68 Force-field analysis

The purpose of this activity is to shape how you think about making changes in your professional life.

Step 1
Take a piece of A4 plain paper orientated to be in landscape format, so it’s like this ▭.
Draw a horizontal line across the middle of the page.

Step 2
In the area below your centre line draw a series of boxes representing all of the things in your working life that drive you forward. For instance ‘family’ might be one box, ‘financial security’ and ‘wanting to be good at your job’ others. Don’t forget personal factors too, like your own determination to succeed, or even fear of failure. List as many as you can and don’t think too hard about them.
Make the size of the box correspond to how influential this thing is in your life.

Step 3
Repeat Step 2 in the area above the centre line, only this time draw boxes that represent all of the things that hold you back. ‘Boring job’, ‘Lack of time’, ‘Self doubt’, and so on.
After you’ve brainstormed all of your ideas you should have something like this;

Step 4
Now to play a bit of a game with this… force yourself to choose just one of these options:
– Option 1: Concentrate all of your energy on growing those forces that drive you forward (the things listed below the line), on the assumption that if these grow stronger they will overwhelm the things holding you back and you’ll flourish
– Or option 2: Concentrate all of your energy on reducing the influence of those things that are holding you back (the boxes above the line), on the assumption that if I reduce these forces, those things driving you forward will have a clearer path and you’ll flourish

Step 5: Analysis
Take a moment to think about the reasons why you chose to take Option 1 or 2. What was your motivation? Understanding this might help you understand how you approach change in other areas of your life.
Typically, people think that enhancing the drivers below the line is the innately ‘positive’ approach, and reducing barriers is ‘negative’, but this is a mistake because both are, in fact, positive: they both involve determined action.

Reflection
It’s often easy to do this at a personal level, and this activity works really well with groups when people can contrast their different approaches to making change, but it also works really well when done as a collective exercise amongst professionals.
Getting people to agree what’s driving a profession like physiotherapy forward, and what’s holding it back, reveals a lot about the discourses shaping our own sense of who we are as professionals, as well as providing material for questions of agency and structure. Is it in our hands to make the change that the profession needs, or are we just the puppets of bigger forces shaping healthcare and the professions generally?