Sharing and building Solution Focused practice in organisations

Paolo Terni's Blog (11)

Solution - Focus practices as an open process

I strongly believe that the effectiveness of Solution-Focused practice is linked to its radical simplicity. That is what makes Solution-Focused practices beautiful and elegant. I also believe that what we are doing today is the seed of what we will be doing tomorrow. In other words, Solution-Focused practice… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on July 28, 2009 at 1:37am — 3 Comments

Distinction: SF coaching vs. "being positive"

Inspired by the latest posting by Kirsten Dierolf, I wrote something about SF vs. "being positive": Solution-Focused coaching is not about “being positive”. Solution-Focused is not about denying the reality of tough situations. Solution-Focused coaching is about noticing what works - in a fact-finding manner. It is about helping clients observe what they are doing: what d… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on June 19, 2009 at 11:58am — 5 Comments

Distinction: SF & Positive Psychology

New posting on my blog. Here is an excerpt: Therefore: IF therapy is about treatment and about helping people function in society (Using a sports metaphor, a therapist makes sure that an injured athlete recovers to compete again, via an effective rehab program) AND IF coaching is about helping people function well in society, if it is about living better and about performing better (Using a sports metaphor, a coach makes sure that the athlete performs at his or her best, via an… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on June 15, 2009 at 9:48pm — 2 Comments

Who knows better?

For a specific work assignment, I am brushing up on my NLP skills; more specifically, I'm reviewing my teaching materials on conversational hypnosis and persuasion strategies, as per a specific request by the client who hired me. I am struck yet again by how traditional approaches differ from Solution-Focused ones. Let's take negotiation skills: a topic that I teach in workshops and in which many clients want to be coached. The NLP skills used in negotiation are designed to get the othe… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on April 5, 2009 at 11:30am — 5 Comments

Solution-Focused approaches & the Positive Deviance Process

In a recent posting I talked about an intervention for reducing hospital infections. I noted how that intervention had all the ingredients of a Solution-Focused approach, and that the authors called that approach "Positive Deviance". Some of my friends, in the comments, mentioned that "Positive Deviance" is a school of thought of its own. That is undoubtedly correct.… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on March 7, 2009 at 1:04pm — 3 Comments

Change We Can Believe In - a case study of a brief coaching session

I learn a lot from my clients. After a session, I review my notes; I think of the path taken and of the many paths not taken; I think about what I said, and I think about what the client said; and new insights, new perspectives emerge. These reflections are very useful to improve my game. Sometimes, they offer very interesting insights into how the mind works, how change happens, how people think. A recent coaching session with a new client led me to musings about language and change. After ge… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on March 1, 2009 at 2:58pm — 2 Comments

A case study: a solution-focused approach to reducing hospital infections

It seems to me solution-focused strategies are blossoming everywhere. Or maybe I see them everywhere. Whatever the case might be, I was not expecting to find anything regarding Solution-Focused approaches in a book whose subtitle is: "a surgeon's note on performance" (the book is BETTER, the author is Atul Gawande). Yet, there it was: a perfect c… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on December 7, 2008 at 12:00pm — 5 Comments

Brain as anticipation machine... and SF for creating memories of the future

Jeff Hawkins, the guy behind the Palm Pilot, wrote a book published in 2005: On Intelligence. The title says it all. I found the book very interesting, because Hawkins’ point of view is very different from that of many brain researchers. For example, basing his argument on a paper by… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on July 18, 2008 at 12:23am — 10 Comments

SF & cognitive "biases"

Sometimes I think SF practice means skillfully navigating and using human biases and quirks. Take, for example, the "anchoring bias". if, in a questionnaire, I use the questions "how happy are you?" and "how often do you date?" in that order, the correlation of the answers to those questions is very small (0.1 or something like that). But if I reverse the order of the questions, i.e. if I ask first "how often do you date?" and then "how happy are you?" the answers to the two questions turn out t… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on June 27, 2008 at 4:39pm — 3 Comments

The infantilization of Italian (European?) culture

Multi-culturalism is a word I do not like, and it rates just above "plague" in my own dictionary. That is because I do not believe in the relativistic nature of that approach, which caused more harm than good: it left us in Europe with increasing levels of anomie, and that is bad according to positive psychology and to my own experience. Not having a theoretical framework, though, that means i am more curious about cultural differences! One thing I noticed just by reading the news is the differ… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on May 31, 2008 at 9:22pm — 1 Comment

Rolling with the punches

My client was another coach / consultant, familiar with the SF process. Very strong and interesting personality. A tough cookie. I decided to co-create the process with her, so I engaged her expertise. We started off alright... until all of a sudden she gave me this feedback: "leave me more space; you are not leaving me enough space to think about the answers to your questions". I was taken aback by the directness of the feedback. I took it in good stride, though; I learned long ago to separate… Continue

Added by Paolo Terni on May 17, 2008 at 12:30pm — 2 Comments

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Blog Posts

How do organizational consultants benefit from the solution-focused approach?

Posted by Coert Visser on December 7, 2009 at 5:40pm

Clean Language and SF

Posted by Judy Rees on November 25, 2009 at 4:30pm — 2 Comments

Meeting with Agile software pioneer Alistair Cockburn

Posted by Mark McKergow on November 23, 2009 at 12:12pm — 3 Comments

The Thinktank That Created The Solution-Focused Approach - Interview with Eve Lipchik

Posted by Coert Visser on November 17, 2009 at 7:35pm

Lean Development - Synergetic with SF?

Posted by Hans-Peter Korn on November 7, 2009 at 12:30pm — 2 Comments

20 Solution Focused techniques

Posted by Coert Visser on November 4, 2009 at 7:30pm

SF gets a warm welcome at the British Wittgenstein Society

Posted by Mark McKergow on November 3, 2009 at 3:54pm — 2 Comments

Presupposing Agency and Responsilbility

Posted by Coert Visser on November 1, 2009 at 10:23am — 1 Comment

Art of Hosting - interesting meta-method of emergent change approaches

Posted by Mark McKergow on October 5, 2009 at 5:00pm

Solution-Focused Assumptions

Posted by Coert Visser on October 5, 2009 at 10:30am — 9 Comments

Notes

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