We are running one of our favourite Solutions Focus training activities during a coaching programme. Nine leaders from a multi-national company are working out what they would say if they were in a follow-up coaching session and their client said nothing was better.

It’s a fun activity because it stretches the leaders, encouraging them to be creative. If one of the main topics of a coaching session is what’s better since the previous session, then how do they get their coachees to talk about that, if their first question - ‘What’s better?’ - gets the dreaded ‘Nothing’ response?

They see the pitfall. If they ask, ‘Why is nothing better?’, they are inviting the client to run through excuses and complain about others, not to mention go on the defensive if they feel the leader had expected them to have made progress.

And so our participants come up with some great ideas. One suggests simply waiting - it’s the coachee’s turn to speak if the leader waits long enough, and so they’ll eventually come up with something that has gone better. Another recommends overlooking the ‘nothing’ and switching the conversation to a reminder of what the coachee wanted to achieve, and to check how it’s going with that project - inevitably they are some distance along that track.

This is our second day of an ambitious programme with a new client in Amsterdam. Our participants are a senior group, including a few from HR, travelling in from around Europe. Most know each other reasonably well. And it’s clear from the start that they love getting into the discussions about the solutions-focused approach and how it might help them with their organisational issues.

As with many managers, they tend to be a bit quick at jumping to conclusions. No matter how tricky the topic, they have that managerial tendency to know what the other person should do with their problem. As coaches, they’ll need to hold off for a least a few minutes, in case their coachee comes up with an idea (maybe a better one, certainly one they are more likely to be willing to own and act on).

They are getting a sense of how a coaching style can build capacity in their colleagues, encouraging them to work out their own solutions, taking a load off of the leaders’ backs. They sense the value of enlivening the resourcefulness of their staff. And by the end of the two-day training, they’ll be ready to apply this very pragmatic set of tools to the projects that they’ll select for themselves to test out these ideas.

We’ll meet them again for the second phase in about three weeks. And now we know what to do if they say ’Nothing’ when we ask them what progress they’ve made, although we are expecting to hear many tales of progress as they incorporate SF into their daily conversations and projects.

When developing an agenda for a government-backed think-tank event on innovation in climate risk insurance practices, we were wondering what would make for stimulating activities between heavy rounds of technical discussions. That’s what we do when we hear phrases like ‘insurance practices’ or ‘government-backed think tank’.
 
Breaking up proceedings with a series of two-minute ‘chat-to-your-neighbour’ conversations seemed ideal, but we had to make a careful choice of topics.
 
A first thought was to ask the pairs to brainstorm the ‘barriers’ - all the things that might make pursuing the solutions that were emerging from the discussion difficult to achieve.
 
Of course, it’s easy enough to find what will stand in your way, if that’s what you are looking for.  And we know that this is a regular topic that gets picked for discussion at project meetings. It’s the equivalent of exploring ‘weaknesses’ and ‘threats’ in a SWOT analysis, for example.
 
But we realised that switching metaphors to ‘Avenues of greatest promise so far’ could be much more productive. For one, it makes for more optimistic conversations, which help to sustain mood and energy into the next session. Plus it helps identify what to prioritise among a bunch of suggestions, while listing ingredients that will be needed for any ‘recipe for success’, if any of the possibilities are to be turned into practical initiatives. In that way, the difficulties get overcome without being the main focus of attention.
 
Add a few flip charts around the room to give everyone a break from sitting in static table groups, and we have a really fruitful energiser.
 
How have you shifted groups from ‘Problem Talk’ to ‘Solutions Talk’ to help achieve more when time together is so precious?

Feeling that you belong to something bigger than just yourself is an indicator of well-being. In other words, it’s good for your health. It’s highly solution-focused to feel a close connection to your resources - kindred spirits, fellow travellers, supporters.
 
So what are you doing that helps you feel connected to your gang, your tribe or your community?
 
Here are a few activities you could do to boost your connections:

• Show up at meetings
• Follow and contribute to your Facebook group
• Read the messages on a relevant specialist list-serv – you can often join in with a range of topics from practical tip requests to the most profound philosophical questions
• Attend - and lead sessions at – your annual specialist conference
• Tell other people about your interests, knowing there’s a whole bunch of people who’ll also be fascinated, know the research and be involved in case examples
• Write blogs and publish them - yes, share your passion in public

Anything there to encourage you? Even a small step can make a significant difference, right...

​

One of the virtues of Solutions Focus as a technology of change is that we can apply it to any situation where we want something to be different. That’s especially true when we are stuck or uncertain about which direction to take.
 
At a recent conference, a group of us looked at how a solutions-focused practitioner would tackle climate change.
 
For a start, rather than analysing the problem again, we can accept that an overwhelming majority of scientists have made it clear that we are heading for trouble. The next temptation is to dive quickly into problem solving and action planning – and we know that there’s plenty of that going on, so we can save what we know about those efforts until later in the discussion. Instead, we’d invite our group of world leaders, concerned citizens, radical activists of whoever, to reach common ground by describing what kind of life and world we want to see (if the problem were solved or if it vanished overnight).
 
Questions along those lines might include:

• Given your understanding of the reality of the situation, what are your best hopes for the future?
• What things do you cherish about life that you’d like more of.
• If we woke up tomorrow in a world of climate stability, what would we notice?
• Tell me a story about the world you want to live in.
• What can we agree that we all want?

 
The conversation would produce visions of a future we might feel inspired to work towards, and would set up descriptions we could recognise of what might already be happening in some places and when they occur in future.
 
Now is the time for what’s working already:

• Who are the most persuasive advocates of what we want here, and how are they doing that?
• Tell me a story about successful change projects and what you know about them?
• Who are good people and organisations to build alliances with?
• There’s productive and useful work been done with COP, Paris and beyond. How might we do more of that?

 
And then we’d discuss what to do next:

• What might be a small next step towards that desired world?
• What qualities do you have that you can bring to changing your own life?
• What would people around you notice you doing that shows you take this seriously?
• Let’s gather to share stories of a future with fewer industrial resources.

 
Of course, a lot depends on who is asking which questions of whom and where.

​Given a crisis that can be tackled on all sorts of levels, whether personal, community, national, international or global, a Solutions Focus approach can offer surprisingly productive progress.

So Boris has been picked as ‘the strong leader’ who can reunite the country. His strength is as a communicator, an enthusiast. And this seems to fit the times, in which the fashion for competencies in organisations has been overtaken by an enthusiasm for strengths. 

It’s thanks mainly to the impact of positive psychologists.  But what are their respective uses for organisations?  Is it competencies for recruitment, then strengths for development? And if so, have we got it the wrong way round with Boris, and his well-publicised lack of competence will scupper him, whatever his strengths?

The words themselves have been wrested from everyday use into a new world of specialist jargon.
Competent used to mean good enough to do something.  So a competence (the noun) gets to be seen as a kind of ability, often indicated by a certificate.  

Strong conjured up physical strength mostly, and was a special, outstanding quality, which had to impress people before it got mentioned.  Strength also is a noun, and there’s a danger of looking for things (nouns) as somehow residing inside people, losing the context of where they are doing stuff.

Now in the professional, career coaching sphere, the terms are twisted further.  A ’strength’ becomes something you are good at, and you feel energised to use them.  But strengths can be over-used or over-done, and suddenly become a weakness. (How can that be possible?)

Strengths tell us about individuals and what they can do. Competencies are put together in frameworks to show what organisations need from people for them to serve in particular roles.  They can offer a list, for example, of desirable leadership behaviours.  And they can be constraining for recruiters and exclusionary for applicants.

In solution-focused circles, we are more interested in resources - whatever might prove useful for you or your team - in a particular context. Those resources aren’t necessarily psychological constructs (like ‘strengths’), so much as experiences, skills and your connections (inside and outside the team). And interviewers can discover these in plain, non-technical language, with more clarity, more fairness, less cost and less bureaucracy.

​Sadly, we were not consulted about the new Prime Minister. But we could help your organisation get the right people into the right place, ready to do the work that’s needed and for which they are best suited.

Roger Federer and Novak Ddjokovic are masters of playing in the zone. They maintain a laser-like attention for hours at a stretch. It’s all about where they focus that attention – which is the same skill needed of a solutions-focused practitioner. Our choice of where we put our attention is what makes the difference.
 
Now, nobody knows what they do when they play in the zone. Because when they are in the zone they have no bandwidth left over to think about being in the zone. As soon as they switch attention to what’s it like to be in the zone, they’ve left the zone they were hoping to find out more about. 
 
You can reflect before or after on what is was like in the zone, just as you can preview or remember anything else. But just as the memory of pain does not hurt in the same way as the original pain, so a recall of zoning is not itself an identical zone experience.
 
And you can recreate the conditions that help you get into the zone – noticing what works.
 
Perhaps the exception is a philosopher whose experience of being in the zone occurs when thinking about being in the zone. We could always ask one for their insights..

We’re embarking on a new coaching programme with an international company. Our participants are keen to be good coaches, and we’re observing them closely so as to help them accomplish this.  But a question for us and for each of them is this: as coach, do you want your client to perform well in front of you during your session, or in the next critical encounter when you are not there?
 
It’s easy for the client of a sports coach to play a great game during the coaching session or for the corporate client to talk a good game in their hour with the coach. But what’s more important is for them to transfer those displays of skills into the arenas where they count. 
 
To mitigate the effect of looking good in rehearsal but not always peaking when the lights go up, we build project work into our organisational coaching programmes. We want to learn about real results, and in particular the difference that bringing in coaching techniques is making to the important everyday work. We ask for quantitative and qualitative reports. What’s changed? What’s different, and are those differences - on reflection - worthwhile?
 
To be a coach is to be willing to trade control (or the illusion of control, more likely) for influence. And sometimes that influence goes unseen. One consequence is that it’s the coach’s job to trust the player more than the player trusts themselves.
 
It’s relatively easy for a solutions-focused coach, as we already take the view that the client as expert in their own performance. Sure, the coach brings something, including helping the client to identify their critical variables. We may also know stuff from our experience, which we can share if the client demands information, even though it may be detrimental for them compared to figuring it out for themselves.  There’s a balance here if a client wants to pay for transfer of knowledge. One solutions is to tell them what they want to know, and ask if it is working to improve their game.
 
If you are a more traditional coach, whose main role has been to transmit your technical expertise to your client, you could convert what you are telling people to do into elements you can direct their attention and awareness towards.  A 'doing instruction’ becomes an ’awareness instruction'. We invite our clients to learn from testing and experience, not from (our admittedly expert) hearsay.  
 
Then your client goes off to do the work between your sessions. And we may or may not see how they perform, but they can report on progress - and their own recipes for managing to succeed - when they choose to return.

Way back in 1972 in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey said he was sure adults could learn like children, with very little technical instruction.
 
In his recent lecture in the UK, he called this approach,'not trial and error, but trial and correction’. To do it successfully, he says, you have somehow to deal with the inner voice that loves telling you what to do - while judging you as you do it, usually unfavourably. When you listen to the inner voice - 'Self 1' as Tim calls it - with its predictions and instructions, it can interfere with your performance. A preferable alternative is to have a go and see what happens,
 
Gallwey proposes an equation: “Performance equals Potential minus Interference".  Thus we can aim to remove or get away from any interfering chatter in our heads, favouring quietness or calm as a route to improved performance and by releasing the powers of ‘Self 2’. 'Self 2' is that part of us that knows unconsciously what to do, and will do it well if allowed to do so.
 
When 'Self 1’ is talking unhelpfully to 'Self 2'. you can see it manifesting in over-tightening of the muscles. In sports, that typically leads to poorer timing of shots, visibly less elegance. When in doubt, in sport, socially or at work, we tend to tighten. We think the antidote is to relax, but ‘relax’ is a clumsy, blunt instruction. The older part of the brain looks after muscle coordination, and the brain doesn’t speak in English ('Relax!') to the hand. Linguistic instructions at best operate in a parallel universe to that of our chemistry and physiology. Even if we were capable of making a translation across those dimensions, that linguistic message - if it's to do any justice to the complexity of the operation - is going to struggle for accuracy and will end up being too long and too slow.
 
The brain speaks in neuro-chemicals. This is a profound insight, harnessed by Gallwey and also (amongst others), Applied Improvisers (AI), Solution-focused practitioners (SF) and exponents of the Alexander Technique (AT). 
 
Working in theatre, Improvisation guru Keith Johnstone realised that if the aim is for an actor to appear natural on the stage, then trying too hard impedes rather than helps that actor. Hence his injunction to ‘be obvious’ or ‘be average’. An Alexander Technique trainer can’t teach you explicitly all the elements of walking - there are too many to hold in our limited consciousness, and we can't describe if fully or fast enough with our limited language. But she can assist you in directing your attention to greater awareness of certain critical variables, such as the degree of freedom in your neck muscles.
 
Similarly, smart sports players and solution-focused coaches prefer to practice not-knowing until the last moment what shot to play or question to ask. By delaying such decisions by an instant, you give yourself the maximum amount of  topical information, at precisely the moment it’s most needed.
 
That’s the theory, and each of the fields I mention has its methods for turning theory to practice. My favourite contribution from Inner Game is that the best way to do this is by focusing on critical variables. Variables are elements that can change, have different values. Critical means the ones that matter in the topic under discussion. 
 
We stiffen when we perceive pressure; pressure is one of the concepts that invites Self 1 to get involved, to the detriment of our Self 2 abilities. Pressure seems real to the commentator and even to the player, even though ‘pressure’ is a constructed concept with no visible reality. If you asked a player how they would  play that shot if rallying or in a practice game, rather than in the heat of competition, they could show you - and it's better. It’s only a perception of ‘pressure’ that results in them not doing it in this match too.
 
It may be possible to fight Self 1 or ignore Self 1, and much energy goes into those efforts. Inner Game sidesteps brilliantly and says give Self 1 something useful to do, namely pay attention to relevant, useful aspects - that is, the critical variables. It’s the job of the coach sometimes to enable the performer (on the field, on the stage, in life) to bypass Self 1 and communicate with Self 2. You might, for example, ask your coachee ‘How would you like to do this task some day? OK, show me. And now choose between these different options'.
 
And if that’s all good - and I think it is - then the question for us is this: How do we go about discovering the critical variables in each of the arenas in which we wish to improve our performance?

‘Therapy is nothing but a bunch of talk’, as the founder of Solution-focused Brief Therapy Steve de Shazer once said. And it’s not too much of a stretch to consider leadership, too, as nothing but a bunch of talk.
 
Organisations spend a great deal of money to develop and train their leaders. More than £20,000 per leader per year, we've seen estimated. And beyond that, people who want to be leaders get themselves expensive educations at business schools.  
 
The idea is that this spending pays off, as these improved leaders increase profits, recruit and retain better staff, engage and motivate them more effectively and so forth.  
 
But what are they taught on their leadership courses? All sort of theories of leadership. Most of which are based on limited or dated research, with conclusions drawn from one set of circumstances as if they can be applied (scientifically) to other circumstances that different leaders will face in their digitally-reconstructed futures in radically different organisations.
 
Even leaving aside the quality of research and the rigour of the logic of the leadership arguments, attempts to apply these theories may or may not be wise. Perhaps it is simply not possible to have a true and accurate map of leadership. To say the least, the landscape of leadership is not fixed.
 
When people mistake a map for the territory, and then people do not react as they are expected or supposed to, we are tempted to call them resistant (to our great idea). I’m the leader, and you should follow me this way. The theory says so. We are confronted with disappointment and even argument and rebellion.  
 
Whereas if we were less tied to theory and were instead, say, trying out something which seems to be a good idea during the course of our leading, we could be looking for signs of co-operation and progress – key elements of a solutions-focused approach.
 
Instead of giving leaders theories, let’s give them tips. Offer hints on how better to interact with people, ways to deal with changing situations, tools for collaboration. And a reminder to keep an eye out for what works.

​There they are, staring at you. Waiting for the magic. They invested time, money and trust. In you. And you have a rough idea what they might want. After all, they signed up for something with a title, a running time, a description.
 
But that was vague and written a while ago. Now they are actually here - facing you in a room or across your screen - and they look expectant. We all know it’s going to go so much better if you can find out exactly what they want. It will help you to shape the event to meet their needs, making steering adjustments that prevent collisions, detours and crashes. And it will help them to recognise that they are receiving value and making progress.
 
Let’s say you have a group of 8-20 people, who are going to meet at least a couple of times. That means you are able to dedicate a fair amount of time to finding out what they want individually and collectively. Ideally, the process will also produce some record of these desires, which can serve as a touchstone to return to for timely check-ins. How best to do so?
 
We’ll follow our well-established facilitation concept of 'Think, pair, share.’ That means everyone gets a few moments on their own first to think about the answer to the question. Then they speak in pairs or small groups to articulate and further develop that thinking. Finally, step 3 is sharing these answers with the whole group, so that we have a collective result.
 
In this group, we’ll start by asking them to spend a minute on their personal account, writing down their first thoughts to answer the question, ‘What are your best hopes from attending this event?’ If they look blank, we might add, ‘After it’s over, what will tell you that coming here has been useful for you in some way?'
 
Observe the scribbling.
 
Now they can get into 2s or 3s to interview each other with a scripted A4 sheet, to develop their answers, perhaps picking up inspiration from each other’s ideas.
 
What’s on this A4 sheet? Further variations and elaborations of those first questions.

• At the end of programme, what do you want to have accomplished?
• What will you be able to do (better) then than now?
• How will your colleagues/friends/family know that coming here has been worthwhile for you?
• What difference will these new things make to your life/work?

You can tell the participants to choose the questions that most interest or attract them. While they have this conversation, they can write their answers on post-it notes, then collect them (signed or anonymously - you don’t need to know who has said what) onto a wall or flipchart. They may wonder whether they should write their own answers or write for their partner. The latter is potentially bonding, though adds a dangerous frisson of less accuracy.
 
Which brings us to step 3. Let’s hear these hopes read aloud. And there they are, visible to all, easy to check, and ready to revisit next time they are needed