This month, Cynthia Johnson, an Associate of The Challenge of Change contributes a guest blog.

How is Sir Graham Henry coping with the stress of releasing a book and the furore surrounding his suspicion about match fixing in the 2007 game against France?  From the comments he has previously made about pressure and stress, we imagine he is not doing too badly.

There's an old joke about the aspiring jazz musician visiting New York and trying to find directions to Carnegie Hall. He stops and asks a jazz busker on the street how to get there, and the busker says "practice, man, practice".

In my last blog I described a recent case study with a large NZ company, which began by questioning the usefulness of a 360 feedback system comprising 31 dimensions, each rated on a 0 to 5 scale.  Complex rating systems like this are almost impossible to analyse, and as a first step the dimensions were reduced by factor analysis to just two, labelled Relationship Skills and Task Skills.  

Does training actually work? The only way to answer this question is to do research. Boring, I hear you groan! Try this.  

Over the years many models have been proposed to try to define and explain stress, but a common feature is a reliance on capacity.  So-called life-event scales, for example, assume a capacity for coping which is exceeded when someone is exposed to a sufficient number of events.  The approach was refined by adding ‘readjustment scores’ to the events, but to no avail: the life-event approach not only completely fails to explain stress, it also misleads people into thinking that events are somehow inherently stressful.  Other models have relied on materials science, using concepts of strain and stress, but since coping is fundamentally influenced by emotion, inert materials are no model at all.  Others again have spoken about coping resources being exceeded by demand, another mechanical view which explains very little.