INTERVIEWS

Conversation between Alasdair Mcdonald and Coert Visser

2011-07-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

Alasdair Mcdonald is a consultant psychiatrist who is the research coordinator and former president and secretary of the European Brief Therapy Association. He is the author of Solution-Focused Therapy. Theory, Research & Practice (2007) and he works as a trainer and supervisor and as a management consultant. Coert Visser is a psychologist, author and expert on the solution-focused approach to coaching and change. His website www.solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com has become, over the years, a trusted source of reference regarding cutting-edge psychological research which is relevant to solution-focused practitioners, coaches and consultants.

Coert: When did you first hear about the solution-focused approach and how did you get involved with it? Could you share some memories?

Alasdair: I chose the field of mental health intending to work as a psychiatrist and psychodynamic psychotherapist. However, there was waning interest in such therapy within the medical establishment and the workloads provided little opportunity for such training. My great good fortune during my child psychiatry training was to meet a young consultant from the Middle East who had a special interest in family therapy. He recommended MRI / strategic therapy which I found useful. We then set up a family therapy clinic in a mental health day hospital for adults.
I moved to another hospital and set up a training team using strategic therapy. In 1988 reading about BRIEFER II (de Shazer 1988) provoked our interest. We agreed that for a six month trial period we would employ solution-focused practice instead of our MRI model. At once we found that sessions became less demanding for the therapist and that the families became more receptive. Our team discussions in the break became shorter because we had already noted strengths and ideas within the family during the conversations. It became more common for our families to attend only once or twice. This was important because they had sometimes driven 100 miles each way to attend the appointment, and had to receive their therapy within the demands of isolated farms with many animals to care for. The practical rural population of the county found solution-focused thinking and using their own resources more congenial than the psychodynamic and Rogerian methods which had previously been the main local options.

Our follow-up programme showed no adverse effect on our success rate when we changed to the new solution-focused model. At the end of the six month trial period, every member of the team believed that solution-focused therapy was a significant improvement on our previous strategic approach.

When did you first hear about the solution-focused approach? Did you get involved with it through management or by some other route? Can you share some memories?

Coert: I first heard about the solution-focused approach around 2000. I remember when I heard about it I was actually quite sceptical. It sounded so simple, too simple actually. And I thought it wasn’t very original, too. I remember thinking that it sounded just like the application of some basic psychological principles. I remember thinking there must be some clever guys behind it trying to make some easy money. Another reason I was sceptical was that this was a therapy approach and I did not do therapy at all. Although I had studied both work and organizational psychology and clinical psychology I had never done therapy and I had only been working as a coach, consultant and manager. So I thought this therapy approach would probably not be useful at all for me.

A few weeks later, I came across the book ‘Interviewing for Solutions’ by Peter de Jong and Insoo Kim Berg. I read about students asking some questions to the client. They were all traditional questions which seemed okay to me. I remember thinking, I’d like to know what’s wrong with these questions because I don’t see what’s wrong with them. Then the book went on to provide some brief explanation of the medical model and problem focused questions. After that a second interview with this client was described with solution-focused questions. When I read this I began to understand some of the essence of the approach and my perspective changed drastically. I immediately saw numerous things I could try in my work as a coach. I started trying these things and was amazed at how much better my conversations with clients went and how much more fun they became for me. I remember realizing that this approach would keep me busy for many years which turned out to be true.

You're a psychiatrist. Can you tell a bit about how the solution-focused approach is received/viewed by psychiatrists?

Alasdair: In spite of my efforts, my colleagues in adult psychiatry think of it as a personal talent and not as a technique that they could learn. Mental health practice in this country follows much of US practice, with a heavy emphasis on medication and ‘expert’ techniques such as traditional cognitive-behaviour therapy. Mental health nurses are more open to studying interview skills and many of them like using solution-focused methods. We find that about one-third of nurses take to it enthusiastically, about one-third use it sometimes and the remainder say that they already have effective skills in other models and will not use solution-focused methods often. Drug and alcohol services in the United Kingdom use solution-focused therapy because it is brief and easily understood by their populations (who may be intoxicated or have poor educational abilities). Also, little background history is needed, which suits work with these clients. Many learning disability teams use solution-focused because it is practical and does not require detailed conversations. It combines well with structured behavioural methods aimed at individual issues. There are formal programmes for providing care in learning disability which are largely based on solution-focused principles.

I guess that you moved from using solution-focused ideas in your coaching work on to using it in management consultancy more generally. Can you say something about how solution-focused is received/viewed by businessmen who have not encountered it before? Is it difficult for businessmen to separate technique from person; 'what is done' from 'who does it'?

Coert: That’s right. At first I only used it in the coaching setting but I started trying it out in projects and consultancy, soon after that. My general experience is that managers respond well to it. I think I have benefited to some degree from having been a manager myself. As a manager I used to be rather sceptical about any new approaches promising all sorts of wonderful things. So when I started to use the solution-focused approach in my work with management teams, for instance, I tried to use it in a quite simple and sober way, phrasing questions in such a way that people usually don't notice I am using 'techniques'. I think this helps them to feel you are really taking their situation very seriously instead of applying some mere ‘questioning technique’. Recently, I considered it a wonderful compliment when I had facilitated a group meeting and someone, afterwards, said: "I really found this very useful. Usually the people who present workshops for us are very theoretical. But you aren't theoretical at all! You are very practical and simple." I really liked that especially because I actually have great theoretical interest.

Regarding the ‘who does it?’ aspect, I think it may work best when your clients don’t have any specific expectation about you as person. When they do know you, or may have read your books, they may sometimes focus a bit more on you as a person that on the process of finding solutions. Another situation in which I think the solution-focused approach usually works particularly well is when you, as a coach or consultant have no knowledge of the situation or profession of the client. This makes it easier to stick with the client perspective. For example, some of the work I did with financial, medical or technical specialists were fine examples of solution-focused helping. For instance, I helped an accountant to determine at what price he would sell his company to the buyer. I had very limited knowledge about these things while he was an expert himself. By asking lots of questions I helped him determine the right price. Another example is how I coached someone working in a hospital who had made a few serious mistakes which might have endangered patients’ health. This person found the coaching useful and so did his manager and personnel manager. A year after the coaching had started he said this about the coaching: "At first, I was sceptical. I really thought the real intention of this coaching was to get rid of me in a decent way. And, at first, I thought, well, I might as well play along. What else could I do? But after one conversation with the coach, I knew this could not be true, so I really started trying. These conversations were really helpful. They helped me to organize my thoughts. I learned how to step outside of myself and to observe myself. This helped me to gradually change my behaviour. What was really helpful was to talk to someone who knows nothing about our work. I could easily notice the coach knew nothing about our work. That was really helpful. I had to explain everything."

My next question to you is about evidence based work. Both in therapy and in a work setting, the demand for evidence based work has increased, I think. What I admire a lot in your work is that you have constantly been contributing to the establishment of the evidence base of the solution-focused approach. What would you say the evidence base for solution-focused work in therapy and outside therapy now is?

Alasdair: The current published evidence base for solution-focused applications finds 103 relevant studies including two meta-analyses and 18 randomised controlled trials showing benefit from solution-focused approaches with nine showing benefit over existing methods. Of 39 comparison studies, 30 favour the solution-focused model. Effectiveness data are also available from some 4000 cases with a success rate exceeding 60%; requiring an average of 3 – 5 sessions of therapy time.

Like many others, solution-focused therapy is approved by the US Federal Government (www.samhsa.gov; www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books). It is approved by the State of Washington and the State of Oregon (www.oregon.gov/DHS). The State of Texas is examining evidence for approval. Finland has a government-approved accreditation programme. Canada has a registration body for practitioners and therapists. Those who construct national guidelines usually begin with a Google search for relevant studies. Because solution-focused workers and researchers tend not to use formal diagnostic categories it is often overlooked when guidelines are being constructed. So the evidence base for therapy is good but does not always achieve recognition.

Coaching is an increasing area for solution-focused work. The solution-focused approach is unusual in that there are numerous scientific studies of its use in coaching and within organisations. Many consultants are using solution-focused models as a basis for change management in organisations. It is also a good model for conflict management and is used internationally as well as within businesses.

I know that you have an interest in language analysis. Is this relevant to your comments about using ‘simple and sober questions’ rather than visible ‘techniques’? How does this interest affect other work that you do?

Coert: Language analysis opens up new ways to learn about the effectiveness of the solution-focused approach. Standard approaches of determining psychotherapy or coaching effectiveness involve randomized controlled experiments in which the treatment of interest is compared with a reference approach and a control group. While this approach to determine the effectiveness of therapy and coaching approaches is indispensable it is not the only useful approach and it is not without weaknesses. For one thing, this type of research requires the existence of generally accepted definitions of the treatments that are researched. For example, a generally accepted definition of solution-focused therapy requires the use of the miracle question, scaling questions, exception-seeking questions, and the what’s better question. This type of research comparing therapy or coaching approaches may say something about the relative effectiveness of these approaches but does not say much about the relative contribution of the constituent elements of these approaches because these are not examined separately in these types of experiments but in combination with each other.

This is why research aimed at a micro level can add much and is in my view also indispensable. There are many ways of designing research aimed at this micro level. For instance, Christine Tomori and Janet Beavin Bavelas have micro-analysed conversations of four distinguished therapists, client-centered therapists Carl Rogers, and Nathanial Raskin and solution-focused therapists Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. This type of research is interesting because it does not focus on the theories or assumptions behind models but it shows you what practitioners actually do in conversations with their clients. One of the things Tomori and Bavelas compared is the occurrence of negative and positive expressions by the four therapists. They found the solution-focused therapists use much more positive and much less negative expressions.

Another line of research which I think will emerge will use software to analyse language used in conversations. As it will become easier to convert spoken language into written language and to analyse this language with software many possibilities for research present themselves. Therapy or coaching sessions may be taped and transcribed and analysed. These data may be used as dependent variables while client satisfaction and other variables may be used as independent variables. As this type of research will develop a much more nuanced and specific kind of knowledge will emerge about what works and what not.

I’d be interested to know which authors have been important influences to you.

Alasdair: Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, naturally. However, I have also learned a great deal from Yvonne Dolan and from Andrew Turnell, often about how to apply solution-focused ideas in unusual situations. In conflict management the ideas of Fredrike Bannink have been helpful. With domestic violence I have learned from Lee, Sebold and Uken in California and from Judith Milner in the United Kingdom. I still think back to the work of the MRI writers such as Watzlawick, Fisch, Weakland and Segal, as well as Jay Haley and Brian Cade.

I know that you read very widely and share ideas with many other people. Which themes in current linguistic or other research do you plan to follow in the coming months?

Coert: I am planning to read a lot of stuff that is not related to the solution-focused approach directly. Several examples of books I am planning to read are The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (by Anders Ericsson and others), Thinking, Fast and Slow (by Daniel Kahneman), The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (by Steven Pinker), The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us (by James Pennebaker), Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change (by Timothy Wilson), and The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (by Amabile and Kramer). A solution-focusedbook I hope to read is Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. A Handbook of Evidence-Based Practice.

Can you tell me a bit about recent discoveries, changes of insight you may have had and current interests you have?

Alasdair: I will follow your example and read Steven Pinker: that sounds most intriguing! At present I am pursuing two lines of thought. Many clients, both adults and children, are reluctant to attend therapy, yet they often benefit. Mandated clients do less well. What can we do that will increase our effectiveness? I am exploring the use of Simple Therapy, devised by Plamen Panayotov of Bulgaria. This model is of great interest because it avoids all prior assumptions while keeping responsibility with the client. It is quite similar to my own microtool for the management of urgent situations in the workplace (Macdonald 2007/2011).

Simple Therapy
What do you think is the most useful question we must answer first?
Then the therapist simply repeats the client’s question.
If the client’s first question is ‘Why?’, the therapist relies on The Razor’s Final Cut: Everything happens once and then becomes a habit.
If needed you can ask:
When did this habit happen first (last)?
How often does this habit happen lately?
Then: What are we going to do about it? asked by clients of themselves.
The therapist writes down from 1-5 written tasks, self-chosen by the clients, and hands this to the client.
If you let one of us here ask you 6 months from now please write down your phone number.
At that time we ask:
How are things going on for you?
Was our meeting(s) useful for you?

As well as your list of reading, what other plans have you for the coming months?

Coert: I will be doing many training programs the in the coming months. I’ll be training solution-focused coaches and I’ll be training managers. Also, I’ll be doing a workshop based on Carol Dweck’s work into mindsets. I’ll also be doing some writing and some survey research into coaching effectiveness.

Alasdair: Thank you for the chance to have this enjoyable conversation. I look forward to hearing more of your work in the future.

Interview with Coert Visser

2011-07-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

14 April 2011 Paolo Terni

We have the pleasure to publish an interview with Coert Visser, Dutch Psychologist, author and expert on the Solution-Focused approach. His blog has become over the years a trusted source of reference regarding cutting-edge Psychological research which is relevant to Solution-Focused practitioners, coaches and consultants. So I was very excited to have the opportunity to pick his brain regarding matters we both care a lot about. Here is the interview:

Q: Can you briefly tell us how you got interested in the solution-focused approach?

A: Before I heard about the solution-focused approach I was working as an associate director at a very large international consultancy firm. I felt a certain dissatisfaction with my work which I did not fully understand. Somehow, I decided to reflect carefully and came up with the question: when did I really feel gratified with my work? When thought about this deeply I discovered to my great surprise that the four or five situations of gratification which I had identified were rather strange cases. They were situations in which I had worked with clients and in which I had worked quite differently from what was normal for the firm and for myself. Yet, the clients had been very satisfied.

All of these cases had a few things in common. First, I had asked many questions; in particular variations on the questions: “What do you want to achieve?” and “Why do you want to achieve that?” Second, instead of providing standardized prescriptions for solutions I thought along with clients and really tried to understand them. And I improvised. I was very confused when I found this out. A few days later I was talking about this with a colleague manager and shared my discovery: “I have found I am most successful in my work for clients when I am asking questions.” He replied: “I understand. But I don’t think clients will pay money for questions. We’re in the business of providing answers.”

That was when I realized it might be better to leave the company and start my own business. When I realized this, however, I had no idea at all how I would do it. Then, one of the people who worked in my team, and whom I still work with intensively, Gwenda Schlundt Bodien, told me she wanted to follow a training program in solution-focused training. She briefly explained what it was about and I remember being skeptical thinking to myself it sounded very simple and not very new. A few months later I was walking in a book store and I saw this book: Interviewing for solutions. I picked it up and realized it was about the approach Gwenda had told me about. The book looked rather nice and I bought it. I sat down somewhere with a cup of coffee and started reading. Perhaps an hour later the potential of the solution-focused approach hit me with great force. I suddenly saw the connection with the success cases I had identified when I was reflecting on my work. I felt inspired. I felt this approach would be very important for me in the years to come.

Q: How would you say working solution-focused has made you a better coach and consultant?

A: There are many aspects to this. How can I explain? The main thing, I guess, is the approach has helped me to help clients quicker and more effectively. Also, conversations with clients have become more pleasant, both for them and for me. I approach situations much more openly which helps me to connect much better to what clients are actually saying and asking. They feel taken seriously. In addition to this, through the questions I ask and the conversation that emerges, they become more aware of what they want and feel that they find ways of getting there themselves. Because they discover that they are already doing some things that work, they become more hopeful and confident. And because they identify, or define, steps forward themselves, they are much more likely to start moving in a positive direction. Their awareness of their freedom of choice and of their competence is also supported. All these things make it much more likely that any positive change they are able to achieve is sustainable. In general, there is very little chance of them becoming dependent on me as a coach.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Kirsten Dierolf

2011-03-22T06:27:00.000-07:00

By Coert Visser

Kirsten Dierolf is a solution-focused coach and trainer based in Germany. She delivers programs worldwide on leadership, (virtual) teamwork, conflict management, coaching and cross-cultural management. Kirsten also designs and facilitates large group events and speaks regularly at international conferences on coaching and management and has extensive international experience in Training and Development. She has been designing and facilitating programs and workshops mainly for global corporations for over ten years. In this interview Kirsten and I talk about how she learned about the solution-focused approach when she was a translator, about her experiences in delivering workshops in different countries, and about the solution-focused journal ‘Interaction’ which she co-founded.

Do you remember when you heard about the solution-focused approach for the very first time? Could you talk a bit about what that situation was and what your very first thoughts and your reaction were to it?

There are many ways to answer this question. I can honestly say that I first thought about “SF” in 1984, 1987 and 2001. In 2001, I was working as an intercultural coach and trainer and desperately wanted to go to the post-conference workshop at the coaching conference in Grindelwald. The organizer for the workshop was a Dr. Peter Szabo, and he wanted 2700 Swiss Franks for three days and that was a lot of money for me. So I called up this Dr. Szabo and asked whether he needed a translator for that course and if I could come for free if I agreed to translate. Peter said, sadly, that no, he did not need a translator for this workshop, but that there was another workshop with an American lady, Insoo Kim Berg, and a Belgium guy called Louis Cauffman. Could I do simultaneous translation for them and go to the post-conference workshop for free? I thought “why not?” and read a few of Insoo’s books and listened to her tapes to prepare for the translation. I loved what I read and heard immediately (this is where the 1984 came in) because it seemed to me such a respectful, non-interpretative, normal, intelligent and straightforward way of helping people.

As a theology student in 1984, I had been very interested in pastoral counseling and went to a university orientation seminar for counseling. Now, I don’t want to be impolite now, but my 18 year old self was disgusted at what she heard. I would need to do a 12 month, 1 day a week “encounter group” with a psychotherapist to work on my own issues (which I did not think I had at the time) before I would be allowed to learn how to help others. For me, always rather on the rational side, this seemed ludicrous, and I just could not see the connection. I wanted to learn how to help others respectfully and not deal with problems that are interpreted into me from the outside. I was confirmed in my rejection of the course by the fact that many students who did participate turned from straightforward normal people into people who would react in strange ways: instead of disagreeing with me on a point, for example, they would comment on my presumed relationship with my father which causes me to be rebellious – again a notion that I felt was less than helpful. So, in a way, I came into contact with SF in the negative in 1984 – I knew what I did not want.

In 1987, during my studies of linguistics, I read works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and there was also an immediate connection. Emphasizing what you “do” with language rather than discussing endlessly over the essence of things proved to be a very nice shortcut to many philosophical problems (and more amusingly also the rampant political correctness debates in the late 1980ies).

So, when I met Insoo and Louis in 2001, things really fell into place for me: here was a way to help people that would consciously use language, refrain from disrespectful interpretation, let the client set the goals for themselves and not turn people into weirdos in the process. I bought this immediately! It also helped that Louis and Insoo and I had a lot of fun at the conference dinners. Luckily I got to translate for Insoo and Steve a lot after Grindelwald. With every translation I learned more about how they did what they did.

That’s interesting. If I remember well, Steve de Shazer found it interesting and even useful to work with a translator, didn’t he? I am curious about your thoughts on this and also about what you learned from doing it?

I think Steve liked to work with a translator because it slowed down the process of answering and asking. While I was translating his question and then the answer of the client, he could relax and think. One of the main points that I like about SF is that it emphasizes the emergent process of a conversation – we don’t plan a strategy but we listen closely to what the client says and pick out what seems useful. In translating it became very obvious what Steve and Insoo picked up: signs of what the client wants and signs of what is already working or can give confidence that things will improve. I learned to pay very close attention to the exact language that they used and that the client used and tried to keep my translation as close as possible to the original. If the client used “stupid boss”, I would translate “stupid boss” and not change it to “uncomfortable superior” in the next sentence. What is left out also becomes apparent – details of the problem or interpretations and explanations. I also noticed how messy spoken language is and the curves and loops that Steve especially took before he had identified which question he wanted to ask. What also struck me was the “game of differentiation vs. generalization”. Clients sometimes came with diagnoses like “I have bulimia” – and even when I did not know a lot about SF I realized that Steve and Insoo would not pick that up but go into the details of a “better”.

After becoming a solution-focused coach and trainer/facilitator you started conducting many workshops, not only in your home country Germany but also in several other countries, didn't you? Could you tell a bit about the different types of workshops you have done and what your experiences were of introducing the solution-focused approach to people from such diverse cultures?

In the last years, I have worked in many places and designed workshops for delivery in even more places. One of the projects I was involved in was the global leadership development program for a global corporation. I worked with the material of an international HR development company and helped design and put together workshops on topics like delegation, managing conflicts, self-management, cross-cultural communication etc. Another experience was developing the leadership development program for a Central Asian National Bank which I designed and developed with my own SF material. I am currently involved in the design and roll-out of an innovative SF leadership program at a multinational semi-conductor company and I have coached executives from many different countries.

I found – maybe not surprisingly – that SF was the one thing that would always work. Global companies use their leadership development programs as a way to implement their strategy: the management thinks hard about what kind of behaviors they would like to see, which kind of people and leadership are conducive to their overall goals. The leadership development program should support this strategic orientation – so on the one hand, it needs to be global, but on the other hand it has to fit the local requirements. When you design global programs that have to fit heterogeneous audiences (from German engineers to Brazilian factory supervisors), it is very important that the program is flexible and can start at the exact point where every participant is at, so that everyone can make a step into a useful direction. You can see right here that an expert approach to management development will have difficulties here: for some the content will be trite for others completely unusable because of cultural reasons and only some lucky ones will get a program that fits. Solution Focus is a very good way to help every group to advance in their experience: I used a lot of scaling, asking people to identify their highlights in small groups, asking the groups to identify their own “critical incidents” and reflecting teams to find out what to do. Of course, there was also interesting content – but in my view, the most important things happened in the SF interactions of the participants. In the leadership development program that I am running currently, I even went further: the company’s leaders had requested only 10% theory in the sessions. What a gift to me! The program is organized in 7 modules with two four hour sessions per topic. This way, participants can gain experience between sessions and reflect on what’s working in the next session. Very SF, very useful.

There are two areas where using SF can be a bit tricky in intercultural situations that I have experienced. In Germany, my own country, being too positive and appreciative can be a sign of lack of competence and honesty. So I tone it down, depending on my audience – but, obviously, in good SF practice you would be using the language of your clients anyway and would not fall into the trap of going "WOW, SUPER!" to a client whose best appraisal is: "Actually, not bad". The other issue that I have sometimes encountered is the use of the miracle question (no, not using the miracle question in business contexts – I do that all the time and it works perfectly) or another future perfect. I’m not sure if it has to do with Islamic cultures or not, but both in Dubai and in Bosnia I encountered reluctance to imagine a future perfect. There was a bit of: “Well, one cannot really know, can one … and maybe one should not think about these things, really”. At the time, I understood that the difficulty is about imagining the future and not about imagining the “perfect”. I switched to asking about a perfect dream in one case and about describing a parallel universe (this was a bunch of computer geeks, so they related to things like star wars and such) in the other and the difficulty went away. Otherwise, SF has worked just great in all cultures that I have encountered – and I think the only blank spot I have is most of Africa.

A few years ago, you have started the journal ‘InterAction, the journal of SF in organisations’. Could you tell a bit about this journal?

Well, it wasn’t actually just me who started it. Mark McKergow and I had been toying with the idea for a long time – I just happened to announce it and start it. Carey Glass, Anton Stellamans, Mark McKergow and me, and of course Jenny Clarke, who is not officially on the editorial board but does a lot of work all have an equal share. The same is true for our authors and advisory board. InterAction is “the journal for solution focus in organisations” and we publish 2-3 peer reviewed academic articles, 1-2 case studies, book reviews, a research digest, an interview and an editorial per issue. We want to continue to give SF a voice in academia and practice. So far, InterAction has been a great success: We are available at Ingenta Connect, an online access to journals and we are working on being catalogued and accessible in university journal services. Through the peer review process, we have been able to make connections with people that Mark McKergow calls “the great and the good” of SF and many related fields: we are connected to the British Wittgenstein Society, people from the complexity field, business schools and many more interesting people. And of course, last but not least, we receive great feedback from our readers. “This is one of the few journals where I can’t wait to read every single page – everything is relevant and interesting” was a comment I heard recently from a Swiss colleague.

References

Found in translation by Kirsten Dierol
Website of SFCT, The Association for the Quality Development of Solution-focused Consulting and Training - membership (including Journal) costs 100 euro a year
http://www.solutionsacademy.com/

Interview with Heidi Grant Halvorson

2011-02-20T22:35:00.000-08:00

By Coert Visser (2011)

Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, is an experimental social psychologist and the author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. She received her B.A. in psychology, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, and earned her doctorate at Columbia University, specializing in goal pursuit and motivation. Her research has focused on understanding how people respond to setbacks and challenges, and how these responses are shaped by the kinds of goals they pursue. She has published papers on topics ranging from achievement and self-regulation, to person perception, persuasion, and well-being. She also co-edited (with Gordon Moskowitz) the academic handbook The Psychology of Goals. In this interview, she talks about some of the most fascinating insights on how we can set goals wisely and how we can achieve those goals.

In the book you say something which may surprise many people: ”When you study achievement, one of the first things you learn is that innate ability has surprisingly little to do with success”. Could you explain that?

Many people (and Americans in particular) tend to attribute their successes to and failures to some fixed ability - they believe that some people are just born smart or talented, while others are not, and this determines who is successful in life.

There are really two problems with this kind of thinking. First, there is very little evidence to support the idea that people are "born" with high ability. Yes, smart parents often have smart children - but smart parents give their children so much more than their chromosomes. They talk to their children more, give them more and better opportunities to learn, and they reinforce the value of education and achievement. In short, they give their children the chance to get smarter. We know from many studies that when poorer, less fortunate children are given the opportunity to learn in similarly enriched environments that their IQ scores rise dramatically. Abilities of all kinds turn out to be profoundly malleable - they develop with experience and effort.

Second, ability (no matter where you think it comes from) is just one small piece of the puzzle. Research shows that effort, persistence, commitment, and the strategies you use to reach your goal are far more powerful predictors of who succeeds and who fails. Self-discipline, and not giving up when obstacles arise, actually significantly outpredict IQ on every measure of achievement I've ever seen, including test scores and college grades.

Talking about ‘succeeding’, in the book you say that there are certain types of success which are not going to help you achieve lasting wellbeing and other which are. Which types of success are worthwhile and which not? And why is that so?

Everyone is happy, at least momentarily, when they achieve a long sought-after goal. But decades of research suggest that in order to experience true, authentic happiness and wellbeing, we need to pursue goals that fulfill our three basic human needs: relatedness, competence, and autonomy.

Relatedness is about feeling connected to and supported by others. Any time we seek out new relationships, seek to maintain or strengthen the ones we already have, or reach out to help others in need, we are pursuing goals that fulfill our desire for relatedness.

Competence is about feeling effective - that you have the ability to take action and make good things happen for yourself and for the people you care about. Any time we seek to learn something new, develop a new or existing skill, or challenge ourselves to do better, we are pursuing goals that will increase our sense of competence.

Autonomy is about doing things and making choices that reflect your own preferences and values. Whenever we pursue a goal because we find it interesting or enjoyable, whenever we decide on a course of action because it just "feels right," we are satisfying our basic need for autonomy. (By the way, you don't need to work alone, or to pursue purely selfish goals, to experience autonomy. Working with, or for the sake of, others can be just as genuine an expression of who you are.)

Here are some of the goals that won't satisfy your basic needs as a person: seeking fame, accumulating wealth for its own same, wanting to hold power over others. These goals, though quite common, are all about seeking validation and self-worth in the eyes of others, rather than creating a strong sense of self from within. And any happiness you get from them will be fleeting, because they will leave your true needs unfulfilled.

One of the other important lessons you offer in the book (one I find inspiring) is that young people should focus more on getting better and less on being good. How would you explain to teachers and parents reading this what that is about and why it is important?

The goals our kids pursue in the classroom (or on the playing field, or anywhere else for that matter) tell us a lot about how they will cope with difficulty. The biggest differences arise between kids whose goals are about being good versus getting better. Where being good is about proving how smart you already are, getting better is about developing skills and abilities – about getting even smarter.

Studies show that kids who see their goals in terms of getting better - who see a less-than-perfect grade on a math quiz as a signal to try harder, rather than as evidence of “not being good at math” – benefit from this outlook in many ways. They find classroom material more fun and interesting, and process it more deeply. They are less prone to anxiety and depression than their be-good peers. They are more motivated, persist longer when the going gets tough, and are much more likely to improve over time.

You can shift your child’s focus to getting better by talking about whatever they’ll be working on as an “opportunity to learn a new skill” (feel free to throw in adjectives like fun, cool, or useful) and saying that it’s something you are sure they’ll “improve on over time.” Most of us are quick to snap into be good goals whenever we feel we are being judged or compared to others, so be aware that well-meaning encouragements like “I’m sure you’ll be the best in your class” can send the wrong message.

As much as you can, avoid comparing your child’s performance to other children (which creates be good goals), and instead evaluate him relative to the task requirements (e.g., how many of the test questions he answered correctly) or to his own progress (e.g., how well he did compared to his last test). Knowing that you are being evaluated in a certain way provides a sense of what the task is “about” – either competing with others, or making progress.

Feedback should always emphasize actions that he has the power to change. Talk about the aspects of his performance that are under his control, like the time and effort he put into a practicing, or the study method he used. Help him identify what needs improvement, and what he can do to improve. This will also help him to stay positive and confident, even when he’s struggling to get the hang of it.

That is some practical advice for parents. Perhaps it is also interesting to have a look at situations in which people want to accomplish some personal goal. I understand that something called ‘if-then planning’ is particularly powerful, isn’t it?

I am a big fan of planning. If-then planning, in particular, is a really effective way to help you achieve any goal. Well over 100 studies, on everything from diet and exercise to negotiation and time management, have shown that deciding in advance when and where you will take specific steps to reach your goal (e.g., “If I am hungry and want a snack, then I will choose a healthy option like fruit or veggies,”) can double or triple your chances for success.

For instance, in one study looking at breast self-examination, researchers found that 100% of the women who were told to plan where and when they would perform self-exams actually did so in the following month, compared to only 53% of the group that didn’t plan. Similar results have been shown for getting cervical cancer screenings (92% of if-then planners, 60% of non-planners) and sticking to an exercise program (91% of if-then planners, 39% of non-planners).

The reason they work so well is that these plans speak the language of your brain – the language of contingencies. Humans are very good at encoding information in “If X, then Y” terms, and using these contingencies to (often unconsciously) guide our behavior. When you decide exactly when and where you will act on your goal, this form of planning creates a link in your brain between the situation or cue (the if) and the behavior that should follow (the then). Below your awareness, your brain starts scanning the environment, searching for the situation in the “if” part of your plan. As a result, your brain will seize the critical moment, even when you are busy doing other things.

Once the “if” part of your plan happens, the “then” part follows automatically. Your brain already knows what you want it to do, so now it can execute the plan without having to consciously think about it. If-then plans are sometimes described as creating “instant habits.” However, unlike many of our other habits, these help us reach our goals, rather than get in the way of them.

What about situations in which you are a manager or a teacher and you want the other person, an employee or a student, to adopt your goal? How can you do this without undermining the person’s sense of autonomy and competence?

This is an important question, because when people feel their goals are freely chosen, they experience intrinsic motivation - they enjoy what they do, find it interesting, put in more effort, and persist longer. So how can we give people the sense that their goals are freely chosen, when in fact we (as parents or teachers or managers) are in fact assigning the goal? The answer is to create the feeling of choice, using these three strategies:

First, make sure they understand why the goal they’ve been assigned has value. Too often, we tell others what they need to do, without taking the time to explain why it’s important, or how it fits into the bigger picture. No one ever really commits to a goal if they don’t see why it’s desirable for them to do it in the first place. Don’t assume the why is as obvious to them as it is to you.

Second, allow them, if possible, to decide how they will reach the goal - this can create the feeling of choice necessary to be intrinsically motivated. Allowing them to tailor their approach to their preferences and abilities will also give them heightened sense of control over the situation they find themselves in, which can only benefit performance.

Third, if you have to assign both the goal and the method for reaching it, try creating the feeling of choice by allowing them to make decisions about more peripheral aspects of the task. For instance, if your employees have to attend weekly team meetings to improve communication and collaboration (with both the goals and method for reaching it predetermined), you can have team members take turns deciding what the topic of the meeting will be each week, or even what kind of lunch will be ordered in. If your child doesn't want to eat their vegetables at dinner, allow them to choose the vegetable that will be served at the meal. Studies show that these more peripheral decisions create a feeling of choice, even when the choices aren’t particularly meaningful or relevant to the goal itself.

Around 10 years ago the field of positive psychology started to emerge which had the aim of complementing scientific psychology by studying positive human functioning in order to understand and identify effective interventions to build thriving in individuals, families, and communities. Do you consider your book to be a positive psychology book? Do you see yourself as a positive psychologist?

That's an interesting question. I'm not really sure whether to identify myself and my work in that way or not. I certainly am interested in how to help people thrive, and to help them become as effective as they can possibly be in achieving their goals - so in that sense, I am a positive psychologist, and my book is a positive psychology book. But part of my work has also been about identifying what typically goes wrong when we try to reach our goals, and what kinds of beliefs can sabotage our happiness as well as enhance it. In the end, I think the mission of positive psychology has been to promote balance in the field - to focus on joy as much as on pain. And I couldn't agree more with that mission.

I understand. What makes your book a must read for practitioners and students of psychology is that it provides an accessible state of the art overview of insights and techniques regarding goal setting, development and achievement. I would be very interested if you could say something about what your current research interests are..? What are some currently unanswered questions you would love explore or see explored?

Recently I've been working on creating simple but effective interventions to use with adolescents and college students, to focus their goals on getting better (learning goals) rather than being good (performance goals). The technique I use takes advantage of goal contagion, something I discuss in Succeed - the idea is that we can "catch" goals just by observing people who are pursuing them. The data we've collected so far suggests that this is effective not only in improving grades, but in facilitating better adjustment to college among first year students. In general, I'm very interested in finding ways to take maximum advantage of everything we've learned about how goals work, and I'd like to see more research that focuses on putting knowledge into practice.

References
• Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals
• The Psychology of Goals
• Heidigranthalvorson.com
• Heidi Grant Halvorson’s blog on Psychology Today

Interview with Claude Steele

2010-11-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

By Coert Visser (2010)

Professor Claude Steele is a social psychologist and the Provost of Columbia University. He has written the book Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us about the work he and his colleagues have done on a phenomenon called 'stereotype threat'. Stereotype threat is the tendency to expect, perceive, and be influenced by negative stereotypes about one’s social category, such as one’s age, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, profession, nationality, political affiliation, mental health status, and so on. Stereotype threat can be harmful by creating racial, gender, and social class achievements gaps in schools and in the workplace and tensions across group lines. In this interview Claude Steele explains, among other things, what stereotype threat is and what can be done about it.

How would you explain in simple terms to people like teachers, managers, and policymakers what stereotype threat is and why it is important for them to be informed about it?

First, an illustration; the story of New York Times editorialist Brent Staples. Some years ago, when he began graduate school at the University of Chicago, he noticed that as African American dressed in student informality, he was making white pedestrians a little nervous as he walked the streets of Chicago’s Hyde Park, especially after dark. People seemed to steer away from him; avoid eye contact; even cross the street sometimes to avoid him. He realized he was being seen stereotypically as a possibly threatening African American male. It worried and scared him. Will this happen every time he walks the streets of his neighborhood? One day he whistles Beatle tunes and Vivaldi. Suddenly his passersby relax; say “hello.” Some want to stop and talk. He realizes that whistling Vivaldi has preempted his being seen stereotypically as threatening figure. The relief he felt told him how pressured he had been, how upset he had been all along by the possibility of being seen through the lens of a negative stereotype about his racial identity.

That pressure is what we call “stereotype threat”: being in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities (your age, religion, sex, race, political orientation, etc.) could apply. When this happens you know you could be seen or treated in terms of that stereotype and if you care about what you are doing, the prospect of being seen and treated that way can be upsetting, upsetting enough to make you uncomfortable and interfere with your functioning right then and there.

Now imagine you are a member of a group whose intellectual abilities are negatively stereotyped in an area you care about, as for example, being a woman trying to succeed in a quantitative field. The stereotype threat you feel—the possibility of confirming or being seen to confirm the negative stereotype about your group’s abilities that is an ordinary accompaniment of your taking on challenges in this field—could be an all too constant pressure in your life. Sometimes the pressure might directly interfere with your performance. You might, as people often do, want to disprove the stereotype. But this extra effort makes you multi-task. Now you are trying to perform the task and trying to disprove the stereotype—all at the same time with all of the self-monitoring that goes with that. Such extra effort is tiring and, as our research shows, capable of depressing your performance. That’s how stereotype threat—something “in the air” and seemingly quite ephemeral—can have real effects in a person’s life, effecting important performances, and eventually even the walks of life they chose.

Together with various colleagues you have been doing research on how stereotypes may affect performance since the late 1980’s. How did you start to find out about the workings and strong impact of stereotype threat? Did you more or less expect to find what we know now or did you kind of stumble on it?

The word “stumble” is a little strong. But when we started we certainly had no clear idea of the phenomenon we now call stereotype threat. We were trying to understand the real-world problem of underperformance: that at every skill level, as measured by standardized tests, groups whose intellectual abilities were negatively stereotyped in the larger society (e.g., African Americans, women in math) got worse subsequent grades than non-stereotyped students with the same skills. Something was depressing their performance other than a lack of skill or knowledge. We didn’t know what it was. We guessed that it had something to do with the pressure of being stereotyped. But the process of getting clear about stereotype threat was a long one—several years anyway.

What helped us I think was being precise about what the problem was; the mysterious fact that ability-stereotyped students were getting lower subsequent grades than other students with the same test scores. This specification of the problem pointed to some kind of stereotype pressure. We began designing experiments to test this pressure. Pretty quickly we came up with stereotype threat experiments, only, not having the concept of stereotype threat at the time, we didn’t call them that. It took a while to develop a clear, testable conception or theory about what we had. But that was the process: first a real-world observation, then the effort to replicate that real-world effect in the laboratory (so we could study it closely); then developing an interpretation or theory of the effect; then explicitly testing that theory through conditions that would remove this effect to see if that would improve the performance of these groups. Finally, we thought we had a phenomenon. Then, over the years, we and many other researchers have tested its generality, the internal processes that mediate it and so on.

It seems like a lot has become clear about the mechanisms that underlie stereotype threat. Could you try to summarize what research has revealed about how and to what extent the impact of stereotype threat can be reduced? I am curious about what individuals, organizations and society might do to help reduce it.

I think of remedy as a matter of strategy and tactics; general principles of understanding derived from the research and specific tactics of implementation that, to date, have also been supported in research.

The general principle begins with a recognition: that in “diverse” settings, our identities—given their history in our society and the stereotypes about them that bring that history into the present—have the power to threaten each other, to make us feel uncomfortable and worry about how we will be treated and judged based on an identity we have. This is a recognition that rather than diverse settings being innocent of tension if people have good will, they can always have tension unless something is done to prevent or reduce it. It’s a sobering recognition, but I think a correct one. Thus the general principle of remedy is that something has to be done to allow people to trust the setting, to trust that they won’t be judged or treated badly in the situation based on an identity they have. The setting and the people in it have to convey a sense of “identity safety.” That’s the principle, the goal that derives from our research. Now the tactics.

A group of ingenious and now distinguished investigators have isolated a number of specific tactics for achieving identity safety. The story of this work is described in the book. Here I will mention a few examples.

Geoff Cohen, Lee Ross and I asked the question “how should a white professor give critical feedback to a black student in such a way that the feedback will be trusted and will motivate efforts to improve the work?” In an intriguing experiment that Geoff designed and implemented, he got a clear answer: say that you are using high standards in evaluating their work (a clear signal that you are not seeing them through the lens of an ability-demeaning stereotype) and that you have looked at their work and believe that they can meet those standards (another signal that you are not seeing them stereotypically). The high standards/affirmation of potential tactic has proven to be a powerful way of motivating and engaging students who would otherwise be repressed by stereotype and identity threat.

Critical mass is another effective tactic. A setting that is self-evidently inclusive is a powerful signal that one has identity safety in the setting. Since all of us “count” when we’re in settings where an identity we have puts us in the minority, seeing others there with that identity is a powerful identity safety cue.

The presence of identity role models in the setting is another cue that signals identity safety.

Reminding people in school and workplace settings that ability is an expandable resource reduces the impact of stereotype threats focused on ability and achievement. Derived from the work of Carol Dweck and Josh Aronson, this tactic has been shown to greatly diminish the performance-impairing effects of stereotype threat.

Geoff Cohen, Julio Garcia and Valerie Purdie-Vaughns have accomplished an amazing set of field studies showing that the performance-impairing effects of identity threat in K through 12 classrooms can be dramatically reduced by allowing students to briefly affirm their most important values. It seems to allow students a more trusting understanding of the classroom culture—something their identities would otherwise disrupt—and this greatly improves their engagement and grades—achieving a 40% reduction of the racial achievement gap.

Greg Walton and Geoff Cohen developed a similar strategy in a college-level intervention to lead students toward a more trusting interpretation of their college environment. It too dramatically improved minority student grades; reducing the racial achievement gap by 46% for the whole last 3 years of college.

The book goes into each of these in more detail and describes how to get the original reports of this work, several of which have now been published in Science—I am proud to say. But this should give the reader a sense that remedying these pressures is possible as well as some idea about how to go about designing their own remedies.

Imagine, in the next ten years or so, we would indeed become better at doing these things and at reducing the negative effects of stereotype threat. Could you try to describe what would be some of the important benefits you’d expect to individuals, organizations and society?

If this happened we would likely see a great reduction in racial, gender, and social class achievements gaps, especially in advanced areas of performance, both in schools and in the workplace.

I also think we would have a lot easier time relating to each other across group lines. A good deal of the tensions that can beset our intergroup relations come from the sense of identity threat we can feel in each other's presence. With this threat gone, these relations would be immensely easier and the true, rewarding nature of our diversity would come to light.

Every individual, organization, and the entire society would be able to function more effectively if these threats were diminished. And this would allow us all to better draw the benefits that this diverse society has to offer.

That sounds like an attractive perspective. Now, I have a question about psychology. In the book, you say psychologists tend to focus on the internal, the psychological, when looking for plausible explanations for behavior and deemphasize, as causes of behavior, the things we can't see very well, namely, the circumstances to which we are adapting. Could you share some thoughts about what psychology might look like if – to some extent - we´d get rid of this psychologist´s bias to underestimate the importance situational behavior determinants?

When I use that term I am referring to the idea that we psychologists, like we laymen, tend to make the “fundamental attributional error” in explaining behavior, we tend to see human behavior as stemming from internal, psychological processes, rather than from external, situational conditions and pressures. It’s an honest bias. After all, our mission and focus is to understand internal functioning. So it’s only natural to privilege this perspective in our thinking. But some of the time this “bias” causes us to miss the real causes of behavior—especially when the real causes are indeed situational, or social, or cultural, or normative or structural pressures rather than internal processes; when the internal is only mediator of the external.

This lesson was made clear to us in stereotype threat research when we tried to answer the question of what determined the strength of stereotype threat, that is, the strength of its impact on performance for example. Was it something internal to the person, something like their level of self-esteem, the strength of their skills, their performance expectations etc.? Or was it something external to the person, something like the number and strength of the cues in the immediate situation suggesting the likelihood of being negatively stereotyped there. It turned out to be the latter, and we were initially surprised—thus revealing to ourselves how the perspective we took as psychologists biased us to look for internal causes of behavior. The experience stands as a cautionary tale for us: beware the psychologist’s error, one can fall victim to it without even realizing it.

Here is a last question: how do you see the research into stereotype threat develop in the coming years? And could you say something about your own plans?

Hopefully researchers will continue to explore its role in a broad variety of phenomena. For example, Priyanka Carr and I just published several experiments showing its role as a cause of risk aversion among women making economic decisions. I am heartened to see the utility of the concept in explaining such a variety of phenomena.

For my own part these days, I am most fascinated by the growing body of research showing how small interventions designed to reduce the experience of stereotype threat in classrooms and schools can dramatically improve the academic performance of groups whose abilities are negatively stereotyped—minority students in K through 12 schooling and college, and women in advanced math and science courses. To see these interventions-- by people such as Geoff Cohen, Josh Aronson, Steve Spencer, Greg Walton, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Julio Garcia, Carol Dweck, and others--achieve improvements against such tenacious patterns of underperformance is inspiring. I am thrilled to see it, even though these days, from my current position as a university Provost, I am only able to participate primarily as a cheerleader, commenter and occasionally as a publicist—see chapter 9 of Whistling Vivaldi.

From the standpoint of research, my great blessing in the stereotype threat area (and the other areas of research that I have been involved in) has been the quality of my students and colleagues. One of the joys of writing this book was the opportunity to tell the story behind the research, the story of how it actually unfolded and developed. From that vantage point, what becomes vividly clear is the role of collaboration and the contribution of so many people to the development and application of this idea. When I stick my head up and take an overview look at the enterprise of stereotype threat research, that’s what I am proudest of.

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Interview with Wally Gingerich

2010-09-28T00:43:00.000-07:00

By Coert Visser (2010)

Wallace Gingerich is Professor Emeritus of Social Work at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. As a core member of the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee (BFTC), Wisconsin, in the 1980s, he has been an important contributor to the development of the solution-focused approach. In this interview, he looks back on how and why he joined BFCT and on how the solution-focused approach emerged in the next few years after he joined. Also, he talks about the BRIEFER project and about a soon to be published review of the research on the effectiveness of the solution-focused approach. Finally, he reflects on the ways the solution-focused approach may further develop.

Could you tell a bit about when and how you got involved with the Brief Family Therapy Center?

It was 1982. I had made tenure and I began thinking about what I wanted to do now that I had more independence and flexibility. Although I had been teaching social work practice courses at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I hadn’t been active in clinical work for more than 10 years, since leaving my job in California in to return to school for my PhD. I decided I wanted to get back into clinical work. I had always enjoyed it, and I felt I needed to be in practice myself to teach well and to have credibility with my students.

So I began to check out some options. I had heard through Elam Nunnally, a colleague of mine at the university, about an unconventional, forward-thinking, even radical, small group of therapists that had recently started a clinic – the Brief Family Therapy Center. They called what they were doing brief therapy. They were using a team approach with one-way mirrors, did lots of video-taping, and were beginning to publish some of their ideas in the journals. Of more interest to me was their 9-month training program which consisted of an afternoon seminar one day a week along with an evening of supervised clinical work. My skills were rusty, I lacked confidence, and I thought this would be a good way to get back into practice.

I made an appointment to go out and talk with Steve and Insoo – I remember the meeting quite vividly even today, nearly 30 years later! I was looking for a place to develop my clinical skills and the trainee program was perfect for that. I wasn’t crazy about whatever approach it was they were teaching – I just wanted the guided practice experience. Steve and Insoo were a little apprehensive. Why would a “researcher” from the university want to come out and be a trainee, after all? What does he have up his sleeve? I think they were afraid that I might be there to find out what they were doing and cause trouble. It soon became clear that they were interested in me if I would help them with their research. I, on the other hand, was interested in the clinical work. So we struck a bargain that afternoon – I would help out with research if they would teach me how to do clinical work. I didn’t know exactly what I would be learning, and neither they nor I really knew what research projects we would cook up over the years, but the adventure had begun!

From what I have heard and read, my understanding is that the BFTC team developed the core of the solution-focused approach roughly between 1979, when BFTC was founded, and somewhere around 1986. At what stage would you say that development was when you joined? Could you tell a bit about your memories of that time?

My first encounter with the BFTC group was in the fall of 1982 when I became a trainee in their 9-month program. The training consisted of weekly Tuesday afternoon seminars led by the BFTC team, principally Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, Eve Lipchik, Marilyn Lacourt, and Alex Molnar. The content of the training had to do primarily with the BFTC version of brief, strategic therapy. There was a lot of emphasis on getting details about the pattern of the problem, what maintains the problem, and how could it be interrupted. The message from the team always almost included a homework task meant to help the client interrupt the pattern of the problem. I don’t recall using the miracle question or scaling question, or searching for exceptions during that year.

Although the approach in 1982-83 was problem focused, I suspect Steve and others were beginning to think about other ways of working with clients. The team was always open to new ideas, even if they were unconventional and even radical. There was not the feeling that the model had been developed – it was developing and new ideas were highly valued.

When I completed the training program in the spring of 1983, Steve invited Michele Weiner-Davis and me to form a “research team” with him that would meet weekly. We eagerly accepted. Initially we didn’t have a very organized or directed approach, so we looked at videos of cases, sometimes did sessions ourselves, or sat in on other team members’ sessions. We were clear that we wanted our work to be grounded in clinical practice, as opposed to being theory driven or building on existing clinical research of the time. We believed the BFTC approach was effective, but we wanted to learn more about what made it work and to develop more systematic evidence of its effectiveness. I have reflected many times since those days how important it was – essential, I would say – that our research meetings took place in the context of live clinical practice. That shaped the questions we were interested in, the words and concepts we used to formulate our questions. I firmly believe that had we met at the university to formulate our questions and design our studies, they would have been quite different and probably less useful.

The research team met regularly for several years. It was the group that conceived the study of interview transcripts that led to the discovery that what made the good sessions good was “change talk”, as opposed to talking about the problem. This study soon led us to drop the first interview (which at the time focused on detailed information about the pattern of the problem) and begin cases with talk of how they would like things to be different, has that happened before, etc. This also helped us see the topography of interviews where the early discussion focused on what was different (elicit), how did that happen (amplify), express surprise and amazement (reinforce), and then focus on what else needed to happen (initiate).

It was during this time that Michele came in one day excited about what had happened with one of her clients the previous week. The mother of an adolescent boy who had been referred by the school for absences and declining performance interrupted Michele during the initial interview (which was focused on the pattern of the problem) to ask if she wanted to know what she (the mother) had already tried with her son. Michele had the presence of mind to say “yes” and to follow up with whether the mother’s interventions were working. We found this an astonishing event, and a remarkable coincidence with some of the ideas we had been thinking based on our study of change talk. We recognized immediately that the mother’s talk about what she was doing differently, in the first session no less, was consistent with our growing interest in change talk rather than problem talk. It also suggested that we could begin our work with clients with “what was different?” rather than an extended discussion of the problem.

One other event during this period stands out in my mind. One day when we were training masters students to code interviews for the change talk study we came to a passage in an interview where Steve and I could not agree on whether the client was talking about change or not. After considerable analysis it dawned on us that the client was describing an actual change in her situation but she didn’t recognize it as such. It was “unrecognized” change, we decided! As we pondered this incident it became clear to us that the therapist needs to be on the lookout for change that the client may not recognize as such, and to bring it to the client’s attention. This event, and the one with Michele’s client, also suggested that change may already be happening and that it might be more useful to focus on that rather than the details of the problem.
So, to answer your question, I had the great good fortune of joining the BFTC team during the transitional period when it was moving from a focus on the problem to a focus on change – what we later began to call solution-focused. Looking back, I would say 1983-1984 was when the major shift occurred but, clearly, the foundation had been laid in the preceding years and the new approach would be elaborated and refined in subsequent years. It is difficult to describe the exhilaration we felt during that time about our “discoveries” and the anticipation we had for what would come next. We sensed we were in the midst of a revolutionary shift in how therapy was thought about and done, but also aware that the approach would be considered radical and even irresponsible or unethical by some. We knew we had our work cut out for us, but we felt up to the challenge.

The various publications by Steve and others showed that, in the next few years, the BFTC team did indeed make great progress. I am particularly curious about the BRIEFER projects which, I think, tried to formalize the therapy process and capture it in an expert system. I know you played an important role in BRIEFER. How do you look back on it? What would you say it was about and what did it amount to?

I had been interested in expert systems for some time, and Steve was also interested in computers, so we hit on this idea of developing an expert system that would serve the advising function of the team behind the mirror. The therapist would conduct the first part of the session, then come behind the mirror and ask the computer what kind of task to give the client. The computer would ask questions about what happened in the session and the therapist would answer. After about half a dozen interactions the computer would make its recommendation and the therapist would go back into the room and give the task. This is a simplified version, of course, but that was the idea.

This project evolved in the context at the time of us wanting to understand more about how skilled therapists did their work – how they thought about their cases and decided what intervention to use. We found that skilled therapists were not very adept at giving clear explanations of their reasoning that would enable another therapist to replicate their work. This is typical of experts in general, by the way; true experts tend to function in an intuitive and un-self-conscious way, knowing “in their bones” what to do. We were unsatisfied with this, however, because we wanted to understand better what made SFBT work, and to be able to describe it in such a way that it could be taught and learned more easily.

Expert system methodology at the time paid a lot of attention to the “knowledge mining” process – how the programmer could extract (or construct) the rule-based knowledge the expert used to arrive at her expert advice. We thought of this as another methodology with the potential to help us figure out what expert SFBT therapists did. We had the good fortune about that time of coming into contact with Hannah Goodman, a graduate student who was working on her masters degree in computer science and needed a project for her thesis. She was interested in expert systems and we talked her into doing her project with us. She would use methods she had learned in class to “mine” the knowledge Steve used to decide what intervention to give the client. We were thinking that, if successful, this would reveal more clearly what expert therapists did, that it could be used as teaching too, and that it could even potentially take the place of the team behind the mirror providing solo therapists the advantages of a team without actually having one. We knew this was a reach, but that was what we were thinking.

We met many times with Hannah asking questions to find out what Steve did, constructing rules that she thought embodied that knowledge, and then trying the rules on real cases to see if they led to the intervention the therapist had actually used. Although what came out had probably existed in Steve’s head somewhere, it often seemed like a revelation to us. The finished expert system consisted of about thirty IF-THEN rules and in most cases it did a pretty good job of replicating the intervention advice the actual therapist had given. We called the system BRIEFER, because we thought it should make the therapy process more efficient and consistent, and briefer, of course, which was one of the objectives of the solution-focused approach. BRIEFER also conveyed the idea that the computer would “brief” the therapist about her cases, and we liked that little play on words.

We never subjected BRIEFER to rigorous testing and did not release it outside the clinic because we were afraid people would actually use it if anything happened we could be held liable, so BRIEFER, the computer program, eventually passed into oblivion. We often used BRIEFER in training and presentations, however, and I remember fondly John Weakland’s half-serious comment at one conference that we had better not let it get out that SFBT consisted of only 32 rules – it could put us out of a job and would let the secret out that anyone could do it!

Even though we did not use BRIEFER as an expert system, we felt the project was a success because it helped us describe with considerably more clarity the solution-focused therapy process. It made crystal clear just what information the therapist needed to gather in the initial interview, and how to put it together to figure out what direction to take with a case and what kind of intervention to give. This resulted, among other things, in the flow chart that appeared in the Family Process article which I use to this day in my teaching. That flow chart also helped me stay on track when I interviewed clients in those days, as I did not have the same level of expertise as Steve and found the chart a useful rubric. In effect, BRIEFER helped me interview and decide what intervention to give, even though I wasn’t using the computer version of the program, only the flow chart.

I don’t think the BRIEFER project significantly changed how solution-focused therapy was done at the clinic; it made clearer and more systematic what we were already doing. On the other hand, Steve might say that describing the process in a new language and structure did actually change it. That would be an interesting conversation to have…

Well, I can surely imagine BRIEFER helped to get more clarity about what the solution-focused approach is. Another thing that seems important to me is your research work on the efficacy of the approach. In 2000 and 2001, you and Sheri Eisengart did a review of the outcome research and, if I am well informed, Lance Peterson and you are currently updating the review. Could you share some thoughts on what you think the research has shown about the efficacy of the approach?

Yes, Lance Peterson and I are nearing completion of an update of the 2000 qualitative review of SFBT outcomes, and it looks like we will have around 40 studies that will meet our more rigorous criteria for controlled outcome studies. We are reviewing only studies that utilized comparison groups with random assignment or some form of matching. The studies consistently show positive pre-post benefit from SFBT, and results that are comparable to other established treatments. The increase in number and quality of studies between 2000 and now is impressive, and the evidence base for SFBT is steadily growing. In fact, I would say SFBT now approaches or meets contemporary standards of evidence-based practice, particularly in the fields of mental health and child behavior problems, the populations with which most of the outcome research studies have been conducted.

Two meta-analytic reviews published recently by Stams, et al, in the Netherlands, and Johnny Kim here in the U.S. Those two reviews found SFBT effect sizes to be consistently positive, but lower than those for other well-established interventions. This may be due in part to the wide range of studies included in the meta-analyses, both in terms of study methodology (poor control) and type of outcome studied. Clearly, however, there is room for improvement in the quality of research designs used to study SFBT outcomes, particularly in the areas of treatment integrity and treatment fidelity.

Over time I think we will find that SFBT is equivalent to other established therapies. Wampold’s analysis of the psychotherapy research suggests that all approaches when done well produce equivalent outcomes. The findings of the Helsinki Psychotherapy Study, a very large and well-designed study, confirm this; SFBT produced outcomes comparable to both short-term and long-term psychotherapy, but in much less time and significantly fewer sessions. Thus, I think we’ll see increasing attention to issues such as the efficiency and cost of psychotherapy, as well as consumer preference.

So, overall, I’d say the evidence is accumulating that SFBT is effective – as effective as other approaches – and is probably less expensive and more time efficient.

This seems to fit well with my experience, which is that the solution-focused approach is as effective as other approaches but often faster and more broadly applicable. In addition to this, my experience is that both clients and practitioners tend to be more satisfied with the solution-focused way of working. Clients, because they are approached so respectfully and taken so seriously and practitioners because they experience so much that what they do really makes a difference for their clients. My last question is about the further development of the solution-focused approach. Insoo Kim Berg once said to me she did not think of the solution-focused approach as a finished approach. She said: “For any model to stay alive it will need to constantly keep developing and renewing itself.” What are your ideas about its development? How do you expect it to develop, and how would like to see it develop?

Insoo and Steve were both very clear that the approach should continue to develop – this came more from a belief that nothing is ever final or perfect, rather than an idea that there was something unfinished or wrong with the approach. Most of the fundamental changes in thinking and working occurred in the 1980s, whereas the 90’s and 00’s saw refinements. One of the major ways the approach developed beyond the BFTC group was moving into the area of organizational consulting and other types of interpersonal change in addition to traditional psychotherapy.

The world today is quite different from the developmental days of SFBT. Then there was little thought about the cost of therapy, and “evidence base” was not a big factor in choice of treatment approach. Now cost (length of therapy) is a big factor, as is evidence of effectiveness. Wampold’s work on common factors suggests that all approaches, when done well, are effective and have essentially equal outcomes. I think he makes a strong case for that, backed up by his meta-analysis of the outcome research across many approaches.

A consistent theme in the studies comparing SFBT to other therapies shows SFBT is almost always briefer, more cost-effective. I think that is because the approach does a better job of addressing some of the common factors Wampold talks about – creating the expectation in the client that change will happen, doing things in the session that show change is already happening, and constructing a working alliance that emphasizes client strengths rather than limitations, which makes the approach more attractive to clients. I expect as time goes on we will see less emphasis on distinctions between SFBT and other approaches and, hopefully, more collaboration with other approaches that also focus on strengths and positive change. Collaboration and intellectual exchange can strengthen SFBT and keep it responsive to the needs of clients and the world they live in.

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Interview with Alan Kay

2010-09-07T23:05:00.000-07:00

By Coert Visser (2010)

Alan Kay, owner of The Glasgow Group, is a Canadian solution-focused change management consultant specializing in areas such as strategic planning, brand and customer experience implementation, stakeholder consultation and client-supplier alignment. Alan’s work is widely influenced by the theory and application of the solution-focused approach to encourage attitudinal and behavioural change within an organization, and to help corporate and individual clients become more strategically focused.

Hi Alan, When did the potential of the solution-focused approach first hit you?

It was about an hour into the first basic Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) training I received from Jim Duval at Brief Therapy Training Centres-International in Toronto. I had three thoughts: This isn't easy to understand. I've been waiting all my life to find something like this and I don't dare use this family therapy language on my business clients.

The feelings of confusion and excitement kept coming and going throughout the 2-day training. My colleague, Rick Wolfe and I were in a room of social workers, some of whom challenged Jim’s ideas, including how he was teaching the course. Jim also kept comparing SFBT with traditional psychotherapy, not very politely. So, ‘doing what works’ didn’t relate to what was going on in the room. It wasn’t until another round of training that I later realized the behaviour was common in this realm – it was to be taken seriously, not literally. Conversely, during the role-model and practice sessions I kept encountering layers of wonderful insights about how to make this work for organizations. Then there was constant mention and video demo tapes of a certain Insoo Kim Berg from Milwaukee which created even more exciting insights and feelings of wonder about how on earth she engaged so effectively with unhappy families, stayed out of the emotions and helped them make progress.

Anyway, not realizing fully how transformational an experience the two days had been, I went to a variety of clients' meetings over the next week implementing what I had learned and immediately noticed a significant difference in the dialogue and the outcomes. In reality, I didn’t have to adjust the language a lot.

Could you describe an example of one of your very first attempts to apply this stuff in a client meeting? What did you do, what worked well and how did you notice?

The early encounters after my initial SF training were exciting. The overriding impression was that I was simply asking better questions and that clients were reacting differently as a result.

One client team was feeling stressed by the scale of their success. The organization had grown dramatically in size and reputation. At the strategic planning session the mood was somewhat tense. "What do you do well?", I asked. "Not much", was the answer. Theatrically I said, "That’s odd, your industry journal says that you are now the #2 player in your sector…in the world! Something must be working!" The dam of skepticism burst and long lists of their competencies were quickly generated.

Another client, legendary for their silos and politics, was very fearful that the IT strategy process they wished us to facilitate would be very difficult to develop and implement. Also, consultants were not welcomed with open arms. During our proposal development interviews we kept asking, "What’s working so far in your IT efforts?" Almost immediately, the concerns they had about our credibility to help them were greatly reduced.

At one session I received feedback that I was overusing the term, 'how do you see this being useful to you?' While I knew the question was doing no harm, it reminded me not to get ahead of the client or use language that may not work for them.

Several colleagues with whom I worked expressed their reservations about the SF process. I took them seriously, not literally. Over time, though they didn’t express a lot of enthusiasm for what I was doing, I noticed they were using some of the SF language.

While the solution-focused approach is very popular among Canadian psychotherapists, I know you are one of the few Canadian professionals who use it in organizational consultancy and coaching. At the same time, you are rather active in the large international network of solution-focused organizational professionals, aren't you? Can you talk a bit about this international network and what it means to you?

The joy of being an SF organizational practitioner in Canada is you can't use the name to sell it so you have to do what works for your clients. Having to be credible in the outcomes you help clients achieve, not your SF process alone raises the bar of your performance expectations. That has been very helpful.

The international SF network has been incredibly useful in bringing understanding surrounding applications to the transfer of the wonderful SF therapy model in the world of organizations. Since the SF organizational people first came together informally ten years ago a diverse community of SF consultants, coaches and trainers have built both an informal and, increasingly a formal body of theoretical and application knowledge.

Movements of this nature often spark interest and activity, but somehow the centre doesn’t hold together and the associations that spring up may not sustain. Not so with SF. The diversity of the practitioners has resulted in a variety of organizing groups, almost all with a common cause – around the world. The key issue will be to bring SF to a wider audience, particularly at the organizational leadership level. That said, albeit modest in size so far, SF is now on the cusp on leading organizational change practices and shows signs of great things to come. As we say in SF, to speed things up, go slow.

You are also involved in Interaction, the journal of SF in organisations. Could you tell a bit about what the aim of this journal is and what your involvement is?

The Journal is largely Solution Focused Consulting and Training's link to the academic world. It has an excellent editorial team lead by Dr Mark McKergow MBA and from my perspective a superb review board. The purpose of the Journal, as I see it, is to advocate the efficacy of SF, purse quality practices and in the process to bring solutions focus into the mainstream of organizational change.

My involvement so far has been to pen a recent article. My wish for the Journal is that it addresses both the science of SF and deepens understanding of the practical applications that organizations seek.

I believe that the Journal combined with SFCT's body of cases compiling in the association's peer review section will further the understanding of solutions focus applications in organizations- SF is at a tipping point of achieving the respect that it deserves.

The bigger issue is, how do we commercialize SF applications in organizations? History is littered with great ideas and innovations that never made it into the mainstream because no one person or group took it upon themselves to get folks to use and pay for it regularly.

So there is work to be done, then … Now, imagine we leap ahead 2 years after this interview and imagine SF has developed quite well - it has become better known and accepted in organizations. Could you try to picture that situation? Could you share some thoughts about what you think that situation would look like and what would be better?

The picture is clear! In 2012/3 innovative organizations have recognized the opportunity to make SF their primary change tool (among a number of successful approaches) helping the organization a) move beyond the self-imposed crisis mode that it used to live with and b) constantly set new targets for measurable improvement, including, but not exclusively, financials.

The organization will have embraced and encapsulated approaches like Tony Hsieh’s method to Delivering Happiness, e.g., Profit, Passion, Purpose…through its people. In the post-industrial, technology-leveraged organization, its people will be seen as the path to prosperity for the owners, the staff and the stakeholders who contribute to making it work.

Customers will see the organization determined to bring them maximum value the way they want it. In not-for-profit and public organizations, the focus will be on delivering not profit, but clearer and better outcomes for the communities they serve.

Interview with Keith Stanovich

2009-11-21T01:27:00.001-08:00

By Coert Visser (2009)

Dr. Keith Stanovich, Professor of Human Development and Applied Psychology of the University of Toronto, is a leading expert on the psychology of reading and on rationality. His latest book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, shows that IQ tests are very incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. These tests fail to assess rational thinking styles and skills which are nevertheless crucial to real-world behavior. In this interview with Keith Stanovich he explains the difference between IQ and rationality and why rationality is so important. Also he shares his views on how rationality can be enhanced.

In your book, you say that IQ tests are incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. Could you explain that?

I start out my book by noting the irony that in 2002, cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University won the Nobel Prize in Economics for work on how humans make choices and assess probabilities—in short, for work on human rationality. Being rational means adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence—it means achieving one’s life goals using the best means possible. To violate the thinking rules examined by Kahneman and Tversky thus has the practical consequence that we are less satisfied with our lives than we might be. Research conducted in my own laboratory has indicated that there are systematic individual differences in the judgment and decision making skills studied by Kahneman and Tversky.

It is a profound historical irony of the behavioral sciences that the Nobel Prize was awarded for studies of cognitive characteristics that are entirely missing from the most well-known mental assessment device in the behavioral sciences—the intelligence test, and its many proxies, such as the SAT. It is ironic because most laypeople are prone to think that IQ tests are tests of, to put it colloquially, good thinking. Scientists and laypeople alike would tend to agree that “good thinking” encompasses good judgment and decision making—the type of thinking that helps us achieve our goals. In fact, the type of “good thinking” that Kahneman and Tversky studied was deemed so important that research on it was awarded the Nobel Prize. Yet assessments of such good thinking—rational thinking—are nowhere to be found on IQ tests. Intelligence tests measure important things, but not these—they do not assess the extent of rational thought. This might not be such an omission if it were the case that intelligence was a strong predictor of rational thinking. However, my research group has found just the opposite—that it is a mild predictor at best and that some rational thinking skills are totally dissociated from intelligence.

You write about three types of thinking processes, the autonomous, the algorithmic and the reflective mind. Could you briefly explain these and explain how they are related to intelligence and rationality?

In 1996, philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book about how aspects of the human mind were like the minds of other animals and how other aspects were not. He titled the book Kinds of Minds to suggest that within the brain of humans are control systems of very different types—different kinds of minds. In the spirit of Dennett’s book, I termed the part of the mind that carries out Type 1 processing the autonomous mind. The difference between the algorithmic mind and the reflective mind is captured in another well established distinction in the measurement of individual differences—the distinction between cognitive ability and thinking dispositions. The algorithmic mind is indexed by measures of computational power like fluid g in psychometric theory. The reflective mind is indexed by individual differences in thinking disposition measures.

The term mindware was coined by psychologist David Perkins to refer to the rules, knowledge, procedures, and strategies that a person can retrieve from memory in order to aid decision making and problem solving. Perkins uses the term to stress the analogy to software in the brain/computer analogy. Each of the levels in the tripartite model of mind has to access knowledge to carry out its operations. The reflective mind not only accesses general knowledge structures but, importantly, accesses the person’s opinions, beliefs, and reflectively acquired goal structure. The algorithmic mind accesses micro-strategies for cognitive operations and production system rules for sequencing behaviors and thoughts. Finally, the autonomous mind accesses not only evolutionarily-compiled encapsulated knowledge bases, but also retrieves information that has become tightly compiled and available to the autonomous mind due to overlearning and practice.

Rationality requires three different classes of mental characteristic. First, algorithmic-level cognitive capacity is needed in order that autonomous-system override and simulation activities can be sustained. Second, the reflective mind must be characterized by the tendency to initiate the override of suboptimal responses generated by the autonomous mind and to initiate simulation activities that will result in a better response. Finally, the mindware that allows the computation of rational responses needs to be available and accessible during simulation activities. Intelligence tests assess only the first of these three characteristics that determine rational thought and action. As measures of rational thinking, they are radically incomplete.

That society, educators, psychologists, and personnel managers put so much emphasis on intelligence seems strange and unjustified given that intelligence tests cover only one of these three important mental processes. Could you say something about how individuals, organizations and, perhaps, society as a whole, might benefit from focusing more on raising rational thinking skills?

The lavish attention devoted to intelligence, raising it, praising it, worrying when it is low, etc., seems wasteful in light of the fact that we choose to virtually ignore another set of mental skills with just as much social consequence—rational thinking mindware and procedures. Popular books tell parents how to raise more intelligent children, educational psychology textbooks discuss the raising of students’ intelligence, and we feel reassured when hearing that a particular disability does not impair intelligence. There is no corresponding concern on the part of parents that their children grow into rational beings, no corresponding concern on the part of schools that their students reason judiciously, and no corresponding recognition that intelligence is useless to a child unable to adapt to the world.

I simply do not think that society has weighed the consequences of its failure to focus on irrationality as a real social problem. These skills and dispositions profoundly affect the world in which we live. Because of inadequately developed rational thinking abilities—because of the processing biases and mindware problems discussed in my book—physicians choose less effective medical treatments; people fail to accurately assess risks in their environment; information is misused in legal proceedings; millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry; parents fail to vaccinate their children; unnecessary surgery is performed; animals are hunted to extinction; billions of dollars are wasted on quack medical remedies; and costly financial misjudgments are made. Distorted processes of belief formation are also implicated in various forms of ethnocentric, racist, sexist, and homophobic hatred.

It is thus clear that widespread societal effects result from inadequately developed rational thinking dispositions and knowledge. In the modern world, the impact of localized irrational thoughts and decisions can be propagated and magnified through globalized information technologies, thus affecting large numbers of people. That is, you may be affected by the irrational thinking of others even if you do not take irrational actions yourself. This is why, for example, the spread of pseudoscientific beliefs is everyone’s concern. For example, police departments hire psychics to help with investigations even though research has shown that their use is not efficacious. Jurors have been caught making their decisions based on astrology. Major banks and several Fortune 500 companies employ graphologists for personnel decisions even though voluminous evidence indicates that graphology is useless for this purpose.

Unfortunately, these examples are not rare. We are all affected in numerous ways when such contaminated mindware permeates society—even if we avoid this contaminated mindware ourselves. Pseudosciences such as astrology are now large industries, involving newspaper columns, radio shows, book publishing, the Internet, magazine articles, and other means of dissemination. The House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging has estimated that the amount wasted on medical quackery nationally reaches into the billions. Physicians are increasingly concerned about the spread of medical quackery on the Internet and its real health costs.

It seems that sometimes high rationality can irritate some people. For instance, you can sometimes here people saying things like: "don't be so rational!" Do you think there can be such a thing as being too rational?

Under a proper definition of rationality, one consistent with modern cognitive science, no. It certainly is possible for a person to be “too logical” but being logical is not synonymous with being rational. Psychologists study rationality because it is one of the most important human values. It is important for a person’s happiness and well-being that they think and act rationally. The high status accorded rationality in my writings may seem at odds with other characterizations that deem rationality either trivial -little more than the ability to solve textbook-type logic problems- or in fact antithetical to human fulfillment -as an impairment to an enjoyable emotional life, for instance. These ideas about rationality derive from a restricted and mistaken view of rational thought—one not in accord with the study of rationality in modern cognitive science.

Dictionary definitions of rationality tend to be rather lame and unspecific (“the state or quality of being in accord with reason”), and some critics who wish to downplay the importance of rationality have promulgated a caricature of rationality that involves restricting its definition to the ability to do the syllogistic reasoning problems that are encountered in Philosophy 101. The meaning of rationality in modern cognitive science is, in contrast, much more robust and important. Cognitive scientists recognize two types of rationality: instrumental and epistemic. The simplest definition of instrumental rationality, the one that emphasizes most that it is grounded in the practical world, is: Behaving in the world so that you get exactly what you most want, given the resources (physical and mental) available to you. The other aspect of rationality studied by cognitive scientists is epistemic rationality. This aspect of rationality concerns how well beliefs map onto the actual structure of the world. The two types of rationality are related. In order to take actions that fulfill our goals, we need to base those actions on beliefs that are properly calibrated to the world.

Although many people feel (mistakenly or not) that they could do without the ability to solve textbook logic problems (which is why the caricatured view of rationality works to undercut its status), virtually no person wishes to eschew epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality, properly defined. Virtually all people want their beliefs to be in some correspondence with reality, and they also want to act to maximize the achievement of their goals. Psychologist Ken Manktelow, in his book Psychology of Reasoning, has emphasized the practicality of both types of rationality by noting that they concern two critical things: What is true and what to do. Epistemic rationality is about what is true and instrumental rationality is about what to do.

Nothing could be more practical or useful for a person’s life than the thinking processes that help them find out what is true and what is best to do. This stands in marked contrast to some restricted views of what rationality is (for example, the rationality=logic view that I mentioned above). Being rational (in the sense studied by cognitive scientists) is NOT just being logical. Instead, logic (and all other cognitive tools) must prove its worth. It must show that it helps us get at what is true or helps us to figure out what it is best to do. My philosophy echoes that of Jonathan Baron, in his book Thinking and Deciding (4th Edition), when he argues that “the best kind of thinking, which we shall call rational thinking, is whatever kind of thinking best helps people achieve their goals. If it should turn out that following the rules of formal logic leads to eternal happiness, then it is rational thinking to follow the laws of logic, assuming that we all want eternal happiness. If it should turn out, on the other hand, that carefully violating the laws of logic at every turn leads to eternal happiness, then it is these violations that we shall call rational” (p. 61).

A similar admonition applies when we think about the relation between emotion and rationality. In folk psychology, emotion is seen as antithetical to rationality. The absence of emotion is seen as purifying thinking into purely rational form. This idea is not consistent with definition of rationality that I (and most other cognitive scientists) adopt. Instrumental rationality is behavior consistent with maximizing goal satisfaction, not a particular psychological process. It is perfectly possible for the emotions to facilitate instrumental rationality as well as to impede it. In fact, conceptions of emotions in cognitive science stress the adaptive regulatory powers of the emotions. Emotions often get us “in the right ballpark” of the correct response. If more accuracy than that is required, then a more precise type of analytic cognition will be required. Of course, we can rely too much on the emotions. We can base responses on a “ballpark” solution in situations that really require a more precise type of analytic thought. More often than not, however, processes of emotional regulation facilitate rational thought and action.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestselling book Blink, adopts the folk psychological view of the relation between emotion and rationality that is at odds with the way those concepts are discussed in cognitive science. Gladwell discusses the famous cases of cognitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio where damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex caused nonfunctional behavior without impairing intelligence. Gladwell argues that “people with damage to their ventromedial area are perfectly rational. They can be highly intelligent and functional, but they lack judgment” (2005, p. 59). But this is not the right way to describe these cases. In my view, someone who lacks judgment cannot be rational.

In the book, you explain the lack of rationality is associated with three things: 1) an overreliance on the autonomous mind, relying on unconscious heuristics where deliberate thinking would have been asked for, 2) a mindware gap, lack of rational tools, procedures, knowledge, strategies, and 3) being infected with contaminated mindware, which refers to beliefs, rules, strategies, etc that are not grounded in evidence but which are potentially harmful and yet hard to get rid of, like a computer virus. Now, I can imagine that bridging the mindware gap can be accomplished largely by education. The other two seem a bit harder to me. Could you share some ideas about what might help to prevent an overreliance on the autonomous mind and about how to fight contaminated mindware?

You are correct that irrationality caused by mindware gaps is most easily remediable, as it is entirely due to missing strategies and declarative knowledge that can be taught (your category #2 above). But keep in mind that often category #1 (overriding the tendencies of the autonomous mind) is closely linked because override is most often done with learned mindware, and sometimes override fails because of inadequately instantiated mindware. In such a case, inadequately learned mindware should really be considered the source of the problem (the line between the two is continuous—As the rule is less and less well instantiated, at some point it is so poorly compiled that it is not a candidate to override the Type 1 response and thus the processing error becomes a mindware gap).

Other categories of cognitive failure are harder to classify in terms of whether they are more dispositional (category #1) or knowledge-like (category #2). For example, disjunctive reasoning is the tendency to consider all possible states of the world when deciding among options or when choosing a problem solution in a reasoning task. It is a rational thinking strategy with a high degree of generality. People make many suboptimal decisions because of the failure to flesh out all the possible options in a situation, yet the disjunctive mental tendency is not computationally expensive. This is consistent with the finding that there are not strong intelligence-related limitations on the ability to think disjunctively and with evidence indicating that disjunctive reasoning is a rational thinking strategy that can be taught.

The tendency to consider alternative hypotheses is, like disjunctive reasoning, strategic mindware of great generality. Also, it can be implemented in very simple ways. Many studies have attempted to teach the technical issue of thinking of P(D/~H) [the probability of the observed data given the alternative hypothesis] or thinking of the alternative hypothesis by instructing people in a simple habit. People are given extensive practice at saying to themselves the phrase “think of the opposite” in relevant situations. This strategic mindware does not stress computational capacity and thus is probably easily learnable by many individuals. Several studies have shown that practice at the simple strategy of triggering the thought “think of the opposite” can help to prevent a host of the thinking errors studied in the heuristics and biases literature, including but not limited to: anchoring biases, overconfidence effects, hindsight bias, confirmation bias, and self serving biases.

Various aspects of probabilistic thinking represent mindware of great generality and potency. However, as any person who has ever taught a statistics course can attest (your present author included), some of these insights are counterintuitive and unnatural for people—particularly in their application. There is nevertheless still some evidence that they are indeed teachable—albeit with somewhat more effort and difficulty than strategies such as disjunctive reasoning or considering alternative hypotheses. Aspects of scientific thinking necessary to infer a causal relationship are also definitely teachable. Other strategies of great generality may be easier to learn—particularly by those of lower intelligence. For example, psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has discussed an action strategy of extremely wide generality—the use of implementation intentions. An implementation intention is formed when the individual marks the cue-action sequence with the conscious, verbal declaration: “when X occurs, I will do Y”. Finally, research has shown that an even more minimalist cognitive strategy of forming mental goals (whether or not they have implementation intentions) can be efficacious. For example, people perform better in a task when they are told to form a mental goal (“set a specific, challenging goal for yourself”) for their performance as opposed to being given the generic motivational instructions (“do your best”).

We are often making choices that reduce our happiness because we find it hard to predict what will make us happy. For example, people often underestimate how quickly they will adapt to both fortunate and unfortunate events. Our imaginations fail at projecting the future. Psychologist Dan Gilbert cites evidence indicating that a remediating strategy in such situations might be to use a surrogate—someone who is presently undergoing the event whose happiness (or unhappiness) you are trying to simulate. For example, if you are wondering how you will react to “empty nest” syndrome, ask someone who has just had their last child leave for college rather than trying to imagine yourself in that situation. If you want to know how you will feel if your team is knocked out in the first round of the tournament, ask someone whose team has just been knocked out rather than trying to imagine it yourself. People tend not to want to use this mechanism because they think that their own uniqueness makes their guesses from introspection more accurate than the actual experiences of the people undergoing the event. People are simply skeptical about whether other people’s experiences apply to them. This is a form of egocentrism akin to the myside processing. Gilbert captures the irony of people’s reluctance to adopt the surrogate strategy by telling his readers: “If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people” (p. 229, 2006)

Much of the strategic mindware discussed so far represents learnable strategies in the domain of instrumental rationality (achieving one’s goals). Epistemic rationality (having beliefs well calibrated to the world) is often disrupted by contaminated mindware. However, even here, there are teachable macro-strategies that can reduce the probability of acquiring mindware harmful that is to its host. For example, the principle of falsifiability provides a wonderful inoculation against many kinds of nonfunctional beliefs. It is a tool of immense generality. It is taught in low-level methodology and philosophy of science courses, but could be taught much more broadly than this.

Many pseudoscientific beliefs represent the presence of contaminated mindware. The critical thinking skills that help individuals to recognize pseudoscientific belief systems can be taught in high-school courses. Finally, I think that the language of memetic science itself is therapeutic—a learnable mental tool that can help us become more conscious of the possibility that we are hosting contaminated mindware. One way that the meme concept will aid in cognitive self-improvement is that by emphasizing the epidemiology of belief it will indirectly suggest to many (for whom it will be a new insight) the contingency of belief. By providing a common term for all cultural units, memetic science provides a neutral context for evaluating whether any belief serves our interests as humans. The very concept of the meme will suggest to more and more people that they need to engage in mindware examination.

I recently heard someone say: "I'm just a simple man doing a simple job. What's the harm in me being not so rational?" This made me wonder, is there anything known about what characteristics of a task, role or context determine the criticality of rationality? How can we know when rationality is critical and when it is a bit less important or even completely unimportant?

Your question relates to an issue I have written about in my book The Robot’s Rebellion. The simple man with the simple job might be protected from his irrationality by living in a rational cultural, in which he is, in effect, a cultural freeloader. Cultural diffusion that allows knowledge to be shared short-circuits the need for separate individual discovery. In fact, most of us are cultural freeloaders--adding nothing to the collective knowledge or rationality of humanity. Instead, we benefit every day from the knowledge and rational strategies invented by others.

The development of probability theory, concepts of empiricism, mathematics, scientific inference, and logic throughout the centuries have provided humans with conceptual tools to aid in the formation and revision of belief and in their reasoning about action. A college sophomore with introductory statistics under his or her belt could, if time-transported to the Europe of a couple of centuries ago, become rich "beyond the dreams of avarice" by frequenting the gaming tables or by becoming involved in insurance or lotteries. The cultural evolution of rational standards is apt to occur markedly faster than human evolution. In part this cultural evolution creates the conditions whereby instrumental rationality separates from genetic optimization. As we add to the tools of rational thought, we add to the software that the analytic system can run to achieve long-leash goals that optimize actions for the individual. Learning a tool of rational thinking can quickly change behavior and reasoning in useful ways--as when a university student reads the editorial page with new reflectiveness after having just learned the rules of logic. Evolutionary change is glacial by comparison.

Thus, in an astonishingly short time by evolutionary standards, humans can learn and disseminate--through education and other forms of cultural transmission--modes of thinking that can trump genetically optimized modules in our brains that have been driving our behavior for eons. Because new discoveries by innovators can be conveyed linguistically, the general populace needs only the capability to understand the new cognitive tools--not to independently discover the new tools themselves.

Cultural increases in rationality itself might likewise be sustained through analogous mechanisms of cumulative ratcheting. That is, cultural institutions might well arise that take advantage of the tools of rational thought, and these cultural institutions might enforce rules whereby people accrue the benefits of the tools of rationality without actually internalizing the rational tools. In short, people just learn to imitate others in certain situations or “follow the rules” of rationality in order to accrue some societal benefits, while not actually becoming more rational themselves.

Cultural institutions themselves may achieve rationality at an organizational level without this entailing that the individual people within the organization are themselves actually running the tools of rational thought on their serial mental simulators.

Could you tell me about some of the questions that currently fascinate you? What are some of the research questions you would like to explore in the near future?

I am constantly asked about the possibility of a standardized rational thinking test. I respond that there is no conceptual or empirical impediment to such an endeavor—just the will, money, and time. I have begun, in ongoing writings, to sketch out a framework for the assessment of rational thought.

***

Further reading

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought

Stanovich, K. E. (2009, Nov/Dec). The thinking that IQ tests miss. Scientific American Mind, 20(6), 34-39. Stanovich_IQ-Tests-Miss_SAM09.pdf

Stanovich, K. E. (2009). Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory? In J. Evans & K. Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond (pp. 55-88). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanovich_Two_Minds.pdf

Stanovich, K. E. (2009). Rationality versus intelligence. Project Syndicate. link

Stanovich, K. E, & West. R. F. (2008). On the relative independence of thinking biases and cognitive ability.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 672-695. JPSP08.pdf

The Thinktank That Created The Solution-Focused Approach - Interview with Eve Lipchik

2009-11-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

By Coert Visser (2009)

Eve Lipchik was one of the original core members of the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, which created solution-focused therapy in the beginning of the l980's. She worked at the BFTC until l988, when she cofounded ICF Consultants. She is the author of the book Beyond Techniques in Solution-Focused Therapy: Working with Emotions and the Therapeutic Relationship and numerous chapters and articles. In this interview she looks back on the time the solution-focused approach was developed and she shares her memories of the process of developing the approach and of the people involved. She tells about the essential shift the team made from gathering information about the problem to focusing on constructing solutions with clients. Also, she reflects on recent developments and she explains the importance of describing the approach as encompassing both philosophy and techniques. Finally, she tells about some of her current interests and activities.

Coert: Could you tell me about some of your memories of the early times of the Brief Family Therapy Center? How did you get involved with that and how did you experience that starting period?

Eve: In l978, I decided to sign on to a two year, 40 hour a week training in Marriage and Family Therapy at Family Service of Milwaukee. That is where I met Insoo Berg, who was my supervisor. As a result, I learned about some experimental work she, Steve de Shazer, and some other people at Family Service were doing after hours. They were experimenting with ideas they had learned at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, and from the literature of Jay Haley, the Milan Group, and other therapists on the cutting edge at the time. Before the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) was founded in l979, some therapists from Family Service would meet at Insoo and Steve's house after work, video-taping therapy sessions of friends of friends who volunteered as clients. They would then analyze and discuss these sessions until late at night. I soon became part of that group and eventually joined BFTC in l980, after finishing my training. Interestingly, only people who were not the sole breadwinner of their family had the freedom to join, because we started out without a client base and knew it would take a year or two to build up enough business to provide salaries for everyone.

The BFTC group always saw cases as a team, with on therapist conducting the interview and the others behind a one-way mirror. The lack of business in the early days was a huge bonus. We would spend our whole day at the office and had the luxury of discussing a case for hours, because often there wasn't another one for a long time, if at all. It seems like yesterday that we would gather excitedly after a client family left, while Steve positioned himself at a blackboard to make notes about what we were saying. The purpose, after all, was to notice and understand why we did what we did, and what worked, so that we could do more of it.

That certainly was an exciting time, and I am most grateful to have had the opportunity to experience it. I could never have imagined that a collaborative process could feel so individually creative! Everyone's ideas were of equal value, even those of visitors who might drop by to sit behind the one-way mirror. When a message for clients was finally developed, or a new idea about what had just happened in a session was born, one could feel satisfaction as an individual, as well as a member of a group.

Coert: That sounds like an exciting and fulfilling work environment. A lot has been said and written about the important contributions of Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg to the development of the solution-focused approach. But I think many people relatively new to the field, are less aware of how much the development of the solution-focused approach has been a collective effort and of how different individual members with their own specific interests and qualities have all contributed importantly. Could you tell a bit more about some of those people and how they contributed?

Eve: When I think back upon the collaborative process we were all engaged in, it is really hard to separate out individual contributions. We did, however, have very different personalities and backgrounds. The five people who were the original core group at BFTC in l980, were Jim Derks, Elam Nunnally, Marilyn LaCourt, Insoo Berg, Steve de Shazer and I.

Jim Derks was a Master Degreed Social worker who had been trained in behavioral therapy. He, like Insoo, also studied at the Chicago Family Institute, which had a psychodynamic bent, but also introduced its students to the new developments in Family Therapy. Jim had a most unusual way of thinking. First, he tended to explain his ideas by using a lot of metaphor, which added another dimension to the discussion. Secondly, his thinking was “outside the nine dots.” One could say his contribution to discussions was like a pattern interruption. We would be going over and over a point and he would come left field with a totally different perspective, or a metaphor, that would allow for a new direction of thinking.

Elam Nunnally was a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at the School of Social Work. His PhD was in Family Studies, so he contributed a lot about stages of family development, family relationships, and, in particular, family communication. His thoughtful, quiet manner often grounded the group when imaginations would run wild.

Marilyn LaCourt had a Masters Degree in Communications and a background in education. She had not had any therapy experience before training at the Family Therapy Training Institute at Family Service. That was an advantage for the group because she was not prone to get involved in speculations like some of us did, but evaluated situations at face value. In this respect she and Steve were of one mind and could understand each other before some of us understood them. Her thinking contributed a lot to the minimalist aspect of Solution-Focused Therapy.

I had a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature and spent some time after college working in television production. After I married and had my children, I worked in a research project at the University of Rochester, N.Y. There I did play therapy and studied for a Masters Degree in Human Services before moving to Milwaukee and getting a Masters Degree in Social Work.

One of our first students at BFTC was Alex Molnar, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education. He was adding a Masters Degree in Social Work to his PhD in Education, and came to us for his Practicum. He was instrumental in analyzing our therapeutic process and in helping to construct decision trees to illustrate it.

Later, Wallace Gingerich, also a Professor Social Work at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin, spent time at BFTC. His expertise in research and interest in computers contributed greatly toward articulating the process of solution construction in academic terms.

Michele Weiner-Davis, who was a trainee at BFTC originally, later joined the research team and is credited with having introduced the notion of pre-session change to the Solution-Focused approach.

Last, but far from least, we all learned from, and with, our many visitors. BFTC had not been established very long before we began to attract the attention of therapists interested in innovative ideas through a home publication called the “Underground Railroad.” We all contributed articles to it about what we did at BFTC. Soon we had a parade of visitors like Lyman Wynn, Brad Keeney, Bill O'Hanlon, Carl Tomm, Michael White, Yvonne Dolan, Brian Cade, John Weakland, and many others. They sat behind the mirror with us and shared their thoughts and ideas during lengthy discussions and even longer dinners at Insoo and Steve's house, or mine. Steve cooked great Chinese food and made his own beer. I liked to cook, too, so we shared feeding and putting up our guests at our respective homes.

Coert: Thank you. I'd like to hear a bit more about your own role if that is okay. One of the people who got involved with BFTC, in l984, was Gale Miller. In a recent interview, he said: “I cannot stress enough how important Eve Lipchik was – she was willing to go the extra mile to make sure I understood what she was doing.” Could you tell a bit about your own role and specific style, interests and views?

Eve: Well, for one, the group called me “the psychodynamic one” when we first got together. That changed very quickly though, as we worked together and increasingly began to look for the same things and think along similar lines. However, I do think that I continued to be the one in the group most inclined to bring emotions into the case discussions, particularly at times when we seemed uncertain or stuck.

As I mentioned before, we started out without any client base. It was, therefore, decided that one of us had to go out into the community and find referral sources. I was unanimously elected to do this job even though I had never sold anything before in my life. I think I succeeded in this role only because my genuine enthusiasm for our group, and our work, must have come across to people , and they figured it may be worthwhile to give us a try.

As for Gale Miller's nice comment about me – by the time he came to BFTC I was aware that our core group had become so close, and the communication so idiosyncratic, that it must be difficult for an outsider to understand what is going on. So I tried to help him bridge that gap.

I also developed an interest in spouse abuse in l981, while consulting with a womens' shelter. What I observed there made me question the dominant theory that women should always leave the men who abuse them. I noticed that the level of abuse occurred on a continuum, and that the majority of situations did not fit the stereotypical domestic violence case in which the man could be categorized as severely character disordered and power hungry. The majority of situations ranged from mutual pushing and name-calling to physical fighting, which many woman said they started. In other words, many of these cases looked a lot like the relationship problem cases we treated at BFTC. I began to wonder whether a client centered, future oriented approach like the Solution-Focused one might not help improve these relationships and save families, as long as we knew how to assess the safety of the women. Once again, I went out into the community. This time I talked with District Attorneys and Probation and Parole officers about my ideas. To my surprise they all agreed with me that couple treatment, rather than separation, is the better way to go in many of the situations. They began to refer cases to us and we were very successful in assessing and treating them. I then began to publish this work and to present our ideas nationally and internationally. One thing that really surprised me in the course of these presentations was the violent language often used against me when therapists, who treat violence, disagreed with my ideas.

In terms of my role in the development of Solution-Focused Therapy, I think that my specific contribution was in terms of the interviewing process. From the very beginning of my association with the group I questioned the belief that change occurred primarily as the result of the intervention message at the end of the session. The general understanding was that the interviewing therapist's job was to “gather information for the team behind the mirror so it can compose the intervention message!” This really confused me. I could not understand how to connect with clients in front of the mirror while I had my head behind the mirror with the team. I kept insisting that the interview is an intervention, as well, and began to explore this idea on my own. This difference of opinion became a mute point when we shifted from gathering information about the problem (Brief Family Therapy) to focusing on constructing solutions with clients (Solution-Focused Therapy). Solution construction undeniably occurred during the interview and the message at the end of the session served mainly to reinforce what had been constructed so far.

Coert: That's very interesting. I consider that insight and shift in focus essential because it made the approach more client-centric and effective. Now, could you tell a bit about your last few years at BFTC and the time and the reasons you founded your own practice, ICF Consultants?

Eve: During the last few years I spent at BFTC, our goal of developing a model, and teaching it nationally and internationally had been achieved. The close collaboration that produced such creative energy was no longer necessary. The core group had shrunk down to Steve, Insoo and me, with Elam Nunnally part time, and the research team meeting separately. Jim Derks and Marilyn LaCourt had left. My practice was very busy and I began to run the training program because Insoo and Steve started traveling more and more. The development of the approach had been incredibly exciting, but we also had expended a lot of time and energy on it. I began to feel that I want to cut back and spend more time with my family. It was very difficult for me to leave, particularly because Insoo and Steve asked me to stay and offered me various options. However, in l988, I decided to look for an office to rent somewhere where I could have a small private practice. Coincidentally, Marilyn Bonjean, who had a small private practice at BFTC, and had become a friend, decided to leave her full time job because of a change in management. When I mentioned that I was looking for office space she shared that she had decided to try building a full time private practice rather than looking for another job. She asked whether I would like to share office space. That seemed like a fine idea, and that is how ICF Consultants was born.

My intention to cut back my work schedule did not exactly work out as planned. My practice began to flourish rapidly and I received many invitations to talk about Solution-Focused Therapy, especially in the area of spouse abuse. It was very gratifying to be affirmed on my own, not only as part of an established group.

Coert: I can certainly imagine that. And just like you and the other core members have evolved, so did the approach, I guess. I am curious about your thoughts and feelings on how the solution-focused approach has evolved in, say, the last decade. Do you see any interesting new trends, insights or innovations? And what are your thoughts about the fact that SF is so well-known and broadly applied nowadays, also in many fields outside therapy?

Eve: Originally, the Solution-Focused approach was considered to be process oriented and therefore, applicable to any type of case. I believe that is still true. However, as time went on, people began to apply it to specific problems, as I did with spouse abuse. Over the past ten years I have noticed increasingly varied applications of the approach, such as for group work, for children, for addictions, for child welfare, etc. My impression is that at this time people's thinking has evolved in two directions: either, that Solution-Focused Therapy is foremost a philosophy that guides thinking about how to help people achieve their goals, or, that it is a model that has specific techniques that, when applied correctly, achieves that goal. The majority of books I have seen seem to fall into the second category. However, I am pleased that the Treatment Manual that the Research Committee of the Solution Focused Brief Therapy Association issued in 2008 clearly described the approach as encompassing both philosophy and techniques.

As for your comment that the Solution-Focused approach has been well accepted and propagated, my sense is that that may be more the case in Europe and other parts of the world than in the United States. The term "strength based" is used generically in many applications that obviously originated from Solution-Focused thinking but I do not see BFTC or Solution-Focused Therapy credited too often. I was recently asked to endorse a book written by a psychiatrist about his manner of Life coaching, which he said is rooted in Solution-Focused Therapy. He devoted two sentences to it, and I had to ask him to revise those two sentences because they did not describe the approach correctly. Also, if you look at the programs of therapy conferences lately, there are very few presentations listed about Solution-Focused Therapy and its applications, and Narrative Therapy, too, for that matter. Motivation interviewing, which is so similar to Solution-Focused interviewing, is currently gaining more and more attention, as is Mindfulness, and, of course, Neuroscience and its application to therapy. I think therapies tend to go "out of style" more in the US than they do in Europe and other countries. But it is quite possible that I am missing a lot of information about the legacy of BFTC in the US and elsewhere. I sincerely hope so!

Coert: Could you tell me about your current interests, activities and plans?

Eve: One of my current interests is Neuroscience. I was trained and certified in EDMR about twelve years ago and that opened up my mind to very different thinking than I was used to. I didn't seek this training, it was offered to me free of charge, and I thought it might be fun to experience. To my surprise, I was fascinated by it and wanted to know more and more about how the brain works. My subsequent studies of Neuroscience made me want to examine whether, and how, it can fit with Solution-Focused thinking. [See article in the reference list-CV]. I believe a valid connection is possible in some respects, particularly with regard to the regulation of emotions, a core concept in neuroscientific work. Another example would be in the area of the plasticity of the brain. Neuroscientific findings suggest repetition creates new neuronal pathways, e.g. new thoughts and behaviors. Therefore, Solution-Focused therapists could suggest to clients that they repeat exceptional behaviors or thoughts, or “miraculous” behaviors or thoughts that are already happening, on a daily basis, perhaps even several times a day.

Aside from my clinical practice, I supervise Masters Degree practitioners, as well as people who are working toward AAMFT Approved Supervisor certification. For the past decade, I have also worked for an organization that has a number of community based programs for emotionally disturbed children, such as treatment foster care, school based programs, a day treatment program and a residential program. My mission there is to give all the therapists a good grounding in Solution-Focused thinking and then to act as a consultant. The cases we work on are systemically so complex, and the therapists are often so green, that I have found that it is most effective to instill the Solution-Focused philosophy first, using basic assumptions, and then to start demonstrating the value of the techniques. The assumptions help them develop the relationship with clients that is such an essential underpinning for the success of Solution-Focused Therapy, as all therapy, for that matter.

My future? I would like to keep doing what I am doing as long as I can keep doing it.
Thank you for choosing to interview me.

References:

List of publications by Eve Lipchik
ICF Consultants
Lipchik, E., Becker, M., Brasher, B. Derks, J., & Volkmann, J. (2005). Neuroscience: A New Direction for Solution-Focused Thinkers? Journal of Systemic Therapies (8) 49-70.

Also read:

A Brief History of The Solution-Focused Approach

The Organization as a Prototype

2008-03-31T01:45:00.000-07:00

Interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer

Jeffrey Pfeffer is Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and (co-)author of many well-known management books, like Competitive Advantage Through People (1996), The Human Equation (1998), The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000), Hidden Value (2000) and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense (2006). Some recurring themes in his work are the strong links between the way people are treated and organizational success, the importance of aligning values, strategy and management practices and the importance of bridging the knowing doing gap. Managementsite.com interviews him about his new book.

Coert: Let's start off with a question about your latest book, 'Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management', which you wrote together with Robert Sutton. In this book you make a strong plea for evidence based management. You debunk some popular management practises and you offer a list of facts about what works and what doesn't in management. The book came out a few months ago. How was it received?

JEFFREY PFEFFER: It depends on what you mean by "received." The reviews it has received in the media (places like Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, etc.) as well as informal reviews on places like Amazon.com and comments we have heard through even more informal channels have been just amazingly positive. It has been particularly well received in health-care organizations such as the Mayo Clinic where there is an interest in putting the same sort of thinking and discipline that has improved the practice of medicine to work on the management of medical organizations so that the management can be held to the same standards as the doctors in terms of the rigor of thought and analysis. We have also received very positive comments from executive audiences that have received the book.

But at the same time we ought to acknowledge that in spite of the great reviews and good publicity, actual sales, while strong, have not been as good as we had hoped. That may be because the book does not offer a single, easy (or apparently easy) answer to what to do about the craft of managing and instead argues for a way of thinking about the management process. In that respect, it is actually quite similar to the quality management movement, where the emphasis is on a process (in this instance, of thought and analysis) rather than on a single thing to do, although in the case of TQM, there were things that people could grab onto--such as cords to pull to stop the line in the case of defects, statistical process quality charts, and inventory methods--although it turns out that these more tangible and visible things were not that important for successful implementation but the way of thinking was. It may also be because as we talk about in the book, the business book and idea marketplace is extremely crowded, with some 50 new books being published each week, in an environment where, at least in the U.S. , people are reading less. We (Bob Sutton) and I are launching an evidence-based management web site so we do hope to start and keep going a movement to really get evidence-based ways of thinking more widely understood and embraced in the management community.

Coert: You say the book argues for a way of thinking about the management process. Could you clarify what this way of thinking is?”

JEFFREY PFEFFER: There are several dimensions to this way of thinking. First is to consider one's organization much as you consider its products or services--as an unfinished prototype. This entails adopting an experimenting, somewhat sceptical mind set. We do not assume that a product design, be it for a piece of software or an automobile, or a service such as some banking service, is perfect or fixed forever. Instead, we offer the best we can do at that time, while continuing product and service development, continuing to develop new technologies and ideas, and continuing, in other words, to make things better. In management practice, we have gotten into the "it's done" frame of mind, and do things everywhere or nowhere. More testing, more experimenting, is useful.

Second, it is holding a commitment to trying to make decisions based on the best evidence that is available, being committed to trying to build better evidence for future decisions, and mostly seeking to avoid decisions based on belief, casual benchmarking, what has been done in the past, and so forth. So, for instance, Harrah's Entertainment is committed to basing decisions on evidence, on trying experiments, and learning--there are no sacred cows. DaVita, the kidney dialysis company, is committed to facing the truth and gathering information--so much so that when important measures are not available, they are put on reports anyway with the notation, "not available," as a way of reminding people to try and devise ways to gather information on important aspects of operations.

Both of these mind sets come from an "attitude of wisdom"--being willing to act on the best knowledge and insight available at the moment that action is required, while also doubting one's own knowledge so that you can learn even as you act and in the process gather more information.

Coert: Why is this way of thinking even more important than for instance choosing a good structure, implementing some advanced technology or finding an interesting niche in the market?

JEFFREY PFEFFER: As a colleague once said, in order to have different results, you need to do things differently. But in order to do things differently, at least on a consistent basis, you need to think differently. We act and decide, including deciding on the structures we implement and the technologies we develop, based on our assumptions, mental models, and mind sets. That is why it is how we think that is the most important factor that affects what we do.

Coert: This deciding on the basis of the best evidence available is appealing. How does it exactly work? Should evidence based management be based on self-generated company-specific evidence which is based on the kind of experiments you mentioned? Or is there also a body of generic knowledge managers can fall back on? And if so, when should you develop company specific knowledge and when can you rely on already existing generic knowledge? Could you give some hints?

JEFFREY PFEFFER: In our judgment, managers should rely both on company-specific and more general knowledge. The first guideline is that people ought to know what the general literature says--what the existing evidence is on things like incentive compensation, etc. It is amazing to us how even consulting firms, which supposedly are in the intellectual capital business, are incredibly ill-informed about theories and data on management. This is a situation that would not be tolerated in many other fields. We have a colleague in Scotland, Dennis Tourish, who is actually doing a study of how little managers read in the relevant literature--he argues that management as a field is almost unique in its being disconnected from the relevant professional literature.

The general knowledge should guide what people try in their own organizations, but they should see what works for them. So, for instance, when Gary Loveman got to Harrah's as a COO, he knew from his study of the retail industry that same-store (or same facility) sales growth was a good indicator of performance. He also knew that the "broadcast" model of advertising -running advertisements in newspapers and television- often didn't work very well as it failed to target a company's specific client base. So, he instituted same-store sales as a measure of performance. And he encouraged experiments with different ways of reaching out to past and potential customers. Those experiments confirmed his intuition that direct mail offering some incentive to come to a Harrah's casino--e.g., a coupon for free chips, etc.--worked much better in generating traffic, revenues, and profits than general advertising. He could then encourage further experimentation to see what sorts of inducements worked best in what regions, what customers, etc. So, the answer is to know the general state of knowledge about some subject, and then see what works in your specific situation.

Coert: What is the role of intuition and improvisation? There seems to be a huge interest in intuition in particular, fuelled by, among others things, books like 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. What do you think about the book and about the topic? To what extent is intuition important? When is intuition something to rely on and when isn't it? Can it be managed? Can it be developed?

JEFFREY PFEFFER: There is no question that people often form impressions, including impressions of other people, very quickly and make snap judgments. There is also evidence to suggest that thinking too much about choices, such as choices of consumer products, can actually lead people to choose things they like somewhat less. Nonetheless, the idea that using preconscious reasoning, the kind often captured in the word "intuition," is superior to making decisions based on reflection and analysis is clearly incorrect. Intuition is fine for making decisions with a strong preference or feeling or emotional component, such as the choice of consumer products or impressions about people. It is probably not how you would want to decide on the technology to operate an oil refinery.

Coert: Like Henry Mintzberg, you are known as a strong critic of the dominant approach to management education of many business schools. What’s wrong with it and how can it be done more effectively?

JEFFREY PFEFFER: Contemporary management education is too focused on economics with not enough emphasis on the behavioral sciences, has too little concern for values and ethics, but most importantly, leaves students in too passive a role in the learning process. The recently introduced curriculum at Stanford is a good step toward remedying these problems. This revision has been extensively described in materials from Stanford.

Jeffrey Pfeffer may be reached by email (Pfeffer_Jeffrey@gsb.stanford.edu). Links:
· Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Homepage
· Video conversation between Jeff and Bob Sutton
· Hard Facts (amazon.com)
· Stanford Business School
· Weblog Bob Sutton

Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant, coach and trainer using a positive change approach. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few books. More information: www.m-cc.nl / www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm / Dutch network / Dutch blog, http://solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com

The Support Group Approach - Interview with Sue Young

2008-02-16T05:51:00.000-08:00

Sue Young now divides her time between behaviour support to schools and training in solution focused practice. She advocates using solution-focused thinking to encourage success at every level in schools. Her initiatives include implementing national policies across schools, helping local staff encourage positive behaviours in their students and giving support to individual children and parents. One of Sue’s particular interests is promoting an anti-bullying ethos. In the mid-ninties, she developed the support group approach for responding to incidents of bullying. Later she discovered how well her approach fitted with solution focused thinking and ever since, has been applying solution focused principles to all areas of her work. So, what is the support group approach and how does it work? Is it hard to do? How does it help? Find answers to these questions and more in this interview.

COERT: Hi Sue, could you explain, for readers who haven't heard about it yet, what the support group approach is?

SUE: Briefly, the support group approach is a solution focused strategy for resolving complaints of bullying, particularly in primary schools. I think it is a good example of a ‘solution key’ (de Shazer) because the simplicity of the intervention enables it to fit a wide range of circumstances. The child who is upset is interviewed to find out who they are finding difficult to cope with at the moment, who else is around when they find things difficult and who is (are) their friend(s). They are not asked for any information about what has been happening. The child is reassured that things will begin to get better and told that a group of children, chosen from the names they have given, will be asked to help. The child is asked to notice anything that gets better so they can tell you about it when you review after a week. A support group is made up from these names, ideally 5-8 children. The group is seen separately and simply asked to help with the aim of making the target child happy in school. No explanation is given about why the child may be unhappy. It is important that whoever leads the interviewing does not use the word ‘bullying’ at all and tries to leave behind any judgement about what has been happening. They are asked for suggestions of small things they might try and an arrangement is made to review what they have managed to do a week later.

COERT: Okay, and what happens one week later in the review meetings with the bullied child and in the meeting with the support group?

SUE: In the review meeting the target child is asked about things that are better and is praised for how they have handled the situation. In the group’s meeting that follows, the children are asked how they think things are going and each one is given the chance to report back on what they have managed to do. They are thanked individually for the help they have given and then congratulated for their success as a group. A further review can be arranged in another week's time, if necessary. Sometimes there needs to be more than one review to ensure that any teasing or bullying that is happening, typically by someone outside the group, stops completely but it is rare for it to go as far as five meetings. The criterion for finishing the group is that everyone is agreed that the child is now happy in school: the target child, the members of the group, staff involved at school and the parents.

COERT: I understand how it works. What do you see as the main characteristics and advantages of this approach in comparison to other anti-bullying approaches?

SUE: It is unnecessary for a child to repeat over what has been happening, with the disadvantage of re-traumatising and demoralising a child who is often already feeling powerless and anxious about telling anyone about how they are feeling, plus talking it over may actually reinforce those feelings. It also feels less ‘risky’ for the child when they don’t have to ‘tell tales’ on anyone. Most other approaches presume that bullying has been happening, although in practice this can be difficult to be certain about, since bullying generally takes place outside the view of adults. Other children who know it's happening very seldom report it, and anyone accused of bullying tends to deny it. So ‘proving’ it can be very difficult. Thankfully proving it doesn’t matter with this approach, since no assumptions need to be made about what’s going on. None of the children are labelled by it – ‘bully’, ‘victim’ - whilst at the same time the opportunity is open to them to make amends, if they want to. That applies sometimes, surprisingly maybe, to the target child, too.

COERT: And what is different in the way parents are involved?

SUE: If a parent has made a complaint, they get regular updates at the reviews on how things are going and are involved in evaluating progress. This is reassuring for them at a very difficult time. Often in traditional strategies they get left out, don’t get feedback, and this can exacerbate the difficulties. They can even end up being blamed for being ‘over-protective’. There’s no need to tell other children’s parents that their child has been accused of being a bully – resulting difficulties between parents can become more problematic than the original complaint. On the contrary, parents can be told how helpful and kind their child has been. Parents get to know when their school deals with bullying effectively – and they value it highly because it is something that a lot of parents fear happening to their child.

COERT: How do children typically respond to the Support group approach?

SUE: The children enjoy it – we have interviewed children who have been in support groups and they say things like: I enjoyed doing it, I made more friends too, it made me feel important, it made me feel happier. It teaches children a more helpful way of responding to others and feeling good about themselves. Over the longer term, this can affect the whole ethos of a school. Some other approaches, e.g. assertiveness training, implicitly blame the ‘victim’. However, if you stop the bullying, assertiveness or low self esteem etc. are no longer a problem - and it's easier and quicker this way to stop the bullying.

COERT: This all sounds simple and attractive. What can you tell me about the effectiveness of the approach? Have you done some research for instance or have you otherwise gotten systematic feedback?

SUE: This approach has been subject to rigorous review of a large number of actual cases in terms of outcomes – we know it works, whereas with most other strategies there has been no evaluation based on outcomes (other than solution focused brief therapy, which we have also evaluated). It’s fast acting… and it is maintained longer term. Other approaches tend to rely on the assumed efficacy of the process e.g. traditional counselling, phone help lines, punishment of offenders etc. or anecdotal accounts of a few cases. In an article I wrote at the time (read it here), I describe two types of research: outcome based evaluation and process based. Firstly, and most importantly, evaluation based on the outcomes: in the first 50 support groups that I led, there was immediate success in 80% (40) of those cases, then it tapers off - 7 cases took up to 5 meetings before everyone was satisfied that the child was happy in school and there was no bullying, I called that 'delayed success'. In 3 cases (6%), although there was improvement, I was not completely satisfied, I called that limited success. Importantly, no case got worse. What is interesting, by the way, is that when the group was led by staff from within school, the outcomes seem to be even better - higher than 80% and fewer meetings on average!

Although this research was done about ten years ago now, I still haven't come across any other study of an intervention for bullying that is as transparent in outcomes or as successful as this, over a large number of cases (other than the one I mentioned on SFBT earlier, that Gail Holdorf and I did). I am both proud of this article for that reason, but also frustrated. All the research that has been done into bullying - 'admiring the problem'! - but so little done into what works in individual cases to stop it.

COERT: Can you give an example of an experience of a teacher who has used the Support Group Approach?

SUE: In terms of independent corroboration, I trained a teaching assistant to lead support groups in a primary school that had particular difficulties. She kept excellent records which she allowed me to look through later. Her records showed that she also had led over 50 groups and all had been effective. However, she always continued group meetings for about 5 sessions – even when her records showed there was no problem - I think she just enjoyed doing it! At this school they called them ‘Friendly Groups’. I referred to her work in my chapter in Solutions in Schools – but she wouldn’t let me put in her name! Other than this, I’ve had loads of feedback from individuals who have used it and been delighted. Of course, anyone who didn’t have success is unlikely to feed back. Nevertheless, so many people have tried it successfully, and at the first attempt, I’m certain that it is a very robust strategy.

COERT: You mentioned process research. Could you explain that?

SUE: Sure, I did research into the processes happening in the support group, the theories in social psychology about how groups work and the behaviour of bystanders. I was looking for the rational for why it worked so well, and so quickly. Whilst researching on this, I came across 'solution focused brief therapy'. It seemed to me that how I was doing support groups was a good example of solution focused work, although not therapy. More recently, I have done some research on what children who have been in support groups think about it – I made a couple of videos interviewing them. We took two of these children to the EBTA (European Brief Therapy Association) conference in Krakow and they took part in our workshop there. They were great! It seems obvious to them, if someone is unhappy in school you ask other children to help… of course it works…. of course they enjoy it…. what’s so hard to understand about that...?!

COERT: Sounds logical, indeed. Do you have any experiences with or thoughts on situation in which aggression and physical violence are involved? Would you recommend using the Support Group Approach in the same manner or should additional or different things be done?

SUE: I have used a support group where children have had bruises, black eyes or been kicked etc. and in long term cases where bullying appears to have been a problem for more than a year, maybe at successive schools. However, I recommend using support groups in primary schools – and children don’t generally do very serious harm at that age. I have never had a case in a primary school when I felt unable to recommend it. Although I have led support groups in secondary schools successfully, and I know others have, I would not recommend it universally for any situation. For example, one case I remember was of a teenage girl where there had been a sexual assault by two or three boys – I would not have felt comfortable leading a support group including those boys. (I’m not sure I would call this bullying, although on the news here recently a murder of a schoolboy was called ‘bullying’.) With anything so serious, the police would normally be involved and I would not want to interfere with any investigation. Generally, the student(s) would be suspended from attending school whilst this was going on, anyway. In serious cases in secondary schools, I would use solution focused brief therapy to support the ‘victim’, if that was wanted. I wrote an article with Gail Holdorf on the success of using SFBT, mainly with older students (read it here). There are other reasons why a support group may not be appropriate in secondary school, too - e.g. the student may not want anyone else involved at all and we would respect that.

It is interesting that the anti-bullying project very rarely had referrals of ‘bullies’ – almost all referrals were of perceived ‘victims’. Now I work part time for a behaviour support service, I get referrals of students for ‘anger management’, maybe violent outbursts, and bullying others may occasionally be mentioned. I deal with these individual cases using SFBT too – so I work with them individually on ‘staying calm’ or ‘getting on with work’ or ‘staying in school’ (i.e. not getting excluded) - whatever they identify they want to change. This is not as successful in terms of outcomes as I would like, although still far better than other approaches I have used in the past. It can be hard to get any progress noticed, or recognised as significant, by other staff. Generally, I find working in a solution focused way directly with teachers and other school staff to be more successful in terms of outcomes for children with serious behaviour difficulties.

COERT: As a last question I’d like to ask: what practical suggestions do you have for teachers reading who want to try this out?

SUE: It doesn’t need a lot of training or particular expertise – just a willingness to have a go with something different – so it’s accessible to school staff. I think it would be very helpful to read a case study – there’s one in Interviewing for Solutions and another in my chapter in Solutions in Schools, mentioned before. I am hoping to have a new book out soon – my old one, Solutions to Bullying, is out of print. Anyone leading the group needs to remember the suggestions for making the child happy in school should all come from the group - and resist the temptation to give them any other information or advice. When people have watched me leading a group in a school, as they usually did, they have said that the most surprising thing is that I don’t talk about bullying at all – either with the ‘victim’ or the group. And all the staff I know who have done it, love it! Staff and children learn the effectiveness of becoming solution focused. I would suggest just following the guidelines and keep it simple!

The most encouraging thing is that when used well, solution focused support groups contribute to an atmosphere in school where bullying is less likely to happen in the first place.

References

Y. & Rees, I. (2001). Solutions in Schools: Creative Applications of Solution Focused Brief Thinking with Young People and Adults. London: BT Press
De Jong P. & Berg I.K. (2008). Interviewing for solutions, 3d ed..Brooks/Cole.
Young, S. (1998). The Support Group Approach to Bullying in Schools. Educational Psychology in Practice Vol 14, No 1, April 1998
Young, S. & Holdorf, G. (2003). Using solution focused brief therapy in individual referrals for bullying. Educational Psychology in Practice, 19(4), 271-282.
Young, S. (2002). Solutions to Bullying. NASEN.

Interview with Carol Dweck

2007-11-04T01:48:00.000-07:00

The Growth Mindset

© 2006, Coert Visser (http://twitter.com/DoingWhatWorks)

Carol Dweck is a professor of Psychology at Stanford University. She is a leading expert in the field of human motivation and intelligence and through the years she has developed an extensive body of theory and research. This year, she has published a remarkable book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The book is a true gem, not only because of the clarity of the writing and structure but also, and foremost, because of its important and useful message. This message is that the way you view your own intelligence largely determines how it will develop. In this interview I ask Carol Dweck about the book and about what the practical implications of her work are for managers.

I’d like to start off with a question about the intriguing title of your new book ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’. Can you explain what the importance of mindset is for success?

I'd be happy to. In my book I identify two mindsets that play important roles in people's success. In one, the fixed mindset, people believe that their talents and abilities are fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that; nothing can be done to change it. Many years of research have now shown that when people adopt the fixed mindset, it can limit their success. They become over-concerned with proving their talents and abilities, hiding deficiencies, and reacting defensively to mistakes or setbacks-because deficiencies and mistakes imply a (permanent) lack of talent or ability. People in this mindset will actually pass up important opportunities to learn and grow if there is a risk of unmasking weaknesses. This is not a recipe for success in business, as ultimately shown by the folks at Enron, who rarely admitted any mistakes. What is the alternative?

In the other mindset, the growth mindset, people believe that their talents and abilities can be developed through passion, education, and persistence. For them, it's not about looking smart or grooming their image. It's about a commitment to learning--taking informed risks and learning from the results, surrounding yourself with people who will challenge you to grow, looking frankly at your deficiencies and seeking to remedy them. Most great business leaders have had this mindset, because building and maintaining excellent organizations in the face of constant change requires it.

This difference between the effect of a fixed mindset and a growth mindset sounds very logical. But you also back it up by research, don't you? Could you give us maybe one or two examples of how you have researched this?

Yes, the effects of mindsets are backed up by lots of research over more than twenty years. I'll give you a few examples that show how a growth mindset creates greater openness to learning, which, in turn, leads to greater success.

In one recent study, my colleagues and I monitored people's brain waves as they answered difficult questions and waited for feedback. The brain waves told us what kind of feedback they were most interested in. People with a fixed mindset were only interested in whether their answers had been right or wrong. Once they had this feedback, they tuned out. However, people who had a growth mindset stayed tuned in to find out what the right answers actually were. As a result of this greater interest in learning, they did significantly better when they were later tested on the material.

In another study, we saw the real-world consequences. Here, we looked at freshman at the University of Hong Kong, an elite school where everything was conducted in English--but not all freshman were proficient in English. Surely, they would want to take steps to fix this as soon as possible. To find out, we told students that the faculty was thinking of offering a course that would provide needed instruction in English. Would they take it? Among students with poor English skills, those with a growth mindset were enthusiastic, but those with a fixed mindset were not. In a fixed mindset, people are not willing to expose their deficiency in order to remedy it. Instead, they were willing to put their college career in jeopardy.

Finally, in a recent study we taught struggling students a growth mindset. They were taught that every time they applied themselves and learned something new, their brain formed new connections and, over time, they got smarter. They were also taught how to apply this to their schoolwork. Within a relatively short time, these students showed a clear turnaround in their motivation and their grades. Several other studies have showed the same thing-students taught a growth mindset become more engaged with learning and become higher achievers.

So, research has shown that the fixed mindset limits learning and success while the growth mindset encourages it.d That seems like a very important bit of knowledge for managers, HR-managers and employees. Could you tell us about some of the implications for organizations you have been able to identify?

There is a lot of wonderful research emerging on the effects of mindset in the workplace. For example, Peter Heslin, Don Wanderwalle, and Gary Latham have done great work with managers. First, they have found that managers with a growth mindset, in the spirit of learning, are more open to feedback and criticism from their employees.

Next, they have found that managers with a growth mindset believe in other people's growth too. These managers are quick to see change in employees' performance, so if an employee improves they will take notice. But managers with a fixed mindset get stuck in their first impression of the employee and do not even see the change. This means that if an employee learns on the job, their fixed mindset boss may not give them credit for it.

But it goes even deeper. These same researchers found that when it comes to employee development, managers with a growth mindset give more and better developmental coaching and mentoring to their employees. Managers with a fixed mindset do not believe people can change, so what's the use in coaching employees-they either have it or they don't.

In short, managers with a growth mindset promote and recognize improvement in their workers. Isn't that what we want?

The best news is that a growth mindset can be taught to managers, and when it is, they change. In a short, 90-minute workshop, Heslin and his colleagues fostered a growth mindset in managers who had a fixed mindset. After this workshop, these managers were open to noticing improvement and were more willing and able to coach employees. And the effects lasted over a 6-week follow-up period.

New work from other researchers shows that people in a growth mindset make better negotiators and learn negotiation skills more readily. They are also better at problem-solving on difficult management tasks (both as individuals and as groups).

All these exciting new findings suggest that fostering a growth mindset might well be added to management training programs, since a growth mindset maximizes managers' openness to learning and to promoting skill development in the people they work with.

The fact that the growth mindset can be taught to people sounds like good news. I mean, changing mindsets does not seem like the easiest thing in the world! Can you explain a bit about how this skill can be taught?

Many people are surprised that mindsets can be changed with a relatively short workshop. But it's important to remember that although mindsets are powerful beliefs, they are just beliefs and beliefs can be changed. How can this be done?

The workshop that Peter Heslin and his colleagues developed for managers starts off with a scientific article and a video about how the brain changes with learning. It's a critical first step toward a growth mindset for people to realize how much learning can transform the brain. Next, the workshop asks participants to do four things. First, to think of at least 3 reasons why it's important to recognize that people can develop their abilities. Second, to think of an area in which they once had low ability but now perform well, and to explain how they were able to make the change. Third, to write an email to a struggling (hypothetical) protégé about how abilities can be developed, with examples of how they themselves had dealt with career challenges. And fourth, to remember times they had seen someone learn to do something they never thought this person could do, and to reflect upon how this happened and what it means.

As I mentioned above, this workshop led to marked changes in managers' attitudes and behavior. Aside from creating workshops for individuals, organizations can create a growth-mindset environment in the workplace as a whole. What would this involve? They might present important skills as learnable and not as abilities that only gifted people have and other people will never have. They also might give feedback in a way that fosters the development of abilities. Further, they might define managers as resources for learning, not just evaluators of ability. And finally, they might convey that the organization values learning and dedication, and not just ready-made genius or talent.

Imagine we'd take the growth mindset and we'd start to apply it more to practices like personnel selection, management development and organizational change programs. What do you think would be different? What are some of the changes you'd envision?

Many people (in a fixed mindset) think that personnel selection is simply about selecting the brightest people and turning them loose. Yet years of research have shown that we are not good at predicting future success on the basis of current assessments of talent. In other words, we can measure people's present skills, aptitudes, and strengths, but this does not translate well into their future performance. Why? Because it doesn't tell us about people's potential for growth in the future-how they might perform with the right commitment, effort, and training. In fact, more and more research is showing that people's level of commitment, effort, and continued training is what eventually separates the most successful people from their equally talented, but less successful, peers. This is true in sports, science, and the arts-and it is becoming clear that it is true in business, too.

This means that the best strategy is not simply to hire the ablest people we can find, but also to look for people who embody a growth mindset: a zest for learning (and teaching), openness to feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles.It also means training leaders and managers to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring. Indeed, as I suggested earlier, a growth mindset workshop might well be a first step in any major training program.

You asked what would be different? The whole atmosphere would be different. In a fixed mindset environment, where people are evaluating each other's brains and talent, it's each person for him or herself. Everyone is so busy impressing everyone else and competing for recognition that no one is learning, enjoying their job, cooperating, or thinking of the longer-term health of the company. This is what happened at Enron. If a company instead fosters a growth mindset, people will feel freer to share their knowledge, skills and visions, to the benefit of the organization. This is exactly what happened when great leaders like Lou Gerstner or Anne Mulcahy took over IBM and Xerox.

What are some of the changes you'd expect in schools? How would education and classroom management be different?

We've seen these changes. When students go through a growth mindset workshop, the changes can be dramatic. First, once students understand the idea that their brain forms new connections when they apply themselves and learn-that they are in charge of their mind and its growth-they become more engaged. Before the workshop, many students thought of school as a place where you performed and teachers judged you. After the workshop they saw it more as a place where, with the teachers' help, you learned things that made you smarter. Many students said that as they studied or paid attention in class, they pictured their neurons forming new connections.

Next, after the workshop, students studied differently and more effectively. Instead of just trying to cram things into their heads the night before a test, they studied well in advance, made sure they understood the material, and enlisted the teacher's help when they needed it. As a result, they learned more and earned higher grades.

This doesn't just happen for low-achieving students. In research by Joshua Aronson and his colleagues, even students at an elite university came to value and enjoy their schoolwork more (and earned higher grades) after a growth mindset workshop.

Teachers have told me that classroom management becomes less of an issue when they teach from a growth mindset perspective. They and the students are on the same side-they are collaborators in the development of students' intelligence. Many students who formerly spent their time figuring out ways to sabotage the teacher, now spend their time making their neurons grow.

What are some of the research questions you would like to explore in the future?

There are so many questions still to explore. One major question is how organizations or settings convey a fixed or growth mindset. For example, in a new study we are finding that even talking about geniuses and extolling them conveys a fixed mindset, whereas talking about people who fell in love with their chosen profession and developed amazing skills conveys a growth mindset. We want to understand all the different ways the mindsets are communicated.

There are still many questions about how people function when they are in a fixed or growth mindset. For example, in new research we are seeing that when people experience a blow to their self-esteem, those in a fixed mindset repair their self-image by trying to feel that they are better than others. In a business setting this might take the form of a boss blaming or taking things out on an employee. Those in a growth mindset recover their self-esteem by trying to improve themselves and correct their deficiencies. We would love to know even more about the inner workings of the mindsets.

Perhaps the most challenging research question is how best to create change in an organization as a whole. So far, we've had a great deal of success changing individuals' mindsets, but reorienting beliefs, values, and practices on a larger, system-wide scale is a more daunting (and exciting) task.

References

Aronson, J., Fried, C.B., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing stereotype threat and boosting academic achievement of African-American students: The role of conceptions of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset, the new psychology of success. Random House
Dweck, C. S. (2002). Beliefs that make smart people dumb. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.). Why smart people do stupid things. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Brief video-fragments with Carol Dweck on Human Intelligence Website.
Heslin, P., Wanderwalle, D. & Latham, G. (2006). Engagement in employee coaching: The role of managers' implicit person theory. Personnel psychology.

Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant, coach and trainer using the solution-focused approach to organizational and individual change. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few books. More information: www.m-cc.nl / www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm / Dutch network / Dutch blog, http://solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com

Interview with William Ury

2007-11-04T01:30:00.001-07:00

'No' seems to be the hardest word

© 2007, Coert Visser

Positive thinking is hot. There seems to be an abundance of positive change approaches, for example solution-focused practice, appreciative inquiry, positive psychology, strength-based management, and positive deviance. Does this emphasis on the positive mean that we have agree and go along with everything that we meet on our path? No, says negotiation expert William Ury, co-author of the well-known book Getting to YES and Director of the Global Negotiation Project, part of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. William Ury is convinced that the skill of saying No is indispensable. However, according to him, saying No does not imply that you can no longer be constructive, respectful and positive. He explains this in his new book, The Power of a Positive NO. Here is an interview with him about the book.

First, I'd like to ask you about the importance of being able to say No. On page 5 of your book you say: "Whether and how we say No determines the very quality of our lives. It is perhaps the most important word for us to learn to say gracefully and effectively." What makes saying No indispensible?

No may be the word we need most in today's times. The world has sped up and we get overwhelmed with today's demands, whether it is demands at work or balancing our work and family lives. In fact, No may be the most powerful word in the language, the most needed word in these times of endless e-mail and overwhelm. At the same time, it can be the most destructive word in the language, destructive to relationships. For at the heart of every destructive conflict or war is the word No that people are hurling at each other. Because it can be so destructive, No is the word that is hardest for us to say. But, if we can learn how to say it gracefully, if we can learn how to say it positively, I believe it can really help transform our personal lives, our work lives and the larger world.

In your earlier work you did not focus much on saying No. When did first fully realize how crucial saying No is?

About 25 years ago, I had the privilege of working with Roger Fisher on a book called Getting to Yes. Just a couple of weeks after it was published, there was a cartoon that showed up in the Boston Globe: There was a man looking for a book in the library. He says, "I need a good book on negotiation". The librarian replies, "Well here's a new one, it's called 'Getting to Yes.'" The man's response is, "Yes isn't what I had in mind." That gave me the first inkling that maybe there was another side to this question. That there was not just "Getting to Yes," but also, "How do you say no?"

Then, a couple of years later, I had the opportunity to meet the investor Warren Buffet for breakfast. At one point, he confided in me that the secret to creating his fortune lay in his ability to say No. "I sit there all day and look at investment proposals. I say No, No, No, No, No, No—until I see one that is exactly what I am looking for. And then I say Yes. All I have to do is say Yes a few times in my life and I've made my fortune." This also gave me an important clue that No may be an important word, as important as yes.

And finally, in my personal life, I have a young daughter who has unfortunately had a lot of surgeries. After spending a lot of time in hospitals, I found that, as important as my skills at getting to yes were for dealing with doctors and insurance companies, just as important, if not more important was the word No. I needed to learn to say No in order to protect my daughter from unwanted medical procedures, medical students barging in in the middle of the night, and so on.

Through the years, you have developed a simple and elegant way of saying No gracefully. It is based on a sequence of YES!-No-Yes? Could you explain what this sequence means and how it works?

A Positive No requires you to challenge the common assumption that either you can use power to get what you want (at the cost of relationship) or you can use relationship (at the cost of power). It calls on you to use both at the same time, engaging the other in a constructive and respectful confrontation. In contrast to an ordinary No that begins with No and ends with No, a Positive No begins with Yes and ends with Yes.

To deliver a positive No, you first uncover your underlying interests, needs, and values and distill them into a powerful Yes! Perhaps the biggest mistake we make when we say No is to start from No. We derive our No from what we are against—the other's demand or behavior. A Positive No calls on us to do the exact opposite and base our No on what we are for. The next step is to deliver your No clearly and respectfully.

Once you've said No, it is tempting to leave it at that and think you have done your job: "Whew! I've said No." But if you stop at No, you are overlooking the opportunity to propose a positive outcome.

A Positive No can be compared to a tree. The trunk is like your No – straight and strong. But just as a trunk is only the middle part of a tree, so your No is the middle part of a Positive No. The roots from which the trunk emerges are your first Yes – a Yes to the deeper interests that sustain you. The branches and foliage that reach out from the trunk are your second Yes – a Yes that reaches out toward a possible agreement or relationship. The fruit is the outcome you seek.

I can imagine that following this approach can really help to increase the likelihood that people will understand and accept your No easier. Nevertheless, it is still possible that occasionally people will be very disappointed or even aggressive when you say no to them. What tips do you have for these kinds of situations?

Once you have delivered your Positive No, you still need to deal with the other's reaction. It can be difficult to receive a No. Your next challenge is to transform the other's reaction from resistance to acceptance. The sequence of emotions others experience when you tell them No can range from denial to anger to grief. While you might not be able to stop the natural sequence of emotions from unfolding, you can help others move through them so they will have an easier time accepting your No. The most important things to keep in mind at this stage are to control your emotions, listen respectfully, and continue to stand your ground. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

Could you share with us one striking or beautiful example of the use of the positive No approach you have experienced or applied yourself?

An example is what a man I will call John did when he felt compelled to stand up to a domineering father, who also happened to be his employer. John worked in the family business, putting in long hours that kept him away from his wife and children, even at holiday times. Although John's workload and responsibilities far exceeded those of his co-workers—his three brothers-in-law—his father paid everyone the same salary. It was all about avoiding favoritism, his father explained. Fearful of confronting his father, John had never complained, although he privately fumed about the overwork and inequity. Finally, John realized something had to change. Summoning all his courage, he decided to speak up for himself.

"We were at a family dinner when I told Dad I wanted to speak to him privately. I told him I wanted to be with my family during the upcoming holidays, that I was not working overtime anymore, and that I wanted to be compensated proportionately for my work." John spoke strongly, yet respectfully. The father's response was not what the son feared it might be: "Dad took it better than I anticipated. I wasn't trying to get one over on him. I just wanted to stand on my own two feet—not on his toes if I could help it. Maybe he sensed that: he said fine to no overtime and that we'd talk about the finances. I sensed he felt angry and proud at the same time."

Previously, John had assumed it was either-or. Either he exercised his power or he tended to the relationship. Fearing his father's disapproval, he withheld his power—for years. He accommodated and avoided. What he learned when he said No to his father was that it is possible to use your power and at the same time to preserve your relationship. That is the heart of what it means to say a Positive No.

More informationThe Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes by William UryPodcast by William Ury
Video on the Power of a Positive NO
William Ury’s books
William Ury’s site

Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant, coach and trainer using the solution-focused approach to organizational and individual change. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few books. More information: http://www.m-cc.nl/ / www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm / Dutch network / Dutch blog, http://solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com/

Interview with David Maister (part 2)

2007-11-04T01:30:00.000-07:00

The Only Competitive Advantage in Professional Services

© 2006, David Maister/Coert Visser

This is the second part of the interview with management writer and advisor David Maister. In the first part (here) we talked about the fascinating phenomenon of blogging on which David shared some thought-provoking insights. In this part, we talk about subjects David has written about throughout his writing career, including marketing, strategy, management, career development and money.

Let’s proceed with a question about marketing. Many professionals don't seem to pay much attention to marketing. But you say marketing is of crucial importance for any professional. Why is that so?

The better you are at marketing, the more control you have over your career. If you are really good at developing business, then you can work for only the clients you find interesting and can care about, and only on the type of work that you find fulfilling and challenging. The weaker you are at winning business, the more you are forced into accepting business from anyone who pays you, whether you respect them or not, and whether the work is enjoyable, developmental or meaningful to you. I don’t ever want to be stuck in that situation. I don’t think that having to work for anyone who pays because I am desperate for cash sounds like much fun!

People think that marketing is about getting more business. It’s not. Marketing is about getting better business – the work that engages your enthusiasm and allows you to serve clients you like. The better you are at marketing, the more you can afford to say no to things that do not help your career. Marketing is not something you do for your firm – it’s what you owe to yourself. If your readers want more detail on these points, I have written about them many times. In Managing The Professional Service Firm (1993), I pointed out that, alas, it is easier to get hired for things you already know how to do, so if you are not careful, you end up milking your existing skills instead of building them. In True Professionalism (1997) I pointed out that you can have it all – it is easier to get hired for things you care about by people you care for, and that way you are more likely to get premium fees, too! In The Trusted Advisor (2000) I pointed out that your clients will treat you better and give you a better work experience if they think you care about more than just the money they give you. Recently, I wrote four articles which explore the themes of marketing as sincerity: A Talent For Friendship, Doing it For the Money, Marketing is a Conversation and Do You Really Want Relationships? I hope I have been consistent over the years!

I think you have. I like what you say about the essence of marketing. That it is not a matter of just getting more business and money but rather getting more of the right business. While we're on the subject of money, I’d like to focus a bit more on that. Writers like Alfie Kohn and Jeffrey Pfeffer have criticized the fact that many managers focus on financial incentives as the most important means to improve organizational and individual performance. This trend is more and more common, even in the not-for-profit sector. What role do you think money plays in improving individual and organizational performance?

What Kohn and Pfeffer have to say is very important, and everyone should be aware of their work. Another important writer is Jon Katzenbach who recently wrote a book on the importance of pride in motivating people and getting things done. The trouble with financial incentives is not that they are weak tools– the problem is that they are too powerful and distract attention away from any other factor or source of motivation. They are very blunt, unsophisticated tools that people rely on too much. If you say to someone “Do this and I will pay you” it always ends up coming across as “Don’t do it for any inherent meaning, purpose or value, just do it for the money.” And the minute people start doing things with no commitment other than to get paid, they do it less well, not better.

The problem is compounded by the fact that it is impossible to include all possible outcomes in the incentive scheme. You end up being required to reward people if they achieve the things included in the incentive scheme, even if they have failed to do other important things that are essential for the organization’s success. An obvious and common example is having incentives for individual performance. Where these exist, people will always omit teamwork, but since you have promised an incentive, you have to pay them anyway. None of this means that you don’t pay more to those who contribute the most. It just means that you must have a reward system which is based on qualitative judgments, not explicit quantitative incentives.

It is also important to note that reward systems ARE good at rewarding performance – they are just not good at creating it. To help people achieve more, it is insufficient just to say “Get there and I will pay you.” That assumes that the only barrier to performance is motivation. However, there are many other reasons people don’t or cannot perform at a higher level. Maybe they don’t know how. If that is the case, no amount of incentive will change things. As I tried to show in my article “A Great Coach in Action” you raise performance by managing people, not just by creating incentive schemes.

I think that is a great article. It is the one in which you talked about how, years ago, you had just started at Harvard University as an assistant professor and felt you weren't really performing too well (read or listen). You described how a senior colleague walked by your room and talked with you informally for just a very short time and managed to really get you going in the right direction. Very impressive! What's the essence for you in what happened in that conversation?

There were many lessons, but the key comes down to this: like a good parent, my senior colleague was able to show both a disciplined commitment to standards like “Come on, you can do it” while simultaneously being on my side and actually helping me. This duality has often been recognized. The people who wrote the book back in the 1960s about The Managerial Grid called it having both a task focus and a people focus. The authors of Built to Last called it avoiding the tyranny of the either/or. My friend Peter Friedes wrote a book called The 2R manager where the 2 R’s stood for requiring and relating. It’s all the same idea. The fact that it’s a common thought does not make it easy to do. I used to think that I was getting the balance correct by being demanding on some days, and supportive on others, averaging out -I hoped- to a balanced approach. Of course, this is not the message. If you do it that way, all you end up with are schizophrenic people who never know how you are going to behave. The real art, which you have to learn with your kids as well as your employees, is how to be both demanding and supportive simultaneously. It’s not that easy to learn if you are not a natural. It takes lots of practice.

Talking about being a natural.... a popular perspective in the field of human performance development is the strengths perspective. The people from Gallup for instance have argued and shown that focusing on strengths is critical for achieving career success. They say you have to identify your talents and complement them with skills and knowledge so that they become strengths. I understand you put the focus more on interest and passion, don't you?

I like the Gallup material very much, and think they have made a significant contribution. To the extent that you are just comparing strengths and weaknesses, I think they are entirely correct that the focus should be on building on strengths, not on correcting weaknesses. However, they would be the first to say there are also other dimensions that determine career success. My research -and my own life experience- suggests that if you were really to examine the difference between who succeeds and who only does okay, what you would find would not be a difference in abilities, strengths, IQ, interpersonal skills or any other kind of capability. Instead, my work suggests that the only competitive advantage is something variously described as energy, excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, passion, drive, discipline, determination or ambition. Those are not all the same thing, but I think they are all facets of the same glittering diamond – a state of mind that says: “I’m going to try, and fail, and try again, and just get somewhere!”

If you accept that it is the lifelong willingness to keep trying that determines success, in spite of strengths or weaknesses, then it raises an interesting question. Are you just born with this frame of mind, or can good managers create it in others? I’m not completely sure of the whole answer, but I do know that bad managers can and do destroy enthusiasm, passion and excitement. I think the best managers can not only ‘get out of the way’ but can also find a way to uncover and channel the enthusiasm that most people want to bring to their work. Finally, I think that good managers have to have the courage to ask employees or colleagues who do not feel passionate about the organization’s work to leave. There is nothing more certain to suppress energy and enthusiasm than being forced to work with others who do not show it. Because of all of this, management is not easy, but it is crucially important.

I guess this is linked to your point of view that management is mainly a matter of attitudes and principles, more so than a matter of knowledge, intelligence and experience. Why are attitudes and principles so important in your opinion?

A key to my thinking is that whenever I am trying to think through what would work on other people, I always begin by asking “What would work on me?” In this situation, the question becomes “What kind of manager would have the most impact on me, and cause me to stretch, raise my game and perform at the highest levels?” My answer is that before I care about the manager’s skills, I would want to know why he or she is trying to get me to do something.

If I believe he or she is trying to help me, then I will accept challenges, listen to input and, maybe, even accept some criticism. But first, I need to believe that the manager is on my side. If I believe that you, the manager, are not here to help me but are trying to get me to do more, or different things only to make you, the manager, look good, or to help the company, then I will listen a lot less, only grudgingly accept criticism, and will be unlikely to be excited. In spite of what many managers think, only a very few people will do things for the greater glory of the company or because I buy in to some institutional vision. It can happen, but it’s not very common. So, above all else, managers must be able to convince those they manage that the manager has the right attitude – that the manager is focused on helping the subordinate achieve more. Notice that this is not meant to be idealistic. The manager’s goal is to get me to raise my game and perform more, so that the organization can win and the manager can look good. There’s nothing wrong with the manager having those goals, but that’s not the reason I’m going to try hard.

The trick of managing is getting people to do things for themselves that turn out to help the organization. And if I believe you motives are pure -you are really trying to help- I will forgive you some poor skills, some weak language or occasional wrong actions. When it comes to winning my cooperation, your attitudes as a manager matter more than your skills.

Many of our readers are interested in the topics of managing change and executing strategy successfully. These require buy-in from the employees. How do senior executives demonstrate leadership while still letting good initiatives bubble-up from the workforce?

As I have written previously, you can choose to manage the WHAT, the WHY and the HOW – what the organization is trying to do, why it is a worthwhile thing to do, and how it can be done. The secret to effectiveness, I believe is that management needs to be very clear about the WHAT – that means removing too many dreams, and setting do-able, achievable targets. If everyone is completely clear about what the organization is trying to accomplish, then it is possible to delegate decisions and get hundreds or thousands of people to do the right thing as they do their work. If management has been vague - or has exaggerated or misrepresented what it really is aiming for – then what results is confusion. People need management to be clear, consistent and to practice what they preach – otherwise they don’t really know what they should be doing.

The second thing that management needs to be good at is providing a meaningful reason WHY the goals that have been set are worth striving for. Management must be convincing that there is a worthwhile purpose to what the organization is trying to achieve. If people do not agree with the purpose, they will still come to work, but they will only act in “compliance” with the work rules – what they must do. This is not enough. If the organization is to excel at its purpose, people in the organization must accept that there is a valid reason to struggle, to solve problems, to deal with difficulties, collaborate with others, and all the other little and big things that come up every day.

And, of course, make money for the shareholders is a valid reason, but might fail the test of being a source of great motivation for the thousands who work in the organization. It’s a valid goal, but it’s not a very motivating purpose. If you want me to do the things that make the shareholders rich, give me a reason that *I* can believe in to do those things. Tell me what it means to me. Because of this, the most effective managers are those who actually have ideals and principles that other people also believe in and want to follow. For example, if you say you believe there is a morally correct way to treat customers, and I believe that you believe it, it is more likely to ‘get me on the hook’ than saying it will make the shareholders rich. It turns out, from research that I have done, that the managers who are seen by their people to believe in something – to have an ideology - actually make the most money. If a manager has been effective in managing the WHAT and the WHY, he or she does not have to be too specific on the HOW. The rest of the organization can be trusted to solve problems, and you can tap into the creativity and strategic problem solving of everyone – and make a lot of money this way!

I’d like to get back to the word strategy once more. Some cultures don't seem to value strategy as much as others, leaving them to react rather than "pro-act". What is the value of strategic thinking in your opinion?

I am not a fan of Grand strategic thinking either for individuals or for organizations. Too frequently, this just results in identifying dreams and visions which change nothing. However, I do believe that every person and every company must and should do something each and every three months, to build for the future. If we do not invest in our future, we will fail to adapt as the world around us changes. So, on a regular basis, it is necessary to ask “what can I/we try next, as an experiment that will make things better and get us more of what we want?” Most innovation fails, but individuals and organizations that don’t innovate die. The key is to keep trying something new, making small incremental investments as a regular part of the way you live. It’s the difference between strategic thinking (about which I am skeptical) and regular strategic behaviors, which I support.

I like that way of putting it. As a final question… what are the small incremental steps forward you are trying to accomplish yourself right now. Would you like to share that with our readers?

Very slowly, after 25 years of focusing exclusively on professional businesses, I am experimenting with expanding my scope to other kinds of companies and organizations. I was frightened before about doing this, because I didn’t want to become just one more generalist consultant who did a little bit of everything.

But, I calculated that, at age 58, I can afford to broaden out a little. So, I have just done my first piece of work with a non-profit organization in the social sector, and also some strategy work with a manufacturing company. Luckily for me, my thoughts and ideas seem to apply in those new areas, but I am going to proceed with caution. No overnight revolutions, just steady innovation and continual learning – I hope!

I’d like to thank Jim Mortensen and Willem Mastenbroek for their help with the preparation of this interview

Links
David Maister’s website
Part 1 of this the interview with David Maister
Previous interview with David Maister (2003)

Coert’s favorite books by David Maister:
True professionalism
Practice what you preach

Interview with David Maister (part 1)

2007-11-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

The Art of Blogging

© 2006, David Maister/Coert Visser

David Maister has enjoyed great success as a management author. I have been following his work almost since I started working as a consultant. He has been writing influential articles and books since then. Several years ago I interviewed him for the first time on this site (here). After a few years of relative quiet he is now fully back in business with a splendid blog, new articles, videos and podcasts. Something must be going right with David Maister. Let’s find out what.

David, how come you’re so productive now?

As I briefly mentioned in my article It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Much You Want It I had a period of two or three years of extreme tiredness, just after completing a book per year for three years. I did not know the cause, but it turned out to be a medical condition called sleep apnea, which basically meant I had not had a good night‘s sleep in that time. The treatment is to sleep every night with a breathing mask and to lose weight. I lost 30 pounds and also managed to give up my lifetime habit of smoking. Suddenly, I had the energy of a teenager!

As I always do, I turned the personal experience into a business and management lesson, which became my article Strategy and the Fat Smoker which has been my most well-read piece for many years. This all happened at a time when my wife and I decided that we did not want to do the same amount of global traveling as in the past, cutting back to about 50 percent of the previous level. (As a natural performer, I still need audiences from time to time!)

So, I decided on a strategy of trying to serve my global audience by really committing to the internet. Realizing that people like to receive information in many different ways, I tried to offer alternative ways of absorbing my messages: traditional articles, audio podcasts and videos. Interestingly, the video is the least visited portion of the site so far. I think it’s because video commands your full attention, while you can multi-task with an audio (listen while you are driving) and an article can be printed out to be read at any time. However, I will keep experimenting.

There has not been a problem with material. In my 2-to-3 year “sleepy time” I still did consulting work. It was only the writing that I stopped. So, I had years’ worth of ideas that I had been thinking about while lying on my couch. I also discovered the fun of blogging. At first, the thought of putting something relatively new or fresh down many times a week was scary, but now, three months later, I find it exhilarating. It’s a perfect place to share “smaller” thoughts that do not yet deserve an article, and quite frequently, you get really helpful and stimulating reactions from people around the world. I am learning a lot.

There’s an old writer’s joke that says “You don’t know what you know until you write it down.” I am finding that to be true. The mere act of committing to writing on a regular basis is forcing me to think more clearly, and also more deeply about my work experiences. I am now writing at least once a month, and posting a blogpost four or five times a week. Readers can subscribe to these at no cost by registering on my website. I’m having a wonderful time! And I’m healthy!

It's interesting that you mention your blog. I wanted to ask you about that. It seems like blogging is exploding! Even I have one now. :) What do you think about this trend? Is it the next hype? Do you think it will last? And what are your thoughts on how to make a blog really successful?
I must rush to say that any advice I have about making blogging work is the result of a great deal of advice I have received from other bloggers, and from my own technical advisors (including Shaula Evans.) I only began in January of this year, less than four months ago. As with everything in life, there are a few key principles to bear in mind.

First, you do not get half the rewards by showing half the effort. If you want to make something work, you must really commit serious effort. Don’t just try things a little. I now post new thoughts four and five times a week, in order to make it worthwhile for people to come to my blog on a regular basis. That’s a serious commitment, but as I pointed out in one of my posts entitled Is Blogging Dead, blogging, like everything else, is about relationships, not quick hits.

Second, it must be recognized that, at this stage, blogging is an act of faith. There is just not enough time and evidence to show whether consultants can get a return for the effort. I published an article with Steve Rubel, the master blogger, who has won a lot of business that way, but he is in the business of blogging about blogging. His audience is likely to be reading blogs.

For general management consultants (or other professional advisors like lawyers, or PR advisors, or accountants) it’s not yet clear that the customers and clients you want to reach are watching and reading. However, here’s why I think it’s a good idea, even if they are not. You get the chance, as I have pointed out, to capture your thinking in writing. Putting it in a blog is not the final use of the material. I fully expect that I will turn small blogs into articles, and maybe (perhaps one day) turn collections of blogs into books, probably e-books. Blogging helps me make progress.

This is not a new thought. I have always argued that the benefit of writing articles was not just the initial publication, but the fact that you had readily available things you could reprint and give to new and existing clients. I am already finding it very helpful (when I get an enquiry from a prospective client who asks about me) to be able to say: “Well, actually, I just wrote about that topic last week and you can go, right now, to see what I had to say.

I think you raise some very interesting points on blogging and I'd like to ask a bit more about it. Thanks for mentioning Steve Rubel, I did not know him. This makes me curious: who are some of your favorite bloggers? What makes their blogs fascinating to you?

I will confess that there are very few bloggers that I read every post, and few bloggers that cover the full range of my interests. But, I think that’s the point about the “blogosphere”. It’s very fluid, constantly changing. The “feeds” that automatically come into my Outlook email program (using the Attensa add-on program which costs US$30) include Guy Kawasaki (who has written many terrific books about entrepreneurship), AccManPro (or Dennis Howlett) who writes about the accounting profession, John Sviokla from consulting firm DiamondCluster who is thoughtful about the future of technology, Brian Sommers (blogging under the name Services Safari), an ex-Accenture partner who is good on consulting.

You can find all these people listed (with easy click-through links) on my blogroll (the listing on the right hand side of my blog.) These are only a tiny fraction of the blogs I monitor – I actually look at about 100 per day, just to see what’s there. It’s like quickly flipping through the index and content pages of a lot of magazines before deciding whether to stop and read.

What I have found useful are the emerging attempts to provide guidance. There are so-called carnivals (one on marketing, one on capitalism, one on law) where someone lists the interesting links for the week. I watch out for those, in order to get an early indication as to where to go and new places to discover. It’s hard work, but the whole point of the blogosphere at the moment – its wonderful, wonderful attraction, is the ability to hear new voices from around the world and engage them in conversation. So, I try NOT to stick to the same old places.

Like everybody else, once I find an interesting blog, I click on THEIR blogroll links (the people THEY like) to see if the philosophy that “I will probably like a friend of a friend” is true. It’s a bit hit-and-miss, because there are so many people playing reciprocal blogroll games “You list me and I’ll list you, and we’ll both go up in the automated rankings.” I hate that, and do not play that game. I only list other blogs that I actually visit regularly myself, and the list changes frequently.

At the moment, there is no choice but to hunt a lot and find you own favorite ’magazines’ to read.

What are your thoughts on how to write a good blog message? What helps well to get many readers' responses?

I think there is a danger in asking the question that way. This is a little silly, but many people know that I love popular music and I love to make analogies from my personal life. In this case, the analogy I would make is “why are you making music?” There are two possible approaches. One is because you just have music in you and would pour it out even if you didn’t have a place to perform. (Let’s call that the “Artist” reason) Then there are those, equally “noble”, I think, who are “Entertainers” – they do not pretend to be making art, but are just trying to give the public what they want.

I don’t think one approach is more noble than the other, but I would point out that it is, in fact, easier to be an artist than an entertainer. Worrying about whether or not people are going to “like” you, and constantly changing your music to catch fashion is actually (if pop music is any guide) a very, very difficult thing to do, and one that usually gives you an immediate lack of credibility.

For me, the only viable approach to blogging is the same approach I give as marketing and career advice – “figure out who you are and what you feel passionate about. The people who like that will seek you out, and you can focus on helping them. There’s no point trying to be someone you are not, and no point pretending to care about issues or people that you do not. Most of us are not good enough actors to succeed that way.

So, I guess my real answer to your question is that I am not entirely sure what causes people to join in conversations with me. I don’t go out of my way to be provocative, but I do try to tell truths that I think are being ignored. I have a personal point of view and I am not afraid to let it show. As I said in one of my blog posts, there is a quote from Confucius that all is well if the good people like you and the bad people do not.

I have seen that; everyone likes to join in discussions about what THOSE GUYS are doing wrong. You’ll get lots of response if you criticize bosses or big companies or traditional media. However, I think that’s too easy and not very enjoyable. I may get fewer responses, but I try to create conversations where we learn something that we can use personally.

I am also told that there are “tricks” like making lists. Apparently, there is some evidence that people love lists (so do I) and respond to “top 10 reasons why…” I think that’s true, but personally I do not want to be too self-conscious in the way that I write, and only write to be referenced or quoted. That’s a little too planned for me. So, I use that approach sparingly.

You mention that making blogging successful is hard work. Do you think there will be a big shake out soon?

As with everything in life, I think hundreds of people start things, and only a few finish them. But in the case of blogs, the cost is so small that blogs won’t disappear – their authors will just stop adding new posts. It’s not like real-world magazines where you go bankrupt or the cost of distribution gets too high.

However, eventually, I think that the “neighborhoods to hang out in” will become a lot clearer than they are now, and only a few groups of blogs will make up the interacting community where people with a special interest go. But note, that event is still a long way off. I don’t think that at the moment there are any clear neighborhoods to go to if you are interested in things like consulting, or strategy or management. There is still a lot of room for individuals to turn themselves into the “hub” around which a network of other people concentrate. It’s still very early days.

Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant, coach and trainer using the solution-focused approach to organizational and individual change. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few books. More information: http://www.m-cc.nl/ / www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm / Dutch network / Dutch blog, http://solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com/

Interview with Kerstin Måhlberg and Maud Sjöblom

2007-11-04T01:08:00.000-07:00

The art of constructive conversation in schools

Inspired by the solution-focused model, special education teachers Kerstin Måhlberg and Maud Sjöblom have developed Solution-Focused Education (SFE) at their school FKC Mellansjö outside Stockholm, Sweden. This offers an alternative approach to engaging with young people and to the learning process itself. They also wrote a book with the appropriate title of Solution-focused Education. The book combines description and discussion in such a way that you, the reader can choose which tools and techniques will most readily adapt to your own situation. It describes in detail how to converse with pupils and their parents in a solution-focused manner, and how to raise awareness of pupils’ own resources and focus on what already works for them. By taking up new perspectives on what is happening, a different way of thinking can be created, leading to real solutions. I read the book and found it very practical and to the point. Below is an interview I did with Kerstin and Maud.

How would you explain briefly to teachers who have never heard about solution-focused practise what it is and what it could mean for them and their school?

Employing the Solution-focused practice as a method in the world of education is a relatively new phenomenon. The SF model has clear pedagogical elements, and is an alternative to the more traditional mediation-based approach to teaching. SFE offers a different way of solving problems and consist of an approach and a conversation methodology. The teacher builds solutions jointly with her pupils, fostering their individual resources and goals. The teacher focuses particularly on pupils´ positive behaviour rather than the negative, and supports them through encouragement and positive feedback. By focusing on what works and giving a lot of feedback to the pupils when they are on the right track, gain new energy to make further effort.

For us, the solution-focused model has become a new way of thinking, in which the use of constructive conversation focuses on whatever generates hope and success, rather than on problems and their possible causes. It is a way of working that is more effective, more efficient, and altogether superior to our “old” ways. When the SF way of thinking and working is implemented in a School, we know that what will be experienced by everyone concerned, will not only be a more effective place of learning, but also an environment from which its teachers derive the deepest satisfaction.

Is there a difference in applying SF with children (as opposed to using it with adults)?

Yes, we think it is much easier to apply the SF model with children. Adults are often weighed down with earlier experiences and are used to search for causes of problems. Very rarely do pupils ask for an explanation of their problems like most adults do. Instead they are looking for solutions to problems by actually testing out different approaches and finding out what works for them. Children like to talk about what they are good at, what they like to achieve and their fantasy is at close quarters.

Would you like to share and example or an exercise with us?
One teacher told us this nice story. She was teaching 25 pupils in second grade (eight years) and every time when they were having their art classes, painting, all children were supposed to fetch a special pad in order not to destroy the desk. But they always forgot, or didn’t bother. So, she had to quarrel with many of them every time, nagging and grumble about 'Why don’t you do as I tell you?', ' I have told you so many times….', 'You must fetch your pad….'. As time was running she got real angry with them. After attending our SFE-training for teachers she decided to do something different. Next time when they were having art, she noticed one little girl that immediately put her pad on the desk before starting to paint and she said: 'How smart of you, Alice, to cover your desk'. "Thank you', the girl replied at once. After a few seconds every pupil in the class had fetched their pad. And this teacher was so astonished that it worked out that well.

What advice do you have for the individual teacher who is reading this interview (or your book) and would like to introduce it in his or her school?
Go slow, try to add some of the SF tools you find most appropriate and useful to your own situation and work. Give positive feedback whenever there is a smallest reason for doing it. Highlight resources and abilities. Put focus on the solution rather on the problem. Lucky you, what a wonderful journey you have in front of you!

What can you say about the applicability of solution-focused techniques when working with children with special difficulties, handicaps, problems?
We usually claim that what is good for children in general is especially good for children with deviant behaviour patterns. We think all pupils have special needs and are entitled to the very best support. FKC Mellansjö School provides special education and treatment for children with different difficulties and we have found the SF approach the most valuable and useful model of them all. We treat every pupil on the basis of his own special needs, whether or not he has had a diagnosis or some handicaps.

Do you know of any interesting research on Solution-focused practise in the field of education?
We have heard of many interesting ongoing research in the educational field. And we will gladly come back to you when we will receive the outcome of them. Our own yearly evaluation shows a very high level of contentment with the way the pupil and the family have been treated and that they have reached their own goal during their staying at Mellansjö. Most of the pupils continue to manage very well when going back to the ordinary School system.

Do you see limitations/boundaries in applying SF? If so, where do you think SF finds its limits?
None at all. After fifteen years, working in a SF way, we just see new possibilities.

Could you tell a bit about your current interests and future plans?
Our interest in how we can use language on a daily bases increases a lot. Everyday we make new experiences of the importance of using a positive verbal communication. We make every possible effort to use language as a bridge to cooperate and see it as the foremost instrument in our educational work. Today we are drawing some outlines of an SF workbook for pupils. We are also writing some supplement to the SFE-book about motivation and positive language. The book is also under translation to Bulgarian, Germany and maybe Dutch.

What is a good way of introducing SFE to a school? What steps work well and in what order can these steps best be taken? What should be the role of school counsellors? How long does it usually take before the teachers begin to experience success themselves?
For us it is of greatest importance to confirm the teachers for the work they already are doing today and give them a lot of positive feedback. Describe your own experiences and benefits of working in a SF way. When they show interests in the model, teach them some of the SF tools, for instance how to build solutions instead of solving problems, how to focus on the pupils skills and abilities instead of their difficulties. Highlight what the pupils are good at to reinforce good behaviour and notice what they are doing that works. Scaling is also a very valuable tool in the School-setting. Let them do a lot of exercises and find out the outcome for themselves. As Steve de Shazer said – Doing, is knowing.

As a School counsellor you can encourage the teachers and give them positive feedback for every progress. When they can see the advantages and usefulness of the SF model they become more eager to practice the model for themselves.

If you would like to read more about our School you can visit our webpage at: http://www.fkc.se/. Hugs to you all from Kerstin and Maud!!

Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant, coach and trainer using a positive change approach. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert wrote many articles and a few books. More information: http://www.m-cc.nl/ / www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm / Dutch network / Dutch blog, http://solutionfocusedchange.blogspot.com/

Interview with Alasdair Macdonald

2007-11-04T00:53:00.000-07:00

Alasdair Mcdonald is a Consultant Psychiatrist who is the Research Coordinator and former President and Secretary of the European Brief Therapy Association. He works as a trainer and supervisor and as a management consultant.

Alasdair, we'd first like to ask you a few questions about your current research. Could you describe it briefly?

This study reports the outcomes from our solution-focused brief therapy out-patient clinic in adult mental health. A questionnaire was sent to clients and their family doctors one year after they ceased to attend. The seventy-five clients on whom this latest study is based represent twenty-eight clinic sessions per year. If we had been able to work for three full days weekly at the same rate we would have seen 160 clients annually. If the same good outcome rate was achieved this would make a substantial difference to our Psychotherapy Department, which received in excess of 200 new referrals in one year. It is an uncontrolled naturalistic study of brief therapy in a psychotherapy service. It is therefore open to the biases inherent in such studies, such as referral bias and differential responding by satisfied clients. However, it represents a study of effectiveness in a real-life setting.

What are the most important findings of the research? Are these findings roughly in line with previous research?

Seventy-five clients were referred, of whom fifty-three were seen and forty-one traced at follow-up. Thirty-one (76%) reported a good outcome, with an overall average of 5.02 sessions, 20% attending only one session. Combining these data with our two previous studies, 170 referrals were received of whom 136 attended and 118 were traced. Good outcome was reported by eighty-three clients (70%) with a mean of 4.03 sessions per case. There was no significant difference between the groups in solving additional problems or seeking further professional help. New problems were significantly less common in the 'good outcome' group. In common with other therapies, long-standing problems did less well. This study confirms previous reports in terms of overall benefit. Seventy-six percent of clients report the achievement of some or all of their goals. This echoes similar studies from other countries, including Germany, Spain and the USA.

Were there any results that surprised you or intrigued you?

In all three studies there were no significant differences in outcome between socioeconomic groups. This is important because the higher socio-economic groups usually have more resources and better access to treatment services, so they have more choices. It is important to make treatments available which will be effective for those from relatively deprived groups.

One thing that surprised me was that negative goals are not related to poor therapy outcome. What are your thoughts on this?

Choosing negative goals is not associated with a poor outcome. This is counter-intuitive, since it is easier to do something new than to stop something and put nothing in its place. However, our clients did put new things into place so maybe goal-setting is not in itself a key variable.

If you look at research findings in general, would you say research indicates SF to be the most effective approach to therapy?

More generally, solution-focused therapy has a more substantial research base than some other psychological treatments. Results from different countries all show similar levels of benefit. There appears to be no link between diagnosis and response to treatment, an issue which is currently leading to challenges to the 'Evidence-based Practice' movement in the USA and elsewhere (Wampold and Bhati 2004).

Are there examples of problems for which SF does not seem to be the most effective approach?

Specialist teams eg for alcohol or domestic violence, seem to have better outcomes, which suggests that it is possible to refine the sft model further for specific client groups and situations.

What further research is needed?

Further research into sft could examine such issues more closely. We also need more comparison studies against other treatments such as that of Knekt and Lindforss (see below).

***

Dr. Alasdair Macdonald, president of the European Brief Therapy Association (EBTA) has been a consultant psychiatrist since 1980. He also uses his solution-focused skills as a freelance management consultant and trainer. His main research interest is in the study of process and outcomes in SFBT. Alasdair has over 30 scientific publications on his name and a number of other published pieces. For more information on Alasdair and his work we refer you to his website.

References:

Macdonald AJ (2005). Brief therapy in adult psychiatry: results from 15 years of practice. Journal of Family Therapy, 27, 65-75.
Knekt, P, Lindfors O (2004) A randomized trial of the effect of four forms of psychotherapy on depressive and anxiety disorders: design, methods and results on the effectiveness of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy and solution-focused therapy during a one-year follow-up. Studies in social security and health, no. 77. The Social Insurance Institution, Helsinki, Finland. (www.kela.fi/research)
Wampold BE, Bhati KS (2004) Attending to the omissions: a historical examination of evidence-based practice movements. Professional Psychology, Research and Practice, 35(6), 563-570.

Interview with Insoo Kim Berg

2007-11-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

© 2004, Coert Visser

Amsterdam, May 12, 2004 - There is probably not a single person more important to the invention and development of the solution-focused practice than Insoo Kim Berg. This fragile American lady from Korean origin has a gigantic reputation. She is one of the most important inspirators of nearly all of the solution-focused consultants I know. Together with her partner Steve De Shazer, she developed solution-focused brief therapy. Currently, she often travels the world doing consultancy and training people. Last year, she did a workshop in our Dutch training program for consultants and coaches. This year, I met her in an Amsterdam hotel and we had this conversation by the fireplace.

You are an important inspiration to many. Who are your main inspirators?

(laughing)... Oh gosh, I don't know! What a hard question .... Don’t you have an easy question to start off with?

(laughing)....ok, sorry .... How about this one? When did you start inventing the solution-focused way of doing therapy?
In the sixties, I was doing therapy and I was very dissatisfied with the traditional therapy approach. I realized: 'This doesn't work'. And that was quite something! Just must know, I had a typical Asian girl background: very obedient. I was sent to finishing high school in Korea, the type of school that teaches you to be a good housewife. And my mother’s main mission had been to have me married into a nice family. It was quite a revolution that a girl like me could do something like that...be disobedient about how to do therapy.

I knew I had to be disobedient quietly. I started reading a lot and I came across a text by Jay Haley called 'The power tactics of Jesus Christ'. Can you imagine that? This was a shock! I was shaken up. That was the beginning. That you could look at things like that! Then, I read his book 'Uncommon Therapy'. And in the early seventies I started to do things differently. And I really read a lot. For instance a book by Paul Watzlawick of MRI, The Mental Research Institute, in Palo Alto in California. Jay Haley, John Weakland and Paul Watzlawick worked there.

They did strategic brief therapy didn't they? Sort of a predecessor of Solution-focused brief therapy, wasn't it?
Right. They stated that the attempted solution was the problem. They asked the question 'what maintains the problem'? It was a very interesting approach. And it was an important step forward compared to the really problem focused approach that had been dominant. Shortly after that, I went out to study there. John Weakland, who was married to a Chinese lady, became something of a mentor to me.

In this period, I also met Steve, who was also working in California. At that time, he was experimenting with a one-way screen. The therapist would do the session, and behind the one-way screen, there was a team observing the session. Near the end of the session, the therapist would go and discuss the session with the team behind the one-way screen and then go back to the client and finish the session. And Steve and I spend quite some hours together behind the screen.

(Laughs)... It was funny, he used to say: 'You put a spell on me!' I convinced Steve to come back to Milwaukee and there we moved in with each other.
I worked in a therapy practice, and I did well. I worked very hard, and I accepted cases the other therapists would rather not take. We introduced the one way screen. I did the therapy, and behind the screen was a team watching. And I used it to teach students about therapy. And they loved it. Finally, they had a chance to watch therapy sessions. But my colleagues did not like it at all. They were convinced we were doing things that were unethical. There was quite a lot of pressure. At a certain point, my colleagues even would look the other way when I met them in the hallway. I now know, I made the mistake of talking too much about what we were doing. That way it got too much attention. We should have just continued without talking much about it. I decided to leave because of the pressure. And we started our own practice. Because we hardly had any money, we started off in our own living room.

It was a small house. We did the session in the living room and there was a camera on the steps to tape the session. Can you imagine? (laughs) The dining table was our office. After some time, we saved some money and we could start rent a real office. And then we started developing SFBT by trying things out and finding out what worked.

What was your criterion? How did you notice that something worked?

Oh, you can easily see it. When something worked, the clients started to smile, they got all energized. They said things like: 'Yes!' or 'Oh, I never thought of it that way!' or 'What an idea!'.

And we found out that if something works with one person, it does not guarantee it will work with the next one too. That is why you always have to work with what comes back to you. The responses of the client will show you if what you said worked.

And how important is non-verbal behavior?
It's important. It has to fit with the rest of the behavior and the context. But it is important not to isolate attention to non-verbal behavior. Most people emphasize non-verbal behavior a lot. But if you focus too much on non-verbal behavior it can interfere with the attention you have to have for your client. Mostly if you focus your attention well on your client, your non-verbal behavior will automatically fit.

Is the way you apply solution focused working still evolving or renewing itself?
I certainly hope so.... What I am still trying to achieve is to simplify more what I am doing. Steve always explains the importance of simplicity by referring to Occam's razor (William of Occam, who lived around 1300, argued for the most simple theory that could still explain the facts; quite unusual for his time -CV). I have found that using scales is a very effective way of achieving this simplicity.

However, it would be wrong to think that because it's simple it's also easy to do. People confuse simple with easy. To be simple takes enormous discipline. Working solution-focused is not easy at all, it is hard. First, there is the technique part. This, you can learn. And then there is the art part. The art part is about what to do when. That part is harder to learn.

Using exceptions is an interesting part of the solution focus. Have you ever found yourself not able to help the client find relevant exceptions to a problem?
Oh yes. It happens quite often. For instance, I was talking to this lady and she was with a Church that required her to pray all of the time. Now, she was convinced that an Evil Spirit got into her body. And when she said: 'Sometimes I can get up and cook' I thought: 'aha, there is an exception!' But she blocked it right off: 'O no, yesterday I couldn't cook'. And then she said things like: 'Sometimes I go out in the woods', or: 'I joined the health club'. And when I tried to talk about these exceptions, she would not talk about it, she kept on blocking me off. What did turn out to work well was that I said: 'You must have been overestimating the power of the Evil Spirit'. She asked why. I explained: 'He has been trying to get you down for many years now and he still has not succeeded.' That helped her see things differently. And then I suggested an exercise with throwing a coin every day. If one side came up she would have to completely ignore the Evil Spirit, never mind what he said. If the other side came up, she should do what she normally did. And in the following sessions she never talked about the evil spirit anymore! In the first session that followed, she mentioned that she was moving to another apartment. And in the next session, which turned out to be the last, she mentioned that she had a boyfriend.

Interesting case! I am curious about another case of yours. Last year you mentioned you were going to work with native Americans?
Yes, that is still going on. These Indians live in a beautiful environment and this is why many people move there, mainly pro fessionals. The Indians face two cultures. One the one side, there is their old culture, on the other side, the new culture they're confronted with. Also the Indians now have more money. They have casinos and don't have to pay taxes over their earnings. So they have a lot more money. But many Indians feel as if they're caught between two worlds.

The reason I am doing sessions there is that there is a lot of violence in this community brought on by excessive alcohol use. It is really special for them to let someone like me in to help them. And it is a very interesting experience. I thought them and me would have something in common. Indians were supposed to have Asian roots, you know? But forget it. (laughs). For instance, during a session, they suddenly go out in the lake and they are talking about the lake. And I am thinking: ' What's the connection?' (laughs). They have a lot to teach me!

Patience?
Yes, patience. Although there is no recognizable progression, they keep showing up to my sessions. And another thing I am learning is that they don't like direct compliments. It makes them feel you put yourself above them. What does seem to work is when you say: 'I would like you to do more of this..'.

What makes solution-focused working so interculturally applicable?
We value what the client brings to the situation and work with that. Of course you can't totally leave your ideas behind you. And you don't have to. It is like you have one foot in the client’s world and the other in your own. And if a client says something like 'My boss is a lunatic', I work with that but don't have to agree with it. I don't care if the boss is a lunatic or not. I don't have an opinion about that.

Sometimes when people start to notice how effective the solution focus is at helping people faster and making them less dependent they can start to worry: 'Won't that cost me money'?
This is a central dilemma, and I don't have a clear-cut solution. We have had this ourselves. When we experienced how fast clients were helped, we got financial worries about it too. At a certain point, we even tried to prolong our therapies with two sessions for that reason. And you know what? It did not work. Therapies became even shorter. So, the problem is real. But in the long term, the more effective you are, the better your reputation will become, which will lead to financial success.

Another thing is, despite potential short term financial drawbacks, many people are attracted solution-focused working because it helps clients to be effective so well. And it is cost effective. To many solution-focused practitioners it is really fulfilling to notice that your client is really helped. Organizations would really benefit if more consultants would adopt the solution-focused approach.

You're doing consultancy yourself now?
Yes, nowadays, I don't do much therapy. I do many trainings all over the world, and I am helping many organizations. I do a lot of solution focused management training. For instance, I train middle managers and team leaders. I help them manage their team members in a solution-focused way. Sometimes, when we do role-plays, they are shocked. For instance, we do a role-pla y in which a manager talks to an employee who shows up late for work. And then I say: 'You must have a good reason for being late. How can I help?' And then I might say: 'What are some of your ideas about solving this problem?' So, by doing this, I am being understanding, helpful, and at the same time I am making my expectations clear. And I keep on asking that: 'What are your ideas about solving this? And those middle managers are amazed and sometimes say: 'If you keep on repeating that, the person will get upset!' But most of the time the employee will not get upset. In fact, the clarity of stating your expectation often helps.

And when they do get upset?
Sometimes they do. For instance, they may start to complain. And then I show understanding.

And then?
And then I move on to: 'And what are some of your ideas about how to solve this?’ (laughs)

(laughing) You are tough! Sometimes people think that the solution focus is touchy-feely. What do you think about that?
It is not. You are right: I am tough. People might get that impression of touchy-feely because the way you phrase your interventions softens so much. It is very helping and understanding. But it is also very goal oriented. And it is not touchy-feely.

If you're working in an organization, there will be a hierarchy. That is how an organization works. There is top management who takes decisions and provides direction. And middle management implements it. And if an employee is underperforming that is a problem. You see, as a manager, you expect a performance of an employee. That is the contract you have with him. But it is hardly ever necessary to be authoritative. You get a far more productive conversation when you use those solution-focused techniques I mentioned.

Any more things you'd like to share?
There is also some fantastic news about schools. Many alternative high schools, schools for children with learning and behavioral problems, face severe problems, like violence and drug use. There is one public school I am working with, in Austin Texas, the Garza Independence High School, that does things differently. They have 400 students. They have never advertised. All students volunteered to join the school. The teachers are called facilitators. And the children are in charge of their own learning. They are treated as responsible; they can come and go whenever they want. And, you can guess what happens, they show responsibility. This school is now drawing national attention. There are no metal detectors or other special safety measures, and the school is save. The results are very good.

In another school for special education, I am working with in Fort Lauderdale in Florida, teachers are looking at classes as units. They work with goals for the week and use scales for that. The teacher might say: 'My goal is for you to be a 6 at the end of the week'. Every time the teacher notices progress he pays attentions and compliments. Then they gradually moved into helping students set goals and use scales them selves. By Friday, they review the results. In a special scheme the student rates where he is now on the scale. And the teacher does the same. If the goal was a 6 six and the teacher gives a score of 5, he will say something like: 'Okay, you're at five, what is your plan?' This approach delivers good results. For instance, disciplinary measures have gone down. And teachers are so excited. They say things like ’We are making a difference in a student’s life' And that is precisely why most of them became teachers in the first place. So, they start to use it more and more.

It's contagious!
It is! What you typically see is that a school starts with the school counselor working solution-focused. They then start to think: 'Hey, this might work for teachers too!'

I just came back from an Institution in the north of The Netherlands, what was it called again?.......Jeugdzorg Drenthe in Assen. They are doing some fantastic things. The director, Peter, is trained in the solution-focus and the entire staff is now trained too. They are not only applying it with the children, their clients, but also in the way they run their organization. And they are doing fantastic things, very innovative. And they are very enthusiastic.

We have to end the interview. We leave the fireplace and Insoo walks me to the door and starts to shiver and laugh: "Oh, it's cold. Why is it so cold? That's one thing solution focused working does not work with!"

***

Interview with Fletcher Peacock

2007-11-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

December 2003 - Fletcher Peacock is the Canadian author of the best-selling book, "WATER THE FLOWERS Not the Weeds". Fletcher, who holds a bachelor's degree in science, mathematics and physics, and a bachelor and master's degree in social work, specializes in solution focused communication. As a trainer and consultant he helps clients with team building, conflict resolution, managing change, achieving better working relationships, and stress management. We wanted to learn more about his activities and ideas and asked him some questions.

Could you tell us how you found out about the solution focus?

I was in Graduate School (McGill University , Canada ) and Steve de Shazer gave a talk on Solution Focused Therapy which impressed me immensely as brilliantly simple and immediately applicable. I was doing a mediation session between two partners that evening. I asked the Miracle Question ("If things were going better, how would you know? What would be different?) and suddenly what had been slow and grueling work became simple, easy and flowing.

What attracted you in it?

What attracted me to Solution Focused Communication (SFC) was, and still is, the Simplicity, the Accessibility and the Efficacy (immediate, concrete, measurable, positive results).

How did it change the way you work?

I am much more Present and Future Focused. I am also much more Resource Oriented. I am now always looking for strength and abilities of individual team members, teams and organizations. My questions (hypnotic inductions i.e., where I focus the Client's attention), are very different. My sequencing is usually: Miracle Question, Exception Question, Scaling Question. Also my questions now begin with What? and How? rather than Why? Also I am much more interested in Explanations of Exceptions (Strengths and Resources, potential solutions) than in Explanations of problems.

We like the title of your book. How did you come up with it?

I love metaphors (right brain access - "a picture is worth a thousand words"). My original title was Water the Seeds, Not the Weeds. I am auditory and I liked the rhyme. Also my name is Fletcher Peacock, I am an English person from Toronto, English Canada, but I work almost entirely in French in Quebec, French Canada. Thus I wrote the book in French.

My first language is English and sometimes, when working in French, I miss certain nuances. Apparently the French translation of Water the Seeds, Not the Weeds has a very risque sexual connotation. My French Publisher insisted that I change the title so I switched to Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds. This, incidentally, I now consider to be a Superior title (more visual).

How do you work with SF now?

I work mainly with teams of employees and managers of all levels. I have 4 clienteles: Health, Education, Government, and Business (perhaps (?) see website), also community groups. Generally I present the basic theory of Solution Focused Communication (SFC) (as outlined in my book). I consider styles of cooperation (Visitor, Complainant, Customer) (Ch.6) to be quite helpful and powerful. I then focus on questioning techniques (Miracle, Exceptions, Scaling). We look at Videos of Solution Focused Conversations (ex.: a Manager with her employee) and then we practice role-play of real-life cases from the participant's life.

Which changes/steps have you taken in applying the sf principles over the years?

Which changes? Over the years I have become increasingly sensitive to language patterns and choice of words, so... I talk about hypnotic patterns and also psychosomatic medicine, e.g., the idea that each word we speak triggers biochemical, molecular, and physiological reactions in the speaker and the listener's body. Some words trigger endorphins (positive hypnosis) and other words trigger toxins (negative hypnosis). Also I give more and more importance to my key phrase "I don't have the truth" (Ch. 1), i.e., What is true and useful for me (Positive Hypnosis) may not be true and useful for my employee/colleague/or client, hence the importance of eliciting solutions that are respectful of, and coherent with, the client's "current reality."

What do you see as the main advantages applying SF?
Main advantages of SFC?

A) Simplicity - my perception is that we, as human beings (and I certainly include myself), are absolute geniuses at complicating our lives. SFC arrives like a breath of fresh air as an Invitation to Simplify our life. It suggests that even though problems may appear quite complex, perhaps solutions can be quite simple.

B) Accessibility - SFC is not a complex approach. It can be learned and applied quite easily and quickly. I have many stories of people reading my book, having "insights" and beginning to apply Solution Focused techniques and questions without ever having taken a seminar.

C) Concrete Results - In SFC, we are always looking for small changes in a positive direction which we can focus on, amplify and celebrate (Water the Flowers).

D) Enjoyment (Pleasure/Fun) - SFC focuses on the positive in individuals and in organizations. It is inherently hypnotic, tending to trigger positive hypnotic states ("endorphins") in the bodies of communicators and clients. In the words of a friend and colleague (John Walter, Chicago) Solution Focused Communication (SFC) is "relentlessly optimistic"!!

Do you see limitations/boudaries in applying SF? If so, where do you think SF finds its limits?

Limits and boundaries? I have a Myers-Briggs, Enneagram and Spiritual critique of SFC.

First, I want to say that I Love SFC. I see it as a philosophy, an attitude, a way of life that is equally applicable and effective in both one's professional and personal life. At the same time it is ONE TOOL (a major one!) among several in my Communicator/Consultant's Tool Kit. I see SFC as benefiting in some situations from the addition of other tools and/or other awarenesses.

When you ask about "limits" of SFC, I would rather reframe what I am going to talk about as "Opportunities for Growth/expansion and Increased Effectiveness". Also perhaps (?) what I have to say may be more easily applicable in the personal rather than the organizational realm. However, my intuition is, that ultimately, there is no difference.

A) First, SFC seems to me to have a strong Myers-Briggs (popular Business Personality Profile - see web) - Thinking (T) bias, i.e., rational, logical, analytical and somewhat divorced or Dissociated from Emotions/Feeling. There does not seem to be a lot of space for Emotional Expression, except where the emotion expressed is what we've historically labeled positive emotions, i.e., happiness, joy, etc.

B) From an Enneagram perspective, my guess/intuition is that SFC has a strong "7"-ish flavour/bias/orientation (Positive, Optimistic, Future-Oriented). The Enneagram is a 5,000 year old Personality, Typology with 9 Styles (now used to teach leadership at Stanford MBA (1,000's of pages on the web). It suggests that we all have strengths, and also, that we all have a "shadow side" - some part of ourselves that we are unconsciously avoiding/denying/repressing/fleeing. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, suggests that our "shadow" - that part of our personality that we've spent our life avoiding and repressing - is the key to our personal (and I suspect organizational) development. Hence, we can benefit from Welcoming/Embracing that part of ourself that was previously denied. The Strength of SFC is its Positive, Optimistic Future Orientation:

1) There are no Problems, only Opportunities, 2) There are no failures, only learnings, 3) There is not just one solution, there are thousands, and 4) There is no such thing as a Resistant, Uncooperative, Unmotivated client; there are just people with their unique way of cooperating. What the Enneagram (as a tool for personal and professional development) invites us to explore is the question: Are there moments when we are being compulsively optimistic? Are these moments when our positive, future orientation is an unconscious strategy for avoiding difficult emotions in the present?

C) From a Spiritual perspective - Who are we? What are we doing here on this Planet? In organizations Productivity, Profitability and Efficiency are all honored values, and Solution Focused Communication (SFC) is especially effective and useful in promoting these values. My intuition is that we are moving in the direction of more explicit spirituality (not religion) in organizations, i.e., How can we create organizations that Inspire the Soul? There are more and more books and conferences in North America on Business and Spirituality. SFC is a welcome and valuable piece of the puzzle AND I suggest that SFC can benefit from other complementary Awarenesses, ex., Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Spirituality, and especially Non-Violent Communication (NVC), which encourages us to focus on Feelings and NEEDS.

Suppose it is 2005 and you are happy with how SF is applied in the world of organisations; what would you see happening?
SF in Organization - Year 2005. Executive Committees, Boards of Directors, Managers and Employees would share a common Solution Focused philosophy, attitude and language. People would work together cooperatively to find mutually beneficial, win-win solutions wherein everyone's NEEDS (Management, Workers and Consumers) are nurtured and satisfied. All members of the organization would have integrated the fundamental principles: "I don't have the Truth...I have my "current truth"; and there would be a focus on asking mutually empowering questions (Miracle, Exception, Scaling). Also, there will be increasing openness toward Valueing and Expressing Emotional Intelligence (What are your Feelings and NEEDS?) as presented by Marshall Rosenberg (Non-Violent Communication 1999).

Would you like to share an interesting case or excercise with us?

A Brief Story perhaps (?): I like metaphors. My book is titled Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds and, in my seminars I talk more and more about Gardening, both inner and outer. One of my principal clients is ALCAN (the Aluminum Company of Canada). A few years ago I delivered a three-Day Seminar to eight groups of about thirty managers working in a Northern Quebec plant. At the end of the series of eight seminars, the factory Director purchased 250 watering cans and gave one to each of his managers to remind them that a key part of their job was to be gardeners Watering the Flowers - looking for, amplifying and energizing strengths, resources, abilities, successes in all team members. I see this as a good example of developing a common Solution Focused (SFC) orientation and language.

***

Coert Visser (coert.visser@planet.nl) is a consultant, coach and trainer using the solution-focused approach to change. This approach is focused on simply helping individuals, teams and organizations to make progress in the direction of their own choice. Coert has written many articles and a few books. His latest book (Doen wat werkt) was awarded a prize for best (HR)management book by a professional jury and also by a public jury. He has also interviewed thought leaders like Insoo Kim Berg, David Maister, and Jeffrey Pfeffer. More information: www.m-cc.nl / www.m-cc.nl/solutionfocusedchange.htm / Dutch network / Dutch blog

Gwenda Schlundt Bodien is founder of Positron, Personnel management & Coaching. She does individual coaching, team coaching, organizational consultancy and training. Gwenda has published a lot about HRM and solution-focused practise.

Interview with Paul Z. Jackson

2007-11-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

© 2003, Coert Visser and Gwenda Schlundt Bodien

May 2003 – Paul Z. Jackson is co-author of The Solution Focus, which has been picked out as one of the leading business books in the USA of the year 2002. The book is a great (the first!) English introduction to solution focused working in organisations. Paul has also written about improvisation and inspirational trainership. And .... he is an inspirational trainer himself (we experienced firsthand). In this interview Paul tells about how he learned about the Solution Focus and he shares some interesting stories and examples.

We heard you were once a journalist, a senior producer with BBC Radio and the founder of the More Fool Us improvisation comedy team. When and where did you pick up the solution focus? What was you intial feeling about it?

I read books by De Shazer and others, attended a four-day training at London's Brief Therapy Centre, subscribed to the SFT mailing list and went to the European Brief Therapy Conferences. My feeling was that this was a really elegant, philosophically sound approach to dealing with difficulties and change. I'd read philosophy at university, and this had a logic and simplicity about it that I'd not seen in any other psychology works. It also struck me that this might be applicable outside of therapeutic contexts. I was also impressed by how pleasant, tolerant, sensible and fun loving the practitioners seemed to be.

How and in what areas did you start to apply it yourself? Did you do this alone or did you by then already collaborate with Mark? And when was this?
I started to apply it in Strategy workshops and Team-building sessions, about 5 years ago. Teams are invited to draw their Future Perfect, for example. We then scale where they are now, and how they are moving in the right direction.

With Mark, we have used SF principles in all our programmes together, asking lots of solution focused questions in feedback sessions, for example. And we have run many programmes together to teach SF explicitly to facilitators, trainers and anyone else who is interested.

After having applied the solution focus for quite some years now, what do you see as its essence?

The essence is simplicity. Simplicity and pragmatism. Simplicity, pragmatism and versatility. It is very neat - as much as for what we don't do as for what we do do.

What do you mean by that?
We sometimes describe SF to people and they respond, "Oh yes, we do that." And to some extent often they do. On the other hand, they are often doing many other things too, which we don't do, and which get in the way of a direct route to what works. Perhaps they are still exploring problems in depth, or looking at barriers or deficits. So what we don't do - the routes not taken - is an important part of deploying one's SF skills.

You have co-written a book with Mark McKergow. How is the book received?
Great reviews, super responses from individuals who read it, and a second edition already in print. It also seems to be spreading gradually to the USA and other parts of the world, which is very encouraging.

Besides applying and teaching about the solution focus you also do courses in writing and in improvisation. Are these courses explicitly linked to the solution focus?

All the training courses are grounded in a solutions focus, in that they assume that people are very capable and already bring many resources to the topic. We always include activities that bring out how well people are doing - taking them towards strengths, and looking for small next steps by way of progress. Improvisation - in the sense of responding appropriately in the moment - is a key skill for any solutions-focused practitioner. So they share a common skills base, and also many interesting practical and theoretical overlaps. In both, for example, a practitioner has a commitment to making the other people involved look good - through accepting, affirming and taking the 'client' seriously.

The solution focus is a very simple approach. What keeps it interesting after having done it for many years? Doesn´t the simplicity make it boring sometimes?

No. What keeps it interesting is that every case is different. There are always different people, problems and contexts. We did have one chief executive who was asked by his subordinates what they had to do to have him coach them, and he replied, "Bring me more interesting issues".

Would you like to share a nice SF story with us?
A story: I was coaching a woman called Sharon, who said her problem was that she was 'a terrible cook'. There were, she suspected, all sorts of reasons for this problem. We, however, were embarked on a solutions focused quest, so didn't ever get to delve into the reasons, fascinating though they may have been. Instead, I asked her what she wanted with respect to her cooking. And what she wanted, she said, was to cook splendid dinners with fresh ingredients for her boyfriend and even for a small group of friends. How was she currently doing, on a Scale of such dinners, where 10 was the splendid dinners with the boyfriend and 1 was opening a tin of catfood? Currently at a 4, she said, backing this up by telling me she had some experiences of cooking with fresh food in the past, especially when here work was less time-consuming. To give herself 5 on the scale, she would see herself using some fresh ingredients in a meal. And she set herself the small action of buying some fresh ingredients by shopping at the weekend. You'll note there's nothing in the action about cooking them - and therefore nothing about cooking prowess, so that the nature of the possible solution is well removed from whatever was the cause of the problem. Sharon planned simply to buy fresh ingredients at the weekend: A very doable action to which she was 10-on-a-scale committed. When we met again to review, she revealed that she had bought the ingredients, and indeed did go on to prepare a splendid meal. 'How did you do that?' I wondered, impressed. 'I couldn't bear to let the fresh ingredients go to waste,' she replied. And so the route to her solution was action-oriented (shopping) and based on a 'resource' of parsimony. I think if you 'get' this story, you 'get' solutions focus.

Thank you, that´s an interesting case. Do you also have a SF exercise to share?

I do, it´s called The Scaling Walk.

An activity for any size of group, I've run this with 5 people in a training session to around 100 at conferences. It is suitable for anyone, from beginners to the most experienced. The purpose of the exercise is two-fold: it coaches all the participants in an individual activity of their choice, and it brings the Solutions Tool of Scaling to life through experience and discussion of all its main features. As facilitator, you ask everyone to think of a sport or hobby that they currently engage in and would like to be better at. 10 represents you performing consistently at your personal peak, in your chosen hobby, 0 is you regularly and stuckly at the worst you imagine it can be for you. Where are you now? Let's call that n. Set out a scale in the room from 0 at one end to 10 at the other. Line the Group up first at n on the scale, somewhere in the middle of the room. Simply by placing yourself on a Scale, you have implications of potential movement - and therefore possible progress.

If this is where you are now, what do you see when you look towards 10 (possible future) and towards O (know-how, counters, exceptions). You've used your Know-how to get you to n. Let's now visit 10 on the scale, at the attractive end of the room. Ask "What does 10 represent?", How much detail do we want about 10?" "What's the point of mentally visiting 10 on the scale?" Who has been at 10, for real, for a period, a moment, one swing of a golf club. (That's the source of useful know-how). Take the group back to n on the scale and ask what's different now about looking to 10. (Often people say they feel inspired, motivated, they know something they didn't know before). "Where do we go from here?", "Do we go straight to 10?" No, we look at the know-how we've used to get to n, we look at what we've learned about 10, we collect the know-how we need to advance up the scale and we move to n+1. Getting to 10 in one step is probably too big a step. If not, then do it, or you'd probably have done it by now anyway. Ask the group to take the step up to n+1. Looking at 10, what can they say about 10 now? What have they learned. (New counters and momentum from going from n to n+1). Ask the group to return to their seats, ask any questions they have about scaling and make any notes they need to in their workbooks.

Could you tell us something about your future plans?

Running workshops and trainings to spread the word about solutions focus.

Applying it on behalf of clients in big and small projects.

Collaborating with other Solutionists.

Perhaps another book.

Any final thoughts for our readers?
It's simple, but not always easy!

Thank you Paul and all the best!

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Interview with Michael Hjerth

2007-11-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

Michael Hjerth is one of the organizing people of the international SOL conference, which is to be held next year in Sweden. Sweden counts remarkably many solution-focused consultants. And there is even a Swedisch organization, which calls itself ´the most solution-focused organization in the world. The most solution-focused organization in the world?? We had to know more about that. Michael is consultant to this organization. Reason enough to hear him out.

How did you come across the solution focused way of thinking?

I studied psychology and was struck by the numerous different theories, which were very contradictory to each other, like in no other science. I was looking for something more solid than that and took up philosophy. I worked with post-structural thinkers, Wittgenstein, social constructionism, etc and was very interested in that way of thinking. I started to think about how a possible therapy based on that kind of thinking could look like, planning to write a doctoral thesis on it. Then, a friend at the university mentioned a clinic where they worked in a way which she claimed reminded her of what I was doing in philosophy. I went to visit this team, which included among others Harry Korman and Martin Söderqvist. I started hanging out there and after a few times behind the one-way mirror, Harry kicked me into the therapy room to work with a family he had gotten stuck with. I found it surprisingly easy to do, I felt more at easy with doing it than writing about it. Since then my dissertation in philosophy has been gathering dust on a shelf. So, while still in school, I started to work one day a week at a solution-focused clinic. First with regular solution focused therapy, but I soon got more and more interested in working with organisations and work life problems, and gradually shifted focus to work with training and organisational change. My main interest continues to be how to describe, research and develop solutions focus to fit new contexts, such as consulting, coaching, leadership, organisational change, training, etc.

You have introduced the solution focused principles at the Swedish National Labour Market Department. Can you share with us what worked well, because this organisation is now know as ´the most solution focused organization in the world´.

The funny thing is that there has never been a project and there still is no project or project leader. The solution focused methods were discovered and applied in different parts of the organisation and people got to know from each other how well it worked. The employees who work closely with the clients (who are looking for a job, or who are out of the labour process because of physical or psychological problems) used the solution focused methods and were enthusiastic about it and started talking about it with each other. The “rumour” spread throughout the organisation and people were having less difficulties in their sometimes hard job to get clients at work again. Still yet, there is not a decision from the top management to introduce the solution focus methods in the entire nation-wide organisation, but it spreads out bottom-up and sideways. As of today about a third of the staff has been trained in solution focused methods, and it continues at an accelerating speed.

How did that go?

The National Labour Organisation of Sweden did not introduce the solution focus, it was more like the solution focus introduced itself to them. Employees started to tell their bosses how useful it was, and ask for more trainings, then the bosses started to tell each other how useful it was to their teams, the middle management on the county level noticed that something was going on and started to support and finance it. The middle management trusted their employees and managers enough to support it: the employees said it worked and the management was smart enough to listen and learn. The training department of the organisation cooperated closely with me and others to make sure we got he very best consultants to do their very best work, to keep the good rumour going. And as we do more and more trainings with managers, I expect it to grow even further, since the managers will hopefully note how it can be useful for themselves as leaders and managers.

What were the main effects of the solution focus in this organization?

One clear effect seems to increased work satisfaction among the employees. This is the effect that has been most clearly perceived by the management. Another thing is that the solutions focused is seen as more fitting with the general trends within the organisation, to focus more on competence and effectiveness. There seems to be a decrease of sickness among the employees, a decrease of turn-around of staff, and a lot of interesting new ways to use a solutions focus are being developed. Not least important, though this hasn’t really been measured satisfactorily yet, the clients finds a new jobs much quicker than before. Another major result is that clients who are really suffering from e.g. burnout get through their recovery process much quicker and stay healthy while back at work.

Now, some offices in the organisation are introducing the solution focus into their meetings, using an adaptation of Harry Normans Solution Focused Reflecting Teams. This gives a structure for meetings that is truly solution focused and enables all participants to join in and share their thoughts about work and work improvements in a structured way.

You are a member of the steering group of SOL. Where do you see SOL going from here?

What I really like is the organic process of SOL. There are no accreditations, there is no “boss”, it is all about sharing ideas and successes and learning from each other. Every one is allowed to apply the solution focus in their own way, add personal flavours to it and there is no rigid outline of how things are supposed to be. This is great since there is such a potential for developing and extending solution focused practises to more and more situations and contexts.

Solution focused management, leadership and organisational work is the freshest, most rapidly developing methodology in the organisational world. I also hope that SOL will become even more international and that Southern and Eastern countries will start participating more. Right now there are already participants of a lot of countries, but these are all from Western Europe and it would be a major step forward if Southern countries and Eastern Europe would join in as well.

Yes, we noticed there seem to be a lot of Swedish solution focused consultants.....

I think the cultural issue plays a role in this respect. For example, the Netherlands and Sweden have a social structure in which democracy and employee participation is very important and regulated by law. This also has to do with the small power distance (Hofstede) in these countries. The solution focus really matches this kind of culture. In countries where the power distance is larger, having employees participate in finding their own solutions is a somewhat more difficult step to take. At least, it might to a little longer. On the other hand, a solutions focused might make even more a difference in these countries.

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Interview with David Maister

2007-11-03T15:31:00.000-07:00

© 2003, Coert Visser

David Maister is one of the leading writers on management today. Many managers and consultants love his books, which include titles like True Professionalism, The Trusted Advisor, First among Equals, and Practice what you Preach. What makes these books so popular with managers and professionals must be that they are full of practical advice. On top of that, they are written in a pleasant and easy style. We were surprised to find out that writing was once an activity David hated.

You are now one of the most popular and best-known management authors. But what got you started writing books?

My book writing divides into two time periods. Until 1985, I was an academic, teaching at the University of British Columbia and the Harvard Business School. During that time, I wrote (or co-authored) seven books, on such diverse subjects as managing a trucking company, the airline industry and factory operations. All of those books (now, thankfully, out of print and forgotten) were written to play the academic game.

In 1985, I left academia to launch my consulting practice, aimed at serving professional service firms. In spite of the academic writing I had done, I still did not enjoy writing. In fact, it terrified me. Whenever I had some writing to do, I would get agitated, literally sweat and avoid the task like the plague. Yet I knew that writing was the best way to get known, and to create an audience for my work. So, I promised a (trade) magazine editor that I would write an article every month, knowing full well that I was committing myself to something that I would not enjoy, but which would get me where I wanted to go. In addition, it was emotionally easier to think about writing (only) an article, instead of a book (which seemed like a monumental task.) Having no choice, I lived up to my commitment and, after three years, found that about two-thirds of the articles were acceptable, and about one-third I wished I had not written. I was still insecure about it, so I did not collect my articles together for another five years, when I chose the best ones and published them as Managing the Professional Service Firm. Suddenly, I was "the guy who wrote the book" (which was a nice feeling.) The book didn't sell that well at first, but nice things were said about it.

Then, I faced another level of terror. It had taken me 10 years to collect enough articles for my first book. It was rather like being a pop group that puts out a successful first album based on everything they had done in their lives, then had to write another bunch of songs for the second album in a much shorter time. So, I just kept trying. I made a binding commitment to send my clients two articles every three months (getting the ideas from my consulting work.) In four years, I had enough for my second book. By this time, I was actually finding writing enjoyable, and between 2000 and 2002, I wrote (or coauthored) three more books, and am working on another one for 2004.

What do you consider to be the best book you have written yet and why?
Since my motivation in writing books is to help people, my test of my "best book" is not the writing or the originality of the thinking. Quite simply, my best book is the one that readers have actually used and applied the most, and obtained the most benefit from. So, it has to be Managing the Professional Service Firm, the first book. I like the others, and many readers do too, but they have not had the impact that the first book did. Some of them have sold as well as the first book, but I don't think they have had as big an impact on people's lives. So, by my definition, they are not my best books.

Your book ´Practice what you preach´ provides impressive proof of the causal relationship between how you treat people and objective success measures. I noticed this research confirmed the value of some ideas you have been writing about for many years. What do you consider to be its main message? Were there also big surprises in the outcomes of this research, things you had not expected at all?

I was surprised and delighted by the findings in this research. I set out to test some hypotheses, and worked hard to keep my own biases out of it, and let the data speak for itself. Yet, the conclusions confirmed much of what I had written before. As I tell my clients: "The bad news is I still believe the crazy things I have told you before; the worse news is that I now have proof!"

The main message is very straightforward: you make the most money in a business when your people are energized, excited and enthused. Notice, that is not the same as "be nice to people" or "keep your staff happy." What you need to do in business to succeed is not very intellectually complicated. However, you do need lots of passion, ambition, drive and discipline to get it done. It really is similar to my experience in my career. I honestly believe that most of my books have been common sense. My competitive advantage, if I have one, is not my intelligence. Instead, it is that, that while many people could have written about the things I wrote, they didn't and I did. I got it done. That's an important message.

The second message of the book is that few people can sustain energy, excitement and enthusiasm on their own. Few of us have that amount of self-discipline. (That's why I made binding promises to people to force me to write.) Most of us need a good coach, i.e. a manager, to bring out the best in us. The study is very clear that the source of energy, drive and discipline is not the systems of the firm, but the talents of the individual manager. That's quite an important conclusion, since few managers are actually taught how to manage. (They are taught business, but that's a separate subject.)

The biggest surprise in the study, which I did not anticipate at all, was how important was the character of the manager. Not his or her skills, or knowledge, or behavior, but character. Words like "trust, "honorable", "clear principles," "person of integrity" were frequently used to describe the managers who got the most out of people, and hence made the most money. I was taught that management was about processes, and systems, and knowledge and, maybe, skill.

The data suggests that, while these are important, character is most crucial. I'm not sure many businesses choose their managers primarily on character. And they should, if my data is to be believed.

Who are your favorite management authors? Are there any management books you would really like to recommend our readers? (which are mostly managers, human resources professionals, management consultants and students management and organization)

Everyone who has to deal with people has to read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." It's the most important business book ever written. (Seriously!) Next, I'd choose Kouzes and Posner "The Leadership Challenge." Full of wisdom, full of practical suggestions. I frequently re-read Gerald Weinberg's "Secrets of Consulting," which is applicable to everyone. I also read (and recommend) everything Tom Peters writes. Even if you only agree with a fraction of what he says, you get more ideas and stimulus to thinking than five other books.

A bit of an experimental question: imagine your new book would come out and a real miracle would happen! Everybody would read it and understand it and implement all of its insights and wisdom. Perhaps unlikely, but remember this is a miracle ... After this miracle would have happened from what things would we notice things were different?
The miracle would be that we would all understand how human beings work a little bit better. It's a tragedy that nowhere in our education do we receive any guidance in how to deal with the people we interact with, either in personal life or professional life. Our education works on our rationality, our logic and our intelligence, but we get no help, for example, in learning how to deal with other people's emotions or, for that matter, our own. Did anyone ever teach you how to critique your spouse in such a way that your comments were received as helpful advice instead of an attack? How do you get other people to willingly do what you want? What do you do if someone has let you down? These are all important skills we must learn, but most of us have to develop them through trial and error. I don't think I have many of the answers, but I think, at age 56, I have learned a few lessons that I would love to share with people in their twenties, so they can avoid the mistakes I made.

Too many people think business is about logic, analysis, rationality, detached discussions and being "right." It's not. Business is about people's messy emotions, whether they are clients, superiors, subordinates or colleagues.

On our site there is a lively discussion about developments in the profession of consultants? Questions discussed are: isn't the consultancy profession stagnating? Aren't consultants often too superficial and too commercial (especially the large firms)? Aren't they too much led by hypes? Isn't consultancy becoming too standardized? What are your thoughts on these topics?

One of the difficulties of talking about consultancy is that it actually covers an incredibly wide range of activities, many of which have nothing to do with each other. For example, designing and installing an IT system has nothing to do with providing strategic advice, which has nothing to do with factory productivity improvement. How the people provide value, how they interact with their clients, the definition of quality, what skills are needed, all of these vary incredibly.

For me, the most important distinction is the difference between being an expert and an advisor/counselor. The expert's job is to be "right", and to have the technical skills to solve problems. However, the advisor/counselor's job is not to be right, but to be helpful. There is a world of difference between being able to solve a client's problem, and being able to help the client solve his or her own problem. I think one of the problems that the consulting profession has today, is that there are too many "experts" and not enough "advisor/counselors." The reason is clear.

To be an advisor, you must not only know your field, but you need very advanced skills in working with clients (and client organizations) to help them solve their own problems. The IT firms don't usually do this, and the strategy firms often don't do this. They are still selling brains or ideas or insights. It isn't just strategy versus implementation. So much of what's called implementation is still the outsider doing things "for" or "to" the client organization. It's not improving the client organization.

As a result, the benefits to the client are limited, and clients are becoming skeptical of the value of consulting. A lot of firms think they are addressing this by selling "change management," but what they do is still not counseling: it's running the client through a relatively fixed methodology of processes, many of them bureaucratic. By the way, I include myself in this problem. Often, I can see what the client needs to do, and can get the client to understand that it needs to be done. But getting it done (dealing with politics, resistance, fear, turf battles, the need for consensus) really stretches my skills as a counselor. The process that is required is emotionally charged, and I was never trained in this. And, of course, few other consultants are either.

You mentioned that business is about people's messy emotions; an intriguing point that I fully agree with. Both clients and consultants seem to find it hard to deal with this fact. Do you have any suggestions for consultants how to deal with this?
The first battle is to accept that it's all about emotions, and not resent the fact that the emotions get in the way of your logic. It's also important to recognize that this is not only about other people's messy emotions, but your own. It's telling that Daniel Goleman put "self management" as one of the first elements of emotional intelligence in his book of that name.

Let me give an example. A year or so ago, my wife, Kathy, turned to me and said "David, can I get your help?" Of course, I said yes. She said "Well, when we travel, we are usually lucky enough to stay in hotel suites, and your smoking doesn't bother me. But, occasionally, we are in small hotel rooms, and I find that, then, the smoke makes my eyes itchy. What do you think I should do about that?"

This is, of course, brilliant. She had every right to be angry, but she knew that expressing her anger would reduce the chances of my cooperation, not increase it. She had every right to criticize me, but she knew that, when attacked, people attack back. She did not approach the problem as a logical, rational one to be "solved," but an interpersonal, psychological, emotional one. She was less concerned about being right, and more concerned about getting what she wanted.

How do you learn this? Some reading can help, including Goleman's book. But mostly it's practice, preferably with a colleague to watch you, so you can discuss afterwards "Was there a better way to say that?"

I think there is great consistency in your thinking and your books (and I like that). But what is new in your thinking? What are things you're discovering / learning about now? What are you curious about? Do you have future plans you would like to say something about?
As I said in the introduction to Managing the Professional Service Firm, "All theory is autobiography." I am fascinated by who succeeds and why, and I don't think I have finished my explorations. Most authors and consultants tend to tackle bigger subjects as they progress (for example as Michael Porter did when he went from the competitive advantage of companies to studying the competitive advantage of nations.) I have been tempted to do that, because my clients ask about "big" subjects like mergers, and globalization, and technology.

But, to tell the truth, those things don't interest me. My path has been to go deeper and look at finer detail. I think there's still a lot that I don't understand about dealing with people, managing, working with clients, and I see a lot of my clients also needing to improve in those areas. At the moment, I am writing a book for young professionals on the secrets of building a successful career. Its (tentative) title is "Stumbling Upwards." After that, I'll wait to see where my passions take me. My business principle has always been "Follow your passion, not your logic." So far, that principle has served me well.

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