Transforming organisations

Staying in adult

Sometimes as part of my work I have to feed back some fairly unpalatable comment to director level people. They take this feed back in a variety of ways but there is no doubt that some people do get upset and sometimes they get angry.

One of the models I use to help towards a positive outcome for both the individuals and the organisation is transactional analysis.

Transactional analysis is a concept that was first developed by Eric Berne and published in his best selling book, Games People Play. He said,

"When two or more people encounter each other, sooner or later one of them will speak or otherwise indicate that they are aware of another person. The other person will then say or do something in response."

This is called a transaction. Transactional analysis is the method of examining what happens when "I do something and you do something back."

Berne said that when we engage in transactions with other people there are three possible aspects to our nature which could be used. These are our:

Parent or our Adult or our Child

It has been suggested that these three states of mind exist in each and every one of us and they are caused by the playback of recorded data of events in our past involving real people, times, places, decisions and feelings. It is sometimes easiest to think of this data as "tapes" that play in our head.

Guess which “tape” it is best to play when you are discussing challenging development areas for anyone?

posted by Tim @ 4:33 AM