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.

Tags: Dunning-Kruger Effect, feedback, Psychology, self-assessment, skills, Solution Focused, solutionsurfers, training

Tags: Flowchart, positive psychology, Poster, Solution Focused

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

Tags: behavioral descriptions, language, ordinary use, philosophy, Solution Focused, Wittgenstein

What is the essence of Solution-Focused practice?

Is it the use of some key techniques, like asking the “Miracle Question”?

Or is it something else?

Veronica Bliss and Dominic Bray try to give an answer to these questions in a little gem of a paper titled: THE SMALLEST SOLUTION FOCUSED PARTICLES: TOWARDS A MINIMALIST DEFINITION OF WHEN THERAPY IS SOLUTION FOCUSED published in the Journal of Systemic Therapies.

As the authors note, some practitioners use typical SF techniques, and yet it does not feel they are “doing” SF; and, on the other hand, some practitioners might not be using some key SF techniques and yet it feels they are “doing” SF.

What are then the “smallest solution-focused particles”?

To answer this question the authors take us on a journey in the history of SF: how SF was born; what its major tenets are; the key role of the therapist in SF.

The authors then talk in detail about the different attempts of coming up with technique-oriented definitions of SFBT, including the minimum requirements listed by the European Brief Therapy Association (EBTA).

This alone makes for very interesting reading.

Veronica Bliss and Dominic Bray then introduce some clinical examples of SFBT done without the use of key techniques – mainly work done with people who have limited cognitive abilities, a kind of work that led the authors to “question the technique-oriented definition of SFBT”.

And here I put in my two cents.

From the opposite end of the spectrum (i.e. coaching, not therapy; executives, not people with limited cognitive abilities), my work has led me to question the technique-oriented definition of SF practice, too.

I did have some coaching sessions in which I was definitely brief (less than 20 minutes), in which I felt I was definitely solution-focused and yet in which no or very few SF key techniques were used: the conversation just flowed naturally following a SF rhythm.

I now consider this to be a sign of Mastery: to leave as little of a footprint as possible in the coaching conversation. Do what is necessary, and only that. Simplify to the utmost. In this I am echoing Peter Szabo’s position that the brief coach is a “witness” of clients’ change – read his 10 brief-coaching assumptions here.

Still, all this begs the question: what are “the smallest number of parameters that distinguish solution-focused work from other kinds of therapy”?

The authors, “in the spirit of the minimalist tradition” (to which I subscribe 100%) find two sets of parameters:

a) the role of the client and of the SF practitioner

b) certain key steps.

Let’s take a look at these two points.

a) the client’s role and the SF practitioner’s role.

The quality of client-practitioner interaction is unique in SF.

Clients not only are “the experts” (one of the main tenets of SF practice) but also have “fewer requirements put upon them.. than they do with other types of psychotherapy“. They do not need to learn the language of the therapist nor to fit the therapist’s frame of reference. They do not have to subscribe to a diagnosis nor even to talk about their problem!

SF practitioners‘ behavior is what makes the difference.
Much has been said about keeping a posture of “not-knowing”.
The authors here, though, go for a very simple idea: “the absolute minimal requirement for uniquely solution focused work is the co-construction aspect which requires that the therapist learn from the client”.

b) This idea of the SF practitioner learning from the client leads us directly to the second point highlighted by the authors: the therapist needs to learn from the client about 4 key things:

“1 – the person’s preferred future and implications thereof (perhaps using the miracle question, but perhaps not)

2 – how they both will know when they are moving in the right direction (perhaps using scaling questions but perhaps not)

3 – what the client can do more of or what he or she might do differently to start moving in that direction

4 – how they will both know when they have done enough SFBT”.

These are, in the words of the authors, “unique aspects which need to be operationalized in the most minimal, least restrictive way.”

Incidentally, the first 3 steps listed above correspond directly to the view of SF practice as a Darwinian Algorithm, which I articulated in a recently published paper.

Veronica Bliss & Dominic Bray’s minimalist summary of SF matches my summary of SF as a Darwinian Algorithm point by point:

1 – preferred future and implications thereof / establishing a fitness function

2 – knowing when we are moving in the right direction / searching for and scoring useful behaviors

3 – what the client can do more of or what he or she might do differently / replicate behaviors with the highest score and recombine them.

Though using a different language and starting out from a different perspective, I share with the authors of this paper the quest to get to the core of SF and to capture its beautiful simplicity and elegant effectiveness.

Bliss, E.V., Bray, D. (2009). THE SMALLEST SOLUTION FOCUSED PARTICLES: TOWARDS A MINIMALIST DEFINITION OF WHEN THERAPY IS SOLUTION FOCUSED Journal of Systemic Therapies, 28 (2), 62–74

Tags: Darwinian Algorithm, Dominic Bray, essence of, minimalist, smallest solution-focused particles, Solution Focused, technique-oriented, Veronica Bliss

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

Tags: books, Dan & Chip Heath, How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Made to Stick, Positive Deviance, Solution Focused, Switch

In Solution-Focused practice we ask clients to visualize their perfect future, usually by asking the “Miracle Question”. Research has demonstrated that visualization does not work to help people change. Doesn’t this result invalidate a very important tool of SF practitioners?

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?

Tags: evidence, preferred future, research, science, Solution Focused, visualization