Theoretical Plenary, Thursday May 19th 2011

Interaction by Nora Bateson

Mark McKergow on this plenary:
Gregory Bateson (1904 – 1980) was one of the key thinkers of the 20th century. One of the fathers of systems thinking and a maverick, he laid the foundations for interaction brief therapy, and therefore of the whole SF field. In 1948 Bateson established his research project in Menlo Park, California, to examine how ‘mental illness’ might instead be seen as ‘paradoxes of com munication’. This one totally radical idea led to his work with John Weakland, Jay Haley and others on brief therapy, the foundation of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto (where Steve de Shazer met Insoo Kim Berg), and the Interactional View which forms the basis of the SF approach. Bateson is widely known these days as the person who got John Grinder and Richard Bandler to investigate excellence in therapy and so unwittingly started NLP. His ideas also underpin much of what we do in the field of SF. It will be fascinating to hear directly from his youngest daughter, Nora Bateson about life with G. Bateson, and her views on his extensive body of work.

Learn more:

Wikipedia on Bateson and the Bateson-Project
Mark McKergow on the early days of SF including Bateson
Nora Batesons’ film on her father: An Ecology of Mind

Case Plenary, Friday 20th of May 9:30

SF inside: CNPR in ZACROS by Aoki Yasuteru, JP

Facilitating the plenary learning: Peter Szabó

Aoki San on the case:

Three months after the 5 people from ZACROS Nabari factory finished attending my SF Practitioner Course held in Kyoto and Tokyo which lasted for 5 months (1day a month) they told me things were going very well. So I proposed that I interview them and other workers at their site about their achievement. A year prior to this event they had communication problems between the small groups and between the seniors and the young ones. The operation was not in danger but not at the best at all. So they had adopted SF as their guiding principle for making a better workplace. Before I did the success interview I was really curious and ready to hear the great SF stories from the ZACROS solutionists. I went there… and I was so amazed and amused to have found out that no one person knew at all from an overall perspective what or how things were really happening at their factory when everybody knew that they achieved better productivity and improved working relationship among the workers. They said things are better for sure but they did not know how they achieved it. And when I asked each person how he had changed the typical remark was ”Oh, I haven’t changed. He changed!” When I asked that person the same question, the answer was the same ”Oh, I haven’t changed. That guy has changed.”

Of course shyness and modesty might have been there, but I felt they really meant it. So I wanted to name this phenomenon from an observer’s viewpoint. I came up with a phrase called CNPR, Chain of Natural Positive Response. People look at their co-workers’ different positive response created by their own different way of communicating and think those people changed. But those people only responded naturally and positively to their fellow men’s different face and words, so they don’t think they have changed themselves but the other way around. It’s confusing if you want an explanation but I think it has become a beautiful credit sharing among the group. No one hero, thus everybody is a hero.

I will try to stay with facts as much as possible, but I might get carried away by the story I made up from listening to these interesting fellows. So we have a great facilitator to make this presentation useful to the fellow solutionists in the conference, Mr. Peter Szabo.

Peter Szabó on the case plenary

“When I heard ZACROS workers present their case in Tokio during J-SOL 2009 I realized that a dream had come true.

With a little help from Aoki San these people had found a way to make the workplace a good place to be and work a fulfilling opportunity to reinforce each other as human beings.

I was touched. At this case plenary you are invited to be touched and to reinforce your own treasure for organizations.”

Learn more about the case.

Watch an excellent video on the case

SOLworld Open Space

Friday May 2oth 2011

A waluable and beloved learning moment during SOLworld conferences is the Open Space where everyone can bring in an emergent topic and share and build up on experiences.

We are very much looking forward to this intense and treasureful time and are curious about your topics for dicussions and sharings.

If you are a first-timer at an openspace, studying Mark McKergow’s introductional slides in advance might be helpful.

Download Mark McKergow’s introductional slides.

Practical Plenary Saturday May 21st 2011

SOLworld history plenary with Kirsten Dierolf

Discovering and re-discovering what works is one of the main tools in the Solution Focused Approach. We identify a goal and then look at what has already happened that goes into the right direction. In this plenary, we want to focus on our personal histories with the Solution Focused approach: What have we gained by using it? Which experiences shaped our understanding? What were valuable highlights that we would like to share? From our personal histories, we can create a common narrative with other people in the room and find out where we connect, where we differ and profit from each other’s learnings. The plenary will be a highly interactive session with a lot of room for exchange between people who are new to the Solution Focused approach, people who have been using it for 20 years and everybody inbetween.

From which case do you want to learn?

We asked participants to vote for one of the cases below

Please, give your vote

Cases to choose from:

Title of Case study	Ask them			SF inside
Presenter	Marco Ronzani	Dainius Baltrušaitis, Artūras Laucius, dr. Rytis Pakrosnis	Hans Christian Nielsen	Aoki-san (Yasuteru Aoki)
Client	Andritz Hydro Ravensburg (Germany); Engineering industry plant (450 employees)	PALINK / IKI (Lithuania): Retail industry project with large group setting	Internal employees	ZACROS package manufacturing company
Goal of Client	1. Effectively dealing with rapid growth in customer demand 2. Improving climate (“no blame organization”)	Mobilize and align employees with the major goals of the company, including customer and employee satisfaction, and as a result increase in turnover. It might be worth emphasizing that right prior to the project the company overcame major changes, resulting in change of around 30% employees in managerial positions, other positions followed.	Improving work environment and employee satisfaction through working environment evaluation (mandatory by the Danish Working Environment Authority)	To create an “SF inside” organization
SF Process Design	1. SF-questionnaire 2. SF future-vision-workshop (top managers). 3. SF-coaching with business managers 4. Gathering voluntary change agents (internal “ambassadors of appreciation”). 5. Kick-off-event “spreading an epidemic of appreciation” (large group setting) 6. Trainings (top managers and ambassadors of appreciation) 7. Self-organization of the ambassadors of appreciation. 8. SF-evaluation-interviews (done by ambassadors of appreciation) 9. Culture-days (large group settings)	1. Top management interview 2. Large group SF workshop inviting everyone who cares (~150 people in the room) 3. SF communication training for managers 4. Progress interview 1 5. Individual progress / follow-up sessions: 3 sessions for each participant (~150 people) 6. Group progress / follow-up sessions: 3 sessions for groups of ~ 20 people. 7. Progress interview 2 8. Large group SF follow-up	1. Involving representatives of the employees (“the client is the expert”) in the design of the process presenting the SF approach. 2. SF departmental dialogue meetings with focus on solutions instead of problems and using “preferred future” and scaling questions. 3. Stating a set of simple “SF rules” before all meetings.	This is NOT a one-time interventional work but more like self-organizing on-going developing work, which is not finished yet. Presenter is more like a reporter of what happened after workers had learned about SF and how they utilized it at their workplaces in their own ways.
Difference that made a difference	- SF-questionnaire. - Business managers behaving as role models of appreciation. - Employees of all levels to volunteer for change agents. - SF-evaluation-interviews done by ambassadors of appreciation. - Self-organized conferences of the ambassadors of appreciation (every 2 month half day workshops with guests).	1. Appreciating changes in SF way, and as a result 2. Promoting SF communication within organization	• Toolbox for HR Partners • Inviting employees to develop and take part in solutions.	Spreading SF in a self-organizing way
Treasure discovered	- A business manager who emphasizes the development of the organization’s culture. - Internal Ambassadors of appreciation		When people realize that they are being heard and seen and their proposals for solutions are taken seriously – and being used – it spreads like rings in water up and down in the organization.	SF can be USEFULLY “misunderstood” and interpreted in an organizations so that people start valuing each other’s positive qualities and doing more co-operative actions. Factory workers created their own tools for utilizing SF. And eventually, they found the beauty within themselves and even stopped using SF tools because they no longer needed them in order to give each other affirming messages and have positive working relationships. Typical Pygmalion effect was found when senior foremen realized that their sub-ordinates were their successors rather than burdens. And the youngest workers showed much faster development in a short period of time.
Measurable results	Improvement of: - Appreciation (67% of the interviewees), - Management culture (59%), - Error management culture (57%), - Processes (63%), - Future-vision (63%), - Teamwork (63%), - Solution-orientation (62%). Approx. 80% of the interviewees wanted further development.	1. Improving company’s figures: increase in turnover, decrease in waste, increase in customer basket; 2. Change in internal atmosphere within 5 months with 9000 employees in terms of communication, cooperation, initiative, praise and feedback. 3. Increase in customer satisfaction as reported by external surveys. Video report by the company’s employees on changes is prepared to be presented	• Instead of doing the working place environment evaluation every third 3 as said by the authority the management now wants to do it once every year. • The number of people on sick leave has decreased.	Highest profit in 95 years was explained to be caused by three factors, and one of them was the higher productivity in 2 factories (with SF inside). One of the site in which SF was used intensely achieved the lowest turnover rate of 0%.
What was your most useful contribution?	Optimism, optimism, optimism, …	1. Appreciating and respecting dignity and worth of all people involved 2. Creating space to discuss whatever matters for people In that respect, at the start of the project we made an announcement inviting to the workshop (2) anybody who is interested and cares to discuss and lay out the path for further work in the company. Therefore, we were sure that people who gathered into the room were change agents (?).	• Translating SF principles to everyday language. • Setting a dialogue frame that focused on solutions instead of problems. • Appreciating all suggestions for improvements that came in the process.	Kept the right distance.
What have you learned about solutions in organisations?	It is particularly useful to help managers to leave to the staff the autonomy and responsibility to generate the solutions.	1. Trust in the resources of organization and its ability to reach anything it is about, right from the very first interaction and it proves it can. 2. Usually solutions are much closer than one might think; all you need is just to inquire…		All the theories and tools for organizational development can be considered as a fuse to use only until the people’s own strengths are ignited. The notion of CNPR(Chain of Natural Positive Response) can be a phenomenon that solutionists might purposefully expect.
What might you do differently a next time?	Actively integrate the HR responsible from the beginning of the process.	Even more success sharing within organization crossing departmental, geographic, etc boundaries. One might argue this might produce still better results.		This endeavor is still on-going. Next time is a next time.:-)