Do you find it hard to make decisions? Yes or No? If you find out more about both sides of a decision, it may help. Or you just be even more stuck between the two options. What to wear for a conference - that should be relatively easy. It is for me, but not for my business partner. And what about the ‘big’ decisions? Especially if you are anxiously stuck. How about some different routes towards reaching those? |
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![]() Nice to see the number one story in the Observer this week was ‘Viruses save a man from antibiotic-resistant bacteria’, in which a 69-year-od American is brought out of a coma and has his life saved by an injected cocktail of bacteriophages. The story appears just 16 years after we wrote about phages in the first edition of The Solutions Focus, as an illustration of the SF principle, ‘Every case is different.’ Each phage will attack only one virus, so you have to find the right one to be effective. The trouble with the broad brush approach of antibiotics is that certain viruses become immune to their effects. That’s rather like different approaches to organisational problems. Broad-spectrum approaches can be applied, often with good effect - but not always. We recommend taking care to find the solution that works uniquely for you. Read more in The Solutions Focus, Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE, by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow. And you can find the Guardian article here. The problem might be hard, but the solution can be easy. That’s a central insight of a solutions-focused approach. If we get too tangled up in thinking about the problem, analysing it and talking about it, we might miss the simplicity of doing something different – which may well be unrelated to the problem in any obvious way, yet improve things quickly. A nice example here, in this Guardian Weekend column by Oliver Burkeman.
One of the most important ideas in Solutions Focus is that the problem is not necessarily related to the solution. And this notion seems odd to many people. They wonder how can you get to a solution if you don't start with a problem.
A first step may be to imagine various issues where there is no problem.
Something I learned while facilitating a three-day event for a 30-member team from various continents was that the impacts of a change programme can be slow to manifest. In itself that’s not an issue - unless your objectives include instant results.
Still, there’s plenty you can do in the meantime to ensure that the results turn out favourably. You can do a great deal to re-assure yourself, your clients, your funders, that you are on the right tracks. It’s called 'positioning for impact'.
A post on the Art of Hosting list asked, ‘What if the art of hosting and harvesting is how to be with complexity in a simple way?’ – which rang a bell!
As you may have been vaguely aware, our strapline at The Solutions Focus is ‘Simplicity in a Complex World’. (Does anyone take any notice of straplines or are they simply a way to keep brand gurus employed?) |
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