Clip 13: Analysing interpersonal interactions

Michael:

Role play is just one technique. What underpins the approach is, I think, quite a deep understanding of the underpinning theories about interpersonal effectiveness that comes from the work of Argyris and Schön. So you need to understand that, and you also have to have a reasonable sense of what the preferred model of practice looks like. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is that you need to be able to make those problems of practice visible. We use role play. You can use transcript of a recalled conversation or practice problem. The advantage of transcript is that it’s not live, and you can stare at it for hours and you can analyse it in a lot of different ways. And that’s more accessible for people who are not as fluent in generating alternative approaches to problems. So in some ways, that’s a way of easing into role play.

To make role play work, as I said before, you do need to produce a safe environment to start with, and to have somebody that can conduct that role play in a way that’s going to keep people safe and allow them to take the risks that are necessary to engage with it in authentic ways.

So Catherine has role played what happened; one or other of us may also step in and say, “Give me a go. Let me see if I can talk to Jack in a way that will overcome those problems.” It doesn’t actually matter whether they do or they don’t, whether they’re successful or not. Because what you are getting there is two possible ways of handling that same situation. If it’s successful, then Catherine has seen a successful alternative. If it’s not successful, then you realise that the problem is slightly more difficult than you thought, and you have to find a different, deeper solution to overcome it, and that you’re needing to draw on the resources of the group to delve into that.

So when you find that solution, Catherine learned something, that’s fabulous. But others have learned something too, particularly people who have tried their own solution and it hasn’t quite worked – because then they can very tangibly and vicariously learn from that experience. Because you have put yourself on the spot, you have tried something, you know that it didn’t work because you could feel it not working, you could see the other person not reacting the way you wanted. This solution shows you the way through that, and you can feel that at quite a deep level.