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Repertory Grid is a Conversation

One of the things which sometimes worries me is the way I hear some practitioners talking about Grid: as if were something they do to other people, like a psychological test or an interview. The purpose of this tip is to reinforce what Kelly so often indicated: that Grid is in fact a structured conversation between two people in which Grid provides the methodology for constructive listening as they both explore an issue of common concern. I worry that some people seem to focus their attention on the final analysis - the completed Grid - at the expense of the value inherent in the process of getting there.

 

Involve the interviewee in the interpretation

Let me give some examples. A query came from someone who’d done Grid interviews with a sample of managers - that is, elicited constructs and ratings - and then taken the information back to the office to enter it into the program for analysis. In the course of exploring his query I asked him whether he was going to go back to the original managers, feed the information back, get their comments and refinements, explore any new or unresolved issues. That wasn’t part of his plan. This is of course technically incorrect: the results of any ‘first pass’ with a client are unlikely to give either party the full picture. What bothered me more, though, was his surprise when I suggested it: as if, once his interviewees had yielded up their data, they had nothing more to contribute and that the analysis and interpretation lay solely in his hands. The power implications were unhealthy.

Much more disturbing was a comment made by someone who was proposing a Grid study with the members of a work-group who were not getting on well with one another. She remarked in passing that she wasn’t sure how to handle the feedback because she would be seen to be pointing out their mistakes to them. The great beauty of Grid, properly done, is that it’s a means for getting people to see things for themselves.

Remember: the interviewee’s probably even more interested than you are

Unhealthy power relationships aside, though, if you understand that Grid is a co-operative conversation you can enlist your interviewee’s cooperation in your project - wherever your project fits on the continuum from research to counselling. Your interviewee is probably going to be more interested in the dynamics of his or her construct system than you are - after all, you’ve seen lots, and it’s probably his or her first time. So for example when a counsellor asked me what should be the subject of the fourth interview with a client (she hadn’t done the first one yet) I suggested that she leave it up to the client. As long as she had a good repertoire of Grid technology - for example knowing when and how to introduce new elements like MY IDEAL SELF or perhaps suggest some constructs, she could almost certainly trust the client to see the important issues which the analysis was feeding back.

Sometimes the journey matters more than the arrival

In many Grid interviews, the journey matters much more than the arrival. If you set up a session where the elements are ‘times in my life when I learned something important,’ or ‘changes which our organisation has made in the past two years,’ or ‘times when I tried to be assertive’, the value lies much more in the thinking which the Grid process makes you do than in the final analysis chart. This is the case for any unrehearsed element set (an unrehearsed element set is one which represents concepts which you are unlikely to have given much systematic thought to. So, members of your family or people you work with are not likely to be an unrehearsed element set because you probably think about them a lot, whereas ‘times in my life when I learned something important’ almost certainly won’t have attracted the same amount of deep thought). I keep an Enquire Within® session about client relationships on my desktop; its value to me is not the shape of the analysis, interesting though it is, but the questions it makes me ask myself.

Summary

In summary: Grid is not a test. It is not something you do to people, but with or for people. It is a process, not a picture, and your expertise should lie in providing the structure rather than arriving at a judgement.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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