For the next two years, I will be reporting back from my experience of undertaking an MSc in People and Organisational Development. So far, I have spent four days on the first of this year’s three residential parts of the course in the beautiful surroundings of Roffey Park, the organisation with which (in conjunction with the University of Sussex) I am taking the degree.  Roffey originated as a stress retreat for workers in the 1940s, and it shows. The grounds are more like a five star country hotel than a management training centre, and there is that real sense of ‘away’ that you get with an escape to the country.

Between now and September, I will be working on the first two key pieces of work to submit: a position paper examining what has shaped me as a practitioner to date, and a critical review of the field of People and Organisational Development. The degree is ‘self-managed’ which although it sounds a bit scary actually means that I get to decide what I focus on within the field, rather than following a set programme.

For now, they have been breaking us in relatively gently, although some of the discussions have already been making my head hurt a bit (but in a good way). We looked at models of critical thinking, overviews of the field, and had some excellent and thought-provoking input from one of the external examiners on the course.

One of my favourite questions so far was thinking about how we would define a ‘person’. It seems like a really obvious place to start if you are working as a developer of people, but I have to confess I have never sat down and thought about it before. For me, I think of people as having a particular ‘shape’ which consists of things like their strengths (and conversely weaknesses), their interests and passions (what really excites them) and their motivators (for some it might be money, someone else recognition from the team, someone else a sense of professional pride etc). That means that as a developer I focus a lot on helping people to understand what shape they are and make the most of that.

I’m not sure if this has been shaped by the fact that as a coach working with MBA students from a real variety of environments, I work with a really wide range of people so am more aware of differences.  I would be really interested to hear about how others would answer this question.