>I have been thinking about the process of giving feedback to clients about
>their grids, wondering if the subject has been addressed in the literature
>and how listmembers approach it. I find it somewhat challenging to
>translate the abstractions of grids (a factor analysis, say) into terms
>that have some immediate impact for the client and lead to reconstruing.
>Sometimes I've found it quite effective, other times the response is more
>like, "yeah, that makes sense...so?" (though none have put it quite that
>bluntly.) What approaches have people found that give such feedback
>experiential immediacy rather than just being fodder for
>intellectualization?
The approach which I find useful owes nothing to PCP per se. Rather, it
suggests that the response to a client reaction of this kind is usefully
taken from the discipline which best offers descriptions of the role
relationship in which I, and the client in question, find ourselves at
the time.
So, for example, if we both find it most useful to define the
relationship as a "counselling" one (if that's been what we contracted
for), then the so-called "Core Counselling Skills " provide appropriate
guidelines. If the relationship is one which we've mutually construed as
a management consultant-client one, then the guidelines will come from an
appropriate theory of management development or organizational
development (I say "appropriate", since some of the theories in _this_
particular field do not lend themselves to the acknowledgement of
personhood which underlies our use of grid technique).
There's a lot to justify in the above statements, and perhaps you'll
forgive me if I don't develop them in what's a quick response on our
mailing list. But I guess what I have in mind is that we use PCP and its
techniques in a context which is often far removed from the assumptions
and values which underpin PCT, and that it's probably too much to expect
answers to questions like the ones you raise to be provided for in the
theory itself.
What the theory _does_ do, as I've hinted above, is suggest some
background guiding principles: of personhood, (individuality,
organisation, choice corrolaries) and of sociality. These help to direct
my attention to the theories & approaches which seem to fit best the
expectations which I and the particular client might have of the
situation in whichw e find ourselves.
Don't we _all_ do this: draw on other approaches while using PCP as a set
of organising principles? I guess our clinical colleagues will have lots
more to say about this!
Kind regards,
Devi Jankowicz
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