Day Two: Expectations And Realities - Getting To Grounded Work

Having seen on Day One that psychology could be applied successfully in organizations, today I want to look at a couple of the biggest movements in work psychology that arose out of work psychology rather than management thinking.

The first led to the OD movement, Organization Development began with action. Two types of action: Action Research and Action Learning. In a sentence both emphasize self-awareness as the key to organizations developing a strategic edge over the competition and to sustained growth and the strength to cope with change and when things go wrong.

 

Kurt Lewin [1890 - 1947]

Action Research was the child of one of the most brilliant minds ever in psychology, Kurt Lewin. Lewin was simply a brilliant mind, and a very good scientist. Many attribute the growth and impetus of social psychology and organizational psychology to him, and he influenced many outside of his specialist areas with his ideas and thinking.

The most famous example being his work on genidentity, also known as counterpart theory, that looks a the commonality between physics and biology to explain how objects arrive to be as they are - and whether they remain the same when the original materials are gone - for example, new cells in the human body, or the famous logic puzzle of the Ship of Thesus, where all parts of the ship are replaced - is it still the same ship? Fpr physicists these are important questions. It was no doubt this line of thought that seems to have turned Lewin from being a behavorist to a gestalt psychologist.

Behavorism initally looks very promising in psychology. It was, by far, the most influential movement in lab and experimental psychology in the early parts of the twentieth century, especially in America. Behavorism relies on scientific evidence, observation, and denies subjective experience. It you can’t produce the same result again it ain’t valid.

The only problem with this is that much of what psychology deals with: why do we think about things differently, what is the mind, why do we make decisions differently etc; are subjective.

Franz Brentano [1838 - 1917]

This gave rise to the Gestalt school in Berlin with its roots in Franz Brentano’s very influential lectures in Vienna from 1874 - 1895. Among Brentano’s circle that he is known to have directly influence include his most famous student Sigmund Freud, as well as the founder of anthroposophy Rudolph Steiner, the originator of the phemenology school, Edmund Husserl, which stated that all we know about the world is how our mind’s experience them, and the originator of the idea of the Gestalt, Christian von Ehrenfels. Bretano’s idea that the relation between the mind and the outside world is the relationship of the human condition was a hugely influential one.

Christian Von Ehrenfels [1859 - 1932]

Von Ehrenfels’ idea of the gestalt, along with Husserl phenomenology, found a champion of his cause in Max Wertheimer with is two of his colleagues Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka at the University of Frankfurt in 1912. Wertheimer began by looking at the phenomenon of human sight and light and kept wondering how we are able to piece together images from patterns rather than the whole.

Max Wertheimer [1880 - 1943]

These three went on to establish the Gestalt movement in Berlin. (Not to be confused with gestalt therapy also called empty chair therapy.) Wertheimer has read Ehrenfels’ work where the term gestalt (Literally: form) was coined to mean that sum of the whole is not only greater than its parts, but is also not simply put together in sequence, like say a computer, but rather arises organically from all directions. While juxtaposed to this, but in conjunction, structure does make up wholeness. It was influential thinking that and eventually would lead to cognitive psychology replacing behavorism..

In his own words:

“The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clearcut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole.”
Social Research, 11 (translation of lecture at the Kant Society, Berlin, 1924).

Gestalt was obviously a pretty useful way to think about how the mind and brain work. It was also a way to think about synergy and our social interactions in groups and organizations as surely the whole idea of the effect of an organization is to achieve something greater than the sum of the parts. It is also very sueful in problem solving as it asks who the parts relate to the whole, and how the whole relates to the parts; it also considers the gaps to be important

So back to Kurt Lewin.

Lewin had begun as a behavorist, but found in Gestalt what he had been missing: why groups work. He argued that group work should be better than it was, that group work should produce results, and that with self-awareness the group should get better and better at what they do.

Lewin began by looking at what stops us achieving our goals. He developed the idea and called it force field analysis. Asking what forces were stopping or helping us to go from our current state to our desired state helped groups to see the invisible problems more clearly - but identifying the problems alone wasn’t enough.

Lewin had the gumption to ask what about the people themselves? Aren’t we as often as not ourselves responsible for creating the force fields, for putting barriers in the way and making life difficult for the group?

Here, force field analysis helped, but the fact remained that though we see the fault in others easily we are slow to acknowledge it in ourselves.

The issue is not just how to tell someone what they need to do to change, or even get them to listen and understand that, the problem is to keep working with them effectively afterwards.

So Action Research.

Action research is a way of framing group work that allows people to create a learning environment, or in Lewin’s phrase a “community of practice”, it is both problem solving and a strategical tool that allows organizations to become more self-aware.

How does it work?

Well, it works on a learning loop. Loops are common in quality: plan, act, check, re-evaluate, we learn as we’re doing. They range from a simple plan-check-do cycle to more advanced cycles like Six Sigma and OODA loops. The latter helped fighter pilots to predict likely behavior of enemy pilots in Vietnam, six sigma developed by motorola reduces error to six parts or less in a million, handy in manufacturing.

Lewin coined the term feedback from electrical engineering to mean constructive criticism. More than that though action research is about building a non-judgemental culture in an organization where people genuinely listen to each other rather than simply pushing their viewpoint.

From the IDEAS site

Let us now cross the Atlantic to Britain.

And Reg Revans.

Reg Revans [1907 - 2003]

 

Revans was originally an astrophysicist studying with both Rutherford and Thompson at the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge University. I am lucky enough to have met those who knew Revans well, and the most common trait I have heard is that he was genuinely a humble man. He chose to leave his work in Cambridge to move instead to the Essex education board as he was convinced that he was an educator. He went on to beome the director of education between 1945-1950 of one of Britain’s largest employees: the National Coal Board.

 

While there he developed his ideas around Action Learning.

 

He developed a simple formula to express why people don’t succeed at work, and what they needed to do to remedy that:

 

L = P + Q

 

L is for learning. P = programmed knowledge (What we have been taught) and Q is for insightful questioning. So learning is a combination of knowledge and good questions. There are four major questions Who? Where? What? When? which should cover most aspects of the Q part of the equation.

 

Revans’ and Lewin’s point is entirely valid: we would rather damage our relationships in an organization rather than use some simple tools to acquire the wherewithal to learn how to genuinely learn and develop that organization effectively.

 

While it helps to have a practioner as an impartial facilitator the point is to find the heart and willingness to genuinely learn from each other. Management philosophy has picked up on this as we move more and more away from command and control structures to praticipative work.

 

Work psychology seeks to bring out the best in the organization, and Lewin and Revans both spent their lives dedicated to the idea that work should not be grey, crushing, or boring.

 

The other major point of the Action schools is that it moved work psychology into the workplace as a strategic tool to help individuals and companies develop strategies for excellence.

 

Day Three: Moving Beyond Humanistic Psychologies To The Modern Workplace