AFTERWORD: WHERE STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS GOES FROM HERE

Structural dynamics theory began in the 1970s in the course of my studying face-to-face communication in families. In the 1990s, it extended to the study of couples in therapy. Between 2000 and 2008, I began to expand the theory and to apply it to corporations and their teams. Going forward, structural dynamics will focus primarily on teams, team behavior in low and high stakes, and the ability to measure change using computerized instruments with the capacity to code and capture structural dynamics’ basic unit of measurement, the speech act.

Over time, the speech act became the theory’s basic unit for coding and measuring what happens in human vocal discourse in social networks like families, couples, and teams. Within the speech act, with the development of the first Behavioral Propensities Profile, I was able to statistically establish high levels of validity and reliability for structural dynamics’ thirty-six speech acts.¹ Few issues are more important than how leaders lead in high-stakes situations, but very few instruments currently in use address such situations. Although structural dynamics and its tools are still in early stages of development, they are already in use and capable of putting leaders in touch with damaging impacts they have on others and getting them on a sounder developmental path.

The leadership capacities, and the assignment of ratings in each capacity as described in this chapter, is still in a very early stage of development. The long-term goal in developing this tool is to move it toward a more formal, reliable method of measurement.

Understanding the relationship between the structural nature of human discourse and the performance of teams is one of the exciting research goals of those who work in structural dynamics. We seek to do this through empirical studies of change from a valid baseline measure of behavior, the Behavioral Propensities Profile. Because top-level leaders are willing to put themselves and their teams under the confines of research-based scrutiny, we foresee additional, potentially breakthrough learning in the near future.

Future empirical testing will include analyzing the following:

• The influence of meeting format (formal, structured, informal, leaderless) on discourse and its outcome
• Typologies of stakes-raising themes and circumstances
• How the formal status of the team leader (the presence of “power”) affects discourse patterns
• Subversive communication as a covert response to power
• Assumptions about “the voice of gender” in high-level teams
• The relationship between turn taking and interaction order and communicational productivity
• “Language differences” in supposed homogeneous cultures
• Intrateam trends
• Interteam comparisons
• Team interfaces
• Mixed cultural teams

Note

1. The reliability of the Behavioral Propensities Profile (BPP) was assessed by analyzing its internal consistency, which evaluates individual questions in comparison with one another for their ability to give consistent results. The analysis was conducted on a sample of over two hundred respondents and resulted in a robust Cronbach’s alpha (α) of .96 for the overall scale. For more information on the BPP or to arrange for you or your team to take it, please visit the Kantor Institute Web site (www.kantorinstitute.com).