Doing What Works: Forward in Solution-Focused Change

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December 19, 2012

Best posts of 2012

This year, I have written slightly fewer posts than usual (partly due to the fact that I started this blog which required some time and attention, too). Here is a selection of the posts which I like best:

  1. What Solution-Focused Coaches Do
  2. Case: the trust is gone
  3. The Solution-Focused Mindset
  4. Taming the beast
  5. How the Solution-Focusedness of Coaches Is Related to their Thriving at Work
  6. A 3x2 model of solutions
  7. The test-and-learn approach appears to be associated with flourishing
  8. A Practical Approach for Realizing Desired Behavior in Your Organization
  9. 5 Suggestions for becoming a skilled solution-focuces professional
  10. 3 Principles of doing what works
  11. A growth mindset is associated with effort and thriving
  12. Beneficial effects of a progress focus
  13. 10 Suggestions for how to combine autonomy and structure
  14. Two lesser known disadvantages of fixed mindsets
  15. Balancing Time Perspectives
  16. How can we defend ourselves against those who try to control us by creating fear?
  17. Happiness and labor
  18. Combining practice based learning and theory based learning
  19. Follow Your Interests Not Your Talents
  20. Not every goal is good for you. Choose wisely what you wish for
  21. Conditions for perpetual peace
  22. How solution-focused is the SMART approach?
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About Me

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Coert Visser
psychologist, trainer of solution-focused professionals
coertfvisser50@gmail.com
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Articles

  1. Self-Determination Theory Meets Solution-Focused Change: Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness Support in Action
  2. Supporting Clients’ Solution Building Process by Subtly Eliciting Positive Behaviour Descriptions and Expectations of Beneficial Change
  3. Developing a Growth Mindset - How individuals and organizations benefit from it
  4. 21 Solution-Focused Techniques
  5. A brief history of the solution-focused approach
  6. Improving science
  7. The true nature of intelligence
  8. How equality is driving thriving

Empirical papers

  1. The Solution-Focused Mindset: An Empirical Test of Solution-Focused Assumptions
  2. What Solution-Focused Coaches Do: An Empirical Test of an Operationalization of Solution-Focused Coach Behaviors 
  3. Testing the Association Between Solution-Focused Coaching and Client Perceived Coaching Outcomes
  4. How the Solution-Focusedness of Coaches Is Related To Their Thriving at Work 
  5. A growth mindset is associated with effort and thriving 
  6. Influencing People’s Beliefs About the Malleability of Personal Characteristics Through a Sequence of Four Loaded Multiple-Choice Questions
  7. The test-and-learn approach appears to be associated with flourishing

Interviews

1. Carol Dweck

2. Insoo Kim Berg

3. Eve Lipchik

4. Heidi Grant Halvorson

5. Wallace Gingerich

6. Keith Stanovich

7. Claude Steele

8. David Maister

9. Alan Kay

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9 Solution-Focused Assumptions

I. Assumptions about people
  1. People prefer to choose for themselves what they initiate and they want to control as much as possible what they do
  2. People prefer to be competent, view themselves as competent and they are already competent to some extent
  3. People want to have and build meaningful and caring relationships with other people and want to do things that make a positive difference to others
II. Assumptions about change
  1. There is always already a beginning of the desired situation on which further progress can be built.
  2. People change best by taking actions, one step at a time, and reflecting on and responding to the consequences of those actions so that an intelligible pattern eventually starts to form
  3. Positive behavior descriptions, both in the future and in the past, trigger positive behaviors
III. Assumptions about helping
  1. Treating clients as cooperative, no matter how resistant they may appear, is the quickest and most promising way to encourage further cooperation
  2. Working within the client's frame of reference, without confrontation or blame and without imposing an expert view on the client is the quickest and most promising approach to help the client develop an ever more constructive, realistic and useful perspective
  3. Focusing on identifying and amplifying what works, rather than on explanations in terms of personal characteristics and problem causes, is the quickest and most promising way to help clients make progress
Also read: The Solution-Focused Mindset: An Empirical Test of Solution-Focused Assumptions

20 Things I Believe

  1. Most of the people have good intentions most of the time.
  2. Beliefs are tied to actions and their consequences. Therefore, how we continue to develop our beliefs is quite important.
  3. Effective conversation depends both on a focus on what you want to achieve and sensitivity to the frame of mind of other people.
  4. A challenge for individuals as they grow up is to become less egocentric; for humanity it is to become less anthropocentric.
  5. Having things to do, being focused on tasks, is generally better for one-self and for one's surroundings than to be focused on oneself a lot.
  6. Often, when you become good at something, your 'reward' is that you're asked to do more of that activity so you'd better find interesting what you try to become good at.
  7. Negative experiences can often turn out useful but it does not follow from this that negative experiences are always a prerequisite for improvement and that we, therefore, have to create negative experiences in order to improve.
  8. We often over-estimate the importance of personal characteristics and talents as causal factors of our behaviors and achievements and we tend to underestimate the influence of situations and systems.
  9. While we may never be able to formulate definite descriptions of objective reality, we can often distinguish between false and falser. We can make progress in finding out what is less true and what is more true.
  10. The scientific enterprise is extremely valuable and we should continue to improve scientific practice.
  11. All scientific journals should transform themselves into open access online journals so that the transparancy of science will improve
  12. We can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. We constantly build bridges between our our better pasts and better futures.
  13. Superstition brings bad luck.
  14. Learning to protect ourselves and others against contaminated mindware will make the world a better place
  15. Eventually, all religious dogma will be seen, by most people, as untenable.
  16. What we think of as biological races are socially constructed, cultural categories. Thinking of people in ‘black’ and ‘white’ terms is unjustified and unwise.
  17. The criterion for deciding whether or not something is morally right or wrong is its impact on the thriving of conscious creatures
  18. People will, gradually, become kinder and more civilized both in the way they treat each other and in the way they treat other animals.
  19. In the future everything will be better, even our ability to notice it.
  20. The art of wisdom is preparing oneself for a future of inconceivable possibilities

10 questions for the solution-focused coach

  1. What is important to this client?
  2. How does this client view his situation? 
  3. What does he want to see changed? 
  4. What is his good reason for wanting to see that change? 
  5. What does he see as advantages to himself and others of this change? 
  6. What strategies has he already employed which have somehow been helpful? 
  7. What improvements has he already made? 
  8. How far is he already in accomplishing what he wants? 
  9. What resources can he draw on? 
  10. What is he willing to do and what will he not do?
See article

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9 Starting points of solution-focused organizational change facilitation

  1. Congruence of implementation approach
  2. Congruence of facilitation style
  3. Communicate rationales
  4. Autonomy-focus
  5. Doing What Works
  6. Utilize individual perspectives
  7. Change sparsity
  8. Share decision making
  9. Progress and usefulness monitoring
More about this here

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www.progressfocusedapproach.com/

  • This just ruthless desire to win
  • Free will is not an illusion
  • Raising kids to become autonomous individuals
  • The term progress-focused
  • Using deliberate practice in our training programs
  • The test-and-learn approach appears to be associated with flourishing
  • Growth mindset associated with various positive outcomes (competence, relatedness, learning, vitality, adjustment)
  • What happens on the our best work days?
  • Exercise: keep a progress diary
  • The meaning of progress
  • 3 Reasons why we may not perceive existing progress
  • The Progress Paradox
  • Is it better to focus your attention on accumulated progress or on remaining progress?
  • Progress over long stretches of time
  • Self-concordance theory
  • Beneficial effects of a progress focus
  • The Progress Principle

© 2007-2013 Coert Visser. If you want to use or refer to anything from this site please mention the copyright properly.

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The Progress-Focused Approach

21 Solution-Focused Techniques

  1. The scaling question
  2. The past success question
  3. The preferred future question
  4. The platform question
  5. The exception-seeking question
  6. Reframing
  7. Indirect compliments
  8. The miracle question
  9. Summarizing in the client’s words
  10. The what-is-better question
  11. Normalizing
  12. The usefulness question
  13. Observation suggestions
  14. The perspective change question
  15. The coping question
  16. The continuation question
  17. The yes-set
  18. The prediction suggestion
  19. The overcoming the urge question
  20. The optimism question
  21. Mutualizing
More about this here.

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10 Tips to make your writing more solution-focused

  1. Make it useful by asking in advance what the other person's expectations are from your text.
  2. Make it simple: make your words, sentences and structure no more complicated than strictly necessary.
  3. Match the use of language of the other person.
  4. Respond adequately to comments and questions.
  5. Formulate positively: whenever possible, use positive and specific language.
  6. Activate the other person: ask good questions.
  7. Motivate your choices and decisions in a compact, clear and positive way.
  8. Check whether you have understood the other person well and whether your text is useful for him or her.
  9. Invite the other person to offer feedback, suggestions and corrections.
  10. When, in a proposal, you offer more than or something different from what the client has asked for, it often works well to mention that part as a separate module in your text so that it will be much easier for the client to choose or ignore that part.
More about this here.

10 misconceptions of solution-focused coaching

  1. In solution-focused conversations it is not useful to talk about problems
  2. There is no room for expressing emotions in solution-focused conversations
  3. The solution-focused approach can only be applied in 1-on-1 conversations
  4. The miracle question and scaling questions are indispensable in solution-focused conversations
  5. If someone does not want to change it is not useful to have a solution-focused conversation with that person
  6. Solution-focused work is fundamentally different from every other approach
  7. In the solution-focused approach only the goals of the client are important
  8. The solution-focused approach does not work with young children and people who are verbally weak
  9. Solution-focused coaches always should give many compliments
  10. The solution-focused approach is touchy-feely and idealistic
More about this here.

4 Essential ingredients of solution-focused change

  • Support client choice
  • Utilize client perspective
  • Inquire about success
  • Express positive expectations
Read more

5 Suggestions for becoming a skilled solution-focused professional

  • Practice a lot
  • Feel free to combine
  • Don’t be too hard on yourself
  • Keep an open mind
  • Remain skeptical
Read more

6 critical reflections on the importance of doing what works

  1. Sometimes at first something seems to be working well but after some time it turns out it doesn't 
  2. In some cases doing what works is difficult because things may 'work' extremely slowly 
  3. An overreliance on doing what works may lead you to forget about maintenance 
  4. An overreliance on doing what works may lead you to forget about investment 
  5. The complexity of situations may make it very hard to single out was has been working 
  6. How do you know what level of 'working' you should be satisfied with?
Read article

5 macro-trends overarching all of human history

  1. Anthropocentrism declines
  2. The human web tightens
  3. Human cooperation increases
  4. Collective intelligence grows
  5. Violence declines
More about this here

3 Principles of doing what works

  1. Doing more of what works of what you have already been doing
  2. Systematically trying out new things you have not tried before
  3. Systematically leaving out things in order to identify what works
Read more
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