34. Information-gathering questions and world-stretching questions: a key distinction in Solution Focused practice
Mistaking one kind of question for the other can lead to muddles and confusion – for practitioners and clients alike.
There has been a lively conversation going on one of the Solution Focused Therapy (SFT) groups I’m on this week. An SF practitioner was being quizzed by someone else about the use of ‘interactional’ questions, asking the client to look at the situation from an external perspective. This is a key part of SF work, as regular readers will know by now.
The concern was about what would happen if the client had no-one else in their lives (presumably to take a perspective), and could not for some reason visualise the future. This could, in the mind of the concerned person, lead to frustration as the questions could be unanswerable or irrelevant – which would apparently mean that SF wouldn’t be a good approach to take.
I would like to take the opportunity here to draw attention to a possible confusion which helps us to understand both the concerns and also why they aren’t justified. It’s about the difference between information-gathering questions and world-stretching questions.
Information-gathering questions
Most of the questions we ask in everyday life are information-gathering questions. We want to know something (that’s already known somehow or to someone) and so we ask. A few examples:
What’s your date of birth? (At the doctor’s I am always asked this – it’s how they keep their records connected to the correct person.)
How did Chelsea do against Brentford on Saturday? (A football match. Chelsea lost 0-2.)
Where do you work? (Assuming you have a job, of course.)
What are you doing this weekend? (Not watching Chelsea, we might suppose.)
What’s your mate Nigel’s favourite curry? (He always has the same thing! Chicken korma – the wimp 😊)
These are all straight questions gathering information. They have broadly right/wrong answers (not always – maybe Nigel’s taste has gone up the spice ladder since he want to China, or you’ve lost your job and currently have no workplace). But the purpose is to discover something that’s basically already known.
At the start of an SF coaching/therapy session there may be a requirement to ask some questions like this, usually to keep the records straight. Questions about name, age, marital/family status, address, who referred you to us, that sort of thing. In other approaches there might be something about the nature of the problem that’s happening; we don’t tend to ask about this, as it has no impact on the process which is to follow, but some places insist. Indeed, in the USA it is often necessary to find a diagnosis for this client as part of the process of getting paid. However, in SF work we usually try to get this over as quickly as possible (even having someone else do it, or doing it in a different location to where the more interesting conversations will take place).
World-stretching questions
In my 2021 book The Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice I proposed that our usual range of SF questions is designed to ‘stretch the world’ of the client. The world of the client is the client (of course) and every opportunity for interaction that the client has. SF questions like
What are your best hopes from our work together?
What would be the first tiny signs that things are getting better for you? What else?
Imagine a scale from 1-10 where 10 is that your best hopes are realised… where are you right now on that scale?
When have you been highest on this scale? What was happening then? What tiny signs did you notice? What else?
These questions might look a bit like information-gathering questions. Indeed, back in the early days of SF therapy they did have an information-gathering element, in that the practitioner would be using the replies to put together a task for the client do to following the interview/conversation. However, as the decades have passed since the appearance of SFT as a distinct approach in the mid 1980s, there has been less emphasis in some circles on task-devising and more focus on the conversation itself as the change medium.
Broadly speaking, it comes down to this. Are we asking the questions so we can hear the answers, or so that the client can hear their own answers? In my view, first put forward in my paper SFBT 2.0: The next generation of Solution-Focused brief therapy has already arrived (2016), the answer has shifted. At the outset it was clearly the former. As time went on, practitioners could hedge their bets – the client would anyway hear their own answers, as well as the information being useful to the practitioner. In the past two decades some practitioners have been experimenting with doubling down on the client influencing themselves through the answers, so in a way the practitioner only needs to hear them to help create the next questions (which are often expansionary small questions like ‘What difference would that make to you?’. ‘what else?’ and ‘who would be the first person to notice that [thing X mentioned by the client] was happening? What would they notice?’
Interactional questions are world-stretching
Let’s go back to the original objection posed at the start of this piece. What if the client has nobody in their lives to take such a perspective?
Two points here. First everyone does have other people in their life. They don’t have to be ‘significant’ – the perspective of the receptionist at work, the supermarket checkout assistant or Nigel with whom they have a curry once a month. To take a more elevated view, the philosophy of Ubuntu says that ‘We are people through other people’. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was the first to point out (nearly a century ago) that language is a social practice; we don’t have it innately in our brains. Learning language is a social process requiring other people to learn it from and with. So there must be other people somewhere in the mix, or they couldn’t talk at all.
Secondly, this is NOT an information gathering question (though it might look like it) – it’s a world-stretching question. It’s not about gathering information on how other people actually respond, it’s asking the client to think about the details of how they would respond in a better future, or to construct a more detailed picture of how they did respond when things went better (an ‘instance’, as it’s sometimes now termed). So – it doesn’t have to be a person ‘in the client’s life’, just a different and external perspective. It could be a pet (dog, lizard, whatever). It doesn’t even have to be animate – a teddy bear, the coffee machine at breakfast time. I have even been known to ask how the office waste-paper basket or the steering wheel of the client’s car or their bike would know that things have changed. It’s not about gathering information; it’s about becoming aware of a wider context (which will then interact with and affect inner experience too).
Do our clients have to be able to ‘visualise’ a different world?
Not necessarily. We are looking for description, which is usually done with language in the first instance in SF work. No doubt some people do visualise a picture or image when they are casting forward to imagine a different and stretched world in which they can go about their business with their hopes realised and their problem dis-solved. Indeed, imagery can be a fine route to change work, as my use decades ago (and endorsement) of Dina Glouberman’s masterpiece book Imagework attests. However, there are other routes including language, drawing, art and even physical theatre to engaging with new and better futures.
There are relatively recently described conditions where people appear to be unable to conjure up a better future. What to do if they can’t construct any sense of the future (which would be an extreme case, one I’ve never experienced in thirty years)? My colleague Chris Iveson would suggest simply going to the past instead. Describing past instances in great detail has a similar world-stretching effect. Memory is not a simple case of recall (as if taking the information from a file and viewing it again) – Frederick Bartlett was the first to point out that it’s a constructive process where details are adjusted, elements fade and new connections appear. Each time we remember the ‘same’ thing, it’s a different memory. (Linguistic note - re-membering is about putting something back together, the opposite of the more obvious dis-membering, pulling something apart.)
And in the total extreme when both the future and the past are out of reach? My late lamented colleague Luc Isabaert ran a solution-focused in-patient clinic for people with alcohol dependency in Belgium over decades. He found that some of his patients struggled with anything apart from the present, the now, what’s right here. So… he developed a method to work with those people based on the now. His three questions are still excellent for anyone in crisis, unable or unwilling to think very far and who nonetheless want to connect with something better:
1. What have I done today that I am happy with?
2. What has someone else done that I am happy with (or grateful for)? And how did I react? (So that the person might be encouraged to do it again?)
3. What do I see around me – hear, feel, smell, taste – that I am happy with or grateful for?
These are also, of course, world-stretching questions. We used them at Sunday Assembly Edinburgh in the early stages of the COVID pandemic to help people get focused on the here and now.
Who gets to decide on the questions?
There is one other aspect of this issue on which I’d like to comment. The concerned professional, nervous (or unwilling) to ask SF questions, says that they don’t want to ask them in case the client might find it frustrating. This frustration is a real possibility. Future questions are not easy, they need work from the client, who may well be heard making “I don’t know” responses to start with, groaning, screwing face up, making ‘effortful’ reactions… this is part of the process. It’s not like asking people their address or date of birth, it’s a creative process which is building something (somewhat) new (but based on a lot of continuing elements from their current life). Indeed, I reported on a case (‘Mary and the cuddle’ with Chris Iveson) where the client got very frustrated, repeatedly exclaiming “I can’t answer that!” – before answering it.
I’m very curious that the question should not be asked in case the client is frustrated. Who gets to choose? If the practitioner won’t even ask the question, we’ll never know how it might have been answered. . It’s like not asking someone to kick a ball because they may have an amputated foot. They might – but there are other ways of kicking a ball, and almost everyone can achieve this simple task.
A practitioner deciding not to ask such questions is making a choice for their client. They are deciding that the client can’t answer (or may not answer) before they even try. Their ‘expertise’ is not to show the client the door, apparently for fear that they might use it to leave.
Yes, people may struggle with some questions. But to make that a reason for not asking them at all is to decide for the client, not to let the client decide for themselves. It’s degrading, insidious – and points to why some medical professionals are not well attuned to SF in that they are used to making decisions for their clients without reference to them.
Other medical professionals are becoming more attuned to asking more ‘risky’ questions. Dr Dominic Bray in Liverpool works in palliative care with cancer sufferers and has learned the benefit of cutting through medical discourse by asking “What does the patient want?”. His colleagues now call this the Dominic Bray question. (Dominic has written Living Well With Cancer: A solution-focused approach, an excellent guide to bringing the personal into a very difficult medical setting.)
Conclusions
All organisations need information-gathering questions. They can also benefit from judicious application of world-stretching questions. These work best when they are applied deliberately, given time to percolate and expand on. Being unwilling or afraid to ask world-stretching questions is to give up on change before you’ve even started.
Knowing where one kind of question stops and the other starts is very important for leaders and managers. Sometimes it’s time for one and sometimes it’s time for the other. And a lot of confusion can be generated by people who don’t know what time it is.
Dates and Mates
Advance news that the next European Brief Therapy Association (EBTA) conference will be on 20-22 September 2024 in Tenerife, Spain. What a lovely time to visit the Canary Islands…
It has just come to my attention that the EBTA Research List is back online. This listing of mostly quantitative research into the SF approach was collected for many years by the inestimable Dr Alasdair Macdonald. He retired a while ago and the list is now being curated by Rytis Pakronsis and Andreea Zak. Bravo! The list is very searchable and is a great service to researchers and practitioners alike.
This makes me think about the possibility of having an approach in Solution Focus that is characterized by respectful curiosity. At the beginning of my work as a social worker many years ago, we visited detained young people in custody. They often found themselves in a very confusing situation. These clients had literally, at the moment, no-one else in their lives and could often not visualise the future. In this situations, Solution Focused conversations was a possibility to connect, stretch the world and talk about hope.