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.

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.