2016 marks the 100th year since the birth of Harvard Professor Emeritus Robert F. Bales, the author and inventor of SYMLOG, and Social Interaction Theory. Freed, as he preferred to be called, worked intimately in the establishment of SYMLOG Consulting Group and its products, from the inception of the organization in 1983 to his death in 2004.
Many of you knew him, worked with him, or at the very least are aware of his seminal contribution to the field of social psychology. In 1996, Freed gave an interview which runs about 150 minutes in its entirety.
In honor of him, we are posting his answers to questions from this interview over the course of the next year. It is our hope that by watching you will get to know his work better, his wonderful wit and intellect, and the significance of his contribution to the study and advancement in the field of social interaction.
Please watch, enjoy, and share with your friends
The real question is what role art has played in SYMLOG, even though they don’t seem to fit together very well.
Like SYMLOG, color theory has three dimensions, and the color spectrum has colors that are complementary and oppose each other. Much like the values in the SYMLOG system.
Colors can be harmonious with each other, or complementary, or clashng, or oppositional—similar to the way values play a part in our behavior. I get support for my work in interpersonal relations by looking at the picture I’m painting.
When I am painting I want to get the right effect of light. That’s a matter of having every color in the proper relationship to every other one.
There is always some imagination we have when people talk together. That begins to build the context, and that context is a kind of field.
Music takes place in a time trajectory. It cycles, repeats, reiterates, and recapitulates. Our interactions together are like that.
All of the competing forces present when people are trying to work together have a bearing, like a system. One thing follows another, and everything that happens has a consequence. Not everything you can describe or observe is equally important. SYMLOG has identified the most important.
SYMLOG is really a theory of what is most relevant, and what is always there whenever you have a social interaction system.
A rat in a maze certainly gives you the elements of the simplest way of thinking about behavior. But the rat maze model is completely inadequate as a way of talking about the activity of a team, which is a system with a complex number of parts interacting and building up pressure, trying to make progress toward a goal or goals.
Groups typically do not have one goal, but a number of group goals. In coordinating these over time, conflict will grow. SYMLOG enables you to gather information about such a complex system in the most effective and efficient way, and to learn what is going wrong and take another approach.
SYMLOG provides a set of values, general ways of feeling about how social relationships should go. And we typically have strong feelings about those ways, and anger and indignation when behavior doesn’t conform to these values.
I believe we come with built in conflicting motives. We all have to do things to exist that we don’t like in other contexts. We try to put it all together into a consistent system, but it is a real problem.
Since we are different, and since conflict is inevitable, it turns out that on certain issues we will tend to develop subgroups with those with whom we can agree. And the largest social form of this kind of thing is an ideology or a political party.
Leadership arises where there is some dynamic conflict going on and the person who takes leadership takes action/s that start to change the balance of forces. You have to make it happen by intelligence and knowledge of the system which is great enough to enable you to make strategic change.
My work, which began in the classroom, gave me an opportunity to study personality conflicts, what kinds of people are there, what affect they have on each other. It was a wonderful environment to learn about people, conflict, and what different things happen when you put all these types of people together in one mix. It’s the same in life and work environments.
After much study, I determined the most important way of understanding what was going on in groups was knowing the values that were operating. What values? What I came out with sounded quite a lot like political, economic, and social issues on a broad scale. Values deal with those issues.
With the formation of the SYMLOG Consulting Group in 1983 I focused my attention on what I had learned in the laboratory to real groups. Since SYMLOG is a systematic method to gather information about a real system, all kinds of systems can be described by observing values, the way people come with certain value sets, and the way they deal with value conflicts.
It is distinctly relevant. We have the same problems in groups that we have always had. The generalizations one is able to make are problems of human relations which are much the same forever.
At a deep psychological level, individual value systems tend to get hooked on our notion of what it takes to survive. The SYMLOG optimum profile is able to show which of these values it takes for an organization and its employees to survive over time. Does it have any relationship to the effectiveness of my organization—I think yes, a very direct relationship to it.
When we have a number of different people with different concepts of survival, how can we account for the fact that we have any kind of social order? There is a kind of evolution, and we build up as a society, an organization, a culture, opinions about what is good, what is bad, and what is effective. At a deeper level, effective means survival, but it means the bottom line at a more surface level. That’s what we’re interested in, but we can have very different ideas.
There is, I am happy to say, from the thousands who have answered the question about what is most effective for you, a high degree of convergence toward a profile of relative frequencies of the 26 SYMLOG values over what is the most effective. We also know that it tends to be idealized and is not one particular balance, but a distribution. That distribution contains a certain frequency of bad things.
In any organization or team that's tried a SYMLOG survey, the results in their answer to most effective is a very sensible picture that is our optimum profile. But if you ask how things actually are, it will depart from that, very considerably, usually. So, if effective is connected to the probability of survival of the organization, what do we do? We know quite a lot about how much of each kind of behavior is consistent with effective, and whether or not you should attack it as something you want to change.
One way to simplify the very complex arena that SYMLOG attempts to throw light on is to look at isolated areas of the complexity. Looking at the conflicts that arise when two different kinds of value positions are juxtaposed to each other, and seeing how these are played out in a group situation, is one of those “simplifications”.
If you are a donkey and have one bale of hay on one side of you, and another bale of hay on the other, how do you decide where to go? Such is the nature of an approach-approach conflict, where either alternative is positive.
In trying to satisfy our values, our feeling for what is right and deal with the situation, we always face conflict. Life seems to have the character that if you satisfy one value you’re going to have to reduce your attention and investment, at least for the time being, in other values.
The field of values in which we lives our lives, and make our choices, is something like a magnetic field. These opposing concepts tell us how an individual’s “field” is polarized. What values bother the person, which ones give him/her the most conflict, and in which direction a person is most strongly drawn?
Social interaction is by its very nature complex, with the myriad values, attitudes, goals, thinking each person brings to the interaction. Dealing with this multiplicity is quite difficult to do. SYMLOG does a better job of articulating what is important than any other system.
Of the millions of values and traits to consider in evaluating behavior, the simplification of the 26 values used in SYMLOG is extremely important. With factor analysis these important traits seem to group into three dimensions: one dimension of dominant to submissive, one from friendly to unfriendly, and one I call Forward and Backward.
Originally named for the behavior of children, moving forward or “holding back” and not wanting to get involved, if you add an element of goal achievement there needs to be some task orientation. That typically involves leadership or authority.
This dimension is a little difficult to understand because it gets more complex when you get a group of people trying to cooperate and acquire leadership. In the service of authority, or control of people, we have an important distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority.
If you are in agreement with the leadership and direction of those in authority, you will see them as legitimate. If you are part of a minority who feel the present authority is not only illegitimate, but insufferable, that minority leadership will be considered renegade by the majority, but a hero to those with the same point of view.
What will please one group is not going to please another. And leaders always have to deal with those conflicts. What are the strengths and vulnerability of the groups, and what is inherent in the complex mix? SYMLOG is an instrument like no other for describing just what the situation is.
The goal in choosing the directional names for the three SYMLOG dimensions was to be non-evaluative. The problem is that almost any words chosen will be value-laden to someone. The best attempt was to name them for spatial directions.
This instrument is very sensitive to changes, but it doesn’t jiggle. It has great stability on test-retest over time, or assessment and re-assessment over time. You may wish it were not so and it would look like there was more change than there is. But the common sense answer to this is, it is a very reliable instrument.
Do the results mean what you think it means? Yes, and the descriptions ring true to people. But we know that people will tend to accept a description given to them, so not having many instances where people do not agree makes me suspicious. We might have more instances of people accepting than is good for us. But, in the ordinary sense of the word, yes, it is valid.
Chances are your co-workers will pick up on the things you do that bother them most, and overshoot their ratings of ideal. It is important to note what behaviors they’re picking up, but if you are really able to adjust your behavior, best to adjust to the optimal profile.
The simple answer is that they are. They are intentionally so. It is a measurement decision. And it works like a charm.
The items have to be precise in locating the value in this three dimensional space. When the rater picks up a new element in an item that he/she doesn’t like, it seems as though it doesn’t fit with the others. It doesn’t. It doesn’t fit because we are adding elements one by one as we go around the space. But a problem item for one rater will not necessarily be a problem item for someone else.
Take tiny steps, talk to the person responsible for making this type of decision, and get to know what kinds of values the person has. Use illustrative material as well to obviate the need to explain the system.
Most other instruments are training instruments that tell individuals something about themselves or the way they think. But they do not purport to give a picture of a team or organization, and its various parts, and how they conflict. SYMLOG is a method of diagnosis of the organization rather than an education addition to the individual.
“…the number of variations of uniqueness that you can portray with this kind of dynamic system, or this degree of coverage of values, is incalculable really.” With even a small sample, you will see the uniqueness of your organization portrayed against a background of the way things ordinarily look. And it may account for the fact that you are more or less successful than others.
Our sample, on which we build our picture of the norms of what is average, good, better, is quite broad. We have more than a million profiles, so we can give you a very broad and comprehensive sample picture of what your results look like compared to other organizations in other sectors of the economy.
SYMLOG can be helpful to any organization, but needs to be relevant to their perceived needs. If you are working with the leader, have the leader make a set of personal ratings. This might provide insight as to where to go next in terms of the overall organizational needs.
People form impressions very fast. If a team has been working together for any length of time, you would probably get quite a good idea as to the functioning of the team with ratings. We don’t know how long it would take to get adequate data, but isn’t it worth a try?
We indeed can make repeated measurements, you are able to make comparisons and see movement. Without the repeat measure, you won’t know if the movement is in the direction you’re trying to produce.
If there is any way to link it to the amount of work that’s been done, the thought that’s been done on it, the attempt to try out any changes they may have tried to make, that would regulate the timing. I don’t think it has to be a long lapse of time.
The original meaning of multiple levels was that SYMLOG was a set of concepts that give you the means of measuring non-verbal behavior, overt interaction, fantasy, value content in conversation, that can be read at a deeper level-individuals' comments about their thinking on a particular topic are often in keeping with concerns they have about their group and each other.
The answer is, it’s a little bit of all of these because they are all similar in certain ways. They are all interactive systems which you can describe in terms of the values involved. But even a good battery of personality measures will generally leave out an important level in the interaction, and that is the value level.
The articulation of the 26 values as those most important in interaction is a new and significant contribution of SYMLOG. They give you a way of describing and visualizing group dynamics—how people view each other, the kinds of conflicts they are likely to have, how they are likely to react to specific issues—from the very detailed level to large scale societal levels.
While we know quite a bit about leadership in small groups, we do not thus far have much information about large scale subgroups and their common patterns of polarization, unification, leadership, resistance to leadership, or differentiation of roles. Bales’ uses the current Republican Party (1996) as an example, and the observations seem timely even today.
I am gratified to find that almost everything I’ve done before in academia is relevant as it applies to the work of SCG. We have reached an entirely new level of analysis and understanding about the challenges of leadership and group behavior.
I’ve talked quite personally through most of this, and I would like to emphasize that throughout my whole career I’ve had a tremendous amount of cooperation, help and contributions from other people. The work of SCG has added strength to the efforts I could never manage alone, which is most gratifying.
