"Solution" here seems to mean those actions observed to take you in the direction of a more pleasing state of the world and is contrasted with the more traditional "problem" which would be the reasons for the mis–match between what you have now and what you want. The suggestion is to focus on the former and overlook the latter. While we could identify some pretty nasty failure modes for this approach it also has a lot going for it. In particular, this line of thinking reenforces the too–little practised technique of recording what went well during your retrospectives and taking an action to do more of that.
Meanwhile two items from the discussion caught my attention.
Gary Player said (as reported by David Anderson) that when a good player makes a great stroke he swings again to fix the memory of what the good stroke felt like, whereas a poor player swings again after a bad stroke to try to identify what went wrong. Given what the learning curve tells us about repetition and consistency this suddenly made Solutions Focus make a lot more sense to me.
It was observed that a lot of the examples given of the effectiveness of Solutions Focus were concerned with its application to psychotherapy. Asked why this should be Mark opined that therapy is easier than management consulting. Nice.
2 comments:
Sounds similar to the Appreciative Inquiry approach. Did they recognize this or see any differences?
It was recognised that Appreciative Enquiry was a close relative, yes.
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