with all the members of a team about their perceptions of the other team members, then the team members must be the elements for every interview.

The advantage of using offered elements is simply that of control: you as the interviewer determine what the Grid interview will be about. The disadvantage is that your interviewee may not be familiar with some of the elements, and so you need to check that the interviewee does recognise all of them (and perhaps keep a few spare in reserve). But if you’re a market researcher and you specifically want to know how KWIKWASH compares with SOPE-A-DOPE, you’d better put them into the element set.

Offer a category:

With this strategy, you would name the category into which the elements should fall, but leave it up to the interviewee to name the actual elements: for example ‘Think of nine brands of soap powder,’ or ‘think of all the ways you know for cleaning clothes.’ One advantage of this is that you can be certain that the elements are known to the interviewee, but the corresponding disadvantage is that you might get a slight bias towards those which are more familiar and most liked. Another advantage is that you might, just might, learn something interesting about what exactly your interviewee believes fits into the category you’ve named – this is how I discovered the person who’d learned that if he took his dirty clothes to the local charity shop, he could usually buy them back cleaned and pressed a few days later and for less than it cost to sent them to the cleaners.

Use element creation questions:

This strategy has you, the interviewer, prepare a list of questions to which the answers will be the elements: for example ‘Tell me the soap powder you most prefer ... and one you’ve stopped using ... and one that your mother-in-law would recommend ... and another which you like... and another which you wouldn’t choose ...’ etc. There are several advantages in this process: it makes sure that you have a good scatter over the domain you are exploring, you know that the elements are familiar to the interviewee, there’s a stronger feeling of ownership, and if you are doing a project which involves getting Grids from several people then the collated answers to the element questions are themselves informative. The price you pay is that this kind of element set takes longer to elicit, but in many applications of Grid it’s worth it.

You can mix methods, but have a care:

You could, of course, use all three methods in the creation of any one element set – that is, you could start with some element creation questions (‘tell me your favourite soap powder … tell me one you’ve stopped using …’) then go on to name your category (‘can you name me a few more soap powders?’) and finally add KWIKWASH and SOPE-A-DOPE yourself. But if you do, then please use the three methods in the order I’ve suggested, because this gets the maximum information from the element creation session – if your interviewee stopped using SOPE-A-DOPE after getting a bad case of the hives, you need to give this information the opportunity to emerge during the creation process.

Make sure you cover both sides of the boundary:

Whatever strategy you use, if you are using Grid to help define a boundary then you need to have elements from both sides of the boundary. In other words, if you are using Grid to uncover how the interviewee perceives the characteristics of good team members, then you must have in your elements some good team members and some not-so-good, otherwise you won’t get the contrast. If you want to help someone explore occasions when they have successfully been assertive, you need in the element set some occasions which were successful and some which weren’t. And if you want to examine the characteristics of successful women managers, then you need to include (i) some unsuccessful women managers, and (ii) some successful male managers – because you’ve got two boundaries to investigate.


How many elements?

Going back to my analogy with a surveyor picking out highlights in the terrain: you need enough elements in the set to capture the significant features. In practice, it’s difficult to complete a Grid interview if you have fewer than six elements (you can start with a small number and develop new elements during the interview, but if you’re not going to get more than six elements then think of a different way of sampling the terrain). One very useful hint: if there are no other pressing reasons dictating the number of elements you have, then use nine. Then you can write a 3 x 3 matrix – 123, 456, 789 – and use this to order your triads. So you’ll have 123, then 456, then 789, then 147, 258, 369, and if you need more you can go diagonally 159, 267, 348, and so on. This has the advantage of giving you every element in the company of every other element in the shortest time, and it makes it easy for you to lay down the groups of three element cards in order and without having to shuffle.

An example: Doctors’ choice of specialties.

I guess you’re not going to work up a lather about selecting soap powders as elements, so let me give you a more interesting example using some work I did on the reasons why doctors choose their particular specialty. (The superordinate purpose was to suggest ways in which the least-chosen specialties, like psychiatry and geriatrics, could be made more attractive and to understand why there was such a crush of doctors pressing to get into the overcrowded specialties). I was given access to several hundred doctors, and had the opportunity to pilot all three element strategies, and here’s what I learned:

If I offered a complete set of elements, there was a strong chance that my interviewees might not be familiar with some of them – such as community medicine, epidemiology, blood transfusion, etc. – and often expressed frustration that they weren’t being asked about specialities about which they had strong feelings.

When I asked them to name some specialties, it was very obvious that they had a strong bias towards naming those that they liked or admired, so that strategy removed itself fairly quickly. I did, however, learn an interesting lesson about how to phrase the ‘name a category’ question, because one or two doctors said that when they’d finished their training they’d been strongly tempted to leave medicine completely and take up another career – for some reason, forestry received a number of mentions.

So I moved on to trying element creation questions: name your present specialty, another one that you considered, one that you would never have opted for, one that you wished you’d known more about, another one that you would never have chosen, and so on. Bearing in mind the number of doctors that I was interviewing, the answers to these element creation questions, collated appropriately, were themselves highly informative. I had the information to answer questions like: ‘what specialties would heart surgeons be least likely to consider as alternatives?’ and ‘what specialties do doctors wish they’d known more about before choosing?’

Eventually I settled on an element creation strategy where the first seven elements were achieved by using element creation questions, and then I had a store of those specialties which the sponsor wanted to include: so if psychiatry, geriatrics, etc. hadn’t been offered as answers to the element creation questions, I would supply two of them.

Some results:

The results were absolutely fascinating. (By the way, I’d taken the elementary precaution of asking my sponsor for their predictions before I started the research. They thought that money and status would play a large part in the doctors’ choice. They were wrong). Just a sprinkling of findings from the project:

There were some specialties about which doctors’ attitudes were polarised – easily the most common being pediatrics. Those doctors who wouldn’t opt for pediatrics said, in terms, ‘It’s difficult when the patient can’t talk to you, and if you lose a life you lose so much life,’ whereas those doctors who liked pediatrics said ‘It’s a real test of my diagnostic skills when the patient can’t talk, and if you save a life you’ve saved so much life.’

There was a clear division between surgeons’ constructs and everybody else’s, reflecting the life of a typical surgeon: surgeons are faced with far more black-and-white decisions (cut – don’t cut, remove – try to save, etc) and far more black-and-white consequences (patient dies or gets better – patient lingers). It reached the point where I could spot a surgeon’s constructs simply from the appearance of the interview record sheet, before reading the content.

A surprising number of doctors don’t like working with sick people. So they opt for specialties in which they’re dealing with basically healthy folk who need medical intervention – such as obstetrics, orthopaedics, epidemiology – and a smaller sample of doctors preferred it when their patients couldn’t talk back, so they went into anaesthetics.

As for the big question – why the least-preferred specialties were disliked – pay and status didn’t enter into it. The reasons why specialties like geriatrics and psychiatry were so infrequently chosen: you work in a low and distorted feedback environment, and it’s difficult or impossible to be able to heal your patient and to know that it was your efforts that were responsible for the healing. Compared with the heroic aspects of – say – emergency surgery, where you might dive into the abdomen of a dying patient and two weeks later see her depart the hospital looking fit and well, work with the elderly and the mentally ill was seen as offering very little opportunity to make a difference.

See you soon,

Love,

Valerie.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Fourth, on Elements,

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Fourth: Working with Elements (One).

You can use the Repertory Grid interview to explore your subject’s understanding of almost any topic where they have some experience. I hope that I’ve shown you how the construct elicitation process allows you to eavesdrop on the language they use when thinking about the topic. For the practice in construct elicitation, I supplied you with the necessary elements – famous people, cars, people in your life, and so on. Now we need to turn our attention to how the Grid practitioner formulates an element set that’s appropriate to the purpose.

At this point I need to pause and emphasise that every Grid interview needs a purpose. Without a clear purpose you could collect furniture-vans full of data that will be completely irrelevant, or you could miss asking some important questions. Even the mini-interviews that I offer here for practice have a purpose, and it’s worth learning how a skilled Grid practitioner would describe the configuration of a specific interview:

A few examples of Grid interviews properly described:

To help choose my next holiday, to suit a limited budget and my limited mobility.

To think about the people in my team, with the aim of reducing the internal conflict.

To analyse our customers in order to direct our sales efforts more cost-effectively.

To determine the characteristics of successful women managers in this business, with the aim of improving our performance as an equal opportunity employer.

And for your next task:

Have a go at producing an element set that would be appropriate to each of these purposes.

Please don’t read on until you’ve had a wee think about each one (I’ll reveal all towards the end of this post).

An overview of element selection strategies:

Most Grid interviews use at least six elements (nine’s actually a good number, as I’ll show you) and the elements should be concrete examples taken from the field that you want the interview to explore. I find it useful to think of this stage as rather like a surveyor setting out to map a new area: the surveyor starts by selecting a good range of the features of this area – hills, churches, ponds, bridges, masts, etc. – and then fills in the detail of the ground between said features. There are some key principles that will help you get a good element set (by good, I mean one that will enable the production of appropriate constructs):

Elements must be concrete. That is, elements are usually nouns/noun phrases or events or activities, but they shouldn’t be abstract concepts. I’m fond of saying that ‘an element should hurt when you drop it on your foot;’ elements are usually people or objects, or (these are more difficult to use) events or activities but the sort of event or activity that could be captured on a film-clip. You’ll hardly ever go wrong by making your element set more concrete – the more concrete the element set, the better you’ll be able to elicit constructs. For example, let’s assume that we want to explore your perceptions of political leaders. When I’m teaching Grid, I’ll often ask the class to say what sort of elements they would select, because I’m deliberately leading them into making a common mistake so that they won’t make it again. Almost certainly, some of the class will suggest as elements words like CHARISMA, DECISIVENESS, DIVISIVE, YOUTHFUL, EXPERIENCED … So I ask them to take any three of these and tell me what two have in common that make them different from the third, and you can hear the trucks colliding with one another as they realise that probably the only construct they can offer is good – bad. That’s what happens when you use abstract concepts as elements. Another way of phrasing this difficulty is to point out that each of these words is, in fact, half of a construct, thus: has charisma – lacks charisma, decisive – indecisive, divisive – inclusive, and so on. If you can make yourself ‘hear’ the opposite pole of your element, it isn’t an element. And, of course, the appropriate element set to explore your perceptions of political leaders is … political leaders.

Elements must be discrete. This means that they mustn’t overlap, nor should one element ‘contain’ another element. For example, if you were doing a Grid to help choose a car, you wouldn’t want to use an element set that contained both TOYOTA and PRIUS, because Toyota makes the Prius and it would be difficult to strike a good contrast at construct elicitation. If you were helping Mum explore her relationship with her children (and especially her problems with discipline in the home) you might choose an element set of occasions that Mum feels strongly about, but you probably wouldn’t want to use GETTING THEM OUT OF BED ON TIME and ARGUING ABOUT WATCHING BREAKFAST TV IN THEIR BEDROOMS because on the face of it they do look very similar to each other and you might have problems getting a good contrast.

An element set must be homogenous. All the elements should belong to the same ‘family.’ So, to return to our troubled mother for a moment, you wouldn’t get very far with an element set that contained GETTING THEM OUT OF BED ON TIME, PERSUADING THEM TO EAT VEGETABLES, HELPING THEM DEAL WITH BULLYING, and EMMA, JACK, and BECKY. Try a mix of event-elements and people-elements in a thought experiment and see how clumsy it feels …

All the elements must carry approximately the same ‘weight.’ If you have a set of nine elements, it ought to feel as if all elements have the same right to be there. Going back to using cars as elements, if the purpose is to help the interviewee choose which car to buy, you probably don’t want MODEL T FORD as an element in amongst the products of Audi and Toyota and Saab and the other present-day models, because the likelihood of your interviewee being able to choose a Model T Ford is vanishingly small – as is the likelihood that they may have any real experience of one.

OK. There’s something more to be said about element selection, but I’ll leave that until the next post. But I need to address your comfort level, please …

When I’m teaching Grid, and we’ve got a chart of the principles of element selection in view, I sometimes hear people saying ‘how are we going to remember all this?’ and ‘is it worth learning all these rules?’ I’d like to say that first, it’s easier than it looks; with a very little practice these principles start to become second nature. Second, I’d like to say that Grid gives you lots of bites at the cherry, and this is one of its joys. You can try out an element set in your head and see if it generates the sort of constructs that you’ll need, and if it doesn’t you can change it. And when you’re doing a Grid-based project, you can move around the different stages, and change the configurations, until you hit the motherlode.

I’m spending so much time on the basic principles of Grid because – in my view – this is one aspect of Grid practice that usually isn’t taught very well, and without these disciplines you run into furniture-vans full of data that are meaningless. The analogy I like to use is that a Grid interview is a little like going into a church and hearing a beautiful piece of music being played on the organ; you can love the beauty of the experience, but you only see the skill that’s gone into the performance if you take a look at the number of stops and keyboards that the organist had to choose from, and the particular register chosen to illustrate the music’s full potential.


Answers to the Task:

Earlier in this posting I asked you to produce an element set that would be appropriate to each of these purposes:

To help choose my next holiday, to suit a limited budget and my limited mobility.

To think about the people in my team, with the aim of reducing the internal conflict.

To analyse our customers in order to direct our sales efforts more cost-effectively.

To determine the characteristics of successful women managers in this business, with the aim of improving our performance as an equal opportunity employer.

How did you get on?

Choosing a holiday – you’ll need an element set consisting of holiday locations, or holiday packages …

Reducing the conflict in my team – you’ll need an element set consisting of all the team members …

Analysing our customers in order to direct our sales efforts – you’ll need an element set of customers …

Analysing the characteristics of successful women managers – you’ll need an element set of managers …

And if you have the feeling that I haven’t told you everything yet, you’re right. Wait for the next posting – it shouldn’t take too long.

Blessings,

Valerie.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Third, Construct Elicitation (Two)

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Third: More on Constructs and Laddering.

In this post I’m going to go into a little more detail about constructs: how to make sure that you’re getting constructs appropriate to your purpose, how you can ‘unpick’ a construct’s component parts and how you can use a person’s constructs to get closer to their deepest value system.

I’m hoping that you really did go through the various exercises I suggested in previous posts, and I hope you tried the ‘trick question’ – give me a construct that isn’t yours. It’s not possible. The best that anyone can do, if they’re very empathetic and they know their subject well, is to think themselves into the shoes of Elizabeth Bennet or President Nixon or Professor Dumbledore, but we also know that we’ll only be able to penetrate so far and that the characters will retain the capacity to surprise us. Your construct system is personal to you, and it represents the distinctions that you’ve needed to make about your world in order to navigate around it. So there are lots of Grid-based projects that depend on listening to a person’s (or an organisation’s) construct system.

So, let’s whet your appetite with a few examples of consultancy projects that have relied on construct elicitation to research the issues:

Three projects using construct elicitation for problem definition:

A: Middle Managers in an Oil Company.

In the 1980s I was responsible for a project in which middle managers in a very large oil company were asked to produce constructs about their colleagues (anonymously, of course). We interviewed over 200 managers – far more than was necessary – and then did a simple content analysis of the constructs. By far the largest group of constructs could be classified as ‘Knowing the right way to relate to Head Office,’ and the next largest were about extracting the same behaviour from their subordinates. Then there came some constructs about technical knowledge and analytical power. But there were no constructs at all – not one – that mentioned the customer; there were hardly any that mentioned relationships with other departments, team-work, and collaboration; and hardly any about financial discipline.

I’m afraid that this was one of those occasions where the company felt unable, or unwilling, to see the need to make some changes in how managers construed their own and others’ effectiveness. About 20 years later, they were involved in a huge scandal which the official enquiry traced back to an unwillingness of subordinate managers to give their bosses bad news, and a lack of interest in sharing information between the different functions in the business.

B: Managers in a Retail Bank.

This story has a happier ending. When I was introduced to the Bank, they knew that they had to make at least 30% of their managers redundant, plus they had to make the change from being credit experts to having retail skills and become aware of the competitive environment. Again, we interviewed a sample of managers asking them to produce constructs about colleagues (anonymously) and the first content analysis revealed some very interesting findings: there were five major construct groups, in summary:

Effectiveness (which was expressed as activity level, not skill)

Being Mr/Ms Nice Guy with the staff

Timetabling – you couldn’t call it Planning, it meant knowing what you’d be doing on Friday, nothing about priorities

Being a credit expert

Presence in the local community

We fed this information back to the senior managers in a session whose purpose was to ask ‘What’s the survival value of this formulation for effectiveness?’ and go on to plan for changing it. I’ll tell you more about this in a later post, but for the moment let’s say that the senior managers realised that there needed to be drastic changes in how effectiveness was perceived.

Jump to the end product: we ran Assessment Centres for all the existing managers (450 in total) based on the new formula for effectiveness. Although 30% of them were, in fact, offered redundancy, we had only three grievances raised and these were settled quickly and amicably; and an 18-month follow-up study by the local university showed a significant improvement in performance from the managers assessed on the new criteria.

C: Problems with Government Reform.

I spent a considerable slice of my life working with the New Zealand government in the 1980s and 1990s; it was painfully obvious that the way the government worked needed root-and-branch reform (New Zealand was headed to becoming the world’s first white third-world economy) and a small team of brilliant visionaries pioneered many changes in the management of the public service. One of these changes meant that Heads of Government Departments no longer were assured of jobs-for-life, but put onto performance contracts; they were given much more freedom to manage their departments than under the old, creaking bureaucracy; but many of them found it pretty stressful.

I did a nifty little construct elicitation study that compared the constructs of three different groups of people about the job of Chief Executive of a government department. One group consisted of ministers and control agencies (such as Treasury) to whom the Chief Executives reported; one group consisted of Chief Executives themselves; and the third group was composed of senior public servants who’d been around a long time, were perceptive, and didn’t have ambitions to become Chief Executives themselves. The results: Ministers and control agencies judged the Chief Executives on two major criteria – the quality of their policy advice, and not landing them in trouble. Whereas the Chief Executives and the Old Hands used these criteria, for sure, but also a major preoccupation was the business of managing an (often large) department. They were having to work it out for themselves – there were very few helpful examples from the private sector, the reforms were new and there was no established body of knowledge for them to consult, and their ministers and controllers (to whom they had to account for their stewardship of the country’s resources) had a blind spot about many of the issues that preoccupied them.


Enough examples to make your mouth water? Perhaps you’ll permit me to get back to some practice on the details of effective Grid interviewing. Here’s some guidelines:

Anal-Retentive Corner:

When I’m teaching Grid in a classroom, I make no apology for insisting as strongly as I can that people follow the rules … because if you’ve learned to follow the rules and do as ‘pure’ a Grid interview as possible, you can then depart from them when the project requires it in the full knowledge of what you’re doing. It’s like being a musician: you need to keep up with your scales and arpeggios, and if you’re a composer you need to understand the basic disciplines of key structure, harmony, etc., before you depart from them – otherwise you’ll simply produce a Confused Noise. So, forgive my emphasis on the rules; they’re there for a purpose.

Why does Grid use triadic comparison?

People often ask about the purpose of using three elements to generate a construct. Answer: the triadic comparison process is the only way you can be certain of getting two poles, so there isn’t really any consistently successful alternative to offering the elements in triads. However, should your interviewee produce bipolar scales by any other means, if they’re suitable to the purpose then accept them. What’s important is that …

Constructs should be bipolar.

A construct is a scale on which all, or nearly all, of the elements can be rated. Therefore it must have two poles. This may seem to be a very elementary place to start, but one occasionally sees ‘constructs’ described by just one word - for example ‘efficiency’ or ‘happiness’, usually in order to fit them into an oversimplified analysis. The reason why one-word descriptions aren’t a good idea is that …

Both ends of the construct should carry equal weight.

In other words, both poles should be equally well-defined. A construct like X - not X will prove awkward to use when rating; but more important is the fact that you want to know how the contrast pole is defined by the client. If one pole of the construct is creative the constrast pole might be practical, or dull, or realistic or disciplined ... or any of half a dozen other notions, depending on the interviewee's experience; and you will only know what’s meant by creative if you see its constrast pole. So it would not be useful to let pass a construct creative - not creative, nor to write the construct as creativity without bothering to write both poles. Ask for the other pole to be defined, with a question like ‘how would you describe the other(s) by contrast?’ (Don't, please don't, ask what's the opposite? because you might get the dictionary opposite, but not the quality that makes the other pole different by contrast).

Also, there’s a very old piece of psycholinguistic research in which the authors took a series of adjectives, such as happy, interesting, well, etc., and used the techniques of semantic differential analysis to examine how much ‘weight’ was implies when the opposite word was expressed in a variety of ways, e.g. not happy, unhappy, and sad; not interesting, uninteresting, and boring, etc. They found that in all cases the ‘Not X’ or ‘UnX’ formulation carried less information than the formulation X-Y, where Y is the dictionary opposite. This is one reason why good Grid practitioners always ask for the contrast pole to be expressed in its own right, rather than using the emergent pole and tacking a negative on the front of it. You want a scale, a construct, where both poles carry equal weight.

Don’t infer or supply the contrast pole.

If you don’t elicit the contrast pole from the interviewee, you are left to infer it; or if a number of people’s constructs are to be combined or shared, then it is up to someone else to infer it. And it could be dead wrong. For example, imagine that you are interviewing someone about her significant others and she produces one pole which she labels manic. Is this one end of a construct manic - depressive? Or is it one end of a construct manic - even-tempered? Her construct, which of course is personal to her and intended to reflect her experience, could be either, depending on how she experiences the other significant people in her life. If the fully-expressed construct is manic - depressive, then the even-tempered people in her life will be rated at the middle of the scale. If the fully-expressed construct is manic - even-tempered, then the even-tempered people in her life will be rated at the end of the scale. Of course, you can explore the range of her construct manic - ???? and later you may want to re-write or split it (wait until we chat about the Range of Convenience of constructs), but if you leave the contrast pole unexamined then you are not doing justice to the construct system.

Constructs should be appropriate to the purpose.

You need to ensure that you are exploring the domain of constructs appropriate to the purpose. For example, you could interview a manager about his or her team members with a counselling contract, in which case you would want constructs about how the manager feels about the team, relates to them; or you could use the same element set but with an agenda of drawing up a person-specification, in which case you would want constructs about performance. The way to take care of this is with the qualifiers - the ‘... in terms of...’ questions you ask when laying down the triads.

Physical presentation is important.

Until now, you’ve been working with just three elements. In practice, Grid interviews use a larger sample of elements (more on element selection in later posts) and I’ve seen people try to short-cut the process by giving their interviewee a list of elements and asking them to look at numbers 2, 5 and 7. This doesn’t work, even with very perceptive interviewees. It really is important to write the elements on cards so that they can be shuffled around, or otherwise present them three at a time. Seeing them in a physical relationship to one another makes the process much easier.

Full Context Presentation.

One way of being certain that you’ll get a construct is to place all the elements in front of the client and ask for the two which are most similar, and then ask what it is they have in common; then ask for the element which is most different on that dimension. This almost always breaks the log-jam, and if it doesn’t then you need to go back and think about whether the client is comfortable with the contract and the purpose.

Laddering (Up and Down):

If you go back to the second post, where you can eavesdrop on a real session using cars as elements, you’ll observe that at some point the interviewer takes a construct and asks which pole the person prefers, and why. This process is called Laddering Up, and it takes you (very quickly) to the interviewee’s core constructs. Give it a try with some of the constructs that you’ve already produced and see what happens … betcha that after three or four levels of ‘why?’ questioning you’ll be uttering your own version of ‘that’s how it is for me … that’s what I believe … that’s what I was always told …’

According to Kelly, everybody has a hierarchy of constructs, with core constructs at the centre and a network of constructs that eventually leads to the periphery. What’s important for now is that we don’t mess around with people’s core constructs unless it’s with their permission and we’re skilled counsellors. A person’s core constructs – their value system – are deeply-held beliefs, usually non-negotiable, and for most purposes folk like thee and me have got no business asking about them.

By the way, you can also ask the Laddering Up question by taking a construct and asking ‘Is this an important distinction to make about (your field of enquiry)?’ Variations on this theme include asking your interviewee to sort their constructs into High, Medium, and Low priority, and asking for the criteria used in this sorting; and you could keep your detailed questioning to the high priority constructs only.

Also in the interview about cars, you’ll hear the interviewer take the construct flashy- wolf in sheep’s clothing and ask for more detail about how cars that are flashy differ from cars that are wolf in sheep’s clothing … what would the person see or feel? And the response ‘unpicks’ the construct’s component parts: Flashy cars are covered in unnecessary gadgets; have auxiliary brake lights halfway up the back; have personalised number plates (yuck!); go-faster stripes; fancy hubcaps. Wolves in sheep’s clothing don’t have gadgets; orthodox brake lights; standard fittings.

This process is called Laddering Down, and it’s an essential skill. It’s the means by which you move from an abstract, high-level construct towards the features that you can actually see, hear, feel, touch – it’s how you answer the question What does this construct mean in practice? If you think about a construct system as a hierarchy, there’s no telling at what ‘level’ your two-against-one question is going to enter said hierarchy. Ask me about MONTY, JIM, and PAUL and I might respond with good drivers – bad driver, which is a pretty important construct but by no means as important to me as responsible – careless. If you laddered down from responsible – careless you’d get good drivers – bad driver, which for me is a sub-set of responsible – careless; and you could, of course, ladder down from good drivers – bad driver to learn more about what that distinction means to me.

How to write elements and constructs:

It’s worth keeping to a convention about how to write elements and constructs. In a printed text I always write elements in capitals, and constructs in italics. I’ve already mentioned the importance of writing each element on its own card or piece of paper; when writing constructs, I usually take a fresh index card (8” by 5” or thereabouts) for each construct and begin by writing the construct roughly half-way up the card, with the pair on the left and singleton on the right, with the numbers of the associated elements at the side. This gives you room to write any information from Laddering Up above the construct, and information from Laddering Down below it.

Why so many cards, you might ask? Well, because there are lots of applications of Grid that involve sorting the constructs into groups – by priority, or with a content analysis. Having each construct on its own card makes the sorting easier.


Homework:

We’ve got homework to do. It’s a rainy Friday afternoon, and I ought to figure out how to create a picture of a typical construct card and post it into the blog. That’s not going to be easy because (i) my camera’s broken, and (ii) if I can make a mess of doing something new, you can guarantee it’ll happen. Hold thumbs.

What I’d suggest for you is to get some practice in laddering up and down, and in writing the constructs. If you can persuade someone to let you practise on them, then use a set of more than three elements (nine is a good number, but they should all be from the same ‘family’) and notice how, with a bit of practice, you can co-ordinate your writing with the interviewee’s thinking. There’s likely to be a pause when you’ve presented a new triad, or shuffled the existing triad differently, and you’ll find that you can use this thinking time to tidy the construct card you’ve been working on and be ready to listen to the next.

Enjoy!!

Valerie.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the Second, Construct Elicitation (One)

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the Second: Getting to Work with Constructs.

One of the great things about Grid is that there’s hardly any jargon and it’s all pretty transparent – in fact there are only four jargon terms: elements, constructs, qualifiers, and laddering. In this session I hope to introduce you to the basics of eliciting constructs, which are the scales that we use when making judgements our perceptions. We’ll start simple – please look at the following three people and write down or speak aloud what any two of them have in common that makes them different from the third:

THE POPE

QUEEN ELIZABETH II

PRESIDENT OBAMA

It’s best if you can get into the habit of writing down your results, and a useful convention is to keep the pair-descriptor on the left and the description of the singleton on the right. So my guess is that you’ve written observations such as:

male – female; elected – unelected; older – younger; and maybe even wears a tiara – doesn’t have to wear a tiara.

Good. Pause for a moment and observe that all I did was provide the structure for your conversation with yourself – I didn’t suggest any of the constructs (as these bipolar distinctions are known). I provided the three elements for you to think about, but no more. That’s the basis of Grid’s claim to be free from interviewer bias; the interviewer or researcher will configure the session to meet a particular purpose, but the content and how it’s used will come purely from the interviewee.

Now I want you to work a little harder – and get more personally involved, please. So I’d like you to continue thinking about those three people, but this time write down or speak aloud what any two of them have in common that makes them different from the third in terms of the way you feel about them:

I don’t know what you’ll say here, but when I’m teaching Grid in the classroom I’ll often get answers like: conservative – liberal; indifferent public speaker – brilliant public speaker; disappointed their followers – lived up to expectations; reasonable – fanatic; appeals to older people – appeals to the young; good strategic insight – poor strategic insight; good negotiator – poor negotiator …..

Observe this list of constructs. They tell you much more about the person doing the perceiving than the first list does. The first list of constructs, in fact, is what we call propositional constructs – constructs that are properties of the elements, that are objectively verifiable and that reasonable people wouldn’t disagree about. The second list tells you much more about the language that the different classroom students used when giving their own, more subjective perceptions of the elements. In most Repertory Grid sessions you’ll want to work with these ‘evaluative’ or ‘behavioural’ constructs, though propositional constructs have their uses.

Sticking with the same three elements for the moment, try the question ‘what do any two of them have in common that makes them different from the third, in terms of their leadership skills?’ This question focuses the enquiry more tightly, and the choice of the ‘in terms of’ question (the qualifier) is part of the skills you need to design an effective Grid session.

Done that? Really? Written down your answers – you’ll need the practice, and I did ask you to promise to do the exercise. Right … now try ‘what do any two of them have in common that makes them different from the third, in terms of their sex appeal?’ My guess is that this would be a somewhat less rich domain to explore … hang on to that understanding, you’ll need it later.

Let’s experiment with a different set of elements. Try:

AUDI

NISSAN

TOYOTA

with the same two-against-one pairing, but this time using ‘in terms of how I feel about them,’ ‘in terms of their safety,’ and ‘in terms of their company image.’ See how you could use this technique in market research?

Now I’d like you to try something a little more in-depth. I want you to think of three people – real people whom you know well – one for each of the following prompts:

SOMEONE I ADMIRE

SOMEONE I FEEL SORRY FOR

MYSELF

Construe them (that is, use the two-against-one technique) along the following lines:

how I feel about them … their outlook on life … their skills … anything else that seems to me to be important.

If that doesn’t keep you busy for at least twenty constructs – and if it doesn’t give you some food for thought along the way – then you’re not taking this seriously.

Pause for Thought:

When I’m teaching Grid in a class, I always tell people that at some point round about now their brains will start to feel pulled in several different directions. Typically, the newcomer to Grid will, at about this stage, be feeling any or all of the following:

How do I manage the physical task of writing down the content of the interview?

What are the answers to these questions telling me about myself?

Could I use Grid technique to investigate ……..????????

Bear with me. My aim is to first make you comfortable and then to give you mastery. That’s why I ask you to actually participate in the various exercises. For each of the three preceding questions, the lights will come on for different people at different times and in different order. (Grid’s actually much easier to learn when it’s taught in small groups, because you get to hear other people’s questions and you have more time to let the learning sink in. Learning Grid, like the Grid process itself, is very non-redundant, very information-rich, and I always tell people that one of the most valuable parts of a Grid training course is the night’s sleep at the end of Day One. The unconscious does a good deal of sorting out the new things you’ve learned).

So, don’t worry if you find yourself being pulled in several directions. You’re being introduced to a technique of immense power, and it’s not surprising if the lights are going on all over the place. One learning put it rather well: ‘It’s like being given a new musical instrument – I want to explore its power, I can think of magnificent songs, and at the same time I need to learn the fingering and do my scales and arpeggios.’

Back to Work:

I’d like to propose a little homework before you move on to the next session. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Grab hold of some friends or colleagues and practise eliciting some constructs from them. You might find it easier to write down the elements on separate cards and allow your collaborator to physically shuffle them – moving them about rather than reading from a list really helps.

2. Practise writing down the constructs – the convention is that we number the elements, and write the numbers of the pair on the left and the number of the singleton on the right.

3. If you can assemble a small group of people whom you know to have well-formed opinions (especially if you know there’s a degree of disagreement amongst them) try a group construct elicitation session using political figures as elements. It should rapidly become apparent why PCT is called Personal Construct Theory – each person’s constructs and how they use them are particular to them.

4. Think of some of your own element groups and try working with them – if you can collar a friendly teenager, try eliciting some constructs about video games or school subjects or potential careers.

5. Try faking it - providing a construct that isn’t yours. Observe that it can’t be done. The best that anyone can do is exert a good deal of empathy for someone else’s construct system, but they’re still your constructs. Grid can’t be faked.

Want to Eavesdrop?

Please, pretty please, do the exercise above before moving on to this bit. Here’s an opportunity to eavesdrop on a Grid session used for a very simple purpose – in this case, the task is to choose a new car. Later, you’ll be able to listen to a teacher gaining insights into his students, a patient contemplating a crisis in his life, and many more deeply meaningful quests. I’m showing you this one because the content isn’t especially earth-shattering and I want you to really understand the process before we get onto more sophisticated purposes.


VS: We will start by asking you to think of some cars which you have known. Could you name two cars which you like?

C: The Audi 80 and the BMW Series 3.

VS: And two you dislike?

C: The Honda City and the Ford Falcon.

VS: One you would have if price and other considerations were no object?

C: The Audi 200.

VS: Can you think of one which a friend or relative drives?

C: A Lexus.

VS: Another one you’d have if price etc. were no object?

C: An Audi Cabriolet.

VS: Another one you dislike?

C: The new Rover.

VS: And just one more, at random, any car you know:

C: The Bristol Beaufighter.

VS: That ends the first part. You have the names of each car written on its own piece of paper, and we’ll explore what you think and feel about them.

C: Fine.

VS: My question is: think of something that any two of them have in common which makes them different from the third. I’ve picked the Lexus, the BMW Series 3, and the Audi 200 - please think of something that any two of them have in common that makes them different from the third, in terms of how you feel about them?

C: The Lexus and the BMW Series 3 – I think they’re flashy, but the Audi 200 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.


VS writes flashy – wolf in sheep’s clothing onto a card, then asks:

Next: The Audi Cabriolet, the Bristol Beaufighter, and the Lexus:

C: The Audi Cabriolet and the Bristol Beaufighter, because people will turn and stare at them, while they’ll pass by the Lexus.

VS writes people will turn and stare at – people will pass by onto another card, then asks:

VS: Next: the Honda City, Audi 200, and BMW Series 3?

C: The Audi is very reliable, the Honda and the BMW not so reliable.

VS writes not so reliable – reliable onto another card, then says:
You’ll see that I'm asking you to find the dimensions you personally use when you’re considering cars, and asking for both ends of the scale. The goal is to find all the important dimensions – called ‘constructs’ – which you use when considering cars.’ Ready for some more?

C: Ah – I understand. Interesting …

VS: The next group of three is (and so on) ...

Customer then gives the following constructs in response ...

No waiting list for – waiting list for

Lays down a challenge – fails to meet any challenge

Expensive – cheap

Makes me feel young and sprightly – makes me feel old and past it

Makes realistic claims for its performance – makes unrealistic claims for its performance

Good safety record – poor safety record

Responsive in tight situations – not responsive in tight situations

New model – old model

Difficult to get serviced – easy to get serviced

VS: Thank you. You have given 12 constructs so far. You could (i) give some more constructs now, or (ii) think about what is important to you, or (iii) go into more detail about what each construct means.

Customer chooses (ii) and says I’d like to think about what’s important to me.

VS: Your first distinction reads flashy – wolf in sheep’s clothing. Do you prefer cars that are flashy or cars that are wolves in sheep’s clothing?

C: Wolf in sheep’s clothing, any time.

VS makes a + sign over this pole of the construct, then asks: Why do you prefer cars that are wolves in sheep’s clothing?

C: I like unobtrusive superiority. I don’t want to have to fight for my place, just take it.

At this point VS could ask more about why ‘unobtrusive superiority’ is important, but let’s leave that for the moment and go on to …

VS: Say in more detail how cars that are flashy differ from cars that are wolves in sheep’s clothing. What would you see or feel?

C: Flashy cars are covered in unnecessary gadgets; have auxiliary brake lights halfway up the back; have personalised number plates (yuck!); go-faster stripes; fancy hubcaps.
Wolves in sheep’s clothing don’t have gadgets; orthodox brake lights; standard fittings.

VS can go on eliciting constructs and ‘laddering’ until they feel that they’ve achieved the purpose, entering these new constructs:

covered in unnecessary gadgets – don’t have gadgets

have auxiliary brake lights halfway up the back – orthodox brake lights

personalised number plates (yuck!) – standard fittings

go-faster stripes – standard fittings

fancy hubcaps – standard fittings

but when they’ve agreed that there’s little more that can be said, the interview moves to the third stage:

VS: The next step is for you to rate every car on every scale. For example, cars which are strongly flashy will be rated as 1 and cars which are strongly wolf in sheep’s clothing will be rated as 5 …

C: (rates all the cars and enters the ratings into a matrix).

Eavedropping over:

We’ll leave it there for the moment. You’ve had an overview of almost everything that can happen in a Grid interview; we’re leaving out the matrix analysis because this is a subject that needs special treatment. However, let’s just acknowledge that we already have enough information to ask the customer to do any of the following:

Specify the characteristics of their ideal car;

Specify the characteristics of their least-preferred car;

Generate a ‘shopping list’ with which to examine information about cars that they might have in view;

And …

Ask their spouse to use the list to specify ideal and least-preferred;

In the event of a difference of opinion, pin it down to specifics and do a spot of priority-setting …

Other uses might occur to you. Feel free. Play a little …

Love,

Valerie.

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid: Part the First

Teach Yourself Repertory Grid, Part the First: Understanding George Kelly and Personal Construct Theory.

The purpose of this posting is to give you enough understanding of the background to Grid that you get the most out of what it offers, and that you don’t unknowingly do violence to the technique. It does not pretend to be a thorough exposition of Personal Construct Theory, but to give you enough background to be able to plan, understand, and analyse a Grid interview.

A little recapitulation:

I’ll remind you that George Kelly began his career as an engineer, before becoming a clinical psychologist – which may explain his concern for precision, and that Kelly’s theory of personality is predicated on one axiom: that, as he put it, Man is a Scientist. In other words, from the dawn of consciousness each of us tries to make sense of the world as we experience it, and we do this by constantly forming and testing hypotheses about the world. By the time we are adults, we will have developed a very complex model of the world and our place in it: this model is, according to Kelly, our personality. Kelly’s Theory of Personal Constructs develops this principle further – for example, by considering whether and how we modify our constructs when faced with contradictory information, what are our ‘core constructs’ – that is, the deeply-held values and principles which are unlikely to change, etc.

The term construct is particularly well-chosen, because it reflects the concept’s dual role. On the one hand, your constructs represent the view you have constructed about the world as you experienced it. On the other hand, your constructs indicate how you are likely to construe the world as you continue to experience it. Your construct system is your history and your predisposition to perceive.

As a simple illustration, let me relate a conversation I recently had with a friend who has the happy choice of at least four countries in which to spend her retirement. Talking about the criteria which would influence her choice, she said that one important criterion was the standard of care for the elderly and infirm. This was one of her constructs, and a very important one. It came as a complete surprise to me, because it had never been part of my construct system. When we talked about it, she said that several of her friends and relations had had long terminal illnesses and very different standards of care; and for the first time I realised that all the deaths I had known had been quick, and no-one had lingered in care. She had formed her construct on the basis of her experience, and that construct is one which she uses when thinking about countries to retire to. I didn’t have that construct, because my experience was different from hers; and so I would not have used it when thinking about countries to retire to – at least, not until the conversation gave me the opportunity to modify my construct system.

Kelly developed the Repertory Grid interview as a means of getting people to show him their construct systems. He had some very important methodological concerns about the standard of interviewing, especially in clinical psychology, which were: Interviewer bias, Need for specificity in measurement, and Over-reliance on the ‘expert.’

End of Recapitulation: Here’s the Essence of Repertory Grid:

In order to circumvent these obstacles in his quest for the client’s construct system, Kelly invented the Repertory Grid interviewing technique. The essence of Grid technique is very simple:

· Select a set of elements. The elements are concrete examples of the domain you wish to explore – for example, working with a client who had problems in making satisfactory relationships, the elements would be people with whom the client had relationships. (More - much more - about now to select the appropriate set of elements will follow in later posts).

· Take the elements in groups of three, and ask the question: ‘Can you tell me a way in which any two of these people are different from the third, in terms of ......?’ (The ‘in terms of’ phrase, called a qualifier, directs the client to consider the elements in a way appropriate to the purpose. So in this case the qualifiers might be ‘... in terms of how you feel about them, .... in terms of how they felt about you, .... in terms of how you behaved to each other,’ etc.) This two-against-one question produces a bipolar scale – for example had a sense of humour - I never saw him smile. This scale is a construct – and please note that it comes entirely from the interviewee. The interviewer has set up the parameters for the conversation, but has suggested none of the content.

· There are ways of exploring the constructs in more depth and detail, but at some point in a full Grid interview the constructs are turned into scales (usually 1 to 5) and the interviewee rates every element on every construct. This gives you a matrix which can be analysed statistically in order to progress the discussion with the client. The statistical analysis answers Kelly’s need to measure people individually, and you could, for example, compare the person’s before-and-after perceptions. There are several analysis programs available, but it should also be stressed that it is not always necessary to use them. There are dangers, which will be explored later, in letting yourself become dependent on a computer program to do the work for you.

That is the essence of Grid. It is a powerful and content-free procedure. The interviewer sets up the session in order to meet the purpose, but provides none of the content. Grid enables you to have a structured conversation that's totally free from the influence of the interviewer or researcher.

Another useful feature of Grid is that because it is a standardised protocol, if you are conducting a large-scale research project with a number of interviewers, any interviewer can pick up the work of any other and understand what happened in the interview. You don’t have to have one of those awful reconciliation meetings where everyone has taken notes in their own way and you spend the first day explaining to one another.

What does all this mean for a new Grid interviewer? At its simplest, it means that we have the means of knowing when, as interviewers, we have influenced the discussion. And because Grid can be completely free from interviewer bias, I suggest that we should keep it that way until and unless the purpose requires us to intervene. Some examples of good interviewing protocol:

· Don’t supply the contrast pole yourself. If the interviewee says ‘These two had a sense of humour,’ we don’t say ‘And the other one didn’t?’ We say ‘How would you describe the other, by contrast?’

· Don’t summarise the interviewee’s constructs, either verbally or when you’re writing them down. If the interviewee says ‘She could almost always find two or three new ways of looking at a problem,’ that’s what you write. You don’t write ‘Creative problem-solver.’ And try to avoid asking the interviewee to summarise a construct, even if there are lots of words, because s/he may say ‘Creative problem-solver.’ What you have in the first phrase is a detailed, behavioural description of the element – and you’ll probably get a similarly specific description of the contrast pole – and later on you could find yourself needing that specificity.

· Don’t imply that you’re judging the interviewee’s constructs, or waiting for a particular type of construct to appear. Yes, you do want to elicit constructs that are relevant to your purpose – that’s what the qualifiers are for – but in the early stages of a Grid interview you should respect the fact that the two-against-one process is not how most people are used to thinking and your first goal is to get them comfortable with it. Once they are comfortable with it, you can remind them of the qualifiers (for example ‘Could you look at these three in terms of ......’), or you can ask ‘Does that construct relate to the purpose?’

· A related point - it’s not for you to judge the importance of someone’s constructs. For example, a researcher interviewed a number of people and wrote ‘We stopped the interviews after eliciting twelve meaningful constructs.’ My question – who decided that they were meaningful? You, or the interviewee? And what exactly do you mean by ‘meaningful?’ It’s not your job to decide that. Much better is to elicit the constructs until the interviewee runs out; do a spot of laddering to change the focus and then ask if that has prompted any more constructs, and then ask the interviewee to sort the constructs into high, medium, and low priority. (I'll explain about laddering later).

One core value for a good Grid interviewer is: don’t construe other people’s construing. Don’t judge. Ask open questions – for example, if you can see a pattern in someone’s constructs (let’s say that there are a great many constructs about ‘sense of humour’ in the interviewee’s construing of key relationships) it’s better to ask ‘Can you see any patterns, or groups, in what you’ve said so far?’ than to say ‘You’ve got a lot of constructs about humour.’

Let’s be clear. I’m not saying that the interviewer should be completely passive. There will be occasions in any interview when questions or input from the interviewer are appropriate. What I am saying is: make as much use as you can of the unique opportunity Grid gives you to understand the interviewee’s world in their own terms before you interpose yourself in the process. Once you have interposed yourself, you’ll never get that state again. In the rest of this series, you’ll see that I advocate ‘letting the works show’ – that is, making the interview a joint endeavour, being open about the process and what you’re recording. Most interviewees will quickly find the process interesting and many become almost self-managing, and the interview becomes a co-operative process in which you offer techniques and they offer answers and insights.