1. Part One: The history and purpose of talent management: What is it? Does it matter? Has it now been shown to be an effective identifier for HR?

Do we need to understand the roots of talent management to really use it? Maybe not: but some understanding of the causes and reasoning are helpful so that we don’t see talent management as simply a development tool that enables good workers to be profitable or a set of tools to retain intellectual capital and knowledge capital. There are wider issues to do with more tangible business processes and to do with creating a long-tail solution to succession planning and leadership pipelines.

Most will point to the origins of talent management as being Softscape CEO, Dave Watkins, who in 1998 published a newsletter on an IT tool they had developed called Lightyear. The paper was entitled: “An appliation framework for talent management that acts as a central feedback center for all organizational functions.” It never mentions recruitment or enabling talent as we now think of it, but most agree, it is the first known use of the phrase. However, the origins of talent management as a sytematic approach to competence-based HCM (Human Capital Management) is far more complex.

Any system in OD can be open or closed or both: this is important. For example, school children needing a hall pass are in a closed system, but do not need to ask for pencils (the organisational culture dictates they should have one with them). Feedback systems were developed in the 1930s by Kurt Lewin and others to ensure that closed systems reinforce positive messages in learning and development (a learning loop) and open systems meant that feeback was actually taken on board as culture changes for the better. From this we get a host of feedback systems all of which try to get the employee to give an honest evaluation of what would make their job better. Currently we are using 360° reviews, and coaching and mentoring programs.

Kurt Lewin [1890 - 1940]

This makes one half of the equation: the human feedback or loop.

Approaching fast from another angle are the quality and statistics gurus, like Walter A Shewart, whose Learning Cycle make Lewin’s methodologies measurable, and George Box, a statistical genius at business costs, and of course, Deming. Deming believed in TQM: total quality management. His work in Japan led to the 5 s approach: clean, clear, uncluttered, no waste, on demand manufacturing and those qualitites where human-based and human-driven. A great and under-rated example of this is Yoshio Kondo’s Total Employee Involvement (TEI).  Kondo simply advocated that the time was coming when quality would equal employees committment. And, that that committment would be tied to their involvement and not simply to rewards. His ideas around the need for creativity while applying TQM (Total Quality Management) are, if anything, more relevant today than they were in 1989 when he published Human Motivation: A Key Factor for Management.

Both approaches, the feedback loop and the quality approach were productive, but they needed a synthesis.  It all culminated in the publication in 1990 of an extraordinary book that literally changed how companies saw HR. Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization not only called for this seismic shift and just in time for the internet boom, but gave people all the tools they needed to implement the process.

The Fifth Dicipline showed different ways to do three things: firstly, to “foster aspirations”, secondly, to “create reflective conversations” and finally to “understand complexity”. These was achieved by the five disciplines: firstly, develop “personal mastery” and vision, secondly, examine “mental modes” and the assumptions of any organisation, thirdly, build shared vision, fourthly, get the team “genuinely thinking together”, and finally the fifth discipline is “systems thinking”, an amalgamation of all of these. It also advocated awareness of laws that would help and hinder the process. It was, and still is, enormously influential, and even though it failed to see recruitment, leadership pipelines, and networking per se it hints at all of them. Most of all though, Senge is highly intelegant: simple, intelligent, and elegant in his exposition and thinking. Here was a book everyone could follow - and many did.

From this we get not only the Learning Organization (one that listens and takes on board it’s own information) but also the idea that man management falls short: there is capital in the ideas and feedback of workers. While Senge cannot take credit for the idea of Human Capital, the opening of systems meant that seniors in the company has already seen bottom line value in their workers ideas rather than just their productivity; but the from Taylorism and army developed ideas of IQ and command and control into new frontiers of Howard Gardner’s frames (How we think about problems determines how we choose to solve that problem) and Goleman’s work on EQ and Emotional Intelligence and so on complete a very important change in work: from a manufacturing and industrial worker to the knowledge worker.

All of these factor led in the 1990 to re-engineering and out that came the idea of Intellectual Capital. The best analogy I can think of for intellectual capital is a computer: the computer loses its value as a commodity from the moment you buy it, but the information it holds, its equity, is worth much more than the computer itself. This is true for us too: our knowledge and experience within an organisation cannot just be transferred to a new employee, we learn culture, we know more than just facts, look at the human realtionships and networks for a start. Business Week in 2006 had a great story about a maintenance manager in London who was given a S-Class Mercedes by the CEO. They had replaced him after 15 years with a subcontracted firm, witihn eight weeks they couldn’t work the heating, make the plumbing work, or find out why the air conditioners weren’t working. Smart guy: good intellectual capital!

Intellectual Capital’s leading exponent was a Swede working for Skandia, Lief Edvinsson, who had in turn taken on board the groundwork laid by a fellow Swede, Karl-Erik Sveiby and Hiroyuki Itami’s excellent Mobilizing Invisible Assets, published by Thomas W Roehl in 1991 it led to the idea that the ideas people had were as much assets as any machinery, land or inventory. While hardly a new ide
a in iteself it did provide a way to quantify on the balance sheet the intellectual capital of a company.

Hiroyuki Itami

So now we have all the parts of one side of the equation: listening and evaluating, quality systems and intellectual capital. The other part of the equation was very simple: employers needed brains, and so, the hunt for talent was on. Like racehorses, if you could find the best early on and develop some way of making them stay, the potential profits were huge.

The talent process was initially just a way to hunt for graduates before they sent off their CVs. From the Universities came the Milk Round, where top companies looking for top recruits could have a pre-process face to face. This has now turned into global career fairs with top Blue Chips seeking talent from all areas.

Recruitment shifted dramatically in the 1960s in the 1970s from simply  a job market where jobs where available and full employment was the reality to the massive depression of the early Seventies. The Eighties saw an upswing in the economy and crucially Business became the game to be in: employees were educating themselves, the brightest and best were no longer looking for jobs for life; they wanted statues, reward, and responsibility over security. With the onset of IT after 1994 we see a further crucial change: unlike Ford and his manufacturing base where manpower is needed, in the Knowledge Economy, specialism is in the hands of the few and they are the talent. You either know SAP or you don’t, you can either write COBOL or you can’t, no longer is it just take a kid, train them in sales, if they do well promote them; the game changed.

What did not change was that organizations acknowledged that a good organization needed both a good culture and that that came, not from theories and GANT charts, but from its leaders and its people. Now it seems just common sense, but as IBM proved, the balance is between being an organization that demands people act in an exact way (The Blue Book for employees even outlined dinner conversations for middle managers) and Microsoft, who integrated new techniques, sought talent, and did it right during the 90s.

In conclusion, having some understanding that quality and feedback process should shape a talent process, and that it should not just be a recruitment process matters. As we shall see in the next part, talent is about identification, but, without the right culture talent leaves; and we don’t want that investment bolting, do we?

Introduction

Talent management is narrowly defined as recruiting, aligning, retaining and enabling the best within an organisation. Talent is, simply, all about organisations having individuals who make a significantly profitable long-term contribution.

This course will give you an understanding and overview of the thinking behind and application of talent management programs.

This course is split into six parts:

1. Part One: the history and purpose of talent management
2. Part Two: the talent process in organisational strategy
3. Part Three: setting up a talent program
4. Part Four: finding talent
5. Part Five: the key skill: retaining and engaging talent
6. Part Six: assessment, metrics, and proving the ROI
7. Part Seven: what might the future of talent management hold?
8. Part Eight: summary and conclusion and a talent checklist

1. Part One: The history and purpose of talent management: What is it? Does it matter? Has it now been shown to be an effective identifier for HR?

2. Part Two: The talent process in organisational strategy: talent management’s success is only partly determined by talent, as significantly there must be strategic alignment and buy-in at the most senior level. This part of the course looks at the overall strategic goals and the big picture aims of talent management.

3. Part Three: Setting up a talent program: What are the goals? What are the costs? What are the risks vs. rewards? What is the expected ROI? We will look at both standard and non-standard models within talent management from alignment, building a talent pipeline, and gap identification; through to tools such a self-election & two-step promotion, onto succession planning and offboarding and more; and asks what works and why.

4. Part Four: Finding Talent. So you’re ready: how do you define the talent you want? Where and how are you going to find that find talent? How can the recruitment process help talent? What is talent looking for?

5. Part Five: The Key Skill: aligning, retaining, and engaging talent. The core of any talent process is retention and engagement: having found your star and invested in early promotion and it’s all looking good; now others start sniffing round - how do you keep the talent without losing perspective? What incentives and motivators can the organisation offer that won’t break the budget but will keep talent? What career paths and models are in place for talent and what do you expect from talent? In a fully mobile world should talent be retained? Can talent management and succession planning ever become two halves of the same process?

6. Part Six: Assessment, metrics, and proving the ROI. Good performance management, clear internal processes, and excellence in the interface between the IT data and its applied use is essential for talent management - here we look at the systems and OD interface and ask how the mix of both human and IT resources can significantly improve the talent process.

7. Part Seven: What might the future of talent management hold? As more and more organisations recognize the value of a good talent and performance process we ask what the future holds and what other models may add value to current talent models.

8. Part Eight: Summary and Conclusion; and a Talent Checklist.

We hope you enjoy this course and that it helps your thinking around talent - we wish you a great learning 2010!

Leonardo Da Vinci - View Of A Skull c.1489 (Pen and Ink), Galleria dell’Accademia, Venezia

I spend a lot of time talking at schools about life, money, careers, and yes, health. I know it is next to useless to say to a teenager “Don’t Do Drugs!” - however, show then MRI scans of damage to the hippocampus from ecstasy use, or current statistics of early onset Alzheimer’s in chronic cannabis users, or psychiatric statistics of drug involvement in teenage schizophrenia and manic / depressive behaviour, or finally, amputees testimonies from collapsed veins cutting off circulation and how they just got started with gateway drugs, and yes, you get some interest.

So a little science regarding the incredible dangers of anorexia on the system is justified occasionally. The research lead by Dr Miriam Bredella, and presented at the Radiological Society of North America last weekend is compelling. Bone isn’t just there to hold up the muscle and stop us looking like a big pancake; it is essential for disease management, renewal of red and white blood cells, and for posture.

The damage to looks as well as the immune system is seriously dangerous, and even irreversible. Given that the largest source of fat in the human body is not our behinds but our brains. The body must have fat to survive and grow. It will take it from the last available source: the brain. Teenage brains are plastic; this means they are growing and changing, depriving the brain of its base composite has horrific effects on intelligence, IQ, careers, and emotional lives. Awful. Now we are seeing that the same is true for bone structure.

We need to find a way to get beyond media imaging into pictures of health and that starts with education. Hope it helps.

Children and teenagers with even mild cases of anorexia exhibit abnormal bone structure, according to a new study appearing in the December issue of Radiology and presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

“Adolescence is the most critical period for growth of bone mass, and the onset of anorexia interferes with that process,” said Miriam A. Bredella, M.D., musculoskeletal radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Impairment of bone development may permanently alter bone structure and increase the risk of fractures and osteoporosis in adult life.”

Anorexia is an eating disorder characterized by emaciation, distorted body image and intense fear of gaining weight. People with the disorder are obsessed with weight control and often perceive themselves as overweight, even when they are dangerously thin. The disorder primarily occurs among young women and affects one in 100 adolescent girls, according to the National Women’s Health Information Center.

Among the many health problems associated with anorexia is bone loss. Typically, dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is used to test bone mineral density in adolescents with anorexia.

Dr. Bredella and colleagues set out to determine if alterations in bone structure occur before significant decreases in bone mineral density become evident.

The researchers used high-resolution, flat-panel volume computed tomography (CT) and DXA to study 10 adolescent girls, age 13 to 18, with mild anorexia and 10 age-matched girls without the disorder. The new, high-resolution CT exam allowed the researchers to identify differences in bone structure between the patients with anorexia and the healthy controls, whereas bone mineral density measurements obtained using DXA did not.

The results showed that while there was not a significant difference in bone mineral density between the anorexic patients and the healthy control group, there were significant structural differences, indicating that changes in bone structure begin to occur in anorexic patients well before decreases in bone density.

“Our data suggest that reassuring values of bone mineral density obtained using DXA may not reflect the true status of bone structure in this undernourished population,” Dr. Bredella said. “In patients with anorexia, bone structure should be analyzed to detect abnormal bone health. Flat-panel volume CT allows the examination of bone at high resolution with relatively low radiation exposure making it a suitable technique for evaluation of bone structure in adolescent patients.”

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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“Distal Radius in Adolescent Girls with Anorexia Nervosa: Trabecular Structure Analysis with Very High Resolution Flat-Panel Volume CT.” Collaborating with Dr. Bredella on this paper were Madhusmita Misra, M.D., Karen K. Miller, M.D., Ijad Madisch, M.D., Ammar Sarwar, M.D., Arnold Cheung, M.D., Anne Klibanski, M.D., and Rajiv Gupta, M.D., Ph.D.

Yes, this is a blog about the brain and work, but as I was going through the medical sites I cam across this fascinating piece from Oxford University and a team led by Professor Thomas Helleday that hasn’t appeared on Digg or other aggregate sites.

Here is the article by Jonathan Wood from the OxSciBlog site:

A new concept for cancer therapy could lead to treatments personalised to each patient’s tumour without any side effects, says Professor Thomas Helleday, who is pioneering the idea at Oxford University [watch a video describing this work].

He believes cancer may have an ‘Achilles’ heel’: The genetic damage that builds up in cancer cells and the subsequent escape from the body’s normal controls on growth may also make them very susceptible to treatments that block repair of DNA.

‘DNA damage is a prerequisite for most cancers,’ explains Professor Helleday of the Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology at Oxford University. ‘Whether that damage is a result of the tar in cigarettes, toxins or genetic and environmental factors, it can result in mutations that alter genes. That genetic instability drives cancer.’

Normal cells have many pathways and mechanisms to correct and repair DNA breaks and damage as they occur. These are crucial to maintain the normal functioning of the cell. If the damage is too great, the cells are either killed by a process called apoptosis or their growth and division is arrested so that the damage doesn’t go any further.

Many cancers have defects in one or more repair processes which enables them to sidestep these controls. ‘We can exploit these defects,’ says Professor Helleday. ‘If we can block the remaining repair systems, the body will knock out the cancer cells. Normal cells with a full set of repair kits will be fine.’

Such treatments, designed to each patient’s individual cancer, should mean patients experience few, if any, side effects from the treatment. It would be a great advance over standard chemotherapy techniques which are toxic to all dividing cells.

Professor Helleday’s group have studied defects in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes which predispose women to developing breast and ovarian cancer. In these cancers, a pathway that repairs mistakes when DNA is replicated no longer works, and the cancer cells are reliant on a different process based on a protein called PARP for survival.

The researchers showed that these breast and ovarian cancers could be targeted using an existing drug that inhibits the PARP protein. The idea has now been licensed to Astra Zeneca and phase II clinical trials of the drug involving a few hundred patients began in May 2007.

‘The results are better than expected,’ says Professor Helleday. ‘I thought we might see the cancers in these people stop growing. But in many cases the drug is killing off the cancer cells. The tumours have shrunk substantially and the patients report no serious side effects.’

Professor Helleday is sure this can be a general concept for tackling many cancers: ‘If there are two possible pathways for repairing damage and one is lost in a cancer, we can target the second one. This is called synthetic lethality as the drug is not toxic on it own – only for the cancer cells with this extra defect.’

‘In the future, you could imagine screening a patient’s cancer for defects, picking out the precise inhibitors to target the remaining DNA repair pathways, and treat that person’s tumour in a very targeted way.’

‘We know of thousands of these pathways in yeast. We want to extend this knowledge into humans so we can exploit them and come up with selectively toxic therapies with no side effects and no damage to normal tissue,’ he says.

Truly amazing stuff!

It is good to be asked back again.

When the people asking are a branch of the United Nations then it is a definite privilege and an honour.

I had a great morning with 85 post-graduate students, from a very wide range of nations including China and Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania, Gambia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Malawi, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Ecuador, Peru, Latvia, and even from here in Sweden. (My apologies to those who represent countries I may have left out). Many are women. And all are exceptional.

All have been chosen by their governments, companies, and organizations to do the courses in advanced marine management. I was invited to compliment the academic with a healthy dose of leadership training. Rather tahn adopting a command-control or technical model I talked on Authentic Leadership. We had a blast.

I am very grateful to academic dean, Prof. Patrick Donner, and to all his students, for their efforts. Honestly this is why I work: to have so many people from so many nations on one site like the World Maritime University is a wonderful opportunity to talk about what leadership is becoming and how we achieve changes that will improve both work and life in the modern world.

You may think that you’re a pretty positive person. But we’re betting no matter how hard you try, you wouldn’t be able to out-happy Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk who’s been nicknamed “the happiest man on earth.”

Seem like a stretch? We’re not just claiming that title based on the fact that Ricard is never seen without a smile, or that monks are generally a pretty beatific bunch – he’s got science on his side, too. In 2004, researchers at University of Wisconsin conducted a study on the brain patterns of hundreds of volunteers from different walks of life. The bell curve of the MRI measurements fell between +0.3 (a Sylvia Plath acolyte, no doubt) to -0.3 (Richard Simmons, perhaps?). But Ricard alone achieved an astonishing score of -0.45 – a level of joy so far above the others that his score was nearly off the chart.

So how did Ricard become the world’s happiest man? The 60-year-old monk didn’t always live a quiet life in the Himalayan mountains – as a young man, he was lauded as one of the world’s most promising biologists. But in 1972, he dropped out of the stressful world of French academia, trading in his laboratory for a monastery in Darjeeling, India, where he studied under Tibetan master Kangyur Rinpoche. In the years since, he has become well known as an author and photographer, and he serves as the Dalai Lama’s personal translator in France. He has devoted his life to the study of Buddhist philosophy and the art of happiness – and he firmly believes that the rest of us can achieve his incredible level of joy, too.

“The mind is malleable,” Ricard told The Independent. “Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.”

To fill your life with joy, he said, you must recognize what already makes you happy, and work to change your mental balance. “You have to identify what it is in that situation that makes you happy. It’s as though you’re making a journey, and you look in your rucksack to find it half filled with provisions, half with stones. You need to take out the stones and put in more provisions.”

In his new book, Happiness, Ricard serves as your own personal cross-trainer in the art of happiness, with advice on meditative exercises to increase peace of mind, and his own philosophies on how to fill your life with joy. With his help, you might just be able to tune out your noisy neighbor’s Metallica cover band for a few minutes, and imagine you’re relaxing on a private beach instead. If you can’t make it out to visit a Buddhist monastery any time soon, his book might just be the relief you need.

<a href=http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/191>Here</a> is video of Ricard speaking at the 2004 TED conference.

 Wynton Marsalis with the Lincoln Jazz Orchestra, De Bijloke, Ghent
Source:  Flickr (Creative Commons License)

A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.

This keyboard was specially designed for a study to assess brain activity in jazz musicians during improvisation. Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnets could attract.

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

In a report published Feb. 27 in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, the scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous.”

Though many recent studies have focused on understanding what parts of a person’s brain are active when listening to music, Limb says few have delved into brain activity while music is being spontaneously composed.

Curious about his own “brain on jazz,” he and a colleague, Allen R. Braun, M.D., of NIDCD, devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.

For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.

The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is involved in some mental task, for example.

Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate while they’re playing it.

Each musician first took part in four different exercises designed to separate out the brain activity involved in playing simple memorized piano pieces and activity while improvising their music. While lying in the fMRI machine with the special keyboard propped on their laps, the pianists all began by playing the C-major scale, a well-memorized order of notes that every beginner learns. With the sound of a metronome playing over the headphones, the musicians were instructed to play the scale, making sure that each volunteer played the same notes with the same timing.

In the second exercise, the pianists were asked to improvise in time with the metronome. They were asked to use quarter notes on the C-major scale, but could play any of these notes that they wanted.

Next, the musicians were asked to play an original blues melody that they all memorized in advance, while a recorded jazz quartet that complemented the tune played in the background. In the last exercise, the musicians were told to improvise their own tunes with the same recorded jazz quartet.

Limb and Braun then analyzed the brain scans. Since the brain areas activated during memorized playing are parts that tend to be active during any kind of piano playing, the researchers subtracted those images from ones taken during improvisation. Left only with brain activity unique to improvisation, the scientists saw strikingly similar patterns, regardless of whether the musicians were doing simple improvisation on the C-major scale or playing more complex tunes with the jazz quartet.

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Limb notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.

For additional information, go to:
http://hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/limb.html
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/jazz

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

“We work for 45 years, we work more than we are in any other relationship. You’ll see the people you work with more than you’ll see your children, partners, or anybody else. We work more than we sleep, eat, or any other human activity.

When we are 45 years old, we have worked for 20 years already, and yet we are only half-way through work with another 20 years ahead of us. How can we keep going? What gives us long-term motivation? What will keep us going? What will stop work being grey? Crushing? Boring?”

From “The Way of Intelegance” seminar introduction.

Hi, and welcome to the new course from Business Intelegant. Spread over 5 days (With an occassional break of a day or two when work gets busy for me), this course looks at some of the main types and tools used in one of the most interesting ways to answer that quote above: work psychology.

Work psychology, also called organizational psychology or I/O - Industrial / Organizational psychology is more than simply testing and evaluating candidates, or helping HR to design good job descriptions.

It’s even more than the strategic implementation of HR, the building and fostering of culture within organizations, and the research and practical tools and work design that aim to make work better.

It’s also been for a hundred years one of the most fertile grounds for reaping new ideas about what work can be - how work can help evolve new societies, how work can be creative, sustaining, and promote integrity and drive, rather than work as grey, boring, crushing and just plain yuk.

Scientists and thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Elton Mayo, Reg Revans, Rensis Likert, Chris Agyris, Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, and Otto Scharmer. We will talk about the theories that have driven the field in leadership, organization development, and new thinking and look at theories like Action Research, Action Learning, Organization Development, Force Field Analysis, 360° Feedback, Emotional Intelligence, Theory U, to names a few, and hopefully they’ll all be done is an Intelegant fashion -which aims for simple, intelligent, elegant approaches.

We will also look at work psychology as a academic and practical scientific discipline. It is only a slight exaggeration to say if ts human and works then it has been the subject of a paper: from induction to entrepreneurial leadership, to the interaction of work and family, to promotion, discipline, and reward, onto retirement and beyond all aspects of human behaviour at work is constantly under study.

Above all work psychology is about helping us to make work a better experience through a clearer understanding of the what work is. Ideally work should be a good experience - and a profitable one, for sure - and one that feeds and nourishes the other parts of our lives without dominating it.

I believe the more we learn about work the better work becomes. It doesn’t matter what you work with, the basic tenets that make all work workable, and the job a success, nearly always apply.

I hope you will join me on this journey and that work becomes more interesting - no matter what your aims are - as a result.