Mark McKergow's Blog (11)

Yesterday was marked by the Autumn lecture of the British Wittgenstein Society, and Kirsten Dierolf and I were very pleased not only to be invited to the lecture, but also to be included in a special dinner following the event. The lecturer was Prof Rom Harré (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Romano_Harr%C3%A9) who has added Chair of the LSE’s Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences to his large collection of… Continue

As a practicing consultant, coach and facilitator I always try to keep developing myself by attending trainings and other events from time to time. Within the SF world this is not always easy – after 17 years I feel as if I’ve seen quite a lot. Some of you will know of my recent work on developing the idea of Leader as Host, and part of my research led me to the Art of Hosting group (www.artofhosting.org). Art of Hosting (AoH) is a movement that started… Continue

My paper with Kirsten Dierolf on the Grammar of Neuroscience (published in the SFCT journal InterAction and available for free download at http://tinyurl.com/lqb7p5) has come to the attention of Professor Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (http://herts.academia.edu/DanieleMoyalSharrock) at the University of Hertfordshire and founder of the British Wittgenstein Society. She is a Wittgenstein specialist, and… Continue

You may remember that Harry Korman and I have been working on an epic paper about the radical simplicity of SF, and I put up a draft some time ago. Well, it's finally out in Journal of Systemic Therapies (following quite a lot of revision after the various peer reviewers comments), and you can read the final version at www.sfwork.com/jsp/index.jsp?lnk=6d8. The reference is McKergow MW and Korman H (2009), Journal of Systemic Therapies Vo… Continue

You may remember the section in The Solutions Focus book about the strange story of phage - the virus that eats bacteria. An evolving alternative to antibiotics, phage evolve along with bacteria and so offer a possible way to deal with bacteria which develop resistance to antibiotics. The parallel is with 'every case is different' (phage) vs 'every case is the same' (antibiotics). I thought you might be interested to know that the development of phage treatments is continuing, with the first se… Continue

I recently read the book Nudge by David Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Subtitled Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, the book connects to the movement in behavioural economics which looks at what people ACTUALLY do when faced with choices, rather than what they OUGHT to do… Continue

I have been working on a revised version of the Inbetween paper (thanks to all who commented) and attach the latest working version here Inbetween 080826 FP.doc. Harry and I submitted it to Family Process who have made many helpful comments (and some others too) - we are just addressing these now. In this week's New Scientist magazine I c… Continue

Here in the town of Cheltenham, UK we have just finished our annual festival of literature. Fantastic event, in fact over 200 seperate events over 10 days with authors from all fields - fiction, politics, science, biography, philosophy, childrens' books and much more - speaking about their work, reading from it (a little), debating, signing books and generally having a fun and improving time. Some of my favourite events this year included Tony Curtis (a real genuine Hollywood legend and still in… Continue

The adjective Solution Focused is not always very useful. Everyone wants to work in a ‘solution focused’ way – after all, who wouldn’t? However the term ‘solution’ is used in SF in a different way to everyday conversation: we use it to mean ‘what’s wanted’, whereas in normal usage it is used for ‘what to do’. So, SF coaching, for example, is built around what the client wants, as opposed to problem focused approaches which focus on identifying and fixing what’s wrong. SF usually ends up with the… Continue

Harry Korman (who runs the SFT-L SF therapy listserv) and I have been working on a paper for a while. We think it's now ready for an initial discussion in the SF community, prior to a second version for external publication. We'd be very interested in your comments. You can read the paper at www.sfwork.com/jsp/index.jsp?lnk=6d8 or download a pdf from Harry's website by… Continue

I was sent this very nice quote by Kamila Novokova a few weeks ago. I think it sums up quite a lot about SF practice, and also how to act not-knowingly and still to act. It comes from the part where Treebeard, an ent (tree-shepherd), is carrying Merry and Pippin. They are very unsure about what's going on, having never seen an ent before... Merry: "Would you think it rude, if we asked what you are going to do with us, and which side you are on?" Treebeard: "'I am not going to do anything with… Continue