I am reading the latest book by Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.

I have always been a fan of checklists: I think they are immensely useful. When I think of checklists I think of pilots in the cockpit of a jetliner getting ready to take that marvel of technology and complexity into the air.

Moreover, I had the chance to appreciate the writing style and the insights of Dr. Atul Gawande in the past.

So it was pretty obvious to me that I had to get his latest book.

And it is no surprise that I loved it.

A little bit more surprising are the connections that can be made between Checklists and Solution-Focused practice.

1. to begin with, checklists are a simple and elegant solution to a complext problem - and we already talked in this blog about how Solution-Focused is elegantly simple yet very effective.
2. Dr. Gawande makes a distinction between two issues when facing problems: ignorance and ineptitude. Ignorance means that we do not have enough knowledge to deal effectively with the problem - as an example, Dr. Gawande mentions the differences in treating heart attacks now vs. in the 60s. Back then, we simply did not know. Now we know much more about heart attacks and we have a whole array of surgical options, interventions and drugs to treat heart attack victims. Ineptitude is a different thing altogether - it means we have the knowledge to deal effectively with a problem but somehow we fail to take the necessary steps. For example, on average, according to Dr. Gawande, less than 50% of patients with suspected heart attacks receive the proper protocol within 90 minutes of their admittance to the hospital - after 90 minutes the chances of making it through a heart attack significantly drop. It is not a question of lack of will or improper training - it is just that procedures can be very complicated and require the coordinated performance of many specialists. Checklists, then, are a way to deal with this problem: making sure that nothing is missed, making sure that the knowledge acquired is properly applied right here and right now with the patient. It then struck me that SF questions are just that - a way to help clients appy their own experience, successes and insights to the problem at hand. As SF practitioners we assume clients have all the knowledge they need to solve their own problems - they are the experts. They come to us because, for whatever reason, they got overwhelmed by the problem - the sheer complexity seems too much. But our questions, such as the Miracle Question, or the Scaling Question, are ways for clients to make a checklist of their successful strategies and apply them to the problem they are facing now.
3. I admit it - I have a pre-session checklist. Things to do before a session, to make sure the session runs smoothly. I also have a post-session debrief checklist - with a Solution-Focused twist, since it is a checklist made of scales. But it is still a checklist.
4. Another point that is made in the book and that I felt was very interesting is that checklists can be used also to deal with emergencies. Such checklists are not made of routine operations. Rather they make clear who needs to talk to whom and when in case of emergency X - as Dr. Gawande shows, that is a brilliant solution. The checklist still gives structure and tells people who to talk to - but it allows for maximum flexibility in responding to the emergency, shifting responsibility to experts and people on the ground rather than on a single decision-maker.

… Implicit in this phrase of overcoming adversity is the idea that success or happiness is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed, unmarked by the experience… but in fact we are changed, we are marked, of course by a challenge… and I am going to suggest it is a good thing. Adversity is not an obstacle we need to get around in order to resume living our life… it is part of our life.

Should be required viewing for all coaches, trainers or psychologists.

Dan & Chip Heath wrote a book that I love: “Made to Stick”.

It is a pleasure to read. It is very informative. It is science-based.
Moreover, it is congruent: the way the book is written and organized reflects what the authors preach.
That, my friends, is a very rare thing.
The insights contained in the book are one of the cornerstones of my Persuasive Communication workshop.

Now there is even more exciting news: Dan & Chip Heath discovered Solution-Focus!!
They wrote a new book about Solution-Focused practices and Positive Deviance - the book is called Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard and goes on sale on February 16.

Fastcompany.com published some excerpts.

Here is one, introducing Solution-Focus Therapy:

Consider the story of school counselor John Murphy and one of his students in Covington, Kentucky. Bobby was a ninth grader who was constantly late for class, rarely did his work, was disruptive, and sometimes made loud threats to other kids in the hallways. Bobby’s home life was just as chaotic; he’d been shuffled in and out of foster homes and special facilities for kids with behavioral problems.

In a traditional counseling session, the therapist digs around for explanations — why are the patients acting the way they are? But Murphy was no traditional therapist. He practiced something called Solutions-Focused Brief Therapy. During his sessions with Bobby, he ignored the child’s problems and focused instead on how to remedy them. Here’s a brief exchange from one of their sessions. Notice how Murphy starts by trying to find a bright spot.

Murphy: Tell me about the times at school when you don’t get in trouble as much.

Bobby: I never get in trouble, well, not a lot, in Ms. Smith’s class.

Murphy: What’s different about Ms. Smith’s class?

Bobby: I don’t know, she’s nicer. We get along great.

Murphy: What exactly does she do that’s nicer?

Murphy wasn’t content with Bobby’s vague conclusion that Ms. Smith is “nicer.” He kept probing until Bobby identified that Ms. Smith always greeted him as soon as he walked into class. (Other teachers, understandably, avoided him.) She gave him easier work, which she knew he could complete. (Bobby is also learning disabled.) And whenever the class started working on an assignment, she’d check with Bobby to make sure he understood the instructions.

Ms. Smith’s class was a bright spot, and as we’ve seen, anytime you have a bright spot, your mission is to clone it. Using Ms. Smith’s class as a model, Murphy gave Bobby’s other teachers very practical tips about how to deal with him: Greet Bobby at the door. Make sure he’s assigned work he can do. Check to make sure he understands the instructions.

Over the next three months, Bobby’s rate of being sent to the principal’s office for a major infraction decreased by 80%. He also made striking progress on day-to-day behavior. Before solutions-focused therapy, his teachers typically rated his performance as acceptable in only one or two out of six class periods per day. After solutions-focused therapy, he was rated as acceptable in four or five of the six periods. Bobby is still not a model student. But he’s a lot better.

Read more excerpts here!!

I can’t wait to get the book!

h/t: Paul Jackson

This is the question that we are going to answer in this post.

First of all, let’s see what research has shown so far.

According to some studies, visualizing a perfect future, where all your goals have been achieved, is:
a) ineffective to help people change
b) effective for feeling good.

a) ineffective to help people change
In a study by Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor at the University of California, students were asked to visualize themselves getting a high grade in an important mid-term exam; they were then asked to keep track of the amount of hours they studied. Compared to a control group of students, the experiment subjects ended up studying less and getting worse grades.
Gabriele Oettingen & colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania conducted  several studies about entertaining positive fantasies. The result: those who have more positive fantasies do worse than those who have negative fantasies. For example: obese women taking part in a weight-loss program were asked to imagine how they would behave in different tempting situations related to food, e.g. being tempted by ice cream at a friend’s house. The women who had more positive visualizations (e.g. “I would not budge, I would just ignore the ice cream, keep chit chatting and be good”) lost on average, after a year, 26 pounds LESS that those with more negative visualizations (e.g. “I would sit there and feed my face with the ice cream”).  Oettingen found that the same negative effect of entertaining positive fantasies applies in the realm of romantic relationships. hip replacement surgery and career success (e.g., in a two-year follow-up, among Oettinger’s students who, as seniors, were asked how often they fantasized about getting a dream job, those who fantasized the most about it had submitted fewer job applications, received a lower number of job offers and had lower salaries than the others).
Why visualizing a positive outcome does not help is not clear; professor Richard Wiseman, in his book 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, speculates that subjects who fantasize positive outcomes are either not prepared for the inevitable setbacks they might encounter in their path towards their goals or they indulge in the fantasy and so are less likely to actually do something to make the fantasy real.

But wait! There is more!!
It turns out that “event-simulation” is better than “outcome simulation”.
Some UCLA students were divided into 3 groups: a control group, an “event-simulation” group and an “outcome simluation” group (study described here, p.210-211).
They were all asked to think about a problem that was “stressing them out” and they were all given some generic instructions about problem-solving. Then the “control group” was sent home. The “event-simulation” group was asked to visualize how the problem arose: “visualize the beginning of the problem, going over in detail the first incident… Go over the incidents as they occurred step by step. Visualize the actions you took. Remember what you said, what you did. Visualize the environment, who was around, where you were”. The “outcome-simulation” group was asked instead to visualize a positive outcome: “picture this problem beginning to resolve, you are coming out  of the stressful situation… Picture the relief you feel. Visualize the satisfaction you would feel at having dealt with the problem. Picture the confidence you feel in yourself, knowing that you have dealt successfully with the problem.”
The “event-simulation” group did much better: by the first day they had a positive mood boost compared to the other groups; a week later, they were more likely to have taken action to solve the problem, to have sought advice and support from others; they were also more likely to report growth and learning.

…mmmm… the evidence for visualization as a tool for change seems to converge on one result… it does NOT work.

b) effective for feeling good.

There is however a silver lining in all this research: outcome visualization does work in making people feel better. Laura King at Southern Methodist University had subjects write about their ideal future, i.e. a future where all had gone as well as could reasonably be expected and in which all their aspirations had been met. Compared to a group that was asked to write about a negative event that happened to them and a control group what was asked to write about their plans, those who elaborated on their perfect future ended up significantly happier than those in other groups.

So were does all this research leave us?
Should we throw away the Miracle Question and the concept of “preferred future”?

No.
And here is why.

As usual, it is all in the details.

The kind of visualization investigated in the above mentioned studies is very different from visualizing a preferred future, as it is understood in SF practice.
In SF practice, clients are asked to imagine their problems have been miraculously solved. In a way, this is an “outcome-based” suggestion - clients’ goals have been met, they made it.
However, this is just the first part of the “Miracle Question”.
This part has value: as demonstrated by the research mentioned above, visualizing the perfect future does make people feel better - it boosts positive moods. And we know that when people are in a good mood, they think better, they are more creative and they make better decisions - this is the core of the “broaden and build theory” put forward by Barbara Fredrickson. I am not the first one to make this connection: see the excellent article by Carey Glass published in the May 2009 issue of InterAction Journal.

Then there is the second part of the “Miracle Question”.
As Insoo Kim Berg and Peter De Jong remarked, the “Miracle Question” is just an opening gambit - the SF practitioner needs then to exploit the impact of the question with a proper follow-up.
The proper follow-up is, for all intent and purposes, an “event-simulation”: clients are asked what the first small signs are that tell them a miracle happened. They are invited to go through the “day after the miracle” focusing on small, concrete, observable specific behaviors.

Clients are not asked to elaborate on how great they would feel, they are not encouraged to indulge an escapist fantasy - rather, they are invited to elaborate on the behavioral details that tell them they are feeling great; on how other people would notice; on what they would be doing differently, then. In the study mentioned above, participants in the “event-simulation” condition are asked to notice what they said, what they did, where they where, who was around them. These very same questions are part of the proper follow-up to a Miracle Question - the only difference is that instead of simulating the problem, we are asking clients to simulate the solution (not the outcome - i.e. we are asking clients to describe what they are doing differently that leads them to the desired outcome rather than just describing the desired outcome). Incidentally, “event-simulation” visualizations are even more effective if people see themselves from the perspective of a third person - this is additional scientific support for the SF practice of always introducing a third-party perspective in the follow-up to the Miracle Question, when going through the “day after the miracle” with clients.

Notice another thing. If you clicked on the links above to Oettinger’s papers, you would have noticed that Oettinger and her team made a distinction between expectations and fantasies: study participants with positive expectations but negative fantasies had the best outcomes, while participants with pessimistic expectations but positive fantasies were the ones with the worst outcomes. In this article I am making the case that in SF practice we are NOT asking clients to fantasize; on the other hand, SF practice is all about creating positive expectations, as brilliantly demonstrated by Coert Visser here.

A clue that SF is on the right track in the use of visualization procedures that work is in the solution of the dilemma presented by Prof. Wiseman: how can me use the positive aspects of outcome visualization, i.e. boosting positive moods, without having the negative aspects (less actions taken to actually solve the problem)? Prof. Wiseman’s answer, based again on the research carried out by Oettingen and others: a procedure that involves asking people first “to fantasize about reaching the goal” and “noting the top two benefits that would flow from such an achievement” and then “to reflect on the kind of barriers and problems that they are likely to encounter… and again make note of the top two issues”. Once participants have done that, a sort of back-and-forth movement between fantasy and reality is implemented: people are asked to reflect and to elaborate on their first benefit, and then to think about the biggest hurdle, more specifically what they would do if they encountered the difficulty. True, this is not SF. However, we can appreciate some of the same ingredients and the same dynamic. E.g.: people are asked to elaborate on the benefits, i.e. on how their life would be different once they reach their goals - this is what we do when we ask clients to describe what they would be doing differently once their problem is solved or their goal is reached. Then people are asked to elaborate on reality, e.g. what to do re obstacle X; in SF we ask people what they did in the past that worked re overcoming obstacle X. We can also appreciate the same dynamic: in the work of Oettinger it is a back-and-forth movement between “fantasy about a desired future” and “reflections on present reality”; in SF the movement is between the  ”preferred future”and “exceptions in reality”.

That SF is on the right track, i.e. its protocols use  visualization that works, is demonstrated by how a third group of students performed in the mid-term exam in the study carried out by Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor mentioned at the beginning of our article. Remember that one group was asked to visualize themselves as obtaining good grades, while the control group was not asked anything; there was a third group. Participants in this third group were asked to visualize themselves in the process of studying, including details of when, where and how they intended to study. This is the group that had the best outcome: they put in more hours and they got higher grades than any of the other two groups.
So it turns out the best use of visualization is to picture oneself performing successfully rather than just having achieved success.
Isn’t this what we are inviting clients to do when we ask them what they are doing differently in their preferred future?

This is an excellent point.

I would qualify it by adding a little distinction:

• - 99% of the decisions me make are laundry (in the sense explained above); 1% are the real deal - 20 or 30 decisions that shape our life
• - 80% or more (my arbitrary estimate) of what we do is “laundry” - stuff that we have to do, activities in which we are no better than the average; but 10% or more of what we do is based on our unique skills, it is something that we do better than average - we can make this 10% or more of our activities either deliberate practice that leads us to excel in what we do that is “us”, or actual doing that makes a difference in the world.

And this is where coaching comes into play.

A coaching conversation while facing one of those non-laundry moments in life can make all the difference:

- coaching can make the difference between a good decision, i.e., a rational decision based on our long-term interest and a bad decision, i.e., an impulsive, knee-jerk reaction based on automatic patterns of thinking. Automatic patterns of thinking are good for the laundry moments of life, they might be dangerous in the “non-laundry” scenario where our evolutionary-determined instincts might lead us astray

- coaching can make the difference between focusing our best efforts on that 10 to 20% of our activities that allow us to have a real impact on the world or squandering our unique skills, talents and dreams.

The whole point of Stanovich’s book is that while IQ tests measure our algorithmic mind, sort of like our “mental horsepower”, they do not measure the abilities of the reflective mind, sort of like the driver’s skills of our mind - so even people with high IQ can fail in making the rational choice IF they are not cued first (i.e., if they reflective mind is not engaged and brought online).

What better way of engaging the reflective mind than having a conversation with a professional coach? One session is often all my clients need to figure out where to go and how to get there!

Are you tired of doing laundry yet?

1. Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine and the Search for a Cure by Paul A. Offit MD
   Very well researched, a treat for lovers of science, engrossing like a thriller - essential resource for debunking the anti-vaccine movement

2. Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity and Thrive by Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D.
   Good introduction to the concept of the Positivity Ratio and some useful guidelines for a well-balanced life from one of the pioneers of the field of positive psychology.

3. Mindset: the New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, Ph.D.
   Classic. A simple yet powerful idea. My thoughts on it in a previous post.

4. 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widesprad Misconceptions about Human Behavior by Scott A. Lillienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, Barry L. Beyerstein
   Yes, I am for evidence-based practices. This book was sheer pleasure and a breath of fresh air: in 50 easy-to-read short chapters, the authors use science to debunk popular myths about how we behave - myths like “most people use only 10% of their brain power” or “playing Mozart music to infants boosts their intelligence”. All in one volume.

5. What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E. Stanovich, Ph.D.
   I am still reading this one, and so far it is great: finally a framework to make sense of recent research regarding IQ & genetics, the Adaptive Unconscious and biases in human rationality.

1. Coaching Plain & Simple: Solution-focused Brief Coaching Essentials by Kirsten Dierolf, Daniel Meier, Peter Szabo
   In the spirit of “less is more”, this book embodies the idea that “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” -truly the essence of SF coaching

When I meet prospective clients, I can see there are still many misconceptions in the business world about what coaching is and what coaching can do for you.

Some of these misconceptions are due to lack of information, or information that is not correct: for example, the incorrect idea that the coach is a therapist, or the incorrect assumption that the coach is the expert in the clients’ field who is there to tell them what to do.

Some of these misconceptions have a cultural flavor: for example, here in Italy there is still  an underlying machismo which permeates the business community. The high-powered executive is supposed to do everything on his own, with no help or support from - invariably this is how they call us executive coaches - “a shrink”. Any sort of professional help is seen as a sign of weakness.

Some of these misconceptions have their roots in human nature. For example, it is very common to see prospective clients falling into the trap of all-or-nothing thinking, more specifically bouncing along the ominipotence - impotence continuum: the clients can either do everything and anything on their own, or they can do nothing at all on their own; the coach is either the one who knows everything and can make their life perfect or he / she is somebody who can not understand a thing about how the world (or the company, or real life, or business) works and therefore he / she is useless.

I would like to address a variant of this all-or-nothing thinking.

More specifically: you did a good job as a coach NOT when clients have solved ALL their problems and feel they have NO problems to solve, but when clients feel ready, willing and capable to tackle the issues they are paid to deal with, and feel they are making progress in handling them day in and day out.

This distinction was brought home to me recently by a client of mine, MS.

He is the Head of Personnel and of Administration of a large import-export company. He also sits in the Board of Directors, since it is a family business and he is a member of the family.

It is amazing the ground he covered within a few coaching sessions.

When we started our coaching relationship, his complaints where the concerns a typical middle manager would voice - how can I deal with employee X? how can I organize my activity by projects? How can I avoid spending too much time micro-managing basic operational problems like proper invoice registration? How can I shift from doing things myself to actually managing my department?
There was no thought, no space for issues like: strategically leading his company; re-organizing his department to better support the company’s key strategic objectives; organizing operations in a European country where they recently established a presence; leading his department (vs. managing).
After four coaching sessions, the items listed above were exactly what MS was starting to focus on.

At the end of our coaching relationship, as we were wrapping it up, he made a comment to this effect: “problems never end; but at least now I am dealing with the right set of problems, problems that have a wide organizational and strategic impact for the company. Now I feel I am in the position of making a difference. Now I feel willing and able to make a difference!”

Congratulations, MS!

* note: some details have been changed to protect the privacy of my client; even so, I have permission from the client to share the outline of his story.

The November issue of InterAction Journal, the Journal of the Association for the Quality Development of Solution-Focused Consulting and Training, is finally out!

In it you can find my newest peer reviewed paper: Solution-Focused Interviewing Protocols as Evolutionary Algorithms.

Here is the abstract:

Darwin’s algorithm has been shown to be Nature’s way of exploring the “solution space” for problems related to survival and reproduction. This paper shows how  SF conversations (as used in therapy and brief coaching) can be framed as a Darwinian algorithm to explore the “solution space” for the problems clients bring to the session.

Here you can find some ideas from which the paper originated.

Hoping to put Solution-Focused practice on more solid epistemological grounding, within mainstream science!