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Nick Reed, Director of the Centre
Nick's first career was as a lawyer. He studied law at the London School
of Economics and holds both a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in
law. He qualified as a Solicitor in 1980. After a number of years in
private practice with a law firm, Nick moved into industry to practice law
and later went into management, eventually becoming managing director of a
firm specialising in delivering company secretarial services to firms of
lawyers and accountants.
Looking for a career change, Nick became interested in the area of
organisational development and studied for a post-graduate Diploma in
Management at Birkbeck College, University of London. He also decided to
look for psychological approaches that could be applied to organisations.
Having explored a range of approaches, Nick was struck by the fact that
there were very few large psychological theories, but a great many small
theories looking at particular aspects of human activity. When he
discovered personal construct psychology he was delighted to find a
psychology which not only had a comprehensive, integrated theory but was
also idiographic and so did not 'impose' pre-packaged 'answers' to the
problems that organisations have. Instead, he found that PCP concentrated
on identifying and understanding the construing of organisations and then
on helping them to change their construing, using 'tailor-made'
interventions. Very much a 'case by case' approach and very consistent
with the way that lawyers think about things.
In his Foundation Course in PCP, Nick was introduced to repertory grids by
Fay Fransella. Nick asked her "Can you use these grid things with groups
of people in organisations to find out what they are thinking?" Fay said
you could and that the Centre had used a special form of repertory grid
called a 'group grid' in a great many companies to find out what their
staff thought about their company, their jobs and many other issues. That
method of using grids is called the "Diagnostic
Research Method". Keen
to pursue this, Nick asked Fay when the next course on group grids was
going to be run. Fay said there hadn't been a course for some years and
there were no current plans to run one, but she would see what she could
do. So it was that in Bristol in 1996 a grid course was run that included
studying the design, administration, analysis and interpretation of group
grids.
After the Bristol course, Fay asked Nick if he would like to become
involved with the Centre. He said "Yes, please" and he was very privileged
to be taken on as a personal student of Fay. Nick gained his Diploma in
PCP in 2000, writing his dissertation on PCP and knowledge management in
organisations. He became Director of the Centre in 2005 when it became
part of the School of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.
To contact him please e-mail
Nick Reed
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Nick Reed |
