Blog - The Solutions Focus

Let's get the conversation going | Paul

15/1/2020

We’ve been at a conference in Leuven, Belgium, and our European colleagues tell us that more and more organisations are turning to Solutions Focus as their preferred method of change - for individuals, teams and even the organisational culture as a whole.

They like the focus on what’s wanted (rather than endless analysis of problems), the harnessing of resources (which is fast and economical) and the rapid progress with small, experimental steps (rather than a cumbersome three-year plan that’s daunting to implement and out of date before the ink is dry).

If you think you might be a suitable client to work along those lines with us, here are three good questions to decide which project will most benefit from our collaboration:

What burning issues do you have, that you suspect a solutions-focused approach might well help with?
Is this an issue really worth working on, so that the benefits of progress will outweigh the effort it’s going to take?
Who do we need to get involved to make an engaging start?

Let us know your answers, and we’ll get the conversation going...

How to do a Success Analysis | Paul

15/1/2020

When was the last time you did something well and greeted it with a Success Analysis?

Here’s how to do a Success Analysis when you have a team with accomplishments to its name.

Gather everyone around, and share stories of when this success happens. The stories will ideally touch upon:

What prompts it?
What’s each contributor doing?
What conditions are helping to maintain this success?

Then task the team to work together to generate a list of 10 (home grown) tips you could give to a new member of the team so that they will also know how to do this.

We tend to over-rate how much we can learn from mistakes and failures - mostly, the learning consists of ‘Don’t do that again'.

But the real gold of knowing what to do (instead of the mistaken behaviour) is only found when we discover what works. Then we can analyse and re-apply it.

How coaching offers a way of learning in organisations full of experts

31/10/2016

If we already know how to do something, it appears that there’s nothing to learn. We are already expert, and in most organisations an Expert is a great thing to be. But if we want people to learn, then those people have to accept that there are things they don’t yet know.

That’s relatively easy when it’s abstract - ‘oh yes, there’s always more to learn’ - but a lot trickier if what they don’t yet know is important stuff that would make them better at their job. That’s because it’s tantamount to admitting that they are not at the top of their game. And that is tough to do in a competitive arena where weakness is frowned upon or turned to your disadvantage.

If you want people to be curious, then ‘not-knowing’ has to be OK. How can that be encouraged in an instant-answer-now and an expertise-valued environment?

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'.

Historic England

15/8/2016

Historic England looks after the country’s heritage. It’s almost a solutions-focused organisation by definition as its very purpose is to look for what’s worthwhile in the past and do what needs to be done now to preserve it for the future. That’s what we do with our clients too: help them appreciate the resources that they have which will fuel their progress to the future they want.

The single biggest secret of change in organisations | Paul

4/1/2016

If you want change in your organisation, change the conversations

A brief history of coaching

Coaching has taken a couple of decades to establish itself as a profession and management tool. The rise of coaching means managers are pretty familiar with the idea of a structured dialogue with a colleague, usually one of the manager’s direct reports.

The coaching is typically aimed at sorting out a problem, clarifying goals or encouraging better performance.

Results vary, depending not only on the skill of the coach, but also on the approach that the coach decides to take. A lot of time gets wasted with problem-saturated approaches, and managers are missing wonderful opportunities to make a worthwhile difference.

The best kept secret in OD | Janine

21/10/2013

What’s gone well in your organisation today?
What have you achieved that is significant, however small?
What have your people done to delight a customer or move an important project one step further forward?

Simple questions – but surprisingly not heard that often in corporate life. In the business world we more often shine our spotlight on what went wrong rather than what went right. We spend hours raking over the debris of failed projects, obsessing about exactly why we lost that important client or desperately trying to understand why employees just don’t seem to be buying into our latest change initiative.

How we learn to learn in organisations | Paul

11/2/2013

'What is learning?' When this question was posed at a recent Organisational Development network meeting, several people's thoughts went straight back to school. In classrooms, they said, particularly during the early years, they were dragged through a fixed process with little decision or choice. Later, they and their colleagues chose to learn - some of them, at least.

When learning, we can distinguish between learning facts and learning how to do things. Repeating facts is rather different from knowing how to do something. In organisations, we are often more interested in people learning to do things, often tasks that can be defined and in many cases measured. We call these ‘skills’ when they are desirable or useful.