|
Personal Construct Psychology can provide resources and stimuli to psychologists working with people in organisational settings unaccustomed to psychological interventions, other than 'routine' psychometrics.
Story-telling
The popular Anglo-Irish writer and broadcaster, Charles Handy, models personal construct psychology well, even though none of his books make any mention of it.
If you have read any of Handy's books, you will recognise his style. Lots of stories, each with a mini-message, most of them made memorable with a telling metaphor (such as 'the empty raincoat') - all mixed with some wry jokes. The whole lot then builds up to one of his key themes. How the nature of work has changed radically during his lifetime. The changing structure of organisations has led to core, contract and peripheral workers, making up 'the shamrock organisation'. What is emphasised is the human need for meaning through work roles that have more to them than money. The need is for organisational citizenship.
The basic premise of the PCP approach is about story-telling: in the post World War II period when it emerged from the formalities of behaviourism and psychodynamic psychology, PCP was path-breaking in making the simple, profound proposition that human life is about the story each person creates. By observing how an individual or group interprets the storyline or 'Fundamental Postulate' of their employer, and how he, she or they implement it, ignore it or rebel against it, a coach can use PCP to help people unravel frustrations and muddles that result in inertia, conflict and worse at work. PCP even offers a technique to encourage the construction of personal stories as ways of making sense of distressing or puzzling experience: 'self characterisation' invites someone to write about himself, herself , a group or an organisation in the third person as a method of achieving psychological distance, and depth of perspective.
Amongst writers in PCP in England, Philidda Salmon and Dorothy Rowe, are particularly good exponents of Handy's story-telling technique of arousing a sense of wonder, of kindling the embers of hope and indicating that fellowship remains possible fairly close to you.
Inventing a character
Another leading English exponent of PCP, Tom Ravenette relates PCP neatly to coaching when he writes about 'telling a story, inventing a character'. As he portrays conversations with young people, you can readily visualise how PCP coaching can support them to invent their own character, in both senses of the word.
Its emphasis on existential choosing locates PCP coaching as a way of supporting and gently challenging people in very diverse circumstances. It supports 'life coaching' with the capable professional person who consults about their relationship with the person they are considering marrying. It can equally support coaching the managers of a scheme for troubled teenagers who left school unable to read. The life project of 'character invention' is about 'personal construing', making sense of personal and other human realities, and taking action accordingly .
Trying something new
While the aphorism, 'When you're in a hole, stop digging', is well known, it is not so often practised. The PCP philosophy of 'constructive alternativism' encourages putting a stop to routines that get nowhere, taking stock and creating simple experiments as ways of learning fresh approaches.
The inventor of PCP perhaps offers something to coaching psychologists which makes his approach stand out in the stalls of available psychologies. An engineer and physicist as well as a psychologist, George Kelly, created a tool known as a 'repertory grid', to make it easy for people being coached to recognise an implied concept linked to any concept they use to interpret their experience, and to assign numbers or ratings along a scale that links these concepts.
One of us (Rob) has used PCP to create a flexible coaching structure, known as 'CAME and FAME'. This coaching method facilitates experienced business people to design and engage in 'Conversations about Meaning and Experience' with their customers; it also - and this is the challenging part- stimulates 'Feedback about Meaning and Experience' from the customers, and supports the learning provoked by the gaps between perceptions of customers and those of the business folk about the behaviour of the business people.
While there isn't a single word that can summarise how PCP can refresh coaching, 'benign paradox' is an expression that goes a fair way to offering an inner sense of the mix of enquiry, support and undemonstrative humour associated with its practice.
We find these titles useful for learning to apply PCP to coaching:
A Psychology for Living, Peggy Dalton and Gavin Dunnett. John Wiley. 1992
Living in Time. Phillida Salmon, Dent. 1985
Invitation to Personal Construct Psychology. V Burr and T Butt. Whurr. 1992
Psychology of Personal Constructs. G Kelly, Routledge, 1992.
Personal Construct Psychology in Educational Psychology. A T Ravenette. Whurr. 1999
Friends and Enemies. Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe. Harper Collins, 2001
|
