​There’s a quotation from the Zen philosopher, Shunryū Suzuki, which we sometimes put up as a workshop poster. He says,  "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."
 
The expert knows what to do. All that’s needed is a quick look at the problem and - because they have dealt with it before - the expert knows how to fix it.  Flat tyre, change the tyre. Broken arm, put it in plaster. If you’re hiring a mechanic or a doctor, you don’t want them ‘not knowing’. Which is fine for these simple, repeatable-in-all-relevant aspects problems.
 
But if it’s more complex, perhaps a new problem, a tangle, an unexpected turn of events, political, multi-stakeholder or strikingly different - to mention just a few examples of the most challenging problems we now face - then a beginner mind may offer advantages.
 
The beginner mind means not leaping directly to a solution. It’s about facing the challenge as if it were fresh. Now you can contemplate if from a variety of angles, agnostic as to the next steps until you decide on those that seems most likely to work.
 
A beginner mind allows you to embrace the quality of the interaction as it unfolds. If you are in a meeting, instead of being pressured to offer instant suggestions, you can ask questions and listen, let people in the group find their own solutions.
 
This clearly has the flavour of a coaching approach, in which one function of the coach is to develop the skills, confidence and resourcefulness of the client. If the coach happens also to be the boss, then over time they’ll have a workforce that takes on more responsibility and more of the workload with more success.
 
Yes, says the client at the end of the conversation, I know what to do, and feel sufficient confidence about the next step.
 
So staying with beginner’s mind is also staying in the moment. In doing this, you resist reaching for theories or explanations, and you are able to be more attentive and available to notice what matters and what might make a difference.
 
Here beginner’s mind connects with mindfulness. We remain within the field of possibility that is the present - not stuck back in the past or projecting into a future.
 
What is the moment? You can think of it as your surface of attention. As consultants or coaches, we are working with directing people’s attention, probably towards aspects of what we think will be helpful.  We can, for example, draw attention to what participants want, to what’s going on that’s useful that they might otherwise miss.
 
During a conversation we can notice changes in perspective, without necessarily doing anything particular about them. Until the beginner mind makes an assessment and turns towards a decisive action.

​In our solution-focused practice we suggest that coaches start their follow-up sessions by asking, “What’s Better?”. The idea is to have the client reflect and speak about improvements in their life or progress on their issues. That conversation plainly shows that progress is possible, can build confidence in general, and illuminate in particular - perhaps with a Success Analysis - what works for them.
 
And yet asking ‘What’s better?’ can seem rather a blunt or even presumptive question. What if things have got worse?
 
So it’s useful to know that 'What’s better?' is a topic, not necessarily a question you ask directly. And, as with any topic, there are all sorts of ways of getting into it.

Here are a few of our favourites:
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• Since we last spoke, what’s different or better?
• What’s  been going well for you over the past few days?
• Of all the things that have been happening - I guess some better, some not so good - what’s been improving?
• Remember that scale? When’s it been a bit higher lately?
• What have you been pleased to notice since we last met?

What works better for you and your clients?

You are a coach, or perhaps a manager having a conversation - with good listening intent - with a colleague. They mention something that seems significant to them but strikes you as a relatively trivial detail or not particularly salient for your topic. Let’s call the mentioned something ‘x’.
 
Rather than letting it pass by, you ask, ‘What does x mean to you?’ Surprisingly often your conversation partner will tell you how ‘x’ connects to other things that matter in their world perspective. It turns out not to be isolated, silly or meaningless, but maybe even the key to progress.
 
How so? Well, if ‘x’ means enough to the speaker, it can be an inspiration with respect to all it connects with. That reminder then serves to make related actions relatively effortless, as they now seem more worthwhile. This is especially so if they are small, natural steps that are easy to do and that contribute disproportionately towards a bigger result.
 
When you and your people start noticing significant details, however small, you are primed to notice them more often. That’s hugely valuable if it's stuff that’s been around previously unnoticed anyway. You’ve been doing better than you thought!
 
And now you can systematise these small improvements, so that increments become major. And you are doing it by building on what’s been working (even if unnoticed to that point).

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...

​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.

It doesn’t come naturally to change a management style that’s got you to your position of seniority. If you can see what you want done or how you want a team member to do something, then a coaching conversation is unlikely to be your first choice of tool.

You might be tempted to use coaching if you see your priority is to develop the other person by giving them an opportunity to do it their way, to come up with their own ideas, and take responsibility for them. That is a real attraction for some of the HR team and senior managers of a multi-national company with whom we are currently working in The Netherlands.

These leaders also see how it can work for them when they are not so certain about what should be done or how something should be done. Then a coaching conversation can increase the range of possibilities, allowing them to make a decision at the end of the exploratory discussion.

It may be much later that they come to appreciate SF as a great way in general to get things done, faster and more enjoyably, by making best use of all resources - theirs and the coachees. For the moment, they like the idea of ‘getting the monkey off their back’ and keeping it where it belongs - with the coachee.

Yes, they are used to ‘fixing it’, by taking on the issue for themselves, or - more subtly - by instructing subordinates on how to do it. So a coaching conversation in which the coachee decides what they’ll do and is clearly positioned as responsible for giving that a go, is rather appealing.

And so we may be getting a coaching culture started. Instead of diving in every time by telling people what to do, these leaders will select a few projects, recognise a few potential conversations, and approach them deliberately in a new style - and notice carefully what results they get.

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...

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