In the early 1980s when Fay Fransella created the Centre, she said it existed to give personal construct psychology to those who wanted it, she did not foresee that this would take the Centre into large public and private corporations.
The move into such organisations came about through the Head of Training at British Airways. He booked on to a one-day course at the Centre. During the walk back from lunch he asked whether the Centre could re-train 35,000 people! As this would have been somewhat beyond the Centre's resources, we had to politely decline. He then asked what the Centre could do. We told him that we could find out the attitudes and beliefs that his people held about themselves, their work, their future and about British Airways (which was about to be privatised). He accepted a proposal from the Centre to do work with the BA passenger-contact staff. To carry that out, a method for eliciting personal constructs and using Repertory Grids with very large groups of people was created. Special computer software to analyse the data produced by such large numbers of grids was written by Professor Peter Fonagy.
The results from the Centre's research with the BA passenger contact staff and subsequent BA surveys, provided information that was of immediate use in its' "Putting People First" re-training programme.
Over the years, the Centre's Diagnostic Research work (as it came to be called) has proved of use to many other corporations, both large and small. The Centre has also used personal construct methods with senior management teams, run courses in interviewing skills, selection procedures, assessed training needs and much else besides. The Centre's work is not 'pre-packaged'. We believe that the way to provide the most useful and usable information is to tailor-make research for each organisational problem.
Coaching
The Centre provides a coaching service which is available for managers who work in either small or large business organisations and for the growing band of people who run their businesses from home.
Knowledge Management
An area of great concern in many organisations, is the management of knowledge. The reason for this is simple - to maintain competitive advantage, organisations need to do more with fewer people and ensure that the knowledge stored in the organisation is both identified and disseminated. In particular, making tacit knowledge explicit and getting people to share knowledge is often much easier said than done. Personal construct psychology is a very effective way of overcoming such problems.
Conflict Management
All who work in organisations will be aware that conflict between groups of staff is always a possibility and all too often a reality. Personal construct psychology always proceeds by finding out not only what people are doing but also the reasons behind their behaviour. Only when both of these are known in the necessary detail for all the parties concerned, can the real process of conflict resolution begin.
Small Group Work
The Centre also works with small groups, whether they be formal teams or other working groups. Rather than providing 'team-building' training, the personal construct approach is to look at the underlying relationships between group members, their roles, their organisation and their work. In this way, the group can be helped to understand itself properly and to make the necessary changes to develop and progress.
To contact the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology, please e-mail Professor Fay Fransella