Appreciating Systems

This is a guest post by Coert Visser, www.solution-focusedchange.com

The solution-focused approach, which was invented in psychotherapy in the 1980s, is now being discovered by many people in all kinds of professions such as coaches, social workers, managers, teachers, trainers, consultants, and project managers. Many people know the solution-focused approach from techniques such as scaling questions, the miracle question, past success questions, and coping questions. By using these and other types of solution-focused questions, the approach helps them to get a clearer picture of their desired situation and of what has already worked before. Many professionals who have started to apply solution-focused principles and techniques are pleased both by the response they get from their clients, employees, or students and by how fast it tends to lead to good results.

Professionals who have just begun to work solution-focused also notice that mastering it is not quite as easy as it might appear. They sometimes ask me for suggestions of how they might approach their learning process. Here are five suggestions based on my experience of what usually works well:

1. Practice a lot: The basic assumptions and principles of the solution-focused approach can probably be understood within the span of a day, or so. But to master the skills may take many years. If you want to achieve excellence as a solution-focused coach your best chance of achieving it is to approach it as you would approach becoming an excellent musician. Set stretching learning goals focused on improving areas of performance which you are not satisfied about, practice a lot, get feedback and guidance, observe, discuss and learn from examples, keep practicing, reading, writing and immersing yourself in the subject matter. The more technically proficient you’ll become, the more this will free up your attention in conversations with clients to listen carefully to what they are saying and to respond adequately.
2. Feel free to combine: Since no one can master all the solution-focused principles and techniques at once, it is a good thing that solution-focused principles can often be combined with models and tools from other approaches. To borrow a phrase from Canadian solution-focused consultant Alan Kay, solution-focused principles and techniques can often be ‘layered in’ into existing tools like a SWOT-analysis, or SMART goals.
3. Don’t be too hard on yourself. When students of the solution-focused approach become more knowledgeable and skilled something paradoxical may happen. While they become better, they may feel they don’t make any progress or even become worse. There may be two reasons for this: 1) only when they are exposed to this new complexity, and when they become aware of how subtle the solution-focused approach works, they become aware of what they don’t know. In other words, their self-assessment is reduced because they also learn to judge their ability level more accurately. 2) While they are making progress they are often simultaneously becoming more demanding and raising the bar for themselves. When learning new complex skills please realize that it is not abnormal to feel as though you are not making progress. My suggestion is to be as affirmative and appreciative for yourself as you are for your clients. Also, ask yourself if your client found the conversation with you useful. Even when you found your performance disappointing your client may still have found the conversation very useful. That is what matters most.
4. Keep an open mind: Every now and then, you may come across aspects of the approach which may not directly appeal to you. My suggestion is to not dismiss them too soon but instead to give these aspects a chance to prove themselves in practice. You might not understand and appreciate every aspect of the approach right away but you might do so later. 
5. Remain skeptical: Don’t be convinced solely on the basis of anecdotes, case examples or what ‘authorities’ tell you. Keep trying things out, research them well, add your own inventions and build on what works. This way you may gradually develop your version of the solution-focused approach which is optimally suited for your purposes.  

If you are interested in the solution-focused approach I hope you find one or more of these suggestions useful and I’d love to hear about some of your experiences.

Coert Visser did a nice article about Solution Focus based questions for a new year. I’d like to build on them and propose my own, in the hope that it could positively improve any change initiative you’re a part of (or a leader).

From your customers’ point of view

• What pleased your customers last year? What else?
• How did you provided that to them? What else?
• How could you make more of that?
• What first step can you take right not to make more of that? What smaller step can you make? Even smaller?
• Imagine your customers coming in and asked you straight what they really want. What would they ask? What else?
• How are you going to provide it? What first step do you need to make, now, to provide it?

From your employees’ point of view

Manager to employees

• What made your employees happy last year?
• How could they achieve this?
• How can you help them make more of it?
• What are they thriving for?
• What would make them soar?
• What impact would them soaring could have on yourself? On your business?
• What small step can you make right now to start building that preferred future of them?
• What first thing will your employees notice that you changed in order to bring them more thriving opportunities in their work?
• What strengths did you notice in each of your employees? How is s/he using them? What prevents them from using these strengths more thoroughly and more often? How could you help that? What first step do you see you doing now to help that strength liberation?

Employees to management

• What made you happy last year?
• How did you do it?
• How could you make more of it?
• What worked well in your relations with your management? How did you do it? What else? How could you do more of it?

From a process (system) point of view

• What worked well last year? What else?
• How did the organization make it happen?
• How could you do more of it? What else?
• What first step could you do right now to do more of it?

Ok, I guess you got the point. Feel free to propose more questions below!

Happy new year everyone!

Here’s another excellent blog article from Coert Visser about Solution Focus: Doing What Works: Forward in Solution-Focused Change: The change sparsity principle in solution-focused organizational change.

It reminds us that “continuous improvement” really must be “continuous”. Small steps, and not always big bang kaizen or kaikaku workshops!

Also, Lean already knows that: a work standard is the best way to do a job at a certain time. It’s deemed to be changed and improved as soon as someone finds a new better way (a solution!) to do it. When that’s been found, the standard is updated.

How could have we made Lean and Kaizen threatening for people (despite advocating a “respect for people”)?!

This question is deficit-based because I try to dig a problem. A better question would probably be “when had we experienced non-threatening change that was welcomed by people?”

I think my experience of Lean until now may have been too fast with respect to these I was supposed to coach. Of course, I had to deal with management eager to see results. But isn’t it a situation where “to move slowly is to advance faster”?

I need to try this!

(I’m whining here, but I need to admit that I’ve already tried a coaching stance of not pushing forward, like the one in Motivational Interviewing (see my SFMI Lean series) and had quite some success).

I know from a long time that I’m the one that need to change with respect to Lean coaching. Boy is this difficult sometimes!

Today seems to be under Coert Visser’s auspices. Here’s another nice blog post of him about questions to help a coach prepare himself to really listen to the coachee or client:

Doing What Works: 10 questions for the solution-focused coach.

I feel it really hard not to fall in the rhetoric trap where I know what I would like them to do (Lean management for instance) but feel listening is the way to go and so I need to ask them questions.

A coach mainly works by asking questions, but not in a rhetoric way. He must deeply want to know what is it that his coachee wants, how does he see things or how he feels about the change.

Of course, there’s no other way to do Lean management than by doing Lean management. Yet, there’s more than one path to reach that goal and it’s important to use the easiest path for the learning manager (the coachee) and help him identify what worked before in the direction of that Lean management.

For instance, if the coach identifies that creating a flow is the path to follow for now, one can go for the following kind of question:

Lean teaches us that the most efficiency is achieved in a flowing process (provide details as necessary). Tell me about a time where you have experienced work flowing? What allowed it to happen?

Then, work could focus on the current process:

In the current process, what gives you hope for increasing the flow-ness of it?

Doing What Works: 10 solution-focused lists.

How could I add to this repost in an SF way?

“What else?”

Here’s is a very nice blog from Coert Visser: Doing What Works: Treating clients as cooperative, no matter how resistant they may appear, is the quickest and most promising way to encourage further cooperation.

I’m now deeply convinced that it could help a lot of Lean CEO trying to “do” Lean if their senseï or Lean coach would deal with them in a solution focused way.

The traditional Lean coaching approach has traditionally been to hit the CEO on the head until they do it and get it (maybe from a cultural approach to coaching in Japan). Surely enough, Lean has to be done by oneself to be fully understood: what a one-piece flow can bring in terms of problem detection and team work is a marvellous thing that needs to be experienced to be best understood.

Few consultants that I know can run down this path: the CEO is barely available and most often nominate someone to take care of the Lean job, or worse, let the consultants manage Lean projects on their own.

Instead, if Lean coaches would deal with the CEO first, foremost and only, it might be a slower start but a better, firmer start in the end.

As Solution Focus is about what works in terms of behavior, it may help to raise awareness in the CEO that what he sees in his company is how he thinks. And that by changing his thoughts and corresponding behaviors, he might get something else that works better for the company as a whole.

I’ll post something about Motivational Interviewing as a way to approach that first meetings with the CEO… soon.

Another great article from Coert Visser about overcoming the so-called “resistance to change”:

Doing What Works in Solution-Focused Change: Redirecting attention from negative to positive in 3 small steps (P->C->O).

Often, a Lean program (or any change program for that matter) is being imposed on people by upper management. Hopefully, most of the time, management asks what need to be achieved, but not necessarily how it needs to be done.

That P>C>O method looks useful when people don’t want the change being imposed on them (Lean for that matter). It indeed means that they want something to change: the contraint being imposed on them!

So that a nice way to reframe their “resistance” and transform it into something they want more of.

As I’ve read elsewhere on contrained change: rather than work on the imposed change when the person needing to change does not want to, work on the contraint itself: “what can we do to get some relief from this imposed changed on you?”.

And then the talk can go into another direction.

From that very interesting (as is most often the case from Coert Visser!) paper here, I derive the following insights:

Lean on the motivation continuum

Self -Determination Theory (SDT) has is that motivation can be expressed on a continuum from “amotivation” to “intrinsic motivation” with three basic human needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness (all things that are also found in Maslow‘s hierarchy of needs and the notion of Flow from Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi).

Lean appears to be well on these three pillars of motivation:

• autonomy is high in an environment where management does not solve the problem of their collaborators, but instead coach them to resolution.
• this coaching leads to increased competence on the work and on the process of continuous improvement itself, along with a better knowledge of how the organization works (through A3 problem solving for instance which fosters nemawashi – japanese term for: go see all stakeholders and work with them)
• by doing nemawashi with all stakeholders, people get their relatedness level increased!

On motivating people to do Lean

Visser’s paper continues, on page 13, on the way Motivational Interviewing can help a professionnal helper (!) with their client, as would be the case of a Lean coach in any organization (please bear in mind that I talk of a coach, not a consultant whose approach is different). In this regard, MI is based on 4 general principles:

• the expression of empathy
• the development of discrepancy
• rolling with resistance and
• support for self-efficacy

Considering what I often saw in organizations with respect to Change and Lean more specifically, I’d say that:

• Lean change approaches are often law on empathy: “all your problems are belong to us, we’ll you help solve them”,
• with a development of discrepancy that more than often consist in management or co-called coaches finger pointing faults in those running the processes,
• a rolling with resistance that consists of stomping it for it’s the proof of ignorance in Lean matters and that so-called Lean coaches and experts know better (which is indeed true as for Lean things, but blatantly false  with respect to people’s own Gemba),
• and support of efficacy is most of the time seen as Lean consultants (whoops I should have said ‘coaches’ doing most of the job themselves (deciding on what the Future State Map for instance should look like) with only partial accounting for people’s ideas.

What I described above, though caricatural (or is it?) is still what’s even been given a name: L.A.M.E. (Lean As Misguidedly Executed).

The paper goes on starting from page 14 on some suggested questions to addresse the four principles above to move someone in the needed change direction, but with proper respect for their motivation and of them as people, by helping find how they could be engaged with the change initiative.

Reflection questions:

• As a CEO, how engaged are your collaborators in the Lean initiative? What have you done to motivate them and engage them, as persons, in it?
• As a Lean coach, how have you addressed management’s willing to do Lean? What questions did you asked them as for their own needed change with respect to Lean (that is, Lean should be done by management with collaborators, not to collaborators)?

SD Analysis of Autonomy

Reading Coert Visser’s blog post “People prefer to choose for themselves what they initiate and they want to control as much as possible what they do“, I decided to give it a shot at modelling what comes to my mind using my preferred tool of choice: Vensim.

The first analytical thinking through a problematic autonomy situation would be that people’s desire and actions to increase their autonomy is motivated by Others’ action. “Their faulty behavior against me motivates and authorizes my reacting to it“.

Of course, from the view point of others, the same thing happen with us (‘A‘ in the attached diagram).

So, although each actions from A or other tend to reach an equilibrium toward one’s own autonomy desired level (loops B1 and B2), the connection between actions (center of picture, R1) creates an overall reinforcing dynamical structure where A and Others are competing for their autonomy levels. In the end, it’s more than probable that all will loose: a typical loose-loose situation resulting from a “win-loose” mental model.

So, I added, as a proposed solution, that an overall external loop (in dotted lines on the diagram) be added where A and Others exchange on their similar desire to achieve some autonomy, and do listen to and respect the corresponding desire of the partner. In doing so, they might lower their desired autonomy level but in the mean time counter balance the negative and reinforcing loop of their action and we could hope that they reach some form of win-win equilibrium.

That solution can only exist if Dialogue is possible between A and Others.

How are you communicating about problematic situations in your organization? Do you talk them through or do you complain, finger point to one another and stick to phone and mail to fire reactive actions to one another?

Coert Visser, again, gives some interesting insights with regards to self-reinforcing feedback of success and virtuous circles of the kind in his blog article: DOING WHAT WORKS: A model of success.

I’d like to also point to the Systems Thinking / Dynamics archetype of Success to the Successful (click on the CLD link to see a schematic representation) where, once someone achieve a result, he gets more visibility and maybe more resources to continue its successes, to the detriment of possibly others.