Innovating Even When Others Don’t Understand

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BRIEF Played a huge part in my own personal growth in SFBT. So, while in London, I was very excited to be able to sit down with my mentors, Chris Iveson and Harvey Ratner (Evan George was out of town), and ask them about how they found the strength to innovate in the SFBT field even when others opposed or couldn’t understand why.

When you’re doing something, and trust me, I know. When you’re doing something innovative, which I would say you guys are the most innovative group since Milwaukee. Innovation is a really interesting thing because nothing changes without it, including, evolution. Nothing evolves without innovation. But inherently the innovation means everyone else is doing something different. And the response isn’t always positive to that.

So my question is, (A) how did you guys just notice, oh, this is going to be the way we want to do this? And (B), as everybody’s like, “But they’re not doing it the way the Milwaukee team was doing it, so thus they’re wrong.” How do you deal with the whole field? Because as you’re innovating, you’re inherently doing what’s different, something different from everybody else. And they eventually had to catch up to you, which I think ultimately did happen, but it wasn’t immediate. So how did you make the evolution and then how do you deal with the pressures of, “But you should be doing it like everybody else.”

[Chris Iveson] I remember you coming out of that workshop and just saying about Harvey, how Harvey was just absolutely knocked sideways by it.

[Elliott Connie] I was, it’s absolutely true, Harvey. Honestly, I was. I mean, we’ve become very close over the years and we joke around all that. But I was amazed at your strength in Austin. I was genuinely like, I want to be that strong. Because everybody in the room was basically saying, “If you’re not asking the miracle question, you’re not doing Solution Focused.” And I’m sitting there thinking, Harvey is going to have to buckle to this pressure. Because it was literally, you know, 35 to 1, or whatever it was. And you were sitting. The room was kind of like a theater style room, kind of like a horseshoe. It went up. It was at a major university and the two lecturers are in the front. And Harvey was like, right in the front of that U. But you had such conviction in what you were saying.

[Harvey Ratner] I think also, you say about the three of us, and I think that is such a key thing for me, the fact that where I’ve had the confidence to speak as I might have done in that presentation without knowing I’m part of a group that we’ve worked on honing this together.

And it was interesting because in the NHS clinic that we worked in, we had to literally hone it together because other people there were not only not interested, some were anti. So there’s a sense in which, you know, we’re putting ourselves out there, we’re going to say we’re going to try this. We want to prove that it can work. If it doesn’t work, we’ll do something else. But having that backing, knowing I’m part of a team, I’ve always found that’s probably why I like team sports, like soccer.

But yeah, so I think that’s. That was part of it, that. And so Chris, who first used some of “Best Hopes”, and it was just something, “Well, that’s interesting. Let’s have a think about that.” Because we would try out different things. We could do that in the safety of the group. We weren’t sort of sold, “We must do it one way and one way only.” We can try out different things.

And we’ve got very curious about this. Surely this is in line with what Solution Focused, or de Shazer has been saying all along, it’s about the outcome that people want. What was it Steve said one time? The client is a different person after “The Miracle Question” than they were before it. Which is an extraordinary statement. Linguistic philosophy, whatever. I thought, well, this is in line with that. This is about starting the future.

[Chris] Then there was Putting Difference to Work, Steve’s book, Putting Difference to Work, where he talks about trying to get rid of the problem in Solution Focused Breath Therapy. And he can’t do it. He says, I can’t do it. So what I’m doing, every time I use the word problem, I’m putting a line through it, which is very irritating to kind of read. But it did fit because you’d never use any problem information other than to get to exceptions. And once you got the exceptions, you never touch the problem again.

So we were interested, not as a sort of background interest in how can we get the problem out of Solution Focused. We didn’t sit down and think, “Oh, how can we do this?” It was just a question that was around. And I remember that client from a secure hospital, he came with two guards and I tried to get connected to him, and he spoke in a very flat voice until he said, “Yeah, and I’m paranoid.” And I said, “Oh, how come you’re not paranoid now?”, [to which he responded] “How do you know I’m not.”

I can’t remember exactly what it was. One of the questions we started to ask, and Steve would ask it as well, “What needs to happen for this to be useful to you?”, and what the question led people to do is talk about what they needed to talk about. It was a question that led people to say what they thought needed to happen in the session. And remember this guy was asking it, and somehow there was a jump from “what has happened in the session” to “an outcome”. You gave an outcome answer. And I thought. I remember thinking, ah, that’s not what needs to happen.

We shouldn’t be asking “What needs to happen for this to be useful to you?” You need to find something, “What needs to happen in your life, for this to be useful to you?” So it made that jump and somehow what you hope from this would be an obvious way to ask that. And we probably were using that long before we noticed that we were using it.

[Harvey] Yeah. But that also connected with why, by the time in Ofsted 2008, whatever, we were tending not to use “The Miracle Question” almost at all. Because once you start with the “Best Hopes” in terms of differences in your life as a result of coming here, whatever the client says, I’ll be happy or I’ll be at peace, or this or that, and then you don’t need to say something, “A miracle happened, you got there.”, you just say, “Okay, what would that look like tomorrow in your life?” And you just build up a picture. So “The Miracle Question” dropped out of most of our practice. Not completely. It’s still got its useful place here and there. I think by 2008, saying to people, we don’t think “The Miracle Question” is essential, [and people would respond] “What?”

[Chris] Yeah, partly because “The Miracle Question” is something people remember. And we just thought it’s better if you can do your therapy more invisibly so that the client’s not remembering your questions, they’re more remembering their answers. And “What are your Best Hopes”, and this is a very easy, ordinary question. I mean, people. You hear it talking about football, you hear it on the radio, “What are your best hopes for tomorrow’s match, John?” “Oh, well, John, obviously we’re hoping to win.” And “Your best hope is for the championship?” “Oh, well, John.” So it’s there all the time. It’s idea of what you hope for.

[Harvey] Yeah. You raised the question of, what about people who don’t get that, or are opposed to that way of starting. It was something which goes on through to today. I mean, that doesn’t go away. People assume you have to start with something about the reason the client is there, the problem. And so they say, you know, that’s not the way to start. You’ve got to start a session of what your best hopes are, and you put on a video and there’s somebody, one of us may be, well, actually, Chris will be asking the “Best” question before he’s even sat down.

[Elliott] He’s not even in the frame. He’s literally not on camera. There are multiple times you can’t hear the most important question because he’s closing the door. So as the doors go [shut] he’s saying “What are your best hopes from our talking?”

[Harvey} Yeah. And you’ve got people who just cannot, because it’s so far removed. And we were talking about this the other day when were in California recently on the Internet Solution Focused forum. Big names in the Solution Focused world are saying “No, not starting with the ‘Best Hopes’ question, it’s too optimistic.” And then somebody else said “No, I start with ‘Well what’s bringing you here now?'” And I just think “Why?” I mean if a proponent of Solution Focused, why do you feel you still have to start with that? Now though, most of our work and teaching has been in the public sphere so people are very worried, preoccupied with safety. So if somebody, a nurse or social worker says I have to start with some sort of hearing about problems because I’ve got to think about safety, well that’s, that’s a different category. Maybe they over. I might say they overdo it sometimes, but I can see the rationale. But in regular day to day work, why people feel they’ve got to start with “What brings you here now?”, which was what Steve de Shazer liked to ask. That was still his favorite question towards the end, despite the “How do we this would be useful to you?” question, he’d still want to know what brought people in. They still want that.

[Elliott] Your work has always made sense to me, which is why I gravitated towards it. But that moment was a very profound moment. I knew it was profound in the moment, but over the years it gained significance, I guess, because I remember when you guys did your keynote, and Chris showed a video, and then after the video takes questions, and a man named Joel said “I don’t recognize that as Solution Focused.” And Chris said “Why not?” He said “You didn’t ask ‘The Miracle Question.'” And there were people around me that were like “Yeah, yeah.” I was like “No. It wasn’t like they didn’t ask “The Miracle Question” and [instead] did a backflip. It wasn’t like [they] did something random. They did something else that is congruent to what we do.” And it just floored me. It absolutely, absolutely floored me.