We all know that change is central to successful leadership and it’s now part of every training and development programme. Why then, are we so inexpert at it? Why does some change seem to happen almost spontaneously – and other efforts seem to fail no matter how hard we try? Everything is connected One of the most important social scientists of the last 50 years was Gregory Bateson. A brilliant, multi disciplinary scholar and practitioner, he brought together ideas from many areas to help him understand the relationships he observed in societies and communities. At the heart of his work were his observations about the circular effect of behaviour in the relationships between people. He coined the term ‘vicious circle’ and he was one of the first to study and explain how the way we behave can be amplified (sometimes exponentially) or dampened by the behaviour of someone we are interacting with. He extended these ideas from pairs to groups of people and then to the interaction of people within the
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Why do I keep having the same old conversations with people?
Some frustrating conversations just seem to keep cropping up – and not always with the same people! They are frustrating because we know that failure to move them on is reducing our effectiveness and keeping us from the outcomes we need. This month’s thinker has some ideas to help you break these patterns to get better results. The games people play (yep, that means us!) Eric Berne took Freud’s ideas and made them accessible by focusing, not on the individual but on the patterns of interaction (transactions) between them. His seminal 1964 book ‘The games people play’ introduced not only the Discipline of Transactional Analysis (TA) but was also, arguably, the birth of ‘pop psychology’. Before we look at the ‘games’ (the recurring relationship patterns) that we all play, we need to understand the underlying ideas in Berne’s work on TA. Some (now) familiar ideas… Berne explains that we play ‘games’ from one of three basic roles (‘states’):- Parent. In which we play the part of an authority figure. This is
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