The KAI Certification Course - Thoughts of a Participant

S.G. Fisher

I’ve been on a few test courses recently which seem to entail much working out of standard deviations and correlations by hand.  I have even taught a few of them myself, so when I was persuaded by the research group of which I am a member to attend a KAI Certification course I thought I knew exactly what to expect.  A firm mental set had comfortably become established which told me I was going to spend days learning about a single test.  I expected fellow delegates to be personnel professionals with perhaps one or two academics like myself released for a few days for good behaviour (especially good behaviour – the course is not cheap!)  Things were not as expected.  Almost at once we were reminded of Kuhn’s Paradigm Shifts, a contribution to the philosophy of science (yes, philosophy of science on a test course!) which I just remembered from my undergraduate days.  Before long we were discussing the ingenious ways paradigms are protected and how they become the victim of “precipitative events” which consign them to history.  More important, we learnt about the characteristics of those whose predisposition was to work with existing paradigms and those that preferred generating new ones.

It became apparent that I was not just “buying in” to a neat measure of cognitive style which could be used “to select creative people” but rather to a whole approach to creativity with implication as much for team composition as it has for straightforward selection.  In fact, early on in the course one realised that “selecting creative people” is something which does not really make sense.  Many things began to ring true.  For example, I had just consulted with a company that was wondering how it could manage what it called its innovators, some of who were prone to push forward in many directions at the same time!  Adaption-Innovation theory seemed to give me a theoretical frame-work within which to work out solutions to such everyday problems.  When the course finished I realised that I had experienced the equivalent in lecturing time of a Strathclyde University Psychology Department full semester honours class.  I also seemed to have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.  The angel was saying “Maybe you should break your longer lectures up a bit”, the devil was saying “You could get your honours option over in a few days if you planned well”.  So this was not a course for the frail or faint hearted.  Although these days lacked some of the experiential element one has come to expect (no statistics work out!) it made up for this in the intellectual demands it made on participants.  Not only was there a lot of information to take on board, one had to cope with its many implications.  Towards the end you found yourself generating hypothesis after hypothesis that could be tested in Adaptive-Innovation terms – to an academic a most gratifying kind of creativity.

Originally published in KAI News 1994