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!!!!