Guest post by Coert Visser

Solution-focused principles and techniques, orginally developed in psychotherapy, have found their way into coaching, over the last decade. While an evidence base of solution-focused brief therapy is beginning to come off the ground, little research is done on the effectiveness of solution-focused coaching (one researcher who is already doing interesting research in this area is Anthony Grant). It is important that an evidence base on solution-focused coaching is built, too. Individual clients, client organizations and society at large rightfully demand that solution-focused professionals not only discover things that work but also justify what they do by scientifically testing their claims.

Standard effectiveness research approaches involve randomized controlled experiments in which the treatment of interest is compared with a reference approach and a control group. A recent review summarizes this type of coaching research, which is still in its infancy. While this approach is indispensable it is not the only useful approach and it is not without weaknesses. For one thing, this type of research requires the existence of generally accepted definitions of the treatments (coaching procedures) that are researched. This type of research comparing coaching approaches does say something about the relative effectiveness of these approaches but does not say much about the relative contribution of the constituent elements of these approaches because these are not examined separately in these types of experiments but in combination with each other.

Research aimed at a micro level of coaching can be an important addition to these standard research approaches. One example is micro-analysis research done by Janet Beavin Bavelas and her colleagues. Micro-analysis research will, in the near future, I predict, be supported by software to analyze language used in coaching conversations. As this type of research will develop a much more nuanced and specific kind of knowledge will emerge about what works and what not.

Survey based research also offers some interesting opportunities to analyze the specific interventions and behaviors of solution-focused coaches. Recently I published such a study: Testing the Association between Solution-Focused Coaching and Client Perceived Coaching Outcomes. I designed a web-based survey and administered it to 200 clients of coaches. The survey consisted of a list of 28 coach behaviors, 14 of which were solution-focused behaviors and 14 of which were behaviors solution-focused coaches would deliberately avoid. I asked clients to describe what their coaches had done and what they had not done (without referring to the solution-focused approach or any other approach, by the way). In addition to that, I asked clients to describe on several dimensions how effective the coaching had been. Solution-focused coach behaviors turned out to be were strongly positively correlated to positive coaching outcomes. Non-solution-focused coach behaviors, on the other hand, turned out to be moderately negatively correlated to positive coaching outcomes.

Then, I used a statistical technique called multiple regression analysis which gave insight into which specific coach behaviors were predictive of coaching success. This showed that the following 10 solution-focused coach behaviors in particular were associated with positive coaching outcomes:

• The coach responded with understanding to what I said (coach understandingness)
• The coach let me decide whether the coaching should be continued or terminated (client continuation choice)
• The coach focused on topics that I found useful to talk about (client topic choice)
• The coach encouraged me to describe how I wanted my situation to become (desired situation description)
• The coach encouraged me to describe what I wanted to be able to do differently (positive future behavior description)
• The coach gave me positive feedback (complimented me on what I had done well) (positive behavior feedback)
• The coach encouraged me to choose which step(s) forward I would to take (client chosen action)
• The coach used the same words as I had used (language matching)
• The coach checked several times whether our conversation was useful to me (client usefulness check
• The coach asked questions about what I had already done that had worked well (exploration of what worked)

The number of non-solution-focused coach behaviors that was predictive of positive outcomes was smaller. Three coach behaviors were, as expected, negatively associated with coaching outcomes:

• The coach told me whether the coaching should be continued or terminated (coach continuation choice),
• The coach gave me negative feedback (criticized me on what I had done wrong) (negative behavior feedback), and
• The coach chose what topics we talked about (coach topic choice).

Surprisingly (and interestingly), two non-solution-focused coach behaviors were, contrary to this study’s expectations, positively associated with coaching outcomes:

• The coach analyzed with me what the causes of my problem might be (problem cause analysis)
• The coach asked questions about when my problems were at their worst (problem peak focus)

I hope this is a good (while modest) beginning of survey based research into the effectiveness of solution-focused interventions in coaching. The details of the study can be found in the full article. Soon, I hope to publish a study into the effects of the coaching approach on coaches themselves

Solution-Focus relies on positive feedback – i.e. noticing what is working and going right instead of pointing out what is not working and going wrong.

Even more so with Solution-Focused training: for example, the whole Solutionsurfers’ Brief Coach Training is designed around positive feedback. Exclusively positive feedback. That makes the learning experience unique. At first participants are disoriented – but very quickly they begin to appreciate the empowering nature of positive feedback. Practice session after practice session, each participant’s unique coaching skills develop and evolve, by focusing on what works and ignoring what does not. A process similar to Darwinian Evolution, as pointed out here.

Yet, somehow, not using negative feedback is considered to be a sign of being a wimp. A softie. Out of touch with reality.

Actually, that is quite the opposite.

Everybody can deliver negative feedback. But only expert performers can deliver positive feedback. Because positive feedback is based on tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge.

This point has been brilliantly developed by Gary Klein in his latest book “Streetlights and Shadows – Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making” (pages 45-47).

His reasoning:

- “when we try to improve performance, we usually emphasize explicit knowledge more than tacit knowledge”; that is because “it is hard to give people feedback about tacit knowledge”

- so “in giving feedback, we tend to focus on specific procedures”

- but that means “we give feedback about departures from procedures, instead of helping people to notice subtle cues and patterns”.

- conclusion: “we find it easier to give feedback about errors than about skillful actions or about  improvements in mental models“.

So while how to deliver negative feedback is a critical and important skill, delivering positive feedback is an often neglected ingredient for building expert performance.

Noticing what works is an essential part of developing expertise. And you need to be an expert to notice the little things that are working, maybe just a little bit.

Positive feedback is for pros! :-)

Here is my rule-of-thumb regarding “social media”:

- I use this blog to share observations, thoughts, reflections about (Solution-Focused) Coaching, Training and Consulting.

- I use my business FaceBook page http://www.facebook.com/paoloterni to post daily links to articles or blog posts that might be relevant to Coaches,  Therapists, Trainers and Consultants. If interested, just “like” the page and the links will appear in your FB newsfeed.

I decided to break my own guidelines and post here the following link —>  http://lifehacker.com/5867049/nine-stubborn-brain-myths-that-just-wont-die-debunked-by-science

And here is the summary:
Nine Stubborn Brain Myths That Just Won’t Die, Debunked by Science
Brain games will make you smarter! The internet is making you dumber! Alcohol is killing your brain cells! The brain is a mystery we’ve been trying to solve for ages, and the desire to unlock its secrets has led to vast amounts of misinformation. Many of these false notions are more widely believed than the truth. We took our healthy skepticism and a bunch of brain research to find the truth behind some of the most common myths about intelligence and our brains. Here’s what we learned.

I loved reading Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves. It introduced me to the concept of “Adaptive Unconscious”. And it is the book on which Malcolm Gladwell based his bestseller, Blink.

I loved even more reading Timothy Wilson’s latest book, “Re-Direct: the Surprising New Science of Psychological Change“. A must-read. Science-based. Full of interesting information and insights. And the “story-editing” approach Wilson advocates shares with Solution-Focus the same strategy: a brief intervention that has self-sustaining effects leading to long lasting changes in behaviors.

Wilson’s approach is based on the idea that it is all about the interpretations we give to events – not about the events themselves.
Not a novel idea, since it was one of the cornerstones of Stoic thinkers.
But now we have the science to test this approach and… it works!

The interventions Wilson puts under the “story editing” umbrella follow one of the following strategies to change the stories people tell themselves:

• redirecting the narrative in a way that leads to lasting change: exercises, like Pennebaker’s writing protocol, which are useful for people who have failed to come up with a coherent interpretation of an event that does not make sense and / or it is unpleasant to think about (e.g., trauma)
• story prompting – redirecting people down a particular narrative path with subtle prompts; for example, by giving people information that would allow them to reframe their experiences. E.g. students might interpret their academic difficulties when they start college as a sign they are not cut out for it; simply showing them data that tells them experiencing difficulties at first isnormal, in addition to a video of peers saying they too experienced difficulties when they started, is enough to have a significant impact
• do good, be good; as Aristotle said, “we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlling by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.”  So by acting in a certain way, people shape their narratives in ways that are helpful to them. E.g., they act kindly and so they get to think of themselves as kind persons.

One of the most interesting point made by the author is that while we thoroughly test drugs before putting them on the market, we do not do the same with psychological interventions. As a result, much money and effort has been spent on programs that seem to make sense – but do not work. One example: D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education).

It gets worse. Not only some programs or interventions do not work – they might actually be harmful. Among these: CISD (Critical Incident Stress Debrief); “Scared-straight” programs like R.I.P. (Restoring Inner-city Peace). Bottom line: test first, roll out later. Not vice-versa!

But as I mentioned, the book is not about what does not work – it is about what works in facilitating self-sustaining, and therefore long-lasting, change.

You will learn about a technique that, again, was conceived by the Stoics – negative visualization. You will learn about the power of volunteering for keeping teenagers out of trouble. You will learn about the tricky but effective “minimal sufficiency principle“. And you will learn about how a simple 15-minute writing assignment allowed students to close the achievement gap. Among many other things… and it is all in —> here.

Very often, in explaining what I do, I need to clarify what Coaching is.

People who sell New Agey mumbo jumbo by calling themselves Coaches do not help.

I tried to set the record straight in this post, where I state that Coaching is simply a purposeful conversation designed to help clients improve their performances and move forward with their life/career.

Now, Atul Gawande, in a recently published article in the New Yorker, talks about Coaching and makes the same point – only better, and from the perspective of a Client: “no matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where Coaching comes in.”

Granted, he is not talking about Solution-Focused Coaching but about what I called Behavioral Coaching in the above mentioned post.

Still, the article clearly defines what Coaching is, and it is a very interesting read.

This quote from the article should be framed and put in any office where Coaching is delivered:

“The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury—you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_gawande#ixzz1ZvPXXuJD

Note: I already posted about Atul Gawande, specifically about his Checklist Manifesto book, here: http://www.briefcoachingsolutions.com/checklists-solution-focused-coaching/

Little Bets by Peter Sims is a small treatise on successful innovation.

I think it is more than that – it is a treatise on how to navigate complexity successfully.

It shares with Solution-Focus a strictly inductive approach – in the author’s words: “little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable”.

According to current research, Peter Sims points out that there are two kinds of innovators:

“conceptual innovators” – rare characters who start with a bold vision and pursue it relentlessly, often achieving important breakthroughs early in life; Mozart or Bill Gates can be thought of as belonging to this category

“experimental innovators” – people like the comedian Chris Rock, or Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos. They do not begin with a brilliant idea but they discover it by using an experimental, iterative, trial-and-error approach.

I would definitely put Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer, the founders of the Solution-Focused approach, in the latter category!

Peter Sims illustrates the key principles according to which experimental innovators operate by using many examples – from Pixar, from P&G, from HP, from the US Army, from Starbucks, from famous architects, Nobel – prize winners and famous performers.

It is definitely the stories that make this book interesting and a pleasant read.

The chapters’ titles summarize the key points:

- Big Bets vs. Little Bets: little bets allow us to develop the situation and find out more about what works by acting and observing how the system responds

- the Growth Mindset: it is necessary to have a Growth Mindset because the small bets approach implies failure

- Failing Quickly to Learn Fast: since we are going to fail, it is best to be wrong as fast as possible, so we can discover asap what is right. One great way of doing that is by testing prototypes in the real world and then improve on them; “it is better to fix problems than to prevent errors”

- the Genius of Play; humor, laughter, focusing on the positive and what is working; that is the key to create an atmosphere where experimentation is possible

- Problems are the New Solutions: constraints (budget, timeframe, materials…) actually help you focus and measure your progress; creativity does not happen in a void

- Questions are the New Answers: throw out theory and start experiencing things – “we can’t even know what questions to ask until we reach beyond what is already known through a process of discovery: carefully exploring, observing and listening”. The key to innovation is asking the right questions

- Learning a Little from a Lot – the importance of being open to experience and to different points of view

- Learning a Lot from a Little – tapping into “active users” (early adopters) to better understand what people might want

- Small Wins: they are important building blocks, they are “landmarks that can either confirm we are heading in the right direction or tell us we need to change course”

An essential read for entrepreneurs, leaders, coaches and consultants.

Michael Shermer’s “The Believing Brain” is a gem: a treatise on the brain as a “belief engine”.

I strongly recommend it: Shermer shows how “dependent our beliefs are on a multitude of subjective, personal, emotional and psychological factors”; how belief systems are “formed, nourished, reinforced, changed and extinguished”; how belief systems operate ‘”with regard to belief in religion, the afterlife, God, extraterrestrial, conspiracies, politics, economics and ideologies”; and finally how we know which beliefs are true and which are false.

Here are a few selected quotes – I hope you find them intriguing enough to make you want to get the book and read it.

On how we form beliefs:

“The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data.

…

The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.

…

These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and these beliefs shape our understanding of reality. Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs..”

On belief- dependent realisms:

“In fact, all models of the world, not just scientific models, are foundational to our beliefs, and belief-dependent realism means that we cannot escape this epistemological trap. We can, however, employ the tools of science, which are designed to test whether or not a particular model or belief about reality matches observations made not just by ourselves but by others as well.”

“What you believe is what you see. The label is the behavior. Theory molds data. Concepts determine percepts. Belief-dependent realism.”

On the relationship between “believing weird things” and intelligence:

“A common myth most of us intuitively accept is that there is a negative correlation between intelligence and belief: as intelligence goes up belief in superstition or magic goes down. This, in fact, turns out not to be the case, especially as you move up the IQ spectrum… once people commit to a belief, the smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.”

On why it makes sense we evolved to err on the “false positive” side, i.e. believing something is real when it is not

“If you assume that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator but it turns out that it is just the wind, you have made what is called a Type I error in cognition, also known as a false positive, or believing something is real when it is not. That is, you have found a nonexistent pattern.

…

“If you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the wind but it turns out that it is a dangerous predator, you have made what is called a Type II error in cognition, also known as a false negative, or believing something is not real when it is. That is, you have missed a real pattern.”

“[our] default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind.”

…

“Several psychological studies appear to support [seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch] Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection,…”

On science vs. anecdotal thinking:

“Anecdotal thinking comes naturally, science requires training.”

On how behaviors that were highly adaptive in the past misfire in today’s environment:

“(A) sweet and rich foods are strongly associated with (B) nutritious and rare. Therefore, we gravitate to any and all foods that are sweet and rich, and because they were once rare we have no satiation network in the brain that tells us to shut off the hunger mechanism, so we eat as much as we can of them.”

On uncertainty and “magic thinking”:

“Uncertainty makes people anxious, and anxiety is related to magical thinking.”

On reductionism:

“All experience is mediated by the brain. The mind is what the brain does. There is no such thing as “mind” per se, outside of brain activity. Mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain. No brain, no mind.”

On the relationship between creativity and madness:

“The connection between patternicity, creativity, and madness comes from a thinking style that is too all inclusive and that indiscriminately sees patterns everywhere.”

On religious attitudes and genetics:

“approximately 55 percent of the variance in religious attitudes is genetic, approximately 39 percent can be attributed to the nonshared environment, approximately 5 percent is unassigned, and only about 3 percent is attributable to the shared family environment”

On liberals vs. conservatives:

“Liberals are higher than conservatives on 1 and 2 (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), but lower than conservatives on 3, 4, and 5 (in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity).”

…

“…a more reflective approach is to recognize that liberals and conservatives emphasize different moral values and tend to sort themselves into these two clusters.”

On being realistic vs. political utopias:

“Good fences make good neighbors because evil people really are part of the moral landscape.”

On libertarianism:

“Ludwig von Mises was first among equals; he taught me that interventionism leads to more interventionism, and that if you can intervene to protect individuals from dangerous drugs, what about dangerous ideas?”

“Principle of Freedom: all people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.”

“… a dozen essentials to liberty and freedom that need shielding from encroachment:   1. The rule of law.   2. Property rights.   3. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.   4. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to move about the country.   5. Freedom of speech and the press.   6. Freedom of association.   7. Mass education.   8. Protection of civil liberties.   9. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states. 10. A potent police force for protection of our freedoms from attacks by other people within the state. 11. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws. 12. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws.”

“Organizing libertarians is like herding cats.”

On science:

“Feynman echoed Galileo’s principle in his observation about determining if your theory is right or wrong: “If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

“Science begins with something called a null hypothesis.

…

the hypothesis under investigation is not true, or null, until proven otherwise. A null hypothesis states that X does not cause Y. If you think X does cause Y then the burden of proof is on you to provide convincing experimental data to reject the null hypothesis.”

“So many claims of this nature are based on negative evidence. That is, if science cannot explain X, then your explanation for X is necessarily true. Not so. In science lots of mysteries remain unexplained until further evidence arises, and problems are often left unsolved until another day.”

On skepticism:

“A skeptic simply does not believe a knowledge claim until sufficient evidence is presented to reject the null hypothesis (that a knowledge claim is not true until proven otherwise).”

_______________

And this is just a sample.

In the book you can also find: a complete and detailed list of cognitive biases; an interesting account of the neuroscience of beliefs; a great (and very respectful) chapter on religion, atheism and agnosticism; insightful stories about Michael Shermer’s own life; well written stories about the emergence of science (e.g. about Galileo and the reaction to his discoveries)… and more!

In his latest book, Flourish, Martin Seligman introduces very few tools to improve well-being – most of the book is a very interesting and opinionated summary of the current status of Positive Psychology.

One of the few tools presented is called: “Active, Constructive Responding” – and it is yet another piece of evidence that Positive Psychologists are “re-inventing” well-established Solution-Focused practices.

Here I quote Seligman: ” Strangely, marriage counseling usually consists of teaching partners to fight better. This may turn an insufferable relationship into a barely tolerable one… How we respond can either build the relationship of undermine it. There are four basic ways of responding, only one of which builds relationships” – and then he proceeds by providing two examples of the four styles.

I will only use the first of his examples, and I will highlight questions that come straight from SF practice:

Example – your partner says: I received a promotion and a raise at work!

Active and Constructive Response: “That is great! I am so proud of you. I know how important that promotion was to you! Please relive the event with me now. Where were you when your boss told you? What did he say? How did you react? We should go out and celebrate!” Nonverbal: maintaining eye contact, displaying positive emotions

Passive and Constructive Response: “That is good news. You deserve it.” Nonverbal: little or no active emotional expression.

Active and Destructive Response: “That sounds like a lot of responsibility to take on. Are you going to spend fewer nights at home now?” Nonverbal: display of negative emotions.

Passive and Destructive: “What’s for dinner?” Nonverbal: little to no eye contact, leaving

[Note: Seligman credits Shelly Gable, Professor of Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, for  demonstrating that  how you celebrate is more predictive of strong relations than how you fight].

So… SF practitioners out there… do the highlighted questions ring a bell? ;)

I think we would be a little bit more natural in building an “Active & Constructive Response” to what Clients bring: Wow, I am so impressed!! How did you manage to get it? When did this happen? What did your boss say? And what did you say? Were there other people there? What did they say?…

Production line at the Cepina Levissima Factory, Italy

From 2003 until 2005 I was heavily involved as a Solution-Focused Coach / Consultant in support of a major Organizational Development Project for Sanpellegrino, the Italian bottled-water company owned by Nestle Waters.

It is one project I am still very proud of.

Here is one lesson learned re Coaching and Organizational Development:

Coaching was introduced as a way of helping them once they were already facing problems, i.e. first they were given the new role and thrown into the field, then they were offered the opportunity of having a coach to help them meet the challenges they were facing. I believe this is a key success factor. First, coachees need to experience the problem so they can experience the need for coaching. In this scenario, management does not need to sell coaching – quite the opposite, management can play the role of the saviour by graciously offering them this much-needed support.

You can read the whole case study I wrote for eO&P (e- Organisations and People) and published in November 2010 here.

Project Oxygen was the code-name given to a bold new plan by Google in early 2009.

Was it a new search algorithm? Or a fancy speech-to-text app? Or some other tech wonder?

None of the above.

It was something much more ambitious: it was a quest to find what makes the perfect manager.

After months of exhaustive data-mining and observations (hey, after all they are Google, analytics is their job!) they came out with a list of 8 Good Behaviors that characterized their best and most effective managers.

Here it is:

I know! Not exactly the dramatic insights you would expect, right?

But being data-generated, this list is gold.

As a whole, it reads as a very Solution Focused approach to management.

It is the ranking of these behaviors that is very interesting.

The key skill to be a successful manager in Google? to Be a Good Coach!

So learning how to become a Coach is important. Very important.

Score one for Coaching.

But we can dig deeper. Take a look at what it means to be a “good coach”:

1 – provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive
2 – have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employee’s strength

Now the question is: how do you do that? It is easier said than done!

I would argue that Solution-Focus is the best way to carry out those desired behaviors.

More specifically:

1 – Solution-Focus’ main tool is feedback; no advice is given.  It is constructive feedback, since in Solution Focus we give only positive feedback. By only making comments on what works and not dwelling on what does not work, Solution-Focused Coaching offers an elegant solution to the problem of balancing positive with negative, avoiding all the pitfalls of negative feedback.
2 – in a recent post, I said coaching is the Art of Conversation: so having regular one-on-ones should be no problem to a manager trained in Solution-Focused Coaching.  Solution-Focused Coaches do not “present” solutions. They do something even better. They are trained to elicit clients’ (in this case employees’) specific solutions, which are naturally and of necessity built on the employees’ unique strengths! Which is perfectly in line with the next key skill listed, empowering your team.

I believe that Solution-Focused Coaching not only meets the behavioral challenge set by Google, but exceeds those requirements.

The “Be a Good Coach” in this list can be read as “Be a Solution-Focused Coach“!

Click >>> here <<< to learn how to become a Solution-Focused Brief Coach with a ICF (International Coach Federation) ACTP (Accredited Coaching Training Program).

Thanks to Coert Visser who originally posted about Google’s Project Oxygen >>> here <<<