Introduction to Repertory Grid

Hi there. I'm going to use this blog to tell the world about Repertory Grid, which is a very useful technique for research on almost any topic, a great tool for counselling and self-insight, and many other purposes.

I apologise for being a new and somewhat inept blogger, and I hope you can bear with me if we don't have many bells and whistles, but I hope that the content and quality will make up for that.

OK, here goes, pull yourself together Valerie and make your first posting to the Big Wide World:


Introducing Repertory Grid:

The principle underlying Repertory Grid is very simple: that every time we make a judgement about something, we place it somewhere on a scale or scales. This could be as simple as I like – I don’t like or as complex as your medical history, the result of a Senate investigation, or an orchestral score, but at root all human beings live by a continuous process of perception and judgement. Repertory Grid, which is based on a structured conversation, is a uniquely powerful way of recording each person’s perceptions and judgements, in as much depth as appropriate, and – this point is crucial – without there being any influence from the person(s) or processes doing the recording.

Repertory Grid is also a universally applicable procedure – it can be used on any topic where you have some knowledge or experience. So it can explore a limitless range of questions, such as:

· Who am I?

· How did I get to be like this?

· What do I want to do next?

· What have I learned?

· What would I like to learn?

· What do I like and dislike in (fashion, music, politics, lovers … ad infinitum)?

· How do I avoid making the same expensive mistake again?

and, having explored your chosen question, you can do any or all of the following:

Grow it

Challenge it

Explore ‘what if?’ scenarios

Share it with another person – e.g. for joint decision making

Compare it with another person – e.g. for negotiation, conflict resolution

Measure how you’ve changed – e.g. as a result of a learning experience

The actual process can feel a little strange at first, but most people find that learning Grid not only gives them a very powerful investigative tool, it sharpens their general thinking skills. And in a world where powerful thinking is both very necessary and very difficult to find, Grid ought to become much better known.

That’s why I’ve chosen to share with you what I know about Repertory Grid. I’ve been using it for all my professional life, and each time I’ve used it I honour it even more – it never ceases to surprise me by its power. Using this blog, I propose to take you through a ‘teach yourself Grid interviewing’ course, and then share the skills of planning a Grid project, while at the same time offering you lots of examples of Grid projects that I and others have undertaken. Inevitably, I’ll be approaching the subject from my own perspective as an industrial psychologist, so the examples will be drawn mainly from the fields of counselling and business, but as these are the areas where Grid has been used extensively I trust you’ll forgive – and find it easy to generalise from these many examples to any topics that you might have a special interest in exploring.

I do ask one thing of you: that if you really want to learn Grid interviewing, you work through the various sample tasks that the ‘teach yourself’ course offers. Go ahead and actually do them, with a paper and pen to hand (and borrow another person, if necessary), rather than just reading about them. There really is no substitute for being there in amongst it; holding the learning at a distance by simply reading about it won’t work.

Is it worth it?

Oh my goodness yes. On a personal level – that is, when using Grid to gain insight into a decision that has to be made, or a puzzling problem – it’s common for people to say that they learned more about themselves and felt better able to take decisions than by any other means (and, quite often, in far less time). In business applications, I’ve had clients say that they’ve done better with ten days spent on a Grid project than hundreds of thousands (and more) spent on a standard consultancy intervention. Quite simply, I don’t know any better way of investigating issues and making decisions.

A little history:

Repertory Grid is the creation of George Kelly, an American engineer who became a psychologist. You can see this unusual marriage of traditions at work in Kelly’s output: the engineering side contributing concern for the integrity and transparency of process and for accurate measurement, the psychologist contributing sensitivity and fidelity to the wide variety of individual human experience, to our capacity for creativity and insight and growth as well as for irrationality, self-deception, and mischief.

His main work was done between the 1930s and 1950s – Grid has a very respectable academic hinterland – and it began with his creation of Personal Construct Psychology. He was working at a time when many psychologists were developing their own theories of human personality: this was the time of Freud and Jung and Adler, of major insights and wide speculations and energetic battles between the various supporters. Kelly’s Theory of Personal Constructs is, by comparison with the complex edifices being constructed elsewhere, devastatingly simple: it is based on the single axiom that (as Kelly put it in those pre-PC days) Man is a Scientist. That is, we all seek to understand and make sense of the world we experience, we form and test hypotheses about that world, and that what we call ‘personality’ can be understood as the dynamic processes through which each individual scientist interprets their world and the ever-changing network of hypotheses that they build, test, confirm, or modify as a result. Kelly called this network a construct system, which is a felicitous expression because it simultaneously conveys two meanings: your construct system represents what you have constructed about your world so far, and it also represents your predisposition to construe new information in line with your past experience.

To take the simplest example of what this means: at school I was bullied by a boy called Gordon. Even today, I have a little difficulty when I’m introduced to a Gordon, and if I had to write a romantic story I’m pretty certain that the male lead wouldn’t be named Gordon. The hypothesis Gordon = Bully was drummed into my infant brain; no contradictory information manifested itself; the infant brain formulated a predisposition that If your name’s Gordon, you’ll be a bully, and although my adult brain has reprogrammed itself with the information that you can’t make any predictions about someone’s behaviour from their name, my unconscious still flinches.

At this point you may feel like uttering a gigantic So What? She’s just using fancy words to describe what we already know – that people learn from experience and that they are influenced (or constrained) by their experience. However, please don’t go yet. There’s gold in them thar hills.

First, do Kelly the courtesy of putting into the context of the time. When psychologists were fighting over different kinds of personality theory, and different understandings of causality; when they were basing their theories on humankind being in thrall to their potty training and their lusts for their parents, when they were inventing complex bureaucracies of the unconscious and adding new entities without the ability to subject them to proof, the simplicity of the statement Man is a Scientist is a blessed relief.

Also – and this became more and more important as the more complex and outrageous theories fell into disuse – Personal Construct Theory is a grown-up model, treating people as adults, assuming that most people are healthy and can take responsibility for who and how they are. PCT doesn’t have the quasi-Calvinist determinism with which Freud et al told us that we are formed (and, perhaps, doomed) before we know it and we spend the rest of our lives playing out the hands we were dealt in infancy – unless, of course, we can afford to spend years in therapy. Present-day adherents of constructivist psychology are – whether they know it or not – following a path first travelled by George Kelly.

Kelly’s three problems:

Kelly – the engineer who turned to clinical psychology - was searching for a method for getting people to show him their construct systems. But he was also aware that there were serious failings in the practices and values used in the research methods at the time. (Unfortunately, most of them still remain - Repertory Grid interviewing being the only known way of avoiding them). Kelly identified three problems in contemporary practice, thus:

· The likelihood that in any diagnostic process, the diagnostician contributes to the diagnosis to a considerable extent, and there’s no systematic way of avoiding this;

· The need to make objective and accurate measurements, and if possible predictions, about people taken singly or in small groups;

· The over-reliance on the ‘expert’ who was the sole custodian of the knowledge needed to resolve the issues and problems identified.

The first concern – the influence of the preconceptions of the diagnostician – was troublesome then, and remains troublesome now. One commonly quoted example is the study in which a teacher was told that her students’ IQs had been tested, and that Group A had higher IQs than Group B whereas they had actually been randomly assigned; but at the end of the term, Group A tested higher than Group B – and there have been many other experiments along the same lines. I have my own memories of working alongside other management consultants and being struck by the fact that when prospective clients invited an opinion, their needs were a very good match for that particular consultant’s skill set. Hmmm.

The second concern – his need to make objective and accurate measurements of individuals - was prompted by the practice of psychology at the time, which was either the ‘rats, cats, and stats’ methodology or the search for correlations between one psychological variable and another, which inevitably needed very large populations to produce statistically significant results. Kelly, who saw his patients one at a time or in small groups, wanted to be able to measure a person’s state of mind – and how it might have changed over time – accurately but without being reductionist. Generations of psychology students were condemned to learning about the behaviour of rats in mazes, in the presumed hope that later generations would be able to generalise from the ‘laws’ of rat behaviour to the ‘laws’ of human behaviour. That sort of nonsense has largely been abandoned, but the need to make accurate and sensitive measurements of real people remains: every time there’s an argument about attainment in education, to take just one example.

Kelly’s third concern – over-reliance on the expert –has been effectively lampooned in the cartoon representations of psychiatrists as bearded experts with strange accents and a couch (or, more recently, as dispensers of psychoactive pharmaceuticals). Kelly took the view, and it was unfashionable for its time, that if you want to know what’s troubling someone, ask them – they probably know. This doesn’t mean that there is no role for the specialist, because they can ask you questions you might not have thought of, they can persist where you’d rather not – in short, they can behave like a skilled mirror – but Kelly reckoned that most people were capable of acting in an adult problem-solving mode and taking responsibility for who and how they were, and the therapist or counsellor is there in the role of helper. Again, this problem hasn’t gone away; in Kelly’s own field, there are still far too many therapists who’ll actively do harm by insisting on their own diagnosis in the teeth of the evidence; but in the commercial world, the past few years have seen a trail of destruction wreaked by the ‘expert’ advisors to Enron through Lehman Brothers and beyond (and let’s not mention the war).

Kelly invented Repertory Grid interviewing technique as a methodology that satisfied these concerns. The Repertory Grid interview yields a complete picture of a person’s understanding of the topic, in the interviewee’s own words with no input from the interviewer; the results can be analysed statistically (which means that it’s possible to measure changes in the interviewee’s understanding, or to compare one person’s views with another’s); and its format invites the interviewee to take responsibility for their way of understanding the world, with the interviewer playing the role of a skilled mirror. It’s also impossible to fake a Repertory Grid interview, which is extremely useful in certain situations. Grid is simply the most powerful technique available for accurately charting someone’s thoughts and feelings.

What happened next?

You’d have thought that a breakthrough on this scale would have attracted instant fame and widespread usage. Unfortunately it didn’t happen like that. Why?

Well, Kelly wasn’t a self-publicist. Although he began his work in the 1930’s, in wasn’t until the 1950’s that he was persuaded to publish, and the resulting Theory of Personal Constructs is almost impenetrable. Some people maintain that his engineering-oriented paradigms didn’t suit the intellectual climate of the time; certainly he was taken up much more widely in the UK than in his native country, perhaps because Repertory Grid fits more comfortably with the British empirical approach.

I first learned about Grid at University, back in the Dark Ages, and in the 1970s and 80’s I helped to introduce it for various business purposes; a small group of us at Brunel University, guided by Professor Laurie Thomas, taught Grid technique to a stratum of British managers. My own speciality was using Grid to study the characteristics of effective managers, as that fitted with my interest in the identification and development of management potential; but we covered a huge range of topics, from the evaluation of training to the improvement of quality control, from negotiation and conflict management through to individual counselling, and inventing new and better ways in which business could meet with triumph and disaster and subject them to some tough critical thinking. In 1978 I published Business Applications of the Repertory Grid; its first half consisted of a teach-yourself Grid programme which I’ll be repeating, updated, on this blog, and the second half showed how to configure Grid to address a wide variety of analytical challenges.

However – and maybe I should stress that this is a personal view – the advent of today’s computing facilities, which could have brought Repertory Grid technique out of the closet and given it its full power, came close to ruining it. I’ll go into the technical details later, but for the moment just let me say that many practitioners (including several who should have known better) appropriated some easily-available but totally inappropriate statistical analysis techniques. Not only did this mean that Kelly’s original values and contributions were lost; it also led to an over-reliance on the computer program to do the work instead of the user ‘running it through their brains’ first. For a while I was part of a website that carried my thoughts and correspondence about Grid, and I got so, so tired of questions that read, in essence: ‘I’ve collected my data and run it through the program but I don’t know how to interpret the results.’ To which the only possible response would be a polite formulation of ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ When the request came from a student who’d been advised to use Grid in their thesis, it usually turned out that their supervisor knew nothing about Grid interviewing, nothing about how to configure a Grid project to answer the question at hand, and the poor student was flying blind. One of the most elegant research techniques ever invented came close to withering on the vine once more.

I’m cross about that. Hence this blog. If you stick with it, I’ll take you back to basics and you’ll learn to use Repertory Grid well. And that will give you one heck of a competitive advantage out there in the real world.

A few examples to tempt you:

Grid began as a counselling technique, and I could quote you many examples where the use of Grid in counselling has uncovered the issues with a speed and precision that seems almost frightening at first. Here’s a few explorations that I’ve helped people with:

· Why do I seem to continually waste my hopes and energies on falling in love with people who hurt me?

· How do I choose a job that will bring out the best in me?

· All my other children seem happy enough – what’s the matter with little Junior?

· Under what sort of conditions am I likely to enjoy (and stay with) an adult education course?

I’ve also had a great many years as a management consultant, and Grid has been my methodology of choice whenever a client has asked me to do a research project. Here are just a few of the findings I’ve been able to report back to my clients:

· Did you know that your sales force (including managers) equate sales effectiveness with activity level, rather than skill?

· Did you know that the chief preoccupation of your managers is the degree of power that other managers have, and the extent to which they’ll misuse it if given the chance?

· Did you know that the skill your managers esteem most highly is that of communicating with Head Office in an acceptable fashion, and that they give hardly any thought to lateral relationships or to customers?

· Did you know that your policy staff esteem analysis above all else, and that concern for the effective implementation of the results of their analyses features hardly at all?

· Did you know that in order to be seen to be effective in this business, the two most important skills are (i) voting for the right political party, and (ii) getting older?

By the way, I’ve been able to get away with delivering such challenging news because I’ve also been able to say to the clients, hand on heart, You took part in the interviews I did for this project, and you’ll know that all I did was provide the structure; I’m simply reflecting back to you what people have said. Fire me if you like, but they’ll still continue to think like that. (Also, I ought to say, because I believe that the consultant's job isn't finished when they've diagnosed the problem and I do like to turn my hand to implementing solutions).

Do you want to take up my invitation to learn the skills to be a superb Repertory Grid interviewer and project designer? Than bear with me as I construct this blog – it’ll be slow going at first, because I’ll have Blogging for Dummies at hand all the time (I need a teenager!) but I do promise to share everything I know, and to answer questions if at all possible.

It comes with love,

Valerie Stewart.