Tim
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Tim Connor, M.S. "Psychotherapy is not
Pacific University an applied science, it
School of Professional Psychology is a basic science in
2004 Pacific Avenue which the scientists
Forest Grove, OR 97116 USA are the client and his
<connort@pacificu.edu> therapist"
--George Kelly
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On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Charles Smith wrote:
> At 11:20 4-8-97 +1000, you wrote:
> >Dear people, A BRAIN-PICK.
> > One of my graduate students (not a psychologist but a Management
> >type) is interested in a work-group which has for some years been
> >undergoing experimental and more or less chaotic changes in all directions
> >at once.
> > She has an idea which seems intuitively (and experientially)
> >reasonable that people who keep having demands made on them to see things
> >differently to how they saw them yesterday, again and again, in no single
> >direction but of unrelated kinds, even if the changes are none of them in
> >themselves too enormous, will eventually find it too much for them; she
> >makes an analogy with metal fatigue - such as caused those Comet airliners
> >to go pop in my youth.
> > It struck me that this was just the sort of thing pcp people might
> >well know all about. Any references please?
> > I must confess that answers to this will not shut me up, because I
> >have some more MBA students who might find themselves helped by pcp ideas
> >and I'll ask on their behalf too. Well, it does all make the field KNOWN -
> >and in areas where there's money to be got!
> > With thanks in anticipation, Harry Oxley
> >Harry Oxley
> >
> >
>
> Harry,
>
> I'd like to understand better the extent to which the people in your
> student's work group really see things differently. It's my experience, as a
> change practitioner in industry, that workplace understandings have a large
> degree of stability. Significant individual change can come in response to
> major structural reorganisation or ideological change, but this takes time
> and hard work. Multiple unsustained change initiatives have little personal
> impact. A company I know well recently engaged in empowered improvement
> teams, delayering, major structural change and privatisation all at the same
> time, and still had little impact at the working level. In engineering terms
> I would call this an isolation system rather than fatigue.
>
> For a reference I suggest Tony Watson's book "In Search of Management:
> Culture, Chaos and Control in Managerial Work" which describes, using a
> basically social constructionist framework, the sense-making of managers in
> a company undergoing successive takeovers and 'initiatives'.
>
> Regards
>
> Charles Smith
>
>
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