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When training is not enough…

 

At Human Ecology we have developed a useful equation to determine the degree we can transform a person’s performance: Transformation = Targeting + Tailoring + Tracking.

 

Transformation must start with Targeting people with the potential to change. We all have resistance to change at some levels, but we have found that people in higher-performing roles or teams tend to have a lower resistance to personal change (Simon Walker, 2002, unpublished). Using a simple imagination exercise, we measured people’s ability to imagine new personal horizons and opportunities along with their desire or drive to embrace these novel identities. Greater drive to do so typically correlated with being in higher performing professional roles.

 

It would seem that the flexibility, expansiveness and ‘restlessness’ of a person’s imagination is a good indicator of the individual’s ability and drive to develop their potential. The imagination may be acting as a kind of ‘personal risk assessor,’ predicting if the risk of personal change is worth taking or not. Painful or positive experiences of taking previous risks may leave our imaginations set either ‘high’ or   ‘low’; set to conceive mainly of safe and unchanged futures or to dream up new and exciting ones.

 

The second T is Tailoring. In our research, we were also interested in the degree to which the imagination, once engaged, could help us tailor specific interventions that would ‘motivate’ the individual to change. Some therapy areas are now aware of the potential of imaginative metaphors to release and develop people. In a training context it has mainly been through techniques such as NLP that the imagination has been engaged. Our research has involved developing an imaginative symbolic landscape through which individuals can objectify key personality characteristics (such as confidence, drive, empathy, responsiveness and control) and their personal obstacles to change. For example, an individual’s self-confidence levels are revealed by the kind of terrain they imagine; their drive, by the stability of the scene; their control by the way they manage the landscape in their mind. In other words, mental, imagined symbols indicate actual behavioural traits and attitudes.

 

In revealing such traits symbolically so to speak, it has apparently helped people to literally see and own previously hidden or unacknowledged issues and to take responsibility for them. A growing number of case studies indicate significant long-term change as a result of the interventions and we are working towards a statistical case that will prove this. We suggest this is because each person’s symbolic landscape is very meaningful to them, and so individuals’ have an immediate high level of motivation and focus for addressing personal obstacles revealed in it.

 

Our final T is Tracking . Having engaged the imagination through these interventions, we were also interested in whether changes a person’s imagined symbolic landscape would indicate changes in their outward attitudes and behaviours. In other words could you track and predict someone’s behavioural development by monitoring changes in their symbolic landscape? If you could, then it would provide a kind of inner mirror by which to give individuals ongoing developmental feedback.

 

We tested this by creating an online platform for individuals to regularly input data about their evolving symbolic landscape. This enabled us to monitor individuals’ changes in empathy, confidence, drive, responsiveness and control. We then looked for correlations between these changes and their outward behaviours and circumstances. In one study of the crew of a yacht in the 2002 Global Clipper Race, the system revealed that the confidence of 90% of the crew shot up in their first two months sailing!

 

If this is the case, then it offers a significant new tool for personal coaching in 3 ways:

1. New training interventions can be devised which develop people’s imaginative flexibility.
2. The impact on the individuals undergoing any kind of training intervention can be monitored- change can be demonstrated.
3. Individuals with strategic potential for development can be identified prior to training them.

As Meredith Belbin has commented, "This is a very interesting way of generating constructs relating to key areas of life management. I am sure the system has an important part to play in aiding personal development."