Who is Will Schutz? by Ben Houghton
Dr Will Schutz Phd is mentioned a few times on our noggin website so it's important to give you a very quick overview of who he is.
Jim Tamm and Ron Luyet in their book Radical Collaboration (one application of Will's work used in industrial relations) describe him really well; "Until his death in November 2002, Will Schutz was one of the most respected leaders in the field of human relations and organisational development. His FIRO-B questionnaire and Elements of Awareness are some of the most widely used psychometric instruments throughout the world. He served on the faculty of Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, among others. He created and chaired the graduate department of holistic studies at Antioch University, San Francisco. Schutz is the creator of the Human Element, an integrated series of modules that address organisational development and compatibility."
Will was one of the founding fathers of Humanistic Psychology, a school of psychology that was more about releasing the potential of the majority of the population rather than fixing people who were "broken" as someone like Freud would have wanted to work with.
Will has been described as "the great synthesizer" which came from his willingness to accept and utilise any number of techniques from a range of well known and respected giants of psychology such as Maslow, Huxley, Mead, Feldenkrais, Rolf, Perls, Lowen, Satir and synthesize these with his own observations and real experience.
He first developed FIRO (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation), a psychometric type system still widely used for classifying how people orient themselves toward others, based on original work with the US Navy. He then turned his attention to "open-encounter groups" which encouraged people to recover deadened feelings and increase their ability to be open and honest. These groups were a combination of group therapy, pyschosynthesis, bioenergetics, psychodrama, Gestalt, and anything else he deemed appropriate in the moment.
His bestselling book "Joy" an early popular psychology/self improvement book was based on his experience with these open-encounter groups. The following story is taken from one of his most accessible works "Profound Simplicity":
Several years ago I was on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson, promoting my book Joy. I was delighted to be a celebrity and to bring to the masses the word about the marvelous techniques I had collected and created. I had a whole arsenal of new methods, mostly nonverbal.
Carson was intrigued. He gave me thirty minutes on the program, so I had a chance to show how to express anger by pounding on the mattress along with Carson, Ed McMahon, and the guests—everything I had hoped for. Then we had three minutes left, and he asked me what else I did in encounter groups. " We tell the truth," I replied. I felt the main show was over and now we just would do a short filler and go home. " How would we do that here?" he asked. " Well," I said, "it seemed to me your singer tonight giggled quite a lot and I thought it annoyed you. You winced a few times. If this were a group, I would invite you to tell her directly instead of holding back and keeping yourself more distant from her."
After a few denials, Carson acknowledged he did have a slight feeling of that kind once. At my suggestion, he told her directly. " Oh, I'm so glad you told me," she gushed. "I thought you felt that way and I'm delighted to hear you say it." With that, they exchanged warmth and the show ended happily.
The next morning, on the streets of New York, I was stopped by at least a dozen people who had seen the show and, to my astonishment, every one of them commented only about the truth episode. At first I was chagrined. Here I had demonstrated all my wonderful new methods and apparently no one cared. Their response was to the simple fundamental of encounter—honesty. "Been watching Johnny Carson for four years, and that's the first time I've seen him real," was the tenor of their comments. They felt they had come to know their long-time acquaintance, simply because he had been honest.
Later he combined his work with FIRO theory and experience in encounter groups to develop The Human Element, a guide for enhancing performance and improving organizations through the development of healthier self-concepts, self-determination, and openness. It is this workshop that we run at noggin.
He was a real maverick who believed that all behaviour is driven by self esteem and that it is this that you need to work on if someone is to realise their full potential.