01 Jan Problem Solving or Solution Developing
The field of psychotherapy has had a continuing influence on thinking and practices of organisational learning and development. Here are some stimulating and challenging conceptual nuggets (to switch the metaphor) drawn from ‘Solution-Focused Therapy’.
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This therapeutic model or school was created by Steve de Shazer and colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee in the early Eighties. As the name of their centre suggests, they were influenced by family therapy, particularly that which was founded on those systemic approaches which, ultimately, derived from the work of Gregory Bateson and of Milton Erickson. Hopefully, the application to organisational life will be fairly obvious:
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As their name implies, solution-focused therapists consider it more useful to concentrate their attention on solutions than on the problems which bring their clients to therapy. Behind this orientation is the idea that reality follows attention. That is, what you pay most attention to is what is most real to you. Therefore, the more attention you put on the problem, the more its reality increases. It becomes more solid, as it were, in the person’s perception. This makes it harder to resolve dissolve.
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Solutions to the client’s problem are sought in exception. The idea is : Nothing ALWAYS happens. Problems are not continuous. There will be exceptions. Clients fluctuate between bad days and better days. The question to the client becomes, “What are you doing to create the better days?” This is the search for solutions.
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‘ … one of the basic assumptions we hold is adapted from the Buddhist premise that change is constant and that stability is an illusion. Since life is in a constant state of change, the client’s problem is also in constant flux.’
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‘Instead of putting the emphasis on stopping the problematic behaviour, the more effective, economical, and efficient treatment approach is to elicit and enlarge upon the existing successful solutions that the client has generated.’
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Clients are questioned in great detail about these exceptions and what they are doing to bring them about. Typically, the client had never really registered the significance of the exceptions (even if they had noticed them) and certainly never seen these exceptions as due to anything they did. Since the solutions come from the clients they are in control. They are instructed to do more of what works.
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Although, when first questioned, clients are usually not aware of what they did to bring about the exceptions the more they are asked about it the more they have to justify their (useful) behaviour. They have to come up with more and more plausible answers to the questions specifying what they did. The more the client repeats these answers, the more real they become.
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‘ … a concept of solution must be developed before there can even be a concept called “problem”. “Problem” is just one of the many ways such events can be labeled and understood. It is a gestalt with solution being the ground to the figure of the problem. Without that idea that problems can be solved, what are called problems in the psychotherapy world would become just “facts-of-life” or unfortunate occurrences which could not be avoided and/or changed.’
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‘Regardless of “how” problems are maintained and how many different views there are about this, a general statement can be made: problems are problems because they are maintained. Problems are held together simply by their being described as “problems”.’
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‘ … people in our culture have long assumed that the nature of the problem determines what the solution needs to be. It is often believed that understanding the problem is the first step in solving it. This assumption seems logical and, in fact, it seems more than logical. It seems to lie within the nature of the way things are. Within this framework, it seems that any solution to any problem needs to have a logical relationship to the nature of the problem.’
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‘ … we end up searching for explanations believing that without explanation a solution is irrational, not recognizing that the solution itself is its own best explanation.’
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‘Another assumption that people in our culture often hold is that one needs to know the cause of a problem in order to solve it. Once you know the cause, you an do something about it which will solve the problem. Therapists in particular often search for causation in unconscious conflicts, past traumas, marital problems, family problems, and/or work problems.’
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‘Brief therapists are more likely to assume that problems are simply self-maintaining and that is all there is to it. This assumption leads to the idea that any difference in behaviour, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and/or context stands a chance of making a difference such that the complaint is resolved.
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‘In general, solutions simply involve someone’s doing something different or seeing something differently.’
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‘Once any expectation becomes different, any pattern can change.’
Graham Dawes
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