Solution focussed

 28 January 2010 – My MD at the company of which I am part time Chairman has reflected on our exchanges concerning decision making, his procrastination, and the lack of initiative in the organisation.

It’s obvious he was not excited by my analysis (and I hardly expected he would be) but on the other hand he had done his home work too. This was too have him imagine how he, the company and those within it would behave if he, it and they had a greater capacity to decide what it was they wanted to do, and could act on that decision.

For those not familiar with this approach it is based on something my wife introduced me to, called brief solution focussed therapy. Of course, I’m not doing therapy (well, I don’t think I am) but that’s not the point. The aim of the process is (as far as I can tell) about as far from Freudian analysis with all its dredging through the past as it is possible to get because what it asks a person to do is to imagine a world where the problem they are facing does not exist. Then they have to work out what it is that would be different between the world they’re in and the world they can imagine. And having worked out the difference, assuming they think that it’s still worthwhile, they have to work out how to make the changes that deliver it.

I guess you can see the strengths of the process. It’s a ‘no blame’ solution that works on solutions and ignores how and why they arose. Those solutions, most importantly, are the individuals, not the therapists.

I can’t say my MD had wholly got it. We had to spend more time working through why he can’t blame others for what is happening (which is symptomatic of his procrastination) and instead must agree on a process that delivers a different outcome – albeit that this may require change in others, and maybe even change of the other players. But as we played the game (as I thought of it, but he did not) the realisation began to dawn on him that the problem is that no one really knows what he expects of them. That, of course, is because he does not really know what he expects of himself. And the consequence is that they all play safe, delivering what they hope are acceptable outcomes which will not get them in too much trouble where the safest place to be is well below the parapet.

It was a big step forward. I realised we were making progress when he worked out that if people were to meet his expectations he’d have to communicate what they were. “How might you do that?”  I asked?

He began to get the process. It does, of course, loop. But the critical point is that the solution has to be one he creates and embraces. I am not here to run the show. That’s his job, and I don’t want it. That’s something that is also dawning on him – that this is something he wants.

This is not going to be quick. But it has the prospect of delivering real change. And I enjoyed that.