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Posts Tagged ‘Personal Development’

You’re not to think you are anything special.

Posted in Henley Business School, My PhD and related things, Personal Development, tagged , , on January 28, 2013 | 3 Comments »

The title of this post is explained at the end, so read on to find out – or skip to the bottom.

After a sprint through several Personal Development workshops in January, both at Henley and in several European countries, it’s perhaps time for a breather to see what needs to be noticed. A while ago I might have just said “time to reflect”, as a lot us do, as if the act of reflection was somehow predicated on a deliberate switch from one mode or model of thinking to another. I’m now no longer sure this is a helpful way to look at it. And even less sure that it’s truly accurate. I’m using some of this post as a space for ideas to work themselves around each other, and so want to ask whether there are any things to do with reflection about which one can be sure. The short list below covers some of what has been occurring to me lately:

1. It struck me the other day that the senses are not five in number but actually one, in sum. Our demarcation of one sense from another in perception is artificial. This makes perfect sense to me, though I think the idea would need expansion to convince anyone else. This means that reflection, like all perception, is actually a systemic process, not a systematic one. Unless we understand how systems work, we will never understand the function that reflection has in our learning. I think that the ideas of many of the seminal originators of reflection, in their own ways acknowledge this. But those complex ideas tend to become worn smooth over time by constant reproduction, reinterpretation and simplification by others.

2. What we call reflection is just our punctuation of what is actually a constant flow of experience. We can’t easily prevent ourselves doing this since we hold very dearly to the idea that conscious purpose is, to borrow Sellar and Yeatman’s memorable phrase, “a good thing”. The need to know “to what end?” drives many different varieties of and purposes for reflection, but in every case the process we use is much the same. While helpful in the short-term and therefore essential in formal learning among adults, ultimately our attachment to and affection for conscious purpose in reflection may be counter-productive and in error (right now, this is just a hunch!).

3. Two common denominators seem to anchor everyone’s experience of reflection. The first is that it involves some form of noticing a difference, and the second is that the difference noticed will relate in some way to “unfinished business”. I hope I will be able to expand on this (even explain it…) in future blog postings.

So, that’s my current bedside thinking and my rehearsal of big ideas. The workshops this month have been really fantastic to run. They have, I think, really hit the spot with their place in the curriculum, and are in tune with the collective experience of the intakes at that point. I think this makes all the difference. There are just some things that would be pointless to say at the start (unless one was planning to dump an “I told you so” on people later) but which are liberating to play with later on. For example, I’m glad we don’t start the MBA with lots of goal setting, but with a challenge to how people behave, think and see themselves. If you don’t get that bit right, then the planning would probably resemble the shape of the past, not the future. Also, talking about what “career” means doesn’t make much sense too early in the MBA. Generally, people who are in mid-career don’t need to make any decisions about career steps and goals until they have a certain vocabulary, fluency and confidence which is attained through hard work by about the mid-point. That is actually when career things tend to happen anyway. So I’m glad that the thoughtful approach seems to be paying off. Still, there are always ways in which this could be better, and I’m aware that there is more that is needed in order for the MBA experience to be something remarkable.

This month I was also able to start playing with application of ideas and thinking from the PhD for the first time. This is to a group which was less restricted than in the context of the MBA, and therefore a good challenge because that particular audience was not a captive one (the venue, Gam3 in Copenhagen was unusual too, and it’s worth checking out their web site to see why).

It went pretty much as I had hoped, though I talked more than I let them talk. I was left also wondering whether I could do such a thing without having PowerPoint blazing away in the background. I do try to use it as a graphic guide or creative prompt, and not as just a horribly magnified set of speaker notes, but even so. The best speakers on TED seem to be the ones who just, well, speak, and who hold the audience with the power of imagination and the eloquence of their choice of words. Have I become so entrenched in believing that “it is done this way” (and the PD workshops are no different – the tyranny of the slide pack is also part of the expectation of the group) that I may be missing something here…?

So, the title of this blog is my understanding of the Laws of Jante (10 rules set out originally in the 1930s in a novel by Aksel Sandemose), which amount to a cultural explanation of the collective attitude in Danish society toward the delicate relationship between the individual success and the group identity. “You’re not to think you are anything special” is the first of these, and they are deliberately written in a rather negative overtone. I don’t think this is the same as the English sentiment of not “acting above your station” because that’s an affirmation of a society with rigid class divides and appropriate behaviours at each level. The Danes are very protective, it seems, of everyone’s right to object to the idea of anyone else telling them what to think or behaving as if they were better than anyone else. I’m not sure if this means they like to “cut people down to size” who are “too big for their boots” (see how metaphor gets us from one idea to another without Passing Go…).

Anyway, I quite liked the atmosphere in Copenhagen, so they must be doing something right.

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The fifth PD Principle – Align your Personal purpose to the purpose of Business

Posted in Observations about life, Personal Development, tagged , , on June 9, 2012 | 1 Comment »

For three reasons, it feels as though this particular point has a bit of a minefield to cross to reach you.

First, whenever we ask “what is the purpose of business?” (which by the way on most MBA courses is seldom), there is a temptation to throw back an answer that leaves us none the wiser. If the answer is “to make a profit”, or “grow”, or “create shareholder value”‘ then it would surely be a fairly easy task to continue the interrogation beyond this illusory end-game of naming  abstractions by asking “and what is the purpose of… (e.g. profit, etc.)”. If such a ‘thing’ as money were really the purpose of business, it would surely be, ultimately, a hollow one. Of course, a danger here is that the question may be mis-heard as “what’s the purpose of your business?”, thus restricting the response to one element of the system only and isolating the business or organisation from its environment. In ecology, the unit of survival is not the individual (or even the population) it is the organism and its environment. You can’t consider one without the other.

It has to be considered that there’s another possibility; that the purpose of business may be such a given, a taken-for-granted, or so lost in history that we are just unable to see it.

Secondly,  when we come to pose the question “what is Personal purpose?”, we are in danger of straying into areas of philosophy that have remained contentious for as long as this enormous question has been around. If this has eluded great thinkers, academics and learned scholars for millenia,  what chance have we got?

Thirdly, what do we mean when we say that two things should align? The dictionary offers three meanings for this word, “to arrange in a line or to be parallel”, “to move or adjust to be in proper relationship or orientation with”, and “to ally with a cause”. Which one is it?

So one element of the equation appears too concrete, another too abstract, and their constellation ambiguously either one of linear or relational arrangement (systemic or political). Yet if we are to take this whole Personal Development thing seriously in a management context, we have to find a way of making sense of it. Naturally, I think the preceding four principles of PD help frame an answer in the following ways:

1. Business, commerce, trade and the like are ideas that only exist in context of other things. The purpose of business is therefore a social matter, and its purpose cannot be decided at the level of the firm, by management or shareholders alone, nor in splendid isolation at the level of politicians and legislators. I would suggest that the purpose of business is not any end point or a thing at all but rather it is a process. What’s more, given that we’re all in this together (in a finitely-sized and resourced world), a sustainable process that concerns itself with social good. Anything else is just selfish and short-sighted. Of course, at the level of the organisation, the other answers (making money, creating wealth etc.) are important things but they only make sense when placed in service to this greater purpose.

2. Personal purpose is certainly experienced at the psychological level, emergent from (and part of) the social, and which I would suggest is the highest level of knowing available to us. We would need transcend the self in order to do away with the need to ask the question, so in the main we probably need to keep and open mind and keen eye on our beliefs about our purpose and see where we get. If the individual (psychologically, not biologically) is explained by values at the level of the social, then there must be a close relationship between our core values as experienced by us individually and the purpose of business (as outlined above).

3. Alignment is to be understood in terms of constellation, a matter of dynamic, relational positioning and repositioning of elements in a system.

In conclusion, then, this 5th principle, “Align your Personal purpose with the purpose of Business”, is not a call to toe the corporate line or slavishly put aside personal values in the pursuit of the company’s vision. It’s actually a challenge to think at another, higher, level, to begin to see the pattern of relationship that must necessarily be how these things are connected.

        “Warriors are not what you think of as warriors.  The warrior is not someone who fights, for no one has the right to take another life.  The warrior, for us, is the one who sacrifices himself for the good of others.  His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity.”  ~ attributed to Sitting Bull (with thanks to Finn Jackson for drawing my attention to this quote)

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The fourth PD principle: Practice awareness of the whole, not the parts

Posted in Henley MBA, My PhD and related things, Personal Development, tagged , , on June 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

With so much written about systems thinking in management and leadership over the last twenty years or so, people may feel that this principle is bordering on the cliché. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is now almost a truism, and certainly the language of systemic thinking has been increasingly and uncontroversially used in discussions of Organisational Development, in certain views on Leadership, and in one guise or another in operations and production management for at least two decades, if not more.

I would argue, though, that this apparent application has been more one of vocabulary than of fundamental principles. What’s more, the appetite for the topic of complexity has frequently been faddish, second-hand and poorly thought-through; a handy bandwagon for those with a book to sell, a seminar to fill or a paper to publish. This is not a rant; it has always been so and probably (sadly) always will be. So let me explain how I think that a systemic view is essential to the nature of Reflection, Personal Development and for management practice, and in doing so argue that this is still a fairly radical, exciting idea.  

Thus, the fourth PD principle, and one which (I trust) follows logically from the first three, is “Practice Awareness of the whole, not the parts.”

Since the 1980s, the predominant interpretation of reflective learning in management has been via an analytic approach, of what many would call ’the scientific method’ of measuring cause and effect, just redressed in the clothes of humanism. This is not new, nor is it always the useless thing to do. It is, in fact, the defining pattern of thought from Renaissance times to the present day, a process characterised by Russell Ackoff as a three step process of analysis;

1) take it apart,

2) try to understand what the parts do, and

3) assemble understanding of the parts into an understanding of the whole.

In modern business education it is the same – management is broken down into its parts because the assumption is that knowledge of the parts taken separately allows integration into an understanding of the whole.  Analysis permeates corporations, which are divided into parts, which are then aggregated into the running of the whole – an analytical process.  Business Schools also have curricula separated into parts, which vie with one another in silos of analysis, which occasionally leads to academics vigorously defending the grounds for their view, their models and their theories entirely in relation to the views, models and theories of other competing domains. People, too, are units for and of analysis. Their personalities, traits and characteristics can be measured, their roles assessed and their actions studied in isolation to see how they work.

By contrast, in systems thinking every system is contained in and defined by its function in a larger system. Explanations always lie outside the system, never inside it.  Where analysis takes you inside the system, synthetic thinking contrasts the three analytical steps by:

1) asking “what is this a part of?”,

2) then explaining  the behaviour of the containing whole, and finally

3) disaggregating understanding of the containing whole by explaining the role or function of what I’m trying to explain.

We tend to think of ourselves as individuals, more or less free agents operating more or less effectively, making conscious choices alongside others who are (more or less) in a similar situation of individual free-will and choice. In Personal Development, a systemic approach means setting aside, at least temporarily, certain parts of our training, thinking, or education. Where problems just seem to be repeating themselves, or a more piecemeal approach to change doesn’t resolve things, or the issue just isn’t clear, seeing PD from a systemic point of view can very liberating, with surprisingly rapid insights and results.

Elsewhere in this blog I have posted about systemic coaching, and I have come to the conclusion the basic principles underlying this approach work equally well when applied to Personal and Professional systems. This is easy to say and difficult to talk about since the dynamics that work within a system are best understood when experienced (phenomenologically) yourself.  The invisible ordering forces of a system or whole which are listed below (and the descriptors) are taken from John Whittington’s excellent new book on Systemic Coaching & Constellations:

Acknowledgement (this is the first principle of PD in my list, and here refers to “standing in the truth of the current situation”)

Time (“what comes first has a natural precedence over what follows”)

Place (“everyone, and everything, has a right to a different but unique ad respected place in the system”)

Exchange (“a dynamic balance of giving and receiving is required in systems”)

Seeing the order from the outside…?

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The third Personal Development principle – Engage in dialogue

Posted in My PhD and related things, Personal Development, tagged , , , on May 26, 2012 | 1 Comment »

A couple in dialogue with nature in a rainforest pool in northern Queensland.

I’m fond of telling anyone who’ll listen not only that reflection is at the heart of Personal Development,  but also that “introspection is necessary but not sufficient” for reflection. This second assertion is prompted by observation and supported by deduction.

The observation is of the shyness exhibited by most MBAs when it comes to sharing thoughts and feelings with others in a learning context. Hardened managers who would not hesitate to chip (or butt) in with their views when it comes to business decisions turn deafeningly silent when it comes to surfacing assumptions about themselves in a collective setting. This silent tendency is even more pronounced, if that’s the right word, when the sharing requires those thoughts to be expressed in writing. This is despite an intellectual acceptance of three ideas; that telling others helps reveal our thinking to ourselves, that listening to others somehow provides a boundary and shape for our own thoughts, and that the process of writing (especially for publication to an audience) is a distillation and perhaps a transformation of our thoughts (when we speak we do not use exactly the same language structure as when we write). Anecdotally, when you have a situation where trust has been established between managers who are all committed to learning, the efficacy of dialogue for PD is very often apparent, with rapid results.

Nevertheless, these observations cannot easily explain why dialogue is a principle of PD. That explanation comes from a deduction, itself following on from the second principle (which spoke of the concept of difference), of what must necessarily be going on in dialogue, intrinsic to reflection and therefore part of the Personal Development process.

Whenever a second view or reference point is made available, and difference created, a new level is not just a possiblity but a logical necessity. Gregory Bateson used the example of binocular vision to illustrate this. On its own, each of our eyes is sensitive to information or sense data. But a single eye cannot see distance; this facility is a property of the information processed from both eyes. However, the fact that we can perceive depth in three dimensions is not simply a matter of addition. Binocular vision is at a logical level hierarchically above the levels represented by what each eye “sees” on its own. As Bateson pointed out, this is a sort of multiplication, “[in] principle, extra “depth” in some metaphoric sense is to be expected whenever the information for the two descriptions is differently collected or differently coded.” (Bateson, 1979: 70).

So it may be said that dialogue in reflection results in a depth not present in either person’s thoughts on their own. A ‘conversation’ is an idea one level removed from the individual sets of utterances that make it up. A dialogue is, then, a double description which is the relationship between components (remember that a relationship or difference between things is not a property of those things and has zero dimensions) and when we engage in a dialogue what results is a viewpoint that we could not have seen only from our introspection. At least, deductively, this is what out to be so and what we may then investigate.

The 1st principle

The 2nd principle

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The second principle of PD – seek out and pay attention to ‘difference’

Posted in Henley MBA, My PhD and related things, Personal Development, tagged , , on May 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »

The first principle of Personal Development that was outlined in an earlier post was “acknowledge, without judgement, things as they are.”

Although not in itself sufficient for PD, this is certainly a necessary pre-requisite mental attitude; a stance of genuine curiosity about (and a conceptual uncoupling from) things. It turns out that we are already in trouble when we assert that there such things as “things”, but until now we have had little choice because the English language tends to be steadfastly material in its assumptions of the world. The world of difference, however, is notable for being immaterial.

So the second principle of Personal Development is an invitation to understand and then actively look for ‘difference’. This idea is perhaps the most elemental in Gregory Bateson’s relational view of the world and one that I have blogged about several times over the years. However, as a very brief resume, in a world of almost limitless potential bits of information which our senses detect, a difference is that bit of information that makes a difference. In other words it is an “elemental idea” whereby we become aware of the boundaries between one thing and another thing. In noting difference we must make some of sort comparison, but our comparison literally carries no weight, occupies no space, and is non-dimensional. A difference, in short, is a no-thing. Crucially, it is also not a property of any of the things we are comparing. Bateson went on to note that differences travel in recursive circuits of cause and effect in systems, and that they are transformed successively over time and are at the heart of what make living systems different, so to speak, from non-living ones.

But what does this have to do with PD and what does it mean in practice?

1. Without the relationship between ‘that which is’ and ‘that which is not’ it would be impossible to have any notion of ”things as they are”, the first PD principle. 

2. Meaning is achieved by the ever-present question ”compared to what?” (a question that is almost always an implicit or unconscious one).

3. Every notion implies its opposite, its negation.

4. Development implies learning, learning implies change of one sort or another, and change implies some sort of novelty which would be impossible if the world were a closed system.

An example, perhaps. I recently found out that I have had a development paper accepted to a management conference in September. The paper’s purpose is just to stimulate discussion, in  contribution to a given subject area (in this case ‘knowledge and learning’) and partly in order to give me some developmental feedback in peer review. The acceptance process involved some blind peer reviews, which I got to see. Two of the reviews were largely positive and quite supportive, but the third was a lot more critical. My first reaction was to accept the compliments and look for comforting support from their gentle suggestions for improvement. I dismissed the less complimentary review as being irrelevant, its author too far from my position to be of any use to me. On reflection it may be that the reviewer I didn’t  agree with that will help me understand my own thinking for what it is as it exposes it to its antithesis.  My job is first to note that this is the situation (acknowledge it) and note too how I feel about it, and then get curious about how such a different view clarifies my thinking. To to that, I’d need to understand that alternative argument.

In summary, in their daily working lives managers constantly (if unknowingly) make sense of what’s going on by embracing or ignoring the concept of difference and the world is an open system which operates according to an underlying pattern (or law?), regardless of our awareness of this being the case. Incidentally, because it is a property of the relationship between things and not of things themselves, the nature of “difference” is a very curious one to explore. In short, the difference between one thing and another is at a higher logical level than either of the things themselves. Bateson spent much of his life playing with the consequence of this, i.e. that ideas operate in a pattern, a hierarchy of  logical levels which are immanent in social structures and systems.

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The first principle of PD: “Acknowledge what is”

Posted in Henley MBA, My PhD and related things, Personal Development, tagged , , on May 9, 2012 | 4 Comments »

This post details the first of my Six Principles of Personal Development that every manager should know, which is:

1. Acknowledge things, without judgement, as they are

You are exactly where you have chosen to be.

Through many years of working with (pretty experienced) managers, mostly on MBA programmes, I am convinced that this is the most fundamental PD principle of them all. My conviction stems from the observation of  both how (for all sorts of good reasons) un-self-aware many mid-career managers are, and of how radical the “ah-ha” can be when they wake up.

This principle asks just that you acknowledge the truth of your own present, of where you are, of who you are and how you are. That’s all, no opinions on whether or how you construe the past and the future. And what’s more to do all of this with a challenging and genuinely curious frame of mind, without prejudice or censorship.

Some people are driven to Management Education and development by their sense of being “trapped” in their past. Others are obsessed by something in the future that, necessarily, must always appear just beyond their reach. They seem always to be in pursuit of something they don’t have. The symptons of this malaise are beautifully and poetically illustrated in the following Tom Waits lyrics, from his song ‘Foreign Affair’ :

‘most vagabonds I knowed don’t ever want to find the culprit
that remains the object of their long relentless quest
the obsession’s in the chasing and not the apprehending
the pursuit you see and never the arrest’

Where are our heads? At first glance, a lot of us appear to prefer to occupy a prison of the past or an artist’s impression of the future. Closer inspection (or introspection, in fact) should reveal that both of  these concepts are existent only and entirely in the present. The past is no more a cause of the present than the ship’s wake (to borrow an analogy used by Alan Watts) is the cause of the present position of the ship. That’s not to say that the idea of the past does not have use. Without it, “here” would have no meaning’, we would not know that there is such as thing as the present. Nor would we be able to construct the idea of a future. Our sense of agency, of acting in the world, is reliant on the coming together of these three ideas?

Acknowledging ‘what is’ is a principle that runs through all other, or further, aspects of PD, and represents a fundamental commitment to mindfulness of practice. Notice, suspend judgement and… let go.

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The six Personal Development principles that every manager should know

Posted in Henley MBA, My PhD and related things, Personal Development, tagged , , , on April 24, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I have been turning my mind lately to what could, or should, be central and unifying concepts that represent what we mean by Personal Development here at Henley.

Earlier posts on this blog have rehearsed some antecedents, but inspired by a seemingly inexhaustable parade of “lists” that form a daily digest of reading in popular management magazines and blogs, I really wanted to have a go at a compilation of my own. People do seem to feel at home with lists, and who can blame them? (it’s probably just a matter of time before there’s an an article published with the title “the five benefits for leaders of making lists”…)

So over the coming weeks, dear reader, look out for six intermittently posted attempts to give food for thought for your own management development and management practice.

First, this post names all six principles. I take these to be pre-requisites for Personal Development, though all of them are also activities for practice. There will be other activities, particularly related to career development, work-life balance and academic achievement, that complement these six things, but philosophically they are my starting points.

1. Acknowledge things, without judgement, as they are

2. Seek out, and pay attention to ‘difference’

3. Engage in dialogue

4. Practice awareness of the whole, not the parts

5. Align personal purpose and the purpose of business

6.  Use the logic of metaphor

The first on this list will form the topic in the next posting.

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Scoping a position on Personal Development – Part 2

Posted in Henley Business School, Henley MBA, Personal Development, tagged , , on April 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Following my argument in Part 1, which was expanded on and clarified by some very welcome comments, I would like to conclude this brace of postings by setting out what I hope will stand as an opening statement for a ”Henley approach” to Personal Development. It will need further thought and development, of course.

The Henley position needs to achieve two things. In the first instance, it must be of practical use to the managers who come on our programmes. In other words, it must serve individual goals and the unique, individual purpose behind each person’s study. Secondly, I believe it must go beyond just complementing other modules on the MBA; it must unify the individuals’ purposes with two others, namely the purpose of education and the purpose of business (as in the figure below). No small task.

In Part 1 I argued that where Personal Development is mentioned on an MBA programme at all it tends to manifest either through external factors or internal ones. Where PD has been placed on the MBA in response to external factors (competitor offerings, accrediting body recommendations, assumptions about the job market and demand for preparation of students looking for jobs, and so on…) it is accompanied by a strong sense of being “bolted-on”, of consisting of cumulative add-ons. These extra components are like a buffet that a person may visit if they want (repeatedly, if they so wish) but, equally, they can ignore them too.  The rhetoric of this external version is fundamentally externally focused. The programme will shout very loudly about these opportunities and will showcase them, linking them closely to the idea of the “career leap” implied by the degree offered. Yet that integrative link is by implication only and this external model is actually highly individualistic, short-term in outlook and unproven.

Contrast this with the kind of approach to Personal Development on an MBA where it has emerged from internal factors. These factors are those that are (or should be) also intrinsic to the philosophy of education ascribed to by the MBA provider. Such an approach is essentially a position arrived at privately, and one would not expect any one Business School to look to, or to try to out-do, any other in this regard. Although the need to look over the neighbouring MBA School’s garden fence is not there, the vocational roots of business education would suggest a more harmonious relationship between what hiring organisations need and what the institution stands for. But even this may not be enough, as few hiring organisations ever take the time to consider why they are in business in the first place (beyond making money, which is just an abstract goal). Some, not all, organisations have become as equally short-term in their thinking as some, not all, MBAs, and just as eager to jump on band-wagons.

At this point it should be noted that while the majority of MBA programmes at least cater for PD via the “add-on” approach, many do also already have elements of both the external and the internal positions. It seems that these days catering for the external factors is important (the minimum), and catering for the internal ones is desirable, if you can get it into the course. Neither, however, constitute a position to PD which unites all three elements of purpose that I mentioned earlier.

So my suggestion for the Business School is to go a step further and ask three fundamental questions about all these different forms of purpose (and I have suggested a few possible answers in the diagram above).  I think this is to go beyond the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) definition of PD as “a structured and supported process undertaken by a learner to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development” and allow Personal Development to be an idea that pervades every aspect of Management Education. This is therefore a meta-position on PD, and I think it that supports the role of the “question” as the primary route to learning. At the heart of PD is curiosity, both practical and philosophical.

All of the modules on the MBA should have this in common, as this is the appropriate mode of enquiry in adult education. Managers are hardly ’empty vessels’ which need to be filled up with content. If anything, the problem is the opposite. Managers are so full when they arrive that they can only achieve change by first freeing up some space. They have to adopt an open-minded position to learning and doing, and the first and most important step is becoming aware that this is so. This is difficult because the prevailing experience outside the Business School (back at work) is one of knowing, of having answers, of finding solutions (and quickly) and of never questioning assumptions beyond those which stand in the way of the problem being solved.

Finally, in my opinion faculty too must be part of the unification of these three sets of purpose. This will be tricky, as universities are not usually cultures that excel in being comfortable with ambiguity, or in working across disciplines, let alone in trans-disciplinary thinking. Faculties can be silos, and programmes can be merely products. But the challenge is there, and I hope that we will understand that all of these things are inextricably linked.

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Scoping a position on Personal Development – part 1

Posted in Henley MBA, Personal Development, tagged , on March 31, 2012 | 5 Comments »

I’ve been thinking about what could be Henley’s official “position” on Personal Development. If this sounds like a simple question to you, then allow me first to disabuse you of that thought; it’s actually quite problematic.

In this post I’d like to try to explain why and then, having addressed that, in the second post I will move on to stating several tentative ideas about PD which, I think, state where we are taking the subject, positioning it not only in relation to the MBA education experience but extending it as a statement of something much bigger.

Many Business Schools have some kind of position on Personal Development. Usually the only way to find out what that is by seeing what they say about it in their marketing material or what they reveal about it via their programme information. Any position on PD could be said, I suppose, to come predominately either from without or from within. ’From without’ means that a school has probably surveyed what it considers to be its market and come to the conclusion that this market demands PD, or something like it, be a component of the course (i.e. be one of the course’s benefits). Alternatively it could also be that because so many of their competitors seem to be think it so then they, too, must follow suit.  This is a compelling position among MBA programmes entangled in rankings battles and it ensures that PD will be pluralistic, plastic and will often rely on non-teaching staff supplemented by “expert” input bought in from outside. There’s an overlap with career-related skills development and an advocacy of competency-based frameworks, an extensive use of psychometrics (and resourcing), and advocacy of coaching and mentoring support. Actual integration with the MBA curriculum is minimal when it is mainly the external that influences PD because assessment is expensive and integration of behavioural skills to academic learning outcomes is hard to do without a deeper philosophical intent. The net result of this position is often a strong marketing message but a weak return on an MBA’s investment because the intellectual energy of the course is focused on the rest of the curriculum. PD is demoted to a very few measurables, such as how happy the participants were with the CV writing classes, or the presentation courses, or the mock interviews, or the mentor programme, or just simply with the time taken for job placement (and, of course, level of salary). No connection to the education is really needed to measure the effectiveness of the PD in such a case.

The other position for PD, whereby it comes from within, is often driven by the institution’s culture, history and type of clientele (i.e. the sort of students and the sorts of organisations they work for). It is also much rarer in the market. Where a School has taken the position on PD that it is intellectually significant there may still be many of the manifestations of career assistance and advice that one finds in externally driven schools, but there is something else, too. PD is part of the curriculum itself. This may be implicit in practice-oriented forms of assessment that require a reflective component, and it may be explicit in PD being a course in its own right. To take this position is to acknowledge not only that PD is not merely ‘training’ and ‘skills-building’, but is an epistemic member of the family of domains such as Marketing, Finance, Leadership or Strategy (albeit a much less researched one).

Anyone wondering what the hell I’m talking about can compare and contrast two examples. The first, which I would class as illustrative of the “PD from without” school is an Exec MBA from a little-known institution, London Business School.  The second, much closer to my “PD from within” idea, is the Exec MBA at Aston University in Birmingham.

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Substance abuse, or “Send in the Nouns”

Posted in Observations about life, Personal Development, tagged , , , on March 16, 2012 | 3 Comments »

The philosopher Alan Watts was adept at stating certain truths that would otherwise remain just beyond our grasp (at best), or deliberately hidden from us (at worst). Because Personal Development is often seen as a process of understanding oneself through study of the self, in many people’s minds it is just a type of introspection. And though people may or may not think that they like to introspect, they are frequently willing to subscribe to the idea that the personality is just the set of qualities which one possesses (or doesn’t) and a pre-set series of potentials which one does (or doesn’t) live up to.

This belief has spawned an industry of self-help literature and know-how guides and gurus, and their proliferation is either evidence that the world is really like that, or that it is not. I take the latter view, and I think there is a serious flaw in the idea we hold in our minds when we are thinking about how we come to be what we are.

“Trying to define yourself is like biting your own teeth”, said Watts. And the point is, surely, that we cannot define ourselves in relation only to ourselves;  it’s an impossibility. What we need, in order to find our own outline, are other people’s outlines (and they need ours). So the first point I wanted to make is that our existence and consideration of “self” is entirely a matter of our relations with ‘the other’.  This is true for individuals and it’s also true for organisations, and it’s true for nations… for any concept which is imbued with identity and culture.

The second issue is that we do not seem to be able to talk our way out of this easily. When we come to attach meaning to ideas as if they were “things” with definable qualities, we are caught up in doing what the Polish-born philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski famously referred to as confusing the map with the territory. The truth is that our beliefs and values have no physical reality, neither in personal nor in business life.

This week I have been working with MBAs on their Personal Development. As part of this we looked at the process of learning, through the lens of Kolb’s experiential cycle, and then through the secondary lens of Honey and Mumford’s learning styles (Activist, Reflector, Theorist and Pragmatist). We also used the labels developed by Belbin to indicate behavioral preferences when working in a group or team (Plant, Shaper, Co-ordinator and so on…). How easy it was to begin to label oneself as being one or other of these “things” (and someone else, by implication, as not). What one is tempted to do is then to identify oneself as these things. When someones says ”I’m a Teamworker” or “I’m an Activist”, they are in fact jumping across several levels of abstraction without knowing it. There is “me” and there is my ”description of me”, and they are not the same ‘thing’ at all.  Our problem, in short, is our addiction to nouns. We love giving names to things to separate them from the background mess of not-things, and this is so that we can analyse them and, perhaps, infer from that one, tiny part something about the limitless, unknowable rest.

My assertion that we should be very wary of substance does not accord with much of what one will meet inside an MBAprogramme. Subject Matter Experts like to perpetuate the concrete and the measurable over any system of abstractions. To them, their subject “matters”, is material in fact, and any kind of musing which suggests otherwise is a bit of an anathema. I know this because often I notice that this is how I see it, too. Why not? We’re not only very good at it (at imposing order on the world), we have been able to become incredibly productive as a result. And yet I can’t help being drawn to the idea that the aim of education should be to leave everyone involved (faculty and student alike) in a state of some confusion and flux about what it is they are studying, and what it means to “study” at all, and so on.

This may just be one of those “out there” blog postings that hints at something under the surface but does not capture it, and having kicked the idea around a bit then just carries on in the ordinary, day-to-day life – until there is another glimpse, where it resurfaces in another way.

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