In which I ponder on why I haven’t used instruments and profiles in my consulting work in leadership development or helping organisations to bring about change (the post is after the light hearted questionnaire below).
.jpg)
A recent post on this blog was on how we often treat concepts or ideas as physical things and attribute the properties of physical things to them, such as thinking we can manipulate and manage culture as though it were a physical thing (here). In the comments on that post, a discussion has begun in a spontaneous way about the place of instruments (assessments or questionnaires) in dealing with complex processes of interaction in organisations.
Like many consultants, I am accredited to administer and facilitate workshops based on the Team Management Profile offered by TMS.
I have to confess though that I haven’t used the profile in my consulting work, even though I like it enough to have become accredited to run it. I have plenty of experience of other profiles as well (e.g. Myers-Briggs, Lominger competency profiles, Gallup Strengths Finder, Gallup Engagement Survey, 15FQ+, LSI, HBDI, AVI, Belbin, EQ, 360 degree and others) and I haven’t used them much either. And yet all of them have something to offer, certain compelling points of difference in the way they are presented, in what they claim to measure and in what insights they offer.
I’ve been pondering on why it is that I am not now drawn to profiles. In fact I seem not to be finding them helpful to my clients, even though I have been able to help clients to make sense of different profiles they have bought or undertaken. At times I have helped them to make decisions about how (or whether) to roll these instruments out across their organisation.
When I started out as a consultant in independent practice, I thought that it was important that if a client needed a profile, I should be accredited to provide one, otherwise I might miss out on work. I am aware of other consultants who have the same idea. Somehow, in the five years since I have been in operation, I myself have never found a client who needed a profile, and I’ve been busy with client work. During that period, other consultants have done dozens and hundreds of administrations of such instruments – in fact it’s a staple part of business for a number of consultants.
After a couple of years I realised that this was at least partly because I didn’t see my client’s issues as things that could be resolved by reference to profiles.
I am conscious that sometimes clients want someone to implement "xyz profile" and that there are consultants who do this. Often clients have a particular solution in mind when they talk to a consultant. If they don’t, they certainly have a business problem when they ask a consultant for help.
I have come to realise that how the consultant frames up the solution has a big influence on the solution they offer. If a consultant has a profile, then they will very quickly see in client situations, applications for that profile. I suppose this a variation of "If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything will appear like it’s a nail." And you will have no option but to try banging it with your hammer. Shame if it’s not a nail but a rather painful blister.
But I think it’s more subtle than that, in spite of the joke questionnaire at the top of this post, courtesy of flickr.com. Perhaps it is partly a factor of "I have a solution, now let’s find someone I can flog it to." But I suspect that most consultants do not think this is what they are doing.
I think it’s more that becoming experienced in the profile does give you a certain way of looking at the world, a certain vocabulary, a certain theory about what is going on. A certain habitus as Pierre Bordieu and my colleague Chris Mowles would say. If that’s your theory and vocabulary, then you will see organisational situations in terms of that theory and vocabulary. And no doubt you will also be able to convince clients to try out your solutions.
In my work with my clients I have become more interested in exploring "How are we looking at the world?" Our conversations are rooted in the present world of experience. When abstractions come up I bring the conversation back to what is currently happening. Perhaps that is why I am not feeling the need for instruments at the moment.
Hi Stephen,
As you might expect, I fully agree with your comments about the importance of paying attention to what’s happening in the ‘here and now’ – as well as with the general tenor and underpinning philosophy of your blog.
At the same, I would ask you to reflect on the comments in the penultimate paragraph of your latest post. There you mention that becoming experienced in a particular profile “… gives you a certain way of looking at the world, a certain vocabulary, a certain theory about what is going on … If that’s your theory and vocabulary, then you will see organisational situations in terms of that theory and vocabulary.”
This suggests that it is profiles, models and frameworks such as these, which unhelpfully shift attention away from the messy detail of real-world interactions into a sort of ‘parallel universe’. Rather than working in an emergent way, in the moment of people’s interactions, such frameworks advocate ways forward based on generalization and abstraction. Most importantly, the inference appears to be that working without such frameworks, in an ‘unplugged’ sort of way, is the best means of avoiding the traps and distortions that these introduce.
However, as I argued a few weeks ago in response to a post in Chris Mowles’s blog, you can’t not advocate. You can’t, using your phraseology, avoid having a certain theory, a certain vocabulary and a certain way of looking at the world.
For example, in your blog, you consistently advocate the view that people in organizations should pay attention to what is happening in the here and now, as they try to achieve things together. This way of viewing organizational dynamics also privileges narratives and explorations that take a particular interest in power relations and communicative interaction. In other words, you seek to frame organizations (or provide a framework for viewing them) in one way rather than another. That is, you speak of them as complex responsive processes of people in interaction – not in a prescriptive way but as an aid to the perception and interpretation of all things organizational. I would like to think that informal coalitions adopts a broadly similar stance, albeit that some of the sense-making frameworks are explicit – and visual as well as verbal.
In summary, we all use theories and ‘frameworks’ to help us make sense of the world and to decide how best to act. None of these can ever fully reflect what is happening in terms of the realities that people are encountering through their physical senses and inner feelings. Or in terms of the fantasies that they create as they perceive, interpret, evaluate and act upon this ‘raw data’. And so, none of the sense-making theories and frameworks can be proven to be right (or wrong). But, for me, that is not the test.
The question should not be “Is it right?” but rather “Is it useful?”
Cheers, Chris
Comment by Chris Rodgers — September 9, 2009 @ 4:10 am
Hi Chris, thanks for your very interesting comment. I, of course do have a certain way of looking at the world, informed, like anyone else, by my own experience and ideology.
In this post, because I was concentrating on how reliance on instruments leads consultants to frame their solutions in terms of instruments, I may not have been explicit about my own ideology.
This blog has many posts that attempt to explain my own ideology, as I make sense of the corporate world I live in, so I don’t feel I need to do so in every single post.
I guess that I could say that I practice and perhaps advocate approaches that concentrate on what is going on in the here and now. Some people will see instruments as providing a window or set of lenses for looking at what is going on in the here and now. I am saying in this post that the instruments can often lead to discussion about the instruments, as opposed to what is going on in the here and now.
I am also saying in this post that the consultants I know, many of whom use instruments, are generally not trying to flog product, but to help their clients make sense of what is going on, even if they don’t call it that.
My next post takes this theme further.
Cheers, Stephen
Comment by Stephen — September 9, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
Hello all,
So yesterday I spent a morning with my colleague, Bonnie Cooper and 3 people that had recently completed our distance accreditation process in one of those work preference assessments. It was a really good morning and informs the comments I will make here.
First, in your post Stephen you indicate that you are pondering why you have not used instruments and profiles in your consulting work. To me, it is the YOU in that pondering that is important since you are the primary and constant context with your work. I believe that we share (as does Chris) a similar ideology of how organizations emerge, and in my work, with me being the primary and constant context, I do use intruments and profiles. Within what I would call similar ideologies the use of these profiles may or may not make sense.
I do think many people use instruments like this in a way that is not helpful and distracts from what is actually happening (see my post on Preference Fetishes… http://www.tms-americas.com/blog.cfm?id=913588824) but they do NOT have to be used that way… after all there is always the possibility of novelty in any interaction
Second, your point Chris about the question being not ‘Is it right?’, but ‘Is it useful?’ I think is very important. A couple of stories from yesterday, one preference related the other not.
With our 3 newly accredited people we were talking about Extroversion and Introversion. One of the big things for us is that any discussion on preference needs a context. We talked about the context of organizational values since they might be working with our profile in that context with their clients. As an example we talked about how often respect comes up as a value in organizations. We then talked about how respect can be experienced by the extroverted preference in interaction as interuptions, finishing each other’s sentences and lots of sharing of ideas as clarity of thinking builds through the interaction. This same experience from the introverted preference might be perceived as exhibiting a high degree of lack of respect, since that preference often likes enough space in interaction to express complete thoughts. The point being that through this preference lens we were able to portray another way of thinking about a value that so often is assumed to be universally understood. This discussion of how they could use the preference information was useful to them as they considered their work with clients. Whether it was right or not could not be taken out of this particular context.
The leader of this group joined us for lunch and she has used one of our preference profiles (along with others) for years. We got talking about identity and complex responsive processes and she began to talk about her aging mother who has Alzheimer’s in an advanced stage. She talked with emotion about how she could still ’see’ the core identity of her mother in some of her small movements even though most of what her mother ‘was’ had been consumed by her desease. She was using the word ‘core’ as a noun, identity as a thing and for her that was useful, as Chris says, to enable her to interact with her mother in a good way as her life nears its end. Does she see identity as a noun all the time, is it her ideology? I don’t know, but it was useful then.
The reason this is important for me is that one of the best things I have found with the ideology of complex responsive processes is that it helps us to be ok with being human. As I read Norbert Elias I really felt this in a neat way. If we take our immediate experience seriously, and try and understand that from this experience emerges our lives we can be human in those experience and not distanced from it.
And if I can use an instrument and profile to help someone experience and understand their interactions more usefully, then their use makes sense to me.
Comment by Tom Gibbons — September 10, 2009 @ 12:46 am
I was interested in what you said about treating concepts as “things”. American linguist and psychology writer Stephen Pinker (”The Stuff of Thought”) believes we can only conceptualise ideas as physical objects (e.g. “manipulating culture”), places (”arriving at your conclusion”) or actions (”love is a journey”). His reasoning was quite compelling, it seems likely this is the way our minds work and we can’t really change it. Rather interesting!
Comment by Anne — September 15, 2009 @ 1:04 am
Anne, I am interested in what you say here. There is also the idea of social objects, posited by George Herbert Mead, which are generalised tendencies to act in similar ways by large numbers of people. In other words, social objects are different from physical objects.
Comment by Stephen — September 19, 2009 @ 1:19 am
Just to add my two penn’orth and partially in answer to Chris’ point that we have to take up a point of view on organisations. Why take up one point of view rather than another.
I am tempted to enquire further into this question about whether psychological profiling is useful. I want to ask again ‘useful to whom?’ For me the idea that somethings is worth using because it is useful is insufficiently critical.Why is it that psychological profiling has become so widespread at the same time that managerialism has? One answer would be that it has a performative function which is highly ideological, ie it contibutes to creating the conditions it purports to ‘measure’. We all become familiar with the kinds of personalities that ‘good team members’ are supposed to have and learn our lessons accordingly. We are being manipulated. Moreover, it also contributes to the dominant discourse about human beings derived from cognitive psychology and shared by managerialism that we are ‘essentially’ individuals, either this sort of human being or that sort, perpetually caught up in dualisms. As atomised individuals we are easier to ‘align’ with corporate objectives. In the UK the government’s preferred mental health intervention is cognitive behavioural therapy, ostensibly on the grounds that it is the only scientific therapy which gives ‘measurable’ results. However, at the same time it decontextualises the social being: s/he becomes an individual responsible for her own happiness, rather than a social being possibly experiencing a social pathology caused for example by the way that that captialism works. My own suspicion is that psychological testing is part of the panoply of instruments of control and manipulation that goes along with the managerialist project.
Chris
Comment by Chris Mowles — September 23, 2009 @ 8:25 am
Apologies for rough typing, grammar and punctuation – I typed the above on the bus back from the airport.
C
Comment by Chris Mowles — September 24, 2009 @ 4:17 am
Though there are many quetionnaires , but i wanna know does these questionnaire related to personality questionnaires or not viz.
1.Would you prefer to be in a position where you did not have the responsibilities of making decisions?
2.Would you prefer to be in a position of power whilst servile eunuchs pleasured you with readings from Goethe? Y N nc
Would the idea of inflicting pain on game, small animals or fish prevent you from hunting or fishing?
3. Do you have any idea why that question is being asked of you at this juncture? Y N nc
4.Are you often impulsive in your behavior?
Comment by Personality Questionnaire — March 12, 2010 @ 7:23 pm