49. ‘Stretching the world’ can, and does, change everything
Ripple effects and interconnections in complex systems mean that apparently small differences can result in much bigger and wider scale reorientations.
Last week I wrote about how Solution Focused work ‘stretches the world’ of the client by introducing newly-relevant ‘affordances’ or opportunities for interaction. This work has gathered some useful attention – thank you to everyone who has been in touch. Susan in Australia wrote in to say:
I really like the explanation that you offer about the SF approach as "it is not so much the client who changes but the world around them"… Too many people are experiencing perfectionism and its converse, inadequacy, by personalising the difficulties that they are facing. If the discussion becomes about what they need to change in themselves, it potentially comes close to reinforcing that perception that may already be feeling, which is that they are the problem. If the discussion is about what may change in their world as a result of 'stretching it' in a SF session, by noticing and detailing the changes that may result from viewing or doing things differently, then this work leaves their personal dignity intact and their willingness and capacity to change.
This thought, that ‘stretching the world of the client’ seems a more respectful and encouraging way to think about our work, was echoed by other correspondents.
This week I’ll build on the original book chapter (published in 2020 after a 2017 conference session) by looking at how ‘stretching the world’ is a much more fundamental shift for the client than might initially appear. As we will see, it’s much more than just a new possibility…
Linear and complex views of the world
Most of us work on a day-to-day basis with a linear view of the world. As Brian Klaas observes in his new book Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why everything we do matters, this is based on the need to make sense of a complex world in ways which allow us to get with our lives in a relatively predictable way. One thing leads to another in logical and understandable ways. As Klaas puts it:
With cognitive processes that prioritize survival over truth, our minds have evolved to simplify our understanding of cause and effect into a misleading, but useful, form. We tend to look for one cause for one effect; we tend to imagine a straightforward linear relationship between causes and effects (small causes produce small effects, while big causes produce big effects); and we tend to systematically discount the role of randomness and chance, inventing reasons even when reasons do not exist, averse to the uncertain and the unknown. (Klaas, Brian. Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (p. 71). John Murray Press. Kindle Edition.)
This same logic spills over into thinking about mental health too; a major trauma or dysfunction must require a big intervention. (This may be why psychoanalysis has proved so long-lived; if you’re suffering a lot, then it will take years to sort it out. Obviously.) There’s no basis for this in practice, but it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy which leads those in its thrall to dismiss the very idea that short-term modest treatments can tackle the most stubborn and chronic challenges.
While this linear assumption is a good way of making sense of the world so we can live in it and go about our daily lives, there is a growing realisation among scientists that the world is a whole set of complex adaptive systems where change is happening all the time and events can emerge in unpredictable ways from tiny changes. We are all swept along like kayakers in a swirling river; we have influence (with our paddles) but not control (there are other forces at play too). Small changes can (and do) lead to large effects (and sometimes to next-to-no effect at all). It’s unpredictable – we do what we can and see what happens.
The ’world’ of the client is a complex set of interactions. And that makes a big difference to what happens when small changes come along.
SF and finding new opportunities for interaction
In SF work we are keen to talk about tiny signs that our clients might notice which tell them that something is happening or starting to happen. Noticing something slightly different when they wake up. Catching a glimpse of a different behaviour from someone else. Catching themselves squeezing their orange juice differently at breakfast.
It might appear that when someone starts to notice different things in different ways (as they do during and after SF conversations), that’s quite a small change. As my friend and colleague Chris Iveson put it in his Facebook post which I quoted last week,
Mark’s idea suggests that it is not so much the client who changes but the world around them: successful therapy stretches that world and thus affords more possibilities than were hitherto apparent. This is a better fit with another idea of ours that the client’s answers open doors which they hadn’t noticed before.
The client’s answers open doors which they hadn’t noticed before. Yes indeed. That’s a good way to think about how the process might appear initially. And… that’s just the start. There’s more to it.
Complex systems, far reaching possibilities
With linear assumptions, a new possibility is a new possibility. A new door is a new door. That’s it. Except, of course, that it isn’t. Taking a complex interactional perspective, we can start to see how changes ripple out and start to affect matters which appear distant from the original ‘issue’.
One of the fascinating properties of a complex system is that everything affects everything else. These affects may be large, small, tiny or non-existent, but the potential is there for one thing to have much wider impacts. This is not, I emphasise, because of some hippy dippy notions of resonant fields a la Rupert Sheldrake but rather that one thing nudges another which nudges others, and so on outwards. As Brian Klaas put it in Fluke, ‘Changing anything changes everything’.
‘Changing anything changes everything’ – Brian Klaas
Klaas starts his book with a spectacular example. In 1926 Mr and Mrs HL Stimson, US citizens, enjoyed a week’s holiday in the historic Japanese city of Kyoto. They left after a week, with just a signature in the hotel register to record their visit. Not much of a change here. But… fast forward to 1945. Henry Stimson is now US Secretary of War. Cutting a long story short (see the excellent movie Oppenheimer for more details) and is presented with a list of possible atomic bomb targets in Japan; Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Kyoto. He was resolutely opposed to bombing the beauty and history Kyoto, and convinced President Truman to take it off this list.
Nagasaki was added as a backup target, and the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Then on the second bombing mission Kokura, the intended target, was covered in clouds. The pilot moved to Nagasaki, which was also cloud-covered preventing an attack. Then at the last minute a gap appeared in the cloud, the bomb was dropped and tens of thousands of civilians died. It seems inadequate to say that the inhabitants of Nagasaki were unlucky – had Henry Stimson taken a different holiday or the weather was clearer things could have turned out very differently.
It’s tempting to ask ‘what-if?’. The trouble with trying to trace all the what-if’s is that there are simply so many of them, and it’s impossible to disentangle it all. That’s why SF work is focused on the future, and pasts that support that future, rather than trying to understand or gain insight into the past.
So what does this have to do with world-stretching? Because there too, changing anything changes everything.
Not just a new possibility but a new world
Yes, an SF conversation can get people noticing a new door that wasn’t there before, or a new way to interact with someone or something that’s connected to a preferred future. And that apparently small change can then start to shift other things. The way the person is feeling, the way they start to think about the present, the future (and indeed the past), the sense of agency they have, the sense of possibility. I’ve tried to think about a metaphor for this that is relatable, and this is my best effort so far.
Imagine that you’re a rock climber. You’re on a cliff and somehow you’ve got stuck – there are no handholds and you can’t either go up or down. You’re getting tired, nothing seems possible. And then… you notice a possible handhold further up the cliff face that you hadn’t seen before. It’s just within reach. Suddenly, you start to sense that movement can happen. You look further up and it seems as if there are more holds just above that one. You start to ready yourself to reach up to the hold, and then make your move. Yes! It works, and you can now flex your legs into a different place and regain some feeling in your leg muscles. Now you can see a bit further up the cliff and there looks to be a promising foothold a little over to the left…
You see how noticing one thing doesn’t just offer that one possibility. Other things start moving around it – particularly if the new affordance is connecting to something that’s really important to you. One thing immediately starts leading to others. And this is before you’ve really tried it out.
This way of thinking has always been a part of SF practice
In the course of writing today’s piece, I went back to the handout from the very first SF training I attended in the UK. It was given by Jane Lethem, then of the Brief Therapy Practice (now BRIEF) on 5-6 May 1994 in Bristol. The three-page handout opens with a list of Assumptions in Solution Focused Brief Therapy, and there, in fifth place on the list of six, is this:
Sometimes only the smallest of changes is required to set in motion a solution to the problem and since change in one part of the system leads to change in other parts, it is usually unnecessary to see all the members of a family (Brief Therapy Practice 1994)
At about this time (mid-1990s) breakthroughs were occurring in what became known as complexity science which bore out this assumption in all kinds of settings, including with human behaviour. I was fascinated by these new ways of thinking and included them in The Solutions Focus book (2002) as best I could. Our language with its subject-verb-object structure is not well placed to describe the circular, mutually interdependent and finely balanced ways that our behaviour, lives and worlds emerge. The new edition of the book, now in the proofing stage, contains my latest attempt – look out for it in May 2024.
And, of course, Wittgenstein got there first
In his first book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), Ludwig Wittgenstein makes some very interesting and prescient remarks about ‘the world’ both as a whole and in the way it is experiences by individuals. He wrote:
6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man' (Wittgenstein, Tractatus)
This is a bit stroky-beard, but I want to draw attention to the sense that Wittgenstein gives where he writes that the world must ‘wax or wane as a whole’. The world of the happy man is a different one form that of the unhappy man, but the ‘facts’ (which in Wittgenstein’s terms are to do with relationships between objects) are the same. The world is clearly a subjective feature connected with the person and their relationship with the facts. So when Wittgenstein writes about the world waxing or waning as a whole, he could be seen as being onto the same ideas we’ve been talking about through this piece; that changing one ‘piece’ of the world actually changes much more than that. Wittgenstein moved on his thinking, but there’s a core to his work that sustains and I think this continues to be relevant today.
Conclusions
This piece sets out why I chose the possibly curious phrase ‘world-stretching’ as a friendly explanation of SF practice. The world, the collection of possibilities for interaction, is defined by the work of von Uxkuell and Gibson as I set out in last week’s piece. This week, the way that this world is a complex interactional system helps us understand that to change it is not merely to add on a new option, but it potentially changes everything. The world can be stretched (or indeed shrunk) only as a whole.
I will be coming back to this topic in future weeks – not immediately (there are lots of other things to write about) but soon. There is more to say and more to be learned about the consequences of this way of thinking about SF work.
Dates and Mates
Brian Klaas’s new book Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters is a first-class work about what happens. It’s one of a very few books I read and then wish I’d written. Highly recommended. Brian also writes The Garden Of Forking Paths here on Substack which I also recommend as a varied and entertaining walk through complexity and other related songs.
If you want to submit a proposal for SF24, our international, global 24 hour festival of Solutions Focus, then now’s the time. The deadline is 8th March 2024. The form for proposals is here, and you can get more information and reserve your free place here.
