Search results

This article explains the process and results of distilling meaning from the book Mentoring Executives and Directors by David Clutterbuck and David Megginson, published by Butterworth Heinemann in 1999. Capturing meaning requires a method that suits the context of study. In this case the context is book that contains a number of illustrative accounts of being mentor and mentee within the private, public and voluntary sectors of business. The method permitted capturing ideas contained in the contexts described, and then associating these ideas in order to gain insights into the very nature of mentoring.

The objective of the final plenary session of the 8th European Mentoring Conference was to establish a new understanding of mentoring through a collaborative approach to creating patterns of meaning about the subject. We wanted to use participants’ insights from the sessions they attended. Each insight could then be seen as an “ingredient” or as a “particle”, “cell” or “molecule” of meaning that, when seen in relation to other such “molecules”, would evoke a deeper insight into what we already recognise as a complex mentoring process. Clearly phrases such as “molecules of meaning” are relevant to approaching the science of making patterns of meaning and chosen because such expressions are not part of our everyday vocabulary. They have us stretch our attention and imagination, and are helpful in the stages of a methodology suggested to participants. This paper is an account of what participants did leading up to the final plenary, what we as facilitators did in preparation for this session, what happened during the plenary and what emerged as a result of collaborative sense making.