The Grid Interview Gives You Lots of Opportunities to Probe

A few examples to illustrate:

Keep the Flow Going

The most important priority when you’re interviewing someone new to Grid is to make sure that they’re comfortable with the two-against-one triadic comparison process. Some people take to this very quickly and produce construct after construct. Others find it difficult at first and may need a little help - you can shuffle the cards around for them, for example. If someone’s really flowing, don’t stop them; but if it’s difficult, you could move to laddering up (which pole of the construct do you prefer, in terms of the purpose), or start to do some ratings of elements on constructs. After a little work with laddering or rating, your interviewee is likely to gain insight about constructs and how they work, and you can go back to doing some more triadic comparisons. In other words, you don’t have to get all the constructs out first before starting to work with them. You can always go back for more. What’s important is that the interviewee feels comfortable with the process.

Pause and Assign Priorities

Another way to get a new perspective on the information generated is to ask the interviewee to sort the constructs into high, medium, and low priorities. This is useful if you’ve got a great many constructs and you’d like to work only with the high priority ones for a while; but it also enables you to ask the interviewee about the characteristics which separate the three groups. This can give you some more constructs, or take you naturally into laddering.

Use the Differentiation Process

With Enquire Within, you can start to differentiate between highly correlated elements or constructs on a Grid as small as 6 x 6. Differentiation is a product of the dendritic analysis, where the program looks for elements which are highly correlated and asks for a construct which will ‘split’ the two - in other words, for a construct on which one element will rate at one end of the scale and the other element at the other end. Or, when you are working with constructs, it asks for a new element which will be rated one way by one construct and the other way by the second. Differentiation is a highly focussed search whose purpose is obvious to the interviewee, and the elements or constructs it produces are almost guaranteed to be relevant to your purpose.

Offer or Ask for New Elements or Constructs

As you work your way through the interview, you can introduce new elements or constructs as appropriate to your purpose. For example, if you were in a counselling situation with someone who was not happy with their relationship with their boss, you might begin by using the existing team members, plus MY BOSS and MYSELF, as elements, and then introduce one or two new elements which give expression to your counselling agenda - for example, MYSELF AS MY BOSS WOULD LIKE ME TO BE, or MY BOSS AS I WOULD LIKE HER TO BE, or MYSELF AS I WOULD LIKE TO BE. Introducing imaginary or ‘ideal’ elements part-way through the interview in this way is often the best way of exploring this kind of dissonance, rather than having them in the element set from the beginning, because their abstract quality may make them difficult to work with from the start. Similarly you might offer a new construct: if for example you were doing market research on holiday destinations, you might offer a construct made me decide never to go there again - not so important and see what constructs were correlated with it. Enquire Within allows you to enter new elements or constructs at any stage in the process and have them brought into the dendritic analysis, so that you can immediately look for the difference between MYSELF and MYSELF AS MY BOSS WOULD LIKE ME TO BE, and go into a discussion about where the differences are, do they matter, whose problem are they, and what would have to change in order to resolve any important differences.

Summary

To summarise: the most important goal, particularly at the beginning of the interview, is to have the interviewee feel comfortable with the process and fluent. If they’re producing lots of constructs, go with the flow. If it’s difficult, start to use the constructs in some way which will make their purpose more apparent - laddering up or down, rating, looking at the matrix, differentiation ... you can always go back later. You don’t have to stick to a prescribed order of doing things in order to get the best out of Grid.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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