Blog - The Solutions Focus

What’s it like in your decisive moments? | Paul

15/1/2018

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?

Every case is different

29/12/2017

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.

Hard problems, easy solutions

13/11/2017

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.

Sleeping with President Trump

16/2/2017

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.

Is your present tense or your future perfect?

9/1/2017

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what is going to happen? You could make plans with so much more confidence and feeling of certainty. You’d feel like you were facing the known rather than the unknown. You could move along the scale, away from fear and trepidation, towards excitement and curiosity, perhaps even arriving at comfort and security.

But the future, it is said, is difficult to predict. Notoriously so, in fact, and getting more and more difficult with each shocking change in economics, politics and climate.

Are you positioning for impact with your change programme? | Paul

19/9/2016

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'.

How do we make our big decisions? Ripeness is all. | Paul

1/8/2016

The language of decision-making is quite stressful. You make a choice. You have to take a decision. In German it’s a little less stressful: you meet a decision.

In our coaching conversations we can reduce the stress by changing the terms we use. How about ‘I understand you are in a time of deciding. How is that for you?'

Decisions take time, but we ask binary questions like 'Did you decide yet?’ It may be better to acknowledge the time factor, for example by changing the metaphor to one of ‘ripening the decision’. There are things you can do to help ripening - sun, rain - but you can’t rush it.

Clever people, stupid organisations | Paul

14/3/2016

A great paradox of leadership is that we seem to have clever people in stupid organisations.

Perhaps that’s because we usually view wisdom as a property of the individual. But if we face big collective problems, how about seeking and creating wisdom in a collective approach?

An element of wisdom is the ability to see beyond the obvious. Good leaders notice patterns. They discern signals amongst noise and get a sense of what’s going on. They bring the gift of making even complex circumstance more tractable.

Leaders working effectively together in an organisation (or society) can use this skill to determine from the myriad of activities and sets of information available what to pay attention to and what to overlook.

This guides the practice of colleagues – helping to clarify aims and decide where to apply effort. In your next meeting, how can you increase clarity with your colleagues and generate collective wisdom?

Does anyone read straplines? What does ours signify? | Paul

27/2/2012

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?)