You're at the Coaching Inn 3d Coaching Virtual Pub where we enjoy conversations with people who are engaged in the world of coaching. Welcome to this week's edition of the Coaching Inn. I'm Claire Pedrick. And today I'm delighted to be in the good company of William mckee who I've known you, William. What for one or two years? Yeah. Yeah, it must be, it must be tipping on for a couple of years at this point. Yeah, and we're gonna talk about psychometrics and coaching and things.
I'm sure we'll talk about more than that. So William, welcome. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you. So give us a little bit of your coaching journey context and then we'll jump in a little bit of my coaching. Oh, wow. Ok. So I used to be a civil engineer back in sort of 2010 things like that. I got very interested in the people. The people were much more interesting than the tarmac and the roads and whatnot that I was up to.
So went to work for a company that did some training for the company that I was working for and just kind of never looked back. So that's kind of, what's that now, about 13 years in the kind of people development space. And so from facilitating training courses and bits and Bobs like that coaching seemed like a, a relevant next step and something that was kind of around, but I didn't really understand. So then I kind of went into further in about 2019. I did the program at Henley.
Um, and I've just been, I, I just loved it. I just absolutely loved it and I've just kind of thrown myself into the world of coaching since then. Um I've done a few bits and Bobs. So, so no, no, freelance on coaching practice. I hit up another coaching practice for another company. Um blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Great, great. Well, welcome. And you write interesting posts on linkedin. Oh dear.
Do you know a couple of people say that I haven't seen, I haven't seen a naughty post from you for a couple of weeks. I've been trying to behave myself, but yeah, sometimes, um sometimes I go over a threshold and um I hope they come off as cheeky, cheeky rather than aggressive co in coaching psychometrics is a big thing, isn't it?
Because there's AAA feeling that if you go in with a psychometric, you're more likely to get the work because you're going in with something on top of as well as yourself and that it's going to help the coaching. So they're kind of weird. They're kind of weird bedfellows in my view. So I should also say I'm a fully qualified business psychologist. At some point, I decided, are you getting into coaching? You can only go so far as a civil engineer in the world of people?
So, business psychologist, British Psychological Society A and B and a couple of bits along the way. Hogan and Cambridge University Psychometrics. So, this is a little bit my hobby. I can kind of do psychometrics in the world of recruitment as well. And yeah, the reason, the reason that I'm so interested in psychometrics and coaching is because I do think they are strange bedfellows and I do think there's a lot of interesting things around them that sits underneath them.
So particularly the kind of the implied philosophy that sits behind them that I think a lot of coaches don't maybe think about or examine, like you say, it's just sort of maybe the client says, let's start with the psychometric. And yeah, and what happens when we start with a psychometric? We go in with the expert. Boom. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a different, it's a different relationship, isn't it? You're starting a different set of principles, different set of axioms.
Um And then that kind of, you're facilitating the debrief that relationship, then has to morph into maybe what you, I would think of as a coaching relationship. And that's tricky when you just told me that, you know, all about me. The bit, the bit that really catches me is I may have just told you that I know all about you, but that might actually be complete nonsense as well. Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I've, I've used psychometrics in my coaching career and uninteresting.
Never, ever would use them at the beginning of a session ever. Or at the beginning of a relationship ever would always use them to say. Is there anything in here that might give us a bit of insight here?
That seems, that seems really, really, I'm, I'm seeing that more and more like even in sort of training courses and stuff like that, you know, the idea of leading the psychometrics, coaching, coaching situations and stuff, it makes sense to sort of build a relationship and build the trust before introducing this thing that is potentially quite, um you know, if it's some potentially quite revealing.
Yeah. So why, you know, why, why do that as part of meeting one or why do that as the foundation for the relationship before there's any kind of relationship there? Yeah. And you know, of course, I've had, what do you say? I've had psychometrics done to me. I don't know how you describe that. I, you know, I've been psychometric, I've been well, yeah, let's find a verb for that.
So I have twice and, and in both cases, one line in each report was a game changer because one line made meaning of some stuff. Right. But the rest didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you meet people and they go, I'm whatever I am. So, instead of going, hello, I'm whoever, you know, in that first line in that, uh, in the conversation when you're getting to know them, they say well, you need to know I am. ISP, whatever. So, yeah, whatever, whatever I am. And you want to go. No, you're not.
You're actually you. So what do you really think? William? Um, um, what do I really think? Ok. So, so I really think about half of them on the market are very technically nonsense. Uh, really, technically nonsense. Um, and, and I have this conversation relatively regularly and I really, I really think like I'm really open to people saying that it's you, it's the way you're kind of, it's the way you're saying it. That's what gets the defensive reaction.
But one of the things I think is really interesting is how committed people can be to their chosen tool and then in the face of some, some evidence and things like that, you get all sorts of quite interesting sort of places. So, so one of the places that people sometimes go is it's all about the subjective experience. So what you said there was, there was one line that really made the difference for me. Yeah, wonderful. You know, if you get some value of this process, then that's great.
There's also I'll read a book and there'll be one line that's made a difference for me and the book wasn't written about me. So you go for a walk and think a thought and get some, um, the reason, the reason that I can shy away from the subject, there's two reasons in there, I think one is the principle. Again, there's this thing about sort of the underlying stuff. What do we, what does it say about us as coaches from the engaged in psychometric and things like that?
So one of the line principles is why am I using this one? Because there are some out there that are objectively quite accurate and there are some that are objectively inaccurate. So you've got this battle between people's subjective experience and then what can be demonstrated to be objectively true and accurate. And so if I do Psychometric with you and you say, well, I really like that Williams, thank you. I got great value, but that doesn't mean the psychometrics objectively accurate.
It just means it subjectively made sense to you. And the criteria that I would encourage people to explore is both you want a psychometric. That's, it looks like it makes sense to the person that's being psychometric. But also there's a good amount of research and an objective stuff behind it.
This is actually the way that we're introducing this person to thinking about themselves and the world stands up because if it's only subjective, I think about that as like the kind of the principle that also sits behind drug dealing. Do you know what I mean? Like, if, if, if you said to me right way, why are you, why are you dealing drugs to these people? I'd say, well, they tell me they like it.
Yeah. And that's the same principle that I would, I don't deal with drugs, but that's the same principle I would use to defend dealing drugs as I would use to defend using a dodgy psychometric. Well, people tell me, they like it and that sits uneasily with me, you know, from a kind of ethical perspective, if that, if that's all there is that people tell me they like it and that's the principle. It's like, well, where else would that apply?
And where would you be uncomfortable with applying if you're uncomfortable with that principle, applying over here? Why are you comfortable pushing psych? Yeah. And actually as you, yeah. And as you're talking, it makes me think about, um, about the, the, the programs that coaches might offer that says we're going to go through your values, your beliefs, your, this, your, this, you're the other, that's the, that's the curriculum of the coaching.
And then, and then they say to me that people like it and I say, but you didn't ask them what they needed before you did it. And I've got that, you know, I've still, I've still got a very strong memory partly because somebody else made a lot of money of, of, of having an intake conversation with somebody who was choosing between two coaches and she chose the coach who had the big program cost her a fortune. 18 months later, she meets the person who'd recommended me who says, how was the coach?
And she said it was amazing. And my colleague who, who was the person who did the ref the referral said, said, said, did you get what you needed? She said it was great. And then parallel said, did you get what you needed? And she went, well, no cos I haven't really answered the question I went with. So she said, I'll ring Claire. So she rang me up and she said, I spent all my money. And I said, what was the question? Remind me, what was the question that you wanted to bring?
What was the reason for coming for coaching? And she said something and I asked her, I asked her a question in our free chat and she went, that's the thing that's unlocked it. Yeah. And all of that, she loved the program. She absolutely loved it, but it didn't address the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's such a, it's such an instrument to reflect on. Should we even irrespective of which one? And irrespective of all the different things. Should we even be engaging in them?
Because it's pushing people through a is pushing people through a system to some degree, rather, like you say, just what's the question. But it, it's a, it's a shiny thing and maybe we feel as an industry, it feels more comfortable to say I'm going to study this shiny thing. It lends credibility. It's a defined process. It's easy to talk through. You can borrow a wee bit from the brand as well. So it's a thing that's out there.
So it's no longer, I mean, a lot, a lot of coaches, um, you know, myself included because coaching is such an intangible thing. Sometimes we can feel quite self-conscious about what are you actually selling? It doesn't have a resale value, it doesn't have. So actually, you know, here's this thing based on the work of Carl Jung and it's been around for so many years. Most popular, blah, blah, blah, used to there. And it's like, right. Ok, cool.
So that, that, that can be the foot in the door for a lot of people. Um, but you say it's kind of, um, we've got some answers before we've even asked the question. Yeah. And we used to use it as part of a management development program because that's what they wanted. And then in the end I said to the sponsor, I said, look, if you have 18 people on the program, this thing is a bit transformational for two or three of them because it gives language to something that's been a mystery for them.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you need to decide whether you want to spend this much money on it because actually those people often, what happens is in the coaching session that they have. They go. This is the thing about myself that I don't understand when I'm in a meeting, blah, blah happens. And then you can say, oh, well, if we look at the profile, I wonder if that gives us any insight and then the profile goes, oh, look. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the, that's the Barnum effect.
So the Barnum effect is a well studied thing in psycho. Well, it might be the Barnum effect. So the Barnum effect is a welli thing in psychometrics. And the Barnum effect is um named after Barham borough, named after that kind of Charlatan. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what you mean. So the bar effect is that the cold reading, cold reading is still the name for it. And that's kind of Darren Brown. So you'd write it's how horoscopes work.
So you write a kind of generic paragraph of the people you think about yourself as a generous person, but you worry that you could be more generous. Now, probably about 85% of the population put their hand up and say yes, that's me. So you write these things in all psychometrics, whether they are really well researched, whether they are just junk that someone's made up. Um, they all suffer from this. They all suffer to some degree from the environment effect.
So people will project themselves onto the report and almost a bit of confirmation biases about all that. So again, you've got to be really, really careful with that and from a kind of ethical perspective, you're putting these things in front of people and then someone says, oh, yeah. Yeah, that's definitely me. Oh, that's scary how accurate that is. On the one hand, you know, you can be smiling, going great and providing great service or this is going really, really well.
On the other hand, we should be really, really nervous. Going, hang on a minute. Here's this person seeing what they want to see. Actually what we are doing is entrenching and cementing things even harder and restricting that person's ability to change or move outside of what they exist and what they think about themselves as they are just now because we're all people and we're all different.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so that, that's, again, that's one that just doesn't seem to and I'm not saying that invalidates psychometrics like that, but for some reason, it just doesn't come up in conversation. Yes. Most people use psychometric. What's the bar in effect? And how do you try and mitigate against it? I know.
So when you use psychometrics, how do you mitigate against it the hell out of the like, really, really the hell out of the thing and engage with that and, you know, the best that you love. Um, don't, don't think they're true, be equal. The bits you're railing against, don't think they're true and the bits you're getting mill about, don't think they're true or false. Like, really hold it gently. The, the, the, the best one if, if you're gonna, if you're saying. Right.
Well, and you're being a bit critical. What's the best one? The big five model of personality? I don't know if you, have, you come across that Claire. So, so there's this, there's this huge sort of split between industry and research, an industry tends to use um more kind of stuff that's roughly derived of some things that Carl Young wrote in an essay once upon a time and blah, blah, a few people going to take it and run with it.
But research, if you want to do sort of hardcore personality research, so if you look at all the research that comes out around sort of coaching and persistent effects and personality, um you know, do you see changes in personality if you have a coaching relationship with people and blah, blah, blah, all that research revolves around the big five.
So if you were going to use a Psychometric, I would suggest you use one that's based on or built out of the big five because the big five stands up really, really well to everything we can hit it with in terms of research. I mean, I personally think it's quite cool I can bore you for a couple of minutes on the big five. So um thank you. I was fishing there. Um So, so not so it was like graphic. It was derived in a really weird way. So it wasn't a theory.
Someone didn't sit down one day and say, I think this is how personality works. It was almost sort of derived by accident. It was a bunch of statisticians and they had, they had a bunch of like personality survey data and they said, well, let's do, let's do factor analysis on this data.
And factor analysis is like a really, really hal boring statistical, sorry to any researchers out there turbo boring statistical process where you just feed a data set through factual analysis, set a few parameters. And what it'll do is it'll tell you the sort of correlations in the data set.
So if we run a farm, like let's silly example, if we run a farm and we had 100 animals and you had your data set on your animals, you know how big they are, all this kind of stuff, you fed it through bacter analysis. Bacter analysis would spit out roughly speaking the different species on the farm. So it's say you've got some cows, you've got some goats, youve got some sheep, you've got some ducks, they are separate.
There are similarities, the sheep and the goats seem more similar than the sheep and the ducks. But, but actually, of your 100 animals. This is how it splits and 40 over there. 20 over there just based on things like all the different data points. Some have hoops, some have web feet, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what, that's what these folk did. They just fed a whole bunch of survey data through back analysis.
And what you get with that is you get five clumps in language and this is the lexical hypothesis. The lexical hypothesis is that language has evolved to describe personality. And the relatedness between descriptions is what gives us these five, these five traits if you like. So for example, if uh if you were going to describe someone as organized, it's a bit like, do you remember that old game show a catchphrase? You know. So it's almost like that kind of logic.
So it's like, OK, if we describe someone as organized, our survey also says you might describe them as neat or you might describe them as our survey definitely says you wouldn't describe them as chaotic. So that's separate things and that's what you get. You get five clumps of language. I wish you'd taught me statistics at university. So I might have understood it. Bye. Ducks and farms. And I've got a two year old. So it's very top of mind.
And so yeah, I did pass my applied statistics degree, but only just, and I can't actually do any of it or remember any of it anymore. But it's not the most engaging. Sorry. No, it's kind of, yeah, that was a bit of a myth on my trajectory. Perhaps I should try to be a business psychologist. Do it, do it. But it wasn't. So, so there are five clumps and then you're saying that there are some psychometrics that are based on the five clumps. What the five clumps do really, really well.
Um So they're stable cross culture. So you can run facts, which is really cool. You can run factor analysis on any language and you get the same five clumps. You get, you get a shadow of 1/6 1 in some languages around sort of honesty, but that doesn't, that doesn't wreck or disprove the thing that that's just the next area for research if you like. So you get these five clumps of stable cross culturally.
Um and it has, it has a whole bunch of really interesting properties that your everyday garden variety young secondary just doesn't. So one of the clumps. So there's this really important concept in psychometric predictive validity. You come across predictability in your travel. Oh I have heard of that from my degree in applied statistics. So maybe there's a little bit of I was, so I didn't realize that I was like a high level statistic, you know. Um So predict predictability then go on.
Do you want, do you want to define it or why? No, you define it? So it's just the degree to which if we measure something, it's the degree to which it tells us anything about anything else. And, and humans have like a really implicit understanding of this. Do you know what I mean? Like I say, how's the weather where you are? You look out the window because you know that looking out the window has an incredibly high predictability.
You know, how often do you look out the window and the weather's not doing what it's doing when you, you know, outside the window, in a glass does the job you wouldn't look under the desk because actually what's going on under the desk predicts the weather really poorly. You go for, you go to, I mean, medical example is pretty good. You go to the doctor, maybe you get that thing on your arm, you get your blood pressure checked and stuff like that.
Now, if you have, if you're, if you have high blood pressure, it doesn't mean you're guaranteed to get done in by some kind of condition, it just means that there's more of a likelihood that you might develop certain conditions. So it's not a perfect, it's not a 1 to 1 or 100% predict of validity. But it's just if your blood pressure is sitting around this area, you're more likely than the average person. And this is predictive language.
It's all about likelihoods and likelihoods compared to the average person. So the big five has that you can say things like one of the traits is conscientiousness and all these really geeky research psychologists that are absolutely amazing, go out and do all this wonderful work and conscientious trait conscientiousness on the big five is the second best predictor of anything in the entirety of the social sciences. Wow. Right. So that's one of the big five.
I'll the JY, I won't, I'll name names if you want me to. But um I've had a few interesting emails in the past from certain interested parties. Um I've never quite achieved a cease and desist letter yet, but, you know, that's my aspiration for 2025 want to get there. Um Young psychometrics have never been able to demonstrate predictive validity. So it's literally like looking under the desk and then suggesting what's going on with the weather. Ok. So you might get it right.
You might, you have a broken watch is right? Twice a day, you might be talking absolute rubbish. That's the, that's the bit that kind of catches me. It's like, what's the, there's the deployment of the psychometric with the other individual before a coaching relationship starts? I also think there's something about what's the coach's understanding or what, what idea is the coach bringing into that relationship around how people and the world work.
And so, so my, my brother in law is a lawyer, really, really talented individual, really, really clever guy as well. Um And his organization did one of these not so great psychometrics and he sent me a copy of it. And what I thought was really interesting was there was a lot of predictive language in it. And again, sometimes we talk about the young women as people say, oh, but we're not predicting things and we're not.
And it's like, well, any test is designed to try and predict something outside of the data it gathers. So you are, you are trying to predict something causal language. So anytime, anytime one of these uses causal or predictive, it says because so you are all of these things, the quiet part is compared to the average person and then you've got to say right?
OK. So, so you are a, you are a for color and therefore you are the kind of person who and it's like, well to what degree, how much more likely am I compared to the average person to do Xy and Z and a lot of these psychometrics simply cannot answer that. I think that that kind of gives me a real pause for concern. Sorry, I'm just kind of ranting at, you know. No, no, it's interesting, isn't it?
Because because of course, in coaching, the one thing that we're trying to do is to get the person better connected with themselves so that they listen to themselves and, and make good decisions and to support them to do that. So to support them, to be able to make their own meaning, to support them, to be able to think more deeply, to support them in some cases, to be able to think, to feel, to do all of those things.
So all of the, all of the purpose of coaching is what can I, what can I do inside of myself in service of how I connect better with those around me. That's the purpose of coaching, right? And the biggest expert on that is the individual. And so one of the things that we're trying to do in coaching is to get them to trust themselves more.
So I'm doing a webinar in, in half an hour where, um, I'm going to be talking to some sports coaches and, uh, in the email that said, please, you talk about one of the things was it's very easy in sports coaching to get very dependent on the stats. Yeah. And actually this is about using the stats. So it's exactly the same thing. So it's about using the stats as information, but also the person's got to be able to access their own brilliance, their own, their own self.
They've got to be able to go inside and deal with and use well, what they've already got. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I really like it really like it. What it, what it puts me mates to, to the, this is, this is where I think the philosophy thing starts to kick in a wee bit So one of the things that people, because I spend a lot of time thinking about why are these more easily described as junk psychometrics more popular and why are the kind of hardcore research ones less popular?
And I think the hardcore research ones are less popular, they're more accurate, objectively accurate, but they're less popular because the hardcore researchers don't really think of it, the commercial side. So how palatable they are, what you're saying about the person, you know, we're trying to get the person to depend more on themselves and things like that. So the nonsens you ones because you're making very light predictions and they tend to always be always positive as well.
So it's kind of very easy to just have a nice conversation. Everything's fine, everything's all good, it's all meaningless anyway. So there's no downside and then the person can just make whatever they want, apply some labels to themselves. That that's the bit that kind of I think connects to what you're saying. When the person starts labeling themselves and takes, takes things on as being true.
They've accidentally built in a whole bunch of assumptions which subjectively might feel accurate but objectively are just nonsense. The other, the other thing that I think is quite interesting is with the big five latest research is around the biological component of it, right? So if you start cutting really brutal example, but if you start cutting bits out of my brain, my score on the big five will change. Right now. There's less, there's less extreme experiments.
You don't, you don't get a long queue of volunteers for that experiment for some reason. Um The less extreme ones are if we start dosing people up with certain hormones, traits in the big five score. So for example, testosterone. So if we do a whole bunch of people, we get 100 people, we do them all with testosterone and their score for agreeableness will go down.
Yeah, if we dose people up with, I think it's DNT which is a psychotropic, their score for openness to experience goes up and stays up. Ah, so physiological changes in the brain downstream of that, you'll see changes in personality. What does this mean? Does it mean we're just biological machines? I don't think so. Um But it means that the reason that I'm not you and the reason that you're not me as a physical component to it, it will not change easily.
And some people shy away from that with the big five because it can feel like you are, you are, you are closing down the domain of possible change, you know, because coaching is all about that sort of being open to the possibilities rather than putting limits on people. And that's what these kind of youngian tools do really, really nicely, they don't put any limits on anything.
But if your philosophy is, then there are no limits on anyone then the reason that I'm not Claire Pedrick is, I just haven't trained hard enough. I just haven't done the things that you've done to make me you. Yeah, but, you know, you can never be me and I can never be you. Great, great, great.
So, so built into, built into the slightly better psychometrics is this idea that actually there are some boundaries and there are some things, you know, just like if you put me next to an Olympic swimmer or a jockey, jockey is probably a better example. I'm 6 ft one. I'm just not going to be, I'm just not going to be in the Grand National. Do you know what I mean? It's just not going to happen for me, the wrong shape. That's exactly it. Exactly.
So now that's not to say that I couldn't get to a really high level riding horses. It's just to say it's a bit cruel for the bit cruel for the horse in the Grand National. It's me and it's back, you know, it's looking around at all his pals going. Oh, come on. So, so that's the kind of philosophical bit that gets me, which is what's the coach taking out as their underlying understanding of personality traits?
I think a lot of coaches inadvertently taken this thing of you can be anything and everything and all things and there's no limits and while I think on one level that's a really positive thing to take in on another level that can actually be quite abusive because it means that the only reason that you are not getting what you want is you.
So the only reason that I'm not winning a gold medal or, or the only reason I'm not winning the Grand National is because of me at some point at some point, if I do absolutely everything that the world class jockey is doing simply the fact that they are a third of the way or, you know, two thirds of the way that I am will come into play. Yeah. And, and why am I not a statistician?
I'm not a statistician because I was really very good at maths until the first year of my university degree when I suddenly realized that I was immersed in something that was beyond me. And I however hard I worked, I didn't understand it and effort in mathematics, effort and achievement aren't connected.
I mean, the great thing about doing a mathematical sciences degree and not being able to do it is that you can't spend hours in the library to try and make yourself better at it because it doesn't make any difference. So I had a lovely time. Well, I did actually come out with a degree but I didn't come out with very much mathematical knowledge just about enough to get through.
Because because effort in that context, if, if, if you, you know, and some Children get that encounter with mathematics when they're seven or nine or 12 or 15. And this thing about having educating people up to the age of 18 in maths, you know, all you're doing.
And I, this is, this is not research, this is just my sense and I was a maths teacher for a bit and that was my sense with students as well is that you get to a point where you can do it and you get beyond that point, you can't, you know, I think the best one for this because they have and they say we are not 2530 we're not given 25 blank.
And actually, you know, the, the really elegant job is to create an environment where the child can develop themselves into who they are rather than just saying why jobs to get them all to this point. Um Steven Steven Pinker has got a really good book, The Blank Slate. And he just takes the part of that whole notion. And again, it's this idea that um so we are the shape that we are and there's some, I mean, actually physical shape is probably quite a good metaphor. We are the shape that we are.
There's a huge amount of flexibility in that, but there's a huge amount of things that are actually just growing with our control. Yeah. Um because skeletons are different shapes. Well, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. You know, now the really interesting thing that, that starts to raise is nature versus nurture, right? Because you have your potential. Thick skeletons, skeletons are good. There is the, there is the shape and size your skeleton was always gonna be.
And that's the kind of nature side of things that's in your DNA. There's also the nurture side of things, which is, if you're malnourished, you won't top out at your potential. Yeah. The really cool researcher in the big five comes away with this idea. That's about, it's about 50% nature and 50% nurture the way they do that is with twin studies. So you get identical twins separated at birth and then you run a whole bunch of tests on them and follow them around and stuff like that.
And what they find is that by about age 50 who score the same with the big five. Wow. So you can, and, and what you're doing there, you're controlling as hard as you can for nature. You're saying, you know, here's, here's people that have the same nature you put in a completely different nurture environment and then we're gonna see what effect that has. Wow. Yeah, there's loads of cool stuff.
Loads of, yeah, I, I'm on my hobby horse now but there's loads of cool stuff and then, you know, um, then you get the other stuff out there and it's like, hey, but there's, you know, four colors and that's how people work. And it's like, oh, man, come on also publish some research. You know, if, if I was going to offer one question to any coach or anyone thinking about becoming accredited or qualified in a psychometric, ask the vendor of the published research that is behind it.
I asked, I asked one on linkedin the other week. He said, hey, you know, they posted a big, big brand, you know, big, big brand owned by, bought out and owned by a big, big company. And then they posted, they post like once Tuesday must be their posting day for their marketing stuff. And I stuck a wee comment and saying, hey, that looks really interesting. Um Can you send me some links to some peer reviewed published research? And the reply was literally, hey, thanks for your comment.
William brackets you back. Thanks for your comment, William, why don't you have a look at this page with all the testimonials from the people that have, you know, told us that this is really helpful and it's like, great. That's back to that drug dealer logic. You know, people like it. So we'll keep on pushing it. Yeah. Yeah. So peer research, so I can hear some of our listeners spinning, not necessarily all positively spinning.
And when I put your linkedin profile link in the, in the show notes, you might never speak to me again. What do you want to say to the person who's spinning? Um Oh, I've used, I've used these things as well. Like, so I'm not holding myself up to saying, like, I'm, you know, I'm better than you. I've, I've, I only use the good ones, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of thing. Like I've, you know, when I was years ago I didn't know anything about this.
Started looking at it, read a whole bunch of books and very nearly pulled the trigger on a course that would have got me inducted into the cult of popular nonsense. So, you know, it was only sort of by absolute look that I ended up not doing popular nonsense and then just kind of fell down the other way. What, what I, what I really notice is sometimes people because they're invested in it because they've had a positive subjective experience or this really spoke to me. I found it really accurate.
I would just say, please, please, please, if you can, don't defend, don't defend. You know, one of the really curious things about this whole area is I said to my wife a couple of years ago, the really interesting thing here is we've got a whole bunch of learning professionals, roughly speaking, you know, coaching facilitation, all that kind of stuff. We've got a whole bunch of learning professionals that don't really want to learn. I know what I like and I like what I know kind of thing.
So I just say this, if this has caused you to have a reaction, don't, don't take my word for it, don't take me seriously, but go and engage with the research, go and look these things up, go and go and investigate predictive validity and, and, and, you know, also just wrestle with this idea that something can speak to you and can seem very, very true, but it can be absolute rubbish.
And this idea that, well, the people I work with get a lot out of it, I would say really, really investigate that because there's always a cost and while the person might be telling you that they love it or they got a lot out of it, the cost is that you've introduced a set of labels and a way of thinking about people in the world that may not be accurate. And I think the downstream effect of that never ever really gets taken into account. You know, we've introduced into the organization.
Everyone now thinks of themselves across four colors and then what you find is you find that people will get and they all say, oh, we would never do this. This doesn't happen. Of course, it's going to happen. People end up getting pigeonholed. One of my aversions is that a very long time ago, I went on a course where they did a well known and they did the well known thing and it was a course over a number of weeks. So we did the thing before day one.
We were then told what we were and then the facilitator use the, the types for groups. And I was always in the group that was different from the majority. And I absolutely hated the course, I really hated it. And in fact, I then subsequently went on to run it without using any diagnostics. But when I meet people who had also been on the same course, who told me they, they go, oh, I went on that course. I hated it. And I said, oh, what was your label?
And they would always say the same label as the label that I was given. And it could have been another label, of course. But it, what was interesting was that our label was different from the label of the majority and the way that my perception, which may not be the truth. My perception of the way the group was run is that we were always set up, it felt like we were always set up as being the minority against the majority or the majority against the minority.
And it was really, really unpleasant, really unpleasant. Yeah. Yeah. That there's a really powerful way to use these things that's really helpful, productive. There's a really powerful way to use the nonsense ones that's really powerful and productive. So it's a bit like those ink blocks, you know, the Ross, that's a completely subjective experience. No one's taking those ink blocks in and saying, well, if you, if you see a cat, it means this and if you see a horse, it means this.
So the subjectivity and you can have an absolutely hideous experience with the good ones as well. You know, because people overplay the power of the good ones and it's like they don't account for much where I get wary is when we start to pretend that the ink blots are real. Then I think, well, you wouldn't, you wouldn't take the Easter bunny into a coaching conversation or you wouldn't take, you know, Voodoo into a coaching conversation or an organization.
There's as much evidence behind some of these things as voodoo and the Easter bunny. So, what are the ethics there? You know, what are the ethical considerations for? You're y you're reminding me of some feedback I got during my coach supervision training where, where somebody said, uh in the feedback, they said you were so not grounded in that conversation. Uh Cos your feet weren't touching the floor and it, and it, you just weren't grounded in the conversation.
They were very strange chairs and I was too short for my feet to touch the floor. So of course, they weren't touching the floor to perch on the edge or I had to sit with my legs dangling. So, no, I, of course, I wasn't grounded because I couldn't reach the floor. Yeah, I think what I want to say to our listeners is that if we're working in partnership, we're working in partnership. And if you use a, a diagnostic that becomes bigger than the other person.
Well, even if it becomes the same size as the other person, there are now three of us in this conversation, the diagnostic, you and the thinker and actually the most important person in the conversation is the thinker and anything that makes them smaller isn't serving. So if you're gonna use it, make it the right size. Right. Nice, nice, nice.
I shall, I shall really, really have a think about that one because that's, that's making you think we'll have to come back for another conversation with you. Yeah. Yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to. You're making me think. You're making me think that even if you've got the best quality one, you've still got a lot of work to do.
It's not good enough just to hide behind the quality of the to like have, have the best quality one, but equally have what you just said in front of mind every time you use it. Yeah, cos if I took you into my kitchen now and said here are some ingredients, cook what you like, but it has to be this. Do you know about my cooking? II? A lot of things in your, it's not my kitchen, by the way, my kitchen but, but that's not the same as saying, oh look, there's all these things here.
What should we do? What do you want to cook? Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you. Uh So I'm Claire Patrick and I've been in conversation with William mckee and his contact details are in the show notes, but be kind. Thank you, William. Bye bye everyone. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, we'd love you to share the podcast with a friend or leave a comment on social media.
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