Alcohol Abuse Advice

Wish to Solve a Problem? Here is Why You Should Focus on Solutions

Solution Focus Brief Therapy

In the early 1980’s, Steve de Shazer and his wife Insoo Kim Berg of Milwaukee, USA, and the team at the Brief Family Therapy Family Center started a new approach, or methodology, for dealing with people seeking solutions to their problems [i].

Berg explained what this approach meant: “Instead of problem solving, we focus on solution-building.

Which sounds like a play on words, but it’s a profoundly different paradigm. We’re not worrying about the problems. We discovered, in fact… that there’s no connection between a problem and its solution. No connection whatsoever. Because when you ask a client about their problem, they will tell you a certain kind of description; but when you ask them about their solutions, they give you entirely different descriptions of what the solution would look like for them. So a horrible, alcoholic family will say, “We will have dinner together and talk to each other. We will go for a walk together.” [ii]

Simply put, the Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) methodology suggests that if you focus on the problem at hand, you amplify and enhance it, whereas if you focus on the solution, you amplify and enhance the solution-seeking abilities and strategies that work best for you. This gets you much closer to achieving your goal, or solution. Berg and de Shazer had many years of experience in therapy and achieved impressive success. Soon the method spread worldwide.

The Assumptions You Have to Make

A few assumptions need to be adopted when implementing the approach[iii]

1. Change is happening all the time and is unavoidable

2. A belief in abundance, not scarcity

3. Rational logic is not always the most effective approach. Often, the paradoxical and different way is more appropriate and effective to use (even when it seems totally illogical to us at the time)

4. Look at everything with curiosity and a sense of ‘anything is possible’. This means asking ‘what if?’ and ‘perhaps?’ and never ‘why?’

5. People are the resource for change not the focus of it. i.e., we are not trying to change anyone, but instead, we are trying to change the realities people perceive and act within

6. The anticipated future plays a strong role in the present

7. Encourage action in the face of ambiguity (there always will be a measure of ambiguity no matter how much information you would gather, you always need to make a judgement call at some stage)

8. Promote dealing with setbacks or mistakes via curiosity and generosity rather than blame.

Here are the practical steps:

Start by asking these questions, and investigating these issues relating to the problem at hand:

1. When does the problem NOT happen (finding exceptions, i.e. when it is not there, or when it is diminished or managed better?)

2. How have you (or your client, or employee) coped thus far/ or is coping now?

3. What were the strengths used to cope thus far?

4. Register past successes: What has worked well in the past?

5. What is helping? What do you know for a fact to work?

6. How come it isn’t worse?

Each of these questions in investigated, through the lenses “how come”, “how”, “what happens when”. Remember that the question “why” is not important. Focusing on the problem and learning its details is irrelevant.

There are other techniques SFBT practitioners use: “The Miracle Question”, which is designed to evoke in the problem-solver a sense of what would it feel like when the problem would be solved; and Scaling, which helps put things in perspective, and see what are the resources currently available to us in our search for a solution. Learn more at the sftba org. website.

The Solution Focus Brief Therapy approach shifts from the scientific or medical paradigm of investigating a complaint and understanding it in full before applying a solution. It offers a very different way – and it has been shown to be highly effective.

But there is another angle strengthening the claim that paying attention to solution — and using questions as a tool for self discovery — is a winning combination. We turn to the field of neuroscience.

Neuroscience Research: A Key to Understanding Behaviour- and Mind-Changing

For decades, many researchers and practitioners of the helping professions, including psychotherapists and coaches have been trying to explore practices which would harness the accumulating advanced scientific knowledge about the human brain to the benefit of effectiveness in helping people change behaviours, solve complex problems and increase their sense of well being.

In an article titled “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, Australian Executive Coach David Rock and psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, explore what happens in our brains when faced with change. Understanding these brain processes sheds a useful light on what is required to actually change minds –and behaviour. “Humans have brains designed to register change as threat, and thus they often cling to old habits and mindsets”, they say. [iv]

This new understanding of how the human brain works explains very well why SFBT is so effective:

When faced with change, there is a discomfort, which can be explained by what happens in the brain: the “working memory” which is located in our prefrontal cortex, is the part of the brain that engages when we encounter something new. While habits are stored away in a lower part of the brain, the basal ganglia, ‘home’ to routine activities and familiar objects and processes (such as driving, riding a bicycle, etc) . This lower area works very well without any attention focused on it and without conscious thought. However, when we are faced with a new situation, the prefrontal cortex must become engaged and expend a lot of energy to keep the focus (when you learn to drive a car, at first, for example.)

We have, therefore, a built-in preference to go on with the ‘comfortable’, known, and to stick with less energy/effort demanding habits. Human brains have a very well-developed capacity to discern “errors” which are “perceived differences between expectation and actuality.” [v] The error signals are generated in a part of the brain known as the orbital frontal cortex which is located very closely to the amygdale. The amygdale is an almond-shaped part of the brain, where emotions like fear and anger are activated. The basal ganglia and the amygdale are amongst the oldest mammal parts of our brain. When they are activated, we tend to behave without engaging the higher intellectual functions of the brain. Every time we act out of an impulse of rage, fear, panic, we’re in an “amygdala hijack” mode (as very well explained by Emotional Intelligence expert, Daniel Goleman[vi]).

Therefore, the first two crucial factors we need to understand in approaching behaviour-change are:

1. Change is painful – or requires special effort.

2. When people are given a new instruction or are faced with a new piece of information, the brain may well activate the part of it that notices change as an ‘error’, which is the more ‘primitive’ part of the brain, causing us to go into defence mode.

Understanding these can help us understand why systems based on telling, teaching frontally, and using carrot and stick methods, do not work in the long run. If telling people what to do is not working, what should leaders, parents, and ‘helping professions’ practitioners do instead?

New connections a person makes on his own are those created by access to his or hers own thinking. The best way to facilitate that is by asking questions, requiring the person to access his or hers own powers of thinking, without any threat present. This enables the creation of new neural connections in their brain, avoiding the ‘automatic’ activation of ‘error’-based responses. Moreover, “when people solve problems themselves, the brain releases a rush of neurotransmitters like adrenaline. This phenomenon provides scientific basis for some of the practices of leadership coaching”[vii].

Based on quantum physics principles and neurological research, claim Rock and Schwartz, paying attention to any specific brain connection keeps the circuit open and alive, and after a while, the connections become stable physical changes in the brain’s structure. This explains the importance of focusing attention, repeatedly, to a new connection, a new and fresh thought the person has.

The implication is that as leaders, helping professions practitioners or parents, we must keep focusing on the new neuronal networks. Or, using the words of American coach Sheryl Read, if we do that “closely enough, often enough and long enough” a client can build “the strength of the habit or idea. The attention can take a number of forms. Reinforcement and positive feedback are typical tools of the coach in maintaining attention on an idea. They are a signal to the client’s brain to do more. Positive feedback serves to mark new synapses for preservation rather than pruning. Through the release of dopamine[viii], positive feedback further serves to calm the mind and enhance focus.” [ix]

Furthermore, if focusing attention creates new connections in the brain, it is crucial to choose what to focus on. If we choose to delve in the problem at hand by asking questions about “why this happened” and focusing attention on behaviours or patterns such as self-doubt, anxieties, bad past patterns of problem-solving, etc., we thereby cause the creation of more connections which do not promote the solution of the problem. Focusing on the solution instead, by asking about what worked, when was the problem less apparent or when was it well coped with (as in SFBT’s approach) we are, in fact, enabling the creation of more – and better – coping mechanisms.

Expectations Shape Reality: Mental Maps (and why “stop bitching” is really good advice)

Various researchers and practitioners focusing on neuroscience make a further point which is very well aligned with SFBT’s assumptions: that the anticipated future plays a strong role in the present (“expectation shapes reality” in Rock and Schwartz’s phrasing). Mental maps or mental models, many scientists, practitioners and theorists find, play a huge role in human perception, and thus, in human behaviour.

Neurological evidence also suggests that expectations have an effect on what we perceive and how we interpret information. Those expectations can be conscious or unconscious. In order to change someone’s mental maps, one needs to approach change with an intention of enabling (or “cultivating”, in Rock and Schwartz’s lingo) “moments of insight”. Moments of insight generate brain activity which brings about the required set of new connections needed in order to create change without threat. The new connections can assist us in overcoming the ‘built in’ resistance that we have to new and different things. Insights must come from within. Other people’s observations, no matter how well expressed and elaborated, do not have the same effect as self-discovery. This suggests, again, that advice- giving in all its forms and manifestations has only a very limited effectiveness in changing people’s minds and behaviour. It robs people off the opportunity to feel the adrenaline rush, which only occurs when they make the new connections.

What happens when, instead of focusing on the solutions, one allows for example, the venting of frustration to take place? According to Dr. Ellen Weber, director of MITA Brain Based Renewal Center in New York,

“People who vent actually:

1. Grow dendrite[x] brain cell connectors to vent even faster next time

2. Create a pattern in their brain’s basal ganglia so that anger comes out more whenever they are stressed

3. See fewer answers and sustain fewer friendships than people who reflect… say nothing … or give thoughtful responses

4. Cause conflicts that spread to other people through negative venting practices

5. Shut down learning and blind themselves and others to possibilities that would solve the problem … because of the cortisol[xi] hormone that increases through venting”[xii]

In other words – allowing to vent, focusing on the problem or subjecting people to frontal lectures and advice-giving will work against the change in mental maps which we seek by facilitating new insights, which would, in turn, lead the way to real change.

Practical Implications

So, the ‘sixty four dollar question’ is: “How…can leaders effectively change their own or other’s people’s behaviour?” or: How can I change my own behaviour/solve this specific problem?

The first question is the one Rock and Schwartz pose, but their reply applies to both questions:

1. Leave the problem behaviours in the past

2. Focus on intensifying and creating new behaviours

3. Over time those will shape the dominant pathways in the brain

4. This is achieved through solution-focused questioning approach that facilitates self-insight, rather than through advice-giving. [xiii]

Looking at the two approaches discussed above, namely, neuroscience and Solution Focused Brief Therapy – in conjunction, leads to interesting conclusions, which bring together long-term successful practitioner experience with cutting- edge scientific knowledge of the brain. Shifting the paradigm from lecturing/telling/advising to learning how to draw out the solutions, focus attention on it and enhance the experience until new habits are formed is the challenging effective paradigm for successful changes in both thinking and behaviour.

 

To learn how to practice the Solution Focus technique effectively, chat to me on Skype.
To schedule an exploratory complimentary call, or for more information, please email me.

 

Bibliography and Notes:

[i] De Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg’s work built on that of a number of other innovators, among them Milton Erickson, and the group at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) at Palo Alto – Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, Virginia Satir, Jay Haley, Richard Fisch, Janet Beavin Bavelas and others. More about the background is available online, for example at the Brief Therapy Org website.

[ii] http://psychotherapy.net/interview/Insoo_Kim_Berg [Accessed 11 March 2008]

[iii] Adapted from Belinda Druker and Svea van der Hoom’s Introductory Workbook “Learning to Think and Work Using A Solution Focused Approach”, 2002. P 4

[iv] Rock. D, and Schwartz, J. The Neuroscience of Leadership. In Reclaiming Children and Youth 16:3, Fall 2007 pp 10-17. Available online: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/06207 [Accessed 10 March 2008]

[v] ibid

[vi] Goleman D. Emotional Intelligence & Working With Emotional Intelligence. Omnibus, Bloomsbury, 2004

[vii] Rock. D, and Schwartz, J. ibid

[viii] Dopamine: is an important neurotransmitter which facilitates critical brain functions.

[ix] Read, S.L. Through the Mind, We Create Change. Coaching Methodologies for Enabling Change [Article] Read Solutions Group, April 2007

[x] Dendrite: The treelike extension of a neuron. Most neurons have multiple dendrites, which are short and typically highly branched. Dendrites are specialised for receiving information and form synaptic contacts with the terminals of other nerve cells to allow nerve impulses to be transmitted (source: glossary at Brain Explorer online)

[xi] Cortisol: A vital brain hormone produced in the adrenal gland. Often referred to as the “stress hormone”, it is involved in the response to stress: it increases blood pressure, blood sugar levels and has an immunosuppressive action ((source: glossary at Brain Explorer online)

[xii] Weber, E., Brain Based Business, April 2006, http://www.brainbasedbusiness.com [Accessed 15 March 2008]

[xiii] Rock. D, and Schwartz, J. ibid

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