13.6.2009 von kirsten.

The movie “The life of Brian” ends with a very cynical scene which is often quoted by SF practitioners: Brian (a Jesus spoof) and other people have been nailed to crosses to die a painful death over 3 days. Instead of doing something to save them, they and their followers start singing a happy song with the refrain: “Always look at the bright side of life”. As funny as this scene may be, it is quite ironic that this statement (and the song) are much en vogue in the SF community. However “always look at the bright side of life” is taken literally meaning that “Yes, whatever the situation, we should look at the bright side of life – SF is about identifying the good things, isn’t it?” and not “don’t gloss over what is an unacceptable situation – change something!”

SF is often criticized as an approach which does not take “the problem” seriously. We are seen as naively appreciating any effort and only looking at what works, ignoring serious quality issues and other undesired behavior. In the first session, managers in my SF coaching courses sometimes ask how they can possibly manage when it seems forbidden to notice what is going wrong or mention what can be improved (and I quickly dissuade them of that notion).

For me, SF is a method of helping people become unstuck, a method to move forward when you have a problem or when you want to improve something: it is not a way of life. When someone asked Steve in a workshop whether he uses SF with his family or friends, he always said “no” and advised against it. In fact, Steve seemed to many quite a grumpy old man. SF is a very special language game with a special setting: Someone wants to move forward and gives someone else the mandate to help him or her figure it out. In this setting it makes sense to mainly notice what gives you confidence that the client can reach his or her goals (note: not wildly complimenting anything that can possibly be complimented about the client).

Outside of this setting, there is “normal life” with “normal life” language games. If somebody does something you don’t like, it is a quite customary language game to tell them and ask them to do something else instead. This is very important in business life: If someone performs less than a manager expects, they can expect be alerted to the fact. If someone is an unhappy customer they can point out the problems of the product or the service. In none of these situations does it make sense to only look at the positive side of things and keep silent about what is not working. If you only say the things that you appreciate like in the old advice for Southern Belles: “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all” and think the rest – people in more direct cultures (like most business cultures) might interpret it as dishonesty or at least patronizing behavior.

We know from our experience with SF coaching that it is easier for people to change when they feel appreciated and taken seriously, so we might use this strategy in our communication in situations where we feel we need to point out a problem. Instead of leaving the hotel or restaurant when we are not getting the service we expect, we might opt to talk to the hotel manager in a friendly way, assume that he or she is trying to do a good job and ask what it is that they can do to help us be a happy customer. If we don’t mention it, the hotel manager has no chance to improve his service. In my view, it is not useful to ignore problems or make them look less bad than they are.

“The good is the enemy of the better” – this old saying seems to go against the SF tenet of “if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. In my understanding, “don’t fix what ain’t broken” mainly warns us against creating more problems for our clients than they came with: In therapy, the therapist has no business whatsoever to discuss with a client what could be better than “good enough”. It is the client who defines what is broken and what he or she wants fixed. In business coaching there are very different definitions of “broken”. High performers do not aim for “good enough” but for “top of class” and this means that they challenge things that are already working in some way but can be improved. Our clients’ goal is to be “top of class”, and they want us to help them get there. Of course, we still don’t create more problems for them than they came with – our business clients define what is “broken” and not we. Where in therapy we are in danger of finding more things in our clients’ lives that are broken than the clients themselves, we run the risk of appeasing a client to accept as “whole” what in fact is “broken” when coaching high performers in business. In my view, SF is about helping to create positive change in the desired direction of my clients whether it is a perceived “deficit” or a perceived “opportunity for even better performance”.

“Always looking at the bright side of life” is not an SF technique. But even in “normal life” ignoring what is broken has strange consequences for your language use. Let’s say you go to a workshop which is not well designed, the facilitator is boring, the participants are not engaged, you don’t think the argumentation of the speaker is very sound. If you are a believer in positive thinking, you will go out saying “what a nice workshop, there was good coffee!” – just like our Southern Belle who does not say anything if she cannot say anything nice. People who don’t know you might think you liked the workshop. If they do know you and how you communicate, they will realize what you are not saying: you are not commenting on the great content, the superb presentation etc. – the message lies in what you are not saying. Now imagine that a whole group of people agrees to “see and comment on the positive only” – what you get is a closed circle of people who communicate by what is not said. In intercultural terminology this would be called “high-context culture” which is very confusing to outsiders. Only commenting on the positive makes you somewhat incompatible to people who don’t know that this is what you are doing, especially to the world of business where open criticism and helpful feedback are widely spread.

Suppose you take your business client to the above mentioned horrible workshop. You consciously strive to “always look at the bright side” and see and mention only the positive. You have also often complimented your client on a lot of things: you mentioned how wonderfully they present, how smart they are etc. Now after this workshop which to your client was clearly sub-standard, you start conversations on how wonderful this was, how great and that you very much appreciated it. Imagine the cold shower for your client. Since the meaning of our words is in their use, the client suddenly realizes what you use the word “wonderful” for: a terrible performance.

Personally, I find creating an “inside” and an “outside” language dangerous – I’ve had my share of experience with Christian fundamentalists, and I saw similar distinctions of “insiders” and “outsiders” by way of inaudible and non-transparent subtexts to their communication. Those who are farther up in the “unspoken hierarchy” (because we are all children of Christ, aren’t we, there are no differences) use “love-bombing” (a term coined by Mr. Moon, the founder of the Unification Church) to attract and retain new members. Newcomers are not contradicted even if they say things that are not in line with the church’s teachings, everything they do and say is complimented indiscriminately. Soon the newcomer is integrated into the church, uses their language and becomes funny to the rest of his friends, who stop contact. The effect of this is that it becomes psychologically more and more difficult for the newcomer to dissent: if they disagree with the church’s teachings, they don’t simply disagree in one point and keep their friends – they lose their entire social network and have little hope of making new friends quickly since their “grammar” is quite incompatible with anyone else’s out there.

SF therapy and coaching as I understand it is much closer to the business culture than to the lovebombing, positive thinking culture. When SF coaches give “compliments” at the end of a session, they are not complimenting anything that comes to mind. They don’t generally appreciate clients in an overdone way – they comment on what they think will increase their clients confidence that they will reach their goals. It is not even about what the coach believes: it is about stating what the client said about him- or herself in his or her own words. When SF coaches are engaging in resource gossip, they are noticing the skills and resources that point to the fact that the client can reach his or her target. Lavishing clients with general appreciation on anything and everything is not effective: The coach looses credibility and his or her compliments loose their power.

I prefer to stay in the “every day language game mode” for every day things. I have learned a lot by people telling me I was wrong. I learned a lot by debates and heated discussions with my colleagues about who is “right” (knowing, of course, that from their perspective, they are as “right” as I am from my perspective). I would have become a real asshole if it weren’t for my friends who confronted me with my mistakes, told me what they would like me to do instead or helped me think about what to do better next time. I am very grateful for their helpful honesty.

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14.1.2009 von kirsten.

Preparing a workshop on “Die Theorie des theoriefreien Ansatzes” — “The theory of the theory-free approach” I had to look up “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning *again* (I don’t know, usually I do well with Latin but this one? In both reasonings you “duct”, draw conclusions from something so why is one “in” and the other “de”? Anyway).

I have sometimes heard the solution focused approach described as “inductive” — meaning working from the specific to the general. In inductive reasoning, you look at specific examples and then come up with a general law. An example might be that you take a walnut, throw it down from the first floor, the second, the third, measuring the time it takes to hit the street. You then find some regularity, a correlation between the height and the time it takes to drop. You build a hypothesis and then test it by throwing the walnut from the fourth and fifth floor. The end result is a mini-theory on the general speed of walnut-dropping in Friedrichsdorf, Germany.

So is solution focus really an “inductive” method? Mark McKergow says “every case is different” (book: the solutions focus) and I fully agree. Insoo and Steve did not start with a theory to find out what works in therapy (which makes their approach non-deductive) but they neither did they set out to discover a general law or theory of what to do in which class of therapeutic cases.

Framing solution focus in terms of “inductive” and “deductive” reasoning in my mind is another case of the “physics envy” of the human sciences (and especially psychology). Researchers in psychology, medicine and other human sciences sometimes forget the difference between researching people and walnuts. Of course, if something works with one group of people, it might also work with another. Can I be sure of that? No. Does it excuse me from having to listen to THEM? Definitely not.

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13.1.2009 von kirsten.

My wonderful ex-husband gave me Edward Tufte “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint — Pitching Out Corrupts within”, a very insightful booklet. How unfortunate it is to reduce our conversations to 5 bullets on a sequence of slides is especially apparent when you compare Lincoln’s Ghettysburg address to its rendition in Powerpoint

Speaking in bulletpoints naturally reduces the complexity of our thoughts, conjunctions and relations get lost (but aren’t they unnecessary complications, anyway?). Tufte quotes the Harvard Business Review, 76 p.44 (Shaw, Bron, Bromiley): “Bullets leave critical relationships unspecified. Lists can communicate only three logical relationships: sequence (…), priority (…), or simple membership in a set.” Necessary conditions, differentiation, causality cannot easily be expressed in a list (except, maybe, as members in a set).

One of my favorite Wittgenstein quotes is “I will teach you differences” (letter to Drury 1967, found in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Perspicuous Presentations). How can we present to one another in ways that recognize and take into account differences? How can we design and deliver information in ways that make us think rather than lulling us to cognitive slumber? Presentations with subtitles for the hard of thinking are certainly not the solution.

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5.12.2007 von kirsten.

Since the spring it has been sooo hectic and fun, things I have done include an interesting workshop on “The Grammar of Neuroscience” at the SolWorld conference in Bruges, a workshop on “Grammars of Change” in Heidelberg (Click here for the slides) and designing and delivering global leadership development programs for two global corporations.

I’ve also found an inspiring partnership with Elsässer Spreng, a German executive coaching company that I am now coaching for.

It’s taken me to a lot of places around the globe — in January it is off to the Ukraine!

I won’t even begin to talk about the books that I’ve read …

O — I am using a new toy, the facebook, connect with me if you are there!!

Kirsten

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3.4.2007 von kirsten.

I will ask you to remember what I say, or maybe you would like to forget to remember, or to remember to remember or to remember to forget …

 … if you are now in a deep trance, see a hypnotist to wake you up — however the gorgeous blonde sitting at the computer typing this is real …

So what is this all about? On Thursday, I went on a workshop of Betty Alice Erickson in Amsterdam which was organized by Louis Cauffman from Korzybski Institute and the Saxion Hogeschool. What did I learn?

Stories and stories about Milton Erickson, his canoe trip when he was still almost paralysed, the involvement of his family in therapy, his respect for the individual client and the uselessness of concentrating on theory when the person you are trying to help is sitting right in front of you.

“Observe, observe, observe!” in conversations with your clients (which is different from interpret, analyse, systematize), and the fact that this is easiest done, when the coach or therapist is in a trance him- or herself.

I was made well aware of how much solution focus comes from the work of Milton Erickson, and how much of this is anecdotal and therefore individual.

Any theory of solution focus, of helping, of change will have to take that into account in my view.

How can we help people and organizations identify the change they want and implement this change when we assume that each process is unique?

If you have an answer … there are comments to be made ….

Kirsten

To read more:

“Milton H. Erickson, M.D. An American Healer” Betty Alice Erickson and Bradford Keeney eds.

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2.3.2007 von kirsten.

On Wednesday, I attended a fascinating event organised by the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce, the journal “Handelsblatt” and INSEAD, the renowned business school in Fontainebleau and Singapore, called “More Women into Top-Management Positions”. 

Herminia Ibarra, the The INSEAD Chaired Professor of Organisational Behaviour, gave a keynote to about 200 or so German professional women from many different industries. She was REALLY inspiring: interesting, intelligent, witty, lively …

Here are some of the interesting things that she said (ok, ok, I had to made my peace with the teenage girl vividly quoting Immanuel Kant to not so amused teenage boys that is somewhere stashed away in my memories of myself, and I actually managed to take notes. Let’s say, I did it for you guys):

In becoming a leader, men and women consistently struggle with three things:

1) Thinking strategically

2) Identifying stakeholders and

– learning to sell (not just produce) good ideas

– working through networks and coalitions

3) broadening one’s “natural” leadership style to fit more constituencies

I think this is very interesting from a solution focused point of view — Solution focus MUST be able to help with all of these. Strategic thinking: “If a miracle happened …”, Identifying Stakeholders: Circular questions / Perspective Change “How would your boss notice …” Broadening Leadership Style: “If something does not work, do something different”.

We only seem to have difficulties with the “selling good ideas” part.

Which brings me to the next very interesting discovery:

Chip and Dan Heath “Made to Stick: Why some Ideas Survive and Others Die” — a very good book for those of us who are not only in the business of making ourselves rich and famous but also in the business of making this a better (and alive) place for everyone.

On that note,

*seriously*

Kirsten

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22.2.2007 von kirsten.

After a bit on the road in Nürnberg and Weißenburg (South of Germany — picturesque, rural, blue skies, green meadows, an interesting job, and a visit to a friend http://www.axelcaspary.de/), I’m back home in the office … home on the range, home in the office (I challenge you to ponder that one).

Speaking about pondering things — here are two books that are absolutely brilliant, silly, ingenious, dumb, deep (*gg*), fun:

Astonish Yourself — 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit

Very interesting experiments like “crying in the cinema” (I recommend “Titanic”), or “believing in the presence of a scent” (I recommend “the smell of your grandparents’ hallway”). I have no idea what this could be good for, but it’s interesting

http://www.amazon.com/Astonish-Yourself-Experiments-Philosophy-Everyday/dp/0142003131

And

This Book will Change your Life by Benrik

It makes you draw, jump, do lots of silly things (note the implication of agency here *gg*) — the perfect gift for someone who needs a little bit of devine pranksterhood in his or her life.

http://www.amazon.com/This-Book-Will-Change-Your/dp/0452284899/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/104-2175374-1621558

On that note … cu ’round (and square)

*silly today*

 Kirsten

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13.2.2007 von kirsten.

I’m sitting in the train station of Brussels, have just missed my train, and the next is not for 3 hours. I thought this was the 21st century, but, somehow, I must be mistaken. So I bought hideously expensive internet access *you probably can guess by now that I am not an entirely happy cookie*, read my emails and then thought, why not share with you a very interesting and amusing book:

Paul Strathern.  Dr. Strangelove’s Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius.  London: Penguin, 2001.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

“Instability would appear to be fundamental to any such [financial] system, and it is arguably the very nature of how it works.”

Interesting when you view it from a complexity theory standpoint, I think. We cannot know everything about it, but we must still try and keep the international financial system from crashing somehow.

From Robert Owen, the founding father of the British trade unions who was one of the first to find out that happy and educated workers are more productive:

“Marriage is an unnatural crime [which] destroys the finest feelings and best powers of the species, by changing sincerity, kindness, affection, sympathy and pure love into deception, envy, jealousy, hatred and revenge…”

For those who wonder why I like this statement, remember I went to school in Berkeley … and, like Owen, I am married …

and on a more serious, discursive note:

“Money did not have a self, it had a function. Money wasn’t pieces of gold, or even the things for which they could be exchanged. It wasn’t a thing, it was a action … Money should be regarded as a verb, not a noun.”

(This is Stathern taking about John Law, the person to invent paper money)

Have fun with these…

Kirsten

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11.2.2007 von kirsten.

Just yesterday, I posted the video-clip with my interview with Prof. Rom Harré (http://solutionsacademy.com/videos.htm) on the solutions in organisations mailing list (Solution Focused practice with organisations [SOLUTIONS-L@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM]) and my webstatistics show me that already 165 people saw it!!

Maybe you would like a few book tips, too

Harré, Rom and Michael Tissaw. Wittgenstein and Psychology. Ashgate, 2005.

(Great introduction on Wittgenstein — not a “page-turner” or easy read, but really clear)

Harré, Rom. Key Thinkers in Psychology. Sage, 2005.

(A concise and interesting summary and evaluation of the most important thinkers in psychology in the 20th century — very good as a reference work!)

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10.2.2007 von kirsten.

These are Kirsten’s musings on Solution Focus, Philosophy and the world at large.
For more information on SolutionsAcademy look at

http://www.solutionsacademy.com

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