22. Why making obvious changes can still be hard to do, and how to make progress anyway

When everyone agrees on the need for something to happen and it still doesn’t, how to stay solution focused?

I have been enjoying the Comment Is Freed Substack from education policy advisor turned writer Sam Freedman and his father Laurence, a professor of war studies.  They can often see an angle on current news stories which offers a different slant with more background than the instant analysis one can find the in newspapers.  Sam’s piece on The Policy Paradox caught my eye a couple of weeks ago.

The Policy Paradox

The basic idea is this: the more obvious a policy idea is, the less likely it is to happen. He observes that there are plenty of policies out there which everyone supports – for example preventative healthcare (spending money on helping people not get ill) or improved vocational education in the UK (always the bridesmaid and never the academic bride). These topics have been around for years, in various forms under different administrations, and yet have not made serious progress. What’s going on? Why are they so difficult to get implemented?

Sam Freedman offers different analyses for his examples (spending rules, misdiagnosis of what’s needed, fear of the electorate). But his main thrust across the piece is that given the long struggle in these areas, simply writing another policy paper won’t cut it. The key question he wants to ask is ‘what will be different this time?’.  If something is approved all round and still doesn’t happen, that fact is a key part of the picture going forward.

What will be different this time?

Sam Freedman

Building the platform

Defining the topic we’re working on – the ‘platform’ – is a key part of Solutions Focus (SF) working. When I set out bringing the idea from Solution Focused Brief Therapy into the world of coaching, management and organisational change some three decades ago I thought it was a relatively straightforward part of the work. I have learned that it’s perhaps the most important piece of the whole thing. Without a solid platform, the rest of the work doesn’t make sense. All the funky parts like the Future Perfect (‘day after the miracle’), scales, what’s working already are very confusing without a clear set of words to frame them.

These days when I teach about building a firm platform I usually start with a Best Hopes question:

What are your best hopes for our work together?

(This assumes that I am in a ‘helping’ capacity like a coach or facilitator. It can be adapted for managers or those with a bigger role in the ongoing work, for example What are our best hope from this project?)

The point about hopes is that they are:

(a)    In the future (as opposed to reasons for change, which are normally in the past)

(b)    Positive and desirable, as opposed to negative and undesirable – what we want (as opposed to what we don’t want)

(c)     Personal, coming from each person involved (as opposed to a static and impersonal ‘goal’)

Once we have a form of words about the best hopes which are amenable to all involved (at least those around the table) we can expand this platform with:

• What difference would that make? (to you, to others involved including stakeholder groups). (I sometimes ask specifically about the benefits of this change, which is a more focused question.)

• Is this important enough that you’re prepared to act now (assuming we can find ways forward that make sense)? (Some people may be ‘window shopping’, which is fine but a potential waste of time. SF is about getting things moving right away, not an academic debate.)

• What would be a good name for the project? (I got this idea from veteran SF practitioner and author Ben Furman, and I find it makes a very useful difference particularly when I’m working with groups of people. The name can act as a sign for lots of different things form different people which are then rolled into one. It also makes the subsequent pieces of conversation easier.)

Once all that is covered, and everyone around the table is nodding enthusiastically, then we have a good strong platform and can move on with building descriptions from a better past, present and future, as described in my book The Next Generation Of Solution Focused Practice.

What makes it hard?

Everything above is applicable in general. There are time, however, when I have found myself wondering whether there’s something else to be considered. When the platform sounds perfectly reasonable and achievable, when it’s all sounding straightforward and obvious, then I have been known to ask this question:

“What makes it hard?”

This is not really a solution focused question in many ways. We’re more interested in what will make it possible, do-able, even easier. However, at the platform building stage it’s good practice to make sure we’ve folded in the main angles and aspects of the project. One of these angles is about Sam Freedman’s paradox; have you tried to do this before? I think it’s a different kind of platform if the people are working on something for the first time, or it’s something that’s been bugging them for months or even years.

The answers to ‘what makes it hard?’ help us to refine the platform to include and embrace the past struggles already so that we can move into new areas of solution-building. This kind of questioning was part of SF’s predecessor, the Mental Research Institute’s problem-solving brief therapy. In their take, asking

“What have your tried before?”

Is a very important element. They then factored that information in and attempted to find ways forward that not only didn’t repeat what had been attempted before but went in very positively different and even contrary ways. For example, if the client was trying very hard to do something, the MRI team would instruct them not to try at all, to see what happened. It’s a provocative way to open up new spaces, even if it might look irrational and a bit odd to the outsider.

Hot topics – what do we have to get right?

One way I have found to work in this kind of way while staying solution-focused is to use a Hot Topics activity. I ask the group to list the ‘hot topics’ – things they are concerned about in tackling this issue and move forward. There is usually no shortage of suggestions! 😊 I make a list on a flip chart or similar, and then ask the people to think about each one and come up with a matching, different thought:

What do we have to get right?

This builds up into a list of things that the people want to include as they make progress, rather than a list of challenges/things to avoid. Once that’s constructed (and it doesn’t usually take long), some people like to fold over the paper so that only the ‘things to get right’ are visible. An even more dramatic way it to tears off the left hand side of the paper and throw it away, leaving only the list of things to get right.

The next move is often to get people building detailed descriptions of a better future, sometimes the day after a miracle happened and everything in the platform has appeared and is working. At the point of asking this miracle question or similar, I include ‘and all the things that we have to get right are there and are working surprisingly well’ or some such. This is a great way of including the things that make it hard, re-constructed into things we have to get right (this time), at the outset and making them run though the subsequent conversations and work like letters through a stick of rock.

The Hot Topics activity is one of the 57 SF Activities for Facilitators and Consultants in the book edited by Peter Röhrig and Jenny Clarke. It’s a wonderful resource; the activities are not only usable as they are, but can each serve as inspiration for your own variations built to fit the context in which you are working right now.

Take preventative heathcare, for example…

Let’s take the first example given by Sam Freedman, preventative healthcare. Everyone is in favour of this, but in the UK funding for it has fallen consistently in every area (apart from childhood obesity), by 24% in real terms since 2015. Freedman says that one reason for this is the way spending is allocated, which is not at all strategic but favours short-term priorities (popular with the public) like cutting waiting lists for operations. Another reason might be ‘fear of the electorate’, with ministers not wanting to appear to be offering well-intentioned but spoilsport advice about exercising and not drinking (say). Then there are the perverse incentives which mean doctors are paid for treating people (not helping them stay healthy). So the ‘hot topics’ chart might look like this:

Hot topics

• Lack of funding

• Political will to do it

• Doctors rewarded for treatments, not having healthy service users

• The ‘nanny state’

What do we have to get right?

• Finance available

• Prioritise and show payback

• Incentives aligned to reward effort on prevention

• Show how prevention is good for all (both public and health service)

By the way, as an SF practitioner, I would also be very interested in how the spending on childhood obesity has gone up when everything else has come down. How did this happen? What lessons can we take? What’s worked there that might work elsewhere? And so on.

Conclusions

People sometimes say ‘If I knew then what I know now…’ in considering some missed opportunity in the past. The corollary, of course, is that we DO know now what we know now! If something is hard, then say so. If you’re tried it before, say so. And using all that, it’s still very possible to build ways forward that not only include these past experiences but are much more likely to be productive because of them. And, yes, if you did it before and it worked, even for a while, that’s also very useful grist to the SF mill in terms of useful know-how to include and build upon. Organising humanely and effectively means tapping into the experience of those involved – whether positive or negative – to build progress that will acknowledge and utilise it.

Please share, comment and subscribe as always. And thank you for reading this far!

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Dates & mates

Ben Furman, who got me interested in the very useful idea of getting the client(s) to name the project, has books in English, German, Finnish (his native language), Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Estonian, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Icelandic, Indonesian, Polish, Czech, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Arabic, Farsi and Bulgarian! Check them all out at https://benfurman.com/WP2/books/.

Ben Furman

I will be leading a rare two-day workshop in Munich, Germany on 26-27 June 2023 at the SySt Institute with my dear friends Matthias Varga and Insa Sparrer. I’ll be talking about the latest developments in Solution Focused practice (and theory), and also Host Leadership. Matthias is directly ‘to blame’ for the whole Host Leadership story - it was his saying “the host is both the first and the last'“ that set me off on this track in 2003. The workshop will be in English with German translation, and will be held in the amazing SySt library. Full details and registration here.

The SySt library in Munich, where I’ll be presenting 26-27 June 2023.