I am going to contrast and compare two different books: Dan Ariely’s latest, The Upside of Irrationality; and Daniel Pink’s  Drive.

Both books are terrific. They read very well. They are very engaging. The authors make an extra effort to illustrate their concepts in the simplest and most understandable way. They both use metaphors that are clear and effective in their power to explain. Not only these two books are a pleasure to read – they are also very informative.

Ariely’s book is sort of a sequel to his hugely successful Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Behavior. However in The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely’s takes a more compassionate stance towards the bias that make us irrational decision makers, a.k.a. humans. In keeping with this softer perspective, the book shines with many personal stories that are going to touch the reader. And it is no accident that the focus of this book is not “the consumers’” behavior but how people behave at work and in their own personal life. So we have 5 chapters about “how we defy logic at work”, and another 5 about “how we defy logic at home”.

Dan Pink’ s Drive feeds on the work of Ariely and many others on the science of motivation. Pink is a master in making the insights gained by recent research  understandable and readily usable by managers and businessmen. Drive is a call for a general and comprehensive rethinking of the ways in which we organize what we do.  Pink’s metaphor of assumptions that societies have about human behavior as being their operating system is brilliant and enlightening in and of itself! Moreover, the second part of the book is a treasure trove of practical advice - simple strategies to implement the ideas illustrated in Drive.

It is not my intent here to summarize the 2 books.
For two very good reasons:
1 – they are excellent books and I recommend you read them
2 – the authors themselves did an excellent job in summarizing and presenting their key points: here, here, here and here.

There is a difference, though, between the two books:  Ariely’s book is nuanced. Pink’s book less so.
Ariely explains the experiments used in his research in detail: who the subjects were; what the conditions were: what the context was. Readers are invited to “participate” in the experiments, by imagining how they would react in the very same, specific situation. And in doing so, the reader can both appreciate how the results are counter-intuitive on one hand but also how they make sense, in a way – that is how we behave!
All these details are not only a way to make reading easier. They are precious because they qualify the results. Extrapolations to larger samples without taking into account the context of a specific experiment make for bad science.

Pink’s book is very much… driven! The author is a brilliant speaker and popularizer – research results are transformed into simple recipes for action. And the chasm between current ways of organizing / thinking and what drives us is emphasized. When ideas are turned into slogans they become abstracted from the context and they seem more… novel, catchy, revolutionary, true, absolutes…
Nothing wrong with that – Pink is doing his job.

However, I wanted to contrast the authors for two reasons, one epistemic and the other personal.

- Epistemic: getting rid of contextual information when relaying research results is all fine and dandy. But we need to keep in mind what elements we failed to specify when popularizing science. Some conclusions can be quite reasonably extrapolated and generalized to the population as a whole, while some other conclusions might need to be qualified (i.e. relayed with the context) or replicated with a more significant sample.

Here are some of Pink’s statements: “the science shows that the secret to our performance…“, “bringing our businesses in sync with these truths…”

And here are some of Ariely’s more measured, “scientific” statements: “these findings make it clear that figuring out the optimal level of rewards and incentives is not easy. I do believe that the inverse-U relationship originally suggested by Yerkes and Dodson generally holds, but obviously there are additional forces that could make a difference in performance. These include the characteristics of the task (how easy or difficult it is), the characteristics of the individual (how easily they become stressed), and characteristics related to the individual’s experience with the task…” Most of these qualifying statements are lost in Pink’s account.

One thing is to find out, doing carefully controlled research, that paying bonuses might backfire and so we need to find the right balance between rewards and incentives, as Ariely does – quite another to claim, as Pink does, that rewards do not work in our advanced economy and therefore we need to redesign the Operating System of our society.
Mind you: I agree with what Daniel Pink is saying; I love his message: I just want to issue a warning about how the message is delivered.

Case in point: happiness vs. life satisfaction.
Starting from Easterlin’s 1974 paper “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence“, the notion that money does not buy happiness made its way into the mainstream – to the point that some economists suggested that GNH (Gross National Happiness) should be the main indicator for growth, instead of GDP.
From the 2000s, this idea merged with the newly born Positive Psychology movement to spur the growth of a cottage industry about happiness - and indeed, some interesting psychological research proved that wealth does not automatically lead to more happiness. There are plenty of reasons for that: the hedonic treadmill and our ability to adapt; our tendency to compare ourselves with others; loss aversion; and so on and so forth.
However, the researchers were mostly using a very specific method: sampling participants’ moods at random intervals. So we learned that the same factors that lead us to irritation, sadness, frustration, anxiety affect the wealthy, too – and that many activities that we thought make us happy, actually do not.
Conclusion blared left and right by journalists and bloggers: money, once you earn enough to take care of basic needs, does not matter.
It is not quite accurate: first of all, positive psychology researchers do not say that – actually they can show us how to “get more bang for our bucks“, i.e. how to better spend our money to be happier: buy experiences rather than possessions.
Second of all: Easterlin’s analysis of data turned out to be questionable, at the very least.
And now it turns out that there is an important thing that money can buy: life satisfaction.
There is a distinction about feeling good and feeling satisfied. Wealth affects the latter, not so much the former. This distinction was lost when the idea that money does not necessarily buy you happiness was made popular.

So if we forget the context and the method by which researchers get to their results, and we generalize the findings to a societal level (Gross National Happiness as indicator, Motivation 2.0 as new Operating System for our businesses), we might get in hot waters later on, with the risk of having to throw away the baby with the bath water.

- Personal: I am definitely more of the Ariely’s extraction than Pink’s.
I like subtleties, details, nuances. I pay attention to the context, because the context is everything.
I believe that allows me to be a very effective brief coach and workshop leader. However, that very same trait makes for terrible marketing – prospects need to see you as someone who already has a solution, someone who is very confident and assertive. Being met by more questions or by tentative answers usually is not a very good marketing strategy.
That is why I resonate strongly with Ariely’s book and I envy Pink’s style - both in writing and in speaking.
That is also why almost all of my clients are either clients who come back to me for additional training / coaching needs or clients who approach  me thanks to what their buddies in the companies I worked with tell them.
But I promise – I will try to be less blue, more Pink, without losing Ariely’s stance.

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom gave us a book about pleasure that is a pleasure to read.
Though it is basically a pop-psych book, it reads almost like a collection of short stories – each one with the aim of illustrating from different angles what the nature of pleasure is, each one solidly grounded in psychology or neuroscience.

In the author’s view, human pleasures are universal and are not culturally determined: “we start off with a fixed list of pleasures and we cannot add to the list.” When we derive pleasure from new technologies or cultural habits, it is because they connect to pleasures that humans already possess.

However, most of these hardwired pleasures are not adaptations, but rather are by-products of mental systems evolved for other purposes.

For example, we can get a kick out of coffee, but this is not because “coffee lovers of the past had more offspring than coffee hater” – it is because we like to be stimulated, and coffee is a stimulant.

This is just the starting point for Paul Bloom – the book itself is a journey through the pleasures of food, of sex and love, of collecting objects, of art, of imagination, of sport, of science, of religion. In each entertaining chapter the author argues for his main claim: that “the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences”.

In other words pleasure is grounded in our BELIEFS about the deeper nature of a given thing – even our sensations are always colored by our beliefs.

That is why an original Picasso is worth a lot of money, but a perfectly executed replica is not. That is why sexual pleasure is not merely a matter of sensations, but it is also rooted in beliefs about who someone really is and what someone really is – as illustrated by the use of bedtricks in plays and fiction, and by our preference for partners that are faithful, smart and kind. That is why how we think about food and drink affects how we judge it – orange juice tastes better if it is bright orange, yogurt and ice cream are more flavorful if described as “full fat”, and experts rate highly the same Bordeaux if it is described as “grand cru classe” but not if it is labeled “vin du table”.

I found particularly interesting the chapter dedicated to imagination, where the author develops a very tight explanation of how imagination arose in evolution and why now we take so much pleasure in it – from daydreaming to playing videogames.

I was also intrigued by philosopher Tamar Gendler’s notion of alief, introduced by the author in that very same chapter regarding imagination.

While beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are, alief are more primitive – they are responses to how things seem.

Psychologist Paul Rozin found that “people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the beliefs here are: the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the aliefs are stupider, screaming, “dangerous object! Stay away!” (p.169).

In Bloom’s essentialist framework, even science and religion can be seen as an obvious source of pleasure – even though they are very different, both science and religion share the basic assumption that there is a deeper reality that has significance. Science can tell us about it, religion provides tools to experience that reality.

Our essentialist nature appears in us as infants, as research carried out by the author and others has demonstrated. With science and religion we come full circle: essentialist properties are attributed to the very fabric of the Universe – and in this insight I, as a reader, took a great pleasure.

Recently Katalin Hankovszky shared the following thought by Liselotte Baeijaert:

Solution Focus is not about finding THE solution for a problem, it’s about a useful interaction that leaves the client changed: with more hope, with more creative ideas, with a feeling of competence, with a clearer view on possibilities.

I think this is an important distinction that goes a long way in making clear what Solution-Focus is and what Solution-Focus is not.

I have always been a great fan of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the psychology of optimal performance.
His idea of flow has resonated with me ever since.

In my life I had the good luck of experiencing flow states in different occasions.
When you are “in the flow” everything disappears – including the self.
You are totally absorbed in the activity, passionately engaged in what you are doing.
Time disappears. Joy and doing are all there is.
One word follows another, one movement follows another, in an effortless flow of action and creation.
A frictionless world.

I experienced flow in writing; I experienced flow in running, sometimes with mystical over-tones; I even experienced flow while leading workshops.

But I have always wondered which form flow would take in coaching.
Not anymore.
I experienced it.

Flow in coaching is about tuning in to rhythm of the interaction rather than on the content of the conversation.

Or, as my friend Svea Van Der Hoorn put it recently during a workshop: in the discipline lies the magic.

Just like a tango dancer who is so connected with his partner and so engaged in the dance that he knows exactly when and how to lead his partner into the next step – in the same way a Solution-Focused Coach in a state of flow knows exactly when and how to lead the client into the next phase of the coaching conversation.

Flow in coaching is definitely linked with the concept of not knowing –  having no specific expertise in the clients’ field of work can be a tremendous asset.
The details of the problem the client is experiencing is noise – the signal is that little shift in the coachee’s tone of voice which tells you the client feels he or she has been heard and therefore we can move on to negotiating goals; the subtle smile which tells the coach that the coachee has found something that worked in the past and so we can start asking amplifying questions around that exception; the eyes of the coachee staring in the distance and contemplating the landscape of the Miracle – let’s leave the client there for a while; the signal is noticing the client shifting from “problem language” to “solution language”; the signal is that little key word buried there in that long sentence or that sparkling moment in that long litany of complaints.

Content changes but the process does not.

There is an opening, there is a middle and there is an end – there might be endless variations, thousands of different words and meanings, but the grammar of a Solution-Focused coaching session stays the same.

I am indebted to Coert Visser for having me reflect some more about the importance of not-knowing.

Doing Something Different
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy Practices
Edited by Thorana Nelson

First, big kudos to Thorana Nelson: she had the vision to put together this book and the stamina to make that happen. Contacting many different authors, making a case for sharing their expertise and collecting their contributions is no easy feat.

This book is not an introduction to Solution-Focused Practice but rather it is a collection of stories by solution-focused practitioners for anyone interested in Solution-Focus:  it could be titled “Solution-Focus meets real life”.
The book consists of 76 chapters with 76 stories of Solution-Focus as applied in consulting, therapy, training and coaching today. In the book the reader can find items as diverse as advanced techniques & protocols to be used in certain situations; case studies; training strategies and exercises; and outrageous moments in therapy.

The contributors include many well-known names in the Solution-Focused community.

I contributed 3 chapters to the book:

- Reducing Personnel Turnover Rate from 50% to 10%: a case study of a Solution-Focused intervention carried out by me and others in an Italian company to keep young talents from leaving

- Opening for Brief Coaching Session: a script I find very effective for opening Brief-Coaching sessions, where time is at a premium and all that is said (or unsaid) matters

- Change We Can Believe in: a snapshot of a coaching conversation I had with a client where the uniqueness of Solution-Focus practice is put to action

I hope you all enjoy the book!!

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: people with low levels of ability in a certain field vastly over-rate their talents because they lack the skills to judge their own competence (definition from Mind Hacks Blog).

I see it all the time in trainings: Workshop participants learn something. They get the hang of, say, how to lead a motivational interview, and then I watch in horror as, all of a sudden, they go about touting their skills and marketing themselves as professional interviewers.

This is another reason why I like Solution-Focused practice.
Of course the Dunning-Kruger Effect is still lurking in the background when I lead the Solutionsurfers Training Program for Brief Coaches.
However, as part of the program and inherent in the SF practice itself, lots and lots of positive and specific behavioral feedback is given.
Participants quickly learn to observe details and little cues: what did I say exactly? How did clients respond to that? What did they do specifically? What did they say, and so on.
Trainees are taught to observe, observe and observe, paying close attention to behavioral cues and nuances in the interactions.
They are taught to share those observations with other participants.
They are also taught to think about what they would do differently, if they had the chance to have the same coaching interaction again.

This is a powerful way of defusing the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Granted, it takes time. But I know of no other way,

Our job as trainers is to bring our students quickly to the “other side” of the Dunning-Kruger Effect where improving people’s skills reduces their self-assessment as they also learn to judge their ability level more accurately (again in the words of Mind Hacks Blog).

Paradoxically, then, a trainer does a good job if, at the end of a training program, (on a scale from 1 to 10), the trainees rate their skill levels at a 6, 7 or an 8, rather than at a 10. it means they are being realistic and it means they appreciate the difficulties involved in the skill-set taught. Experience will move the trainees forward on their proficiency scale!

For more thoughts on the issue, check out Coert Visser’s posting.

When philosophers use a word – “knowledge”, “being”, “object”, “I”, “proposition”, “name” – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use – Wittgenstein, #116, Philosophical Investigations

Clients use words like: “unsatisfied”, “undecided”, “stuck”, “fearful”, unable to”, “personality”, “leader”, “executive”, “organization”, “team”.
They also use sentences like: “being more productive”, “being more assertive”, “being a decision-maker”, “being a team-player”, “working better & working less”.

Clients try to grasp the essence of the problem, the root cause of why they feel_____ or why they are_____ or why other people are_____  or why the organization / team is__________

As Solution-Focused practitioners what we do is to help clients bring words back from their metaphysical (i.e. generalizing judgement) to their everyday use (i.e. specific behavioral & contextual descriptions).
We work with specific behaviors in specific situations in specific moments of time in specific interactions (everyday use) –  and when that happens, generalizations and labels crumble, a whole range of different episodes presents itself instead, and solutions emerge.

A picture held us captive. And we could not go outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably - Wittgenstein, #115, Philosophical Investigations