The questionnaire

Having had some interesting and insight-generating conversations with the people who I thought were intellectual property developers, I was assailed with doubt as to whether I was exploring the right people and whether I would be able to justify my choice. Drawing a parallel from a film review in the Financial Times that suggests that the credits for a particularly unmemorable international movie represent the Who the h ell’s who of world cinema, was I pursuing the Who the hell's who of management development? I therefore decided to ask members of the population of management developers who they

considered to be the intellectual property developers o f significance in their work.

I used members of AMED, the Association for Management Education and Development, as a source for respondents to the survey, because AMED presents itself - in its Invitation to Join AMED, for example - as ‘the professional network for people in individual and organisational development’.

I also had an opportunity to wrap this work up in a wider survey that I had volunteered to undertake for AMED. This meant that all 1,300 of AMED’s members would be sent my questionnaire with their monthly mail-out, with a request to return it to the AMED national office, from where it would be forwarded to me.

The questionnaire covered two sides of A4 paper. O f the three questions asked, it is Question 3 that is considered in this dissertation. The question was:

‘3. FRAMEWORKS, INSTRUMENTS, IDEAS, MODELS and PROCESSES One o f the ways we can help organisations and people to develop is by using frameworks, etc. developed by others. Who are these developers o f the

frameworks that you have used? Which of their frameworks have you used? How is it useful? (When you have done this, please indicate up to three from your list that you see as particularly useful to you.)

Author/source Framework/model/instrument How it was useful Tick top 3

There was then a grid of ten rows under the four columns indicated above. The question as sent out did not use the phrase ‘intellectual property developer’. I had used the term in the draft form, but the Chair o f AMED, Roy Williams of BP, suggested that the term was not familiar to members and would therefore be unhelpful. I accepted this suggestion.

The response rate

The response was desperately disappointing to me. Only 19 people responded to the mail- out. These responses were labelled #a F - ‘a l 9 \ I would not begin to differentiate names nominated as idiosyncratic personal choices from widely recognised authorities until I had recommendations from more than one respondent for a number of authors, and

recommendations from quite a number of respondents for several o f the most widely cited sources.

I therefore decided to wait until I had accumulated 40 responses before continuing with my analysis. This took time. My chosen method was to carry copies of the questionnaire with me wherever I went, but particularly when I was going to a meeting involving AMED members. I went to such meetings quite often, because I represented the following bodies relating to the Association:

the elected national Council the Management Group of Council

the planning group for the Research & Development Conference the Research & Development Conference itself

the review group for the Research & Development Conference the planning group for the Annual Conference

the Annual Conference itself

the planning group for the Developing the Developers Diploma programme

the guest lecturer slot on one of the Developing the Developer programme workshops the Editorial board of the AMED journal Organisations and People.

I also had a number of one-to-one meetings with AMED members for other purposes, where, again, I gave out a copy of the questionnaire.

Even these more face-to-face approaches yielded meagre results, but eventually I reached the total of 40, and then worked with those in the analysis described in the next section.

The question can be asked: ‘Were these respondents typical of the membership of

AMED, and indeed of management developers more generally?51 suspect that the answer particularly to the second question may be ‘No5, but in a way that reinforces rather than weakens the interest and value of the results. The later respondents to the survey (a20- a40) were active and well informed members of the Association, often with a breadth of experience and wide knowledge of development work. I also found that I did not get more than three responses from any of the individual meetings I attended, so the range of respondents was not too focused upon a particular sector of AMED’s membership.

Four of my respondents cited their own published work. Of these, two (Mayo and Clutterbuck) were nominated by one other person, and one (myself) was nominated by two others. All three of these names have been put forward into the analysis which follows. The fourth, although citing his own published material, was not picked by anyone else, so he is excluded, along with the other names that were only of interest to one respondent.

My grounds for allowing myself to answer my own questionnaire are that: 1. I am a member o f the target population,

2. I was getting desperate for responses by the time that I included my own 3. I am candid about it.

I do not know definitively why there was such apparent resistance to completing my questionnaire. A number of reasons suggest themselves:

1. The original distribution went out with the regular monthly mailing from AMED office, so was mixed up with brochures for courses and circulars from advertisers. Perhaps most members, like me, shake these papers into the transparent envelope before removing the Newsletter or magazine, and then throw the remaining papers away without looking at them. This reason is confirmed by the reports of many members I spoke with, who claimed that they had never seen the questionnaire. 2. One o f the other questions in my questionnaire involved ranking between seven and

ten items. This takes thought and processing time and tends to reduce response rate. 3. All three questions required a degree of thought, rather than merely responding to

options. One or two respondents added comments saying that they had enjoyed the thinking process triggered by completing the questionnaire, but a lot of non­ respondents may have been daunted by it.

4. Some respondents will have been put off by not knowing of any items that would have enabled them to answer the questions. This might have been particularly the case with the first question, which asked about ‘the organisations that you know personally or by reputation, which you most respect for their policies and practices in HRD?’ It came under the bold, capitalised and, in retrospect, forbidding title ‘ORGANISATIONS WE RESPECT’. One respondent (a6) wrote in ‘Depressingly none - but then I wouldn’t be working with them as a consultant if they were already brilliant!’, another (al8) declared ‘I can’t answer this question. Maybe I want “too much” or don’t know

[personally] any “good” organisations’; and a24 wrote ‘Nothing here - how

depressing’. These robust responses to difficulty in replying might stand in contrast with the non-respondents who could have found such challenges too much for them. 5. A final possibility would be that the non-respondents did not use models and

frameworks created by others, and so could not answer the question that is germane to this research. The indication from the respondents, however, is that this is unlikely to be the case. Of the 40 respondents 243 cases of IPs were nominated, an average of just over six per person. Furthermore, the comments added mostly indicated the

importance that respondents attached to these properties (see Chapter 4.1 for an account of these responses).

In any event, the 40 responses were eventually obtained, and the process for analysing the responses to the question o f relevance to this study, is described below.

Analytic process for the survey results

I typed each of the responses of each respondent, starting with the surname, and then, if noted, the first name of the author, followed by the particular property and its usefulness. I added a slash (/) if it was one of the items they had marked as particularly useful, and for each item noted my code number for the respondent. If there was more than one author (e.g. Pedler, Burgoyne and Boydell) I included them in the established order determined by their title page of the book or manual. If they and my respondents used differing orders (eg Bandler and Grinder vs. Grinder and Bandler) I adopted the

convention o f bringing them together under the name of the author whose name is alphabetically the first.

If a respondent had put two separate sources for one of their items (e.g. Honey and Mumford; Kolb for The learning cycle) I separated the sets of sources (in this case Honey and Mumford appeared as a duo, and Kolb was listed separately). In one or two cases authors received some references linked to others and some on their own (e.g. Pedler was mentioned once for action learning and four further times with Burgoyne and Boydell in relation to The learning company). In these cases I credited the author common to both with all the citations and included them again with their colleagues in the smaller number o f joint citations (so Pedler alone scored one more mention than he scored with Burgoyne and Boydell).

If the respondent did not know the source of a model and neither did I, I recorded it as ‘anon’, unless it was a generic framework - like the 2 x 2 matrix, in which case it was noted as ‘various’. In cases where I did know the source, even if the respondent did not, and where I had documentary evidence to support my knowledge, I put in the source that I knew. For example, Johari window was described by ‘a22’ as Tost in antiquity’,

whereas both I and Hall (1993), for example, know that it is appropriately ascribed to Ingham & Luft (Luft, 1969). The most marked case of wrong ascription was the 7S model cited by three respondents. Two claimed that it was the product o f McKinsey (which is accurate in that they were the employers of Peters & Waterman at the time) and, in the other case, Michael Porter was cited, which is plain wrong. This happens quite often in

the field of management development, where distinguished synthesisers sometimes eclipse the creative originators of their models. Note, for example, how often Roger Harrison and Charles Handy’s culture model is ascribed to Charles Handy as a result of his describing it in Handy (1976).

In order to determine the frequency with which they had been cited I counted the number o f respondents who had included each author, rather than the number o f items ascribed to the author. So, for example, if someone used three different models of one author, this only adds one to the author’s score. I did this to prevent enthusiasts from unduly weighing the scales in favour of their chosen author.

The results of this survey are included in Chapter 4.1, where they are used to determine the population of IPDs in management development in Britain that I would interview. The names of the IPDs I interviewed are discussed later in this chapter, so they are recorded here for completeness. They were Meredith Belbin, Tom Boydell, John

Burgoyne, David Clutterbuck, Bob Garratt, Roger Harrison, Peter Honey, Andrew Mayo, Alan Mumford and Mike Pedler.