Jennifer Liston-Smith

Appreciative Inquiry presents a refreshingly enabling way of relating to ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’. Solution-focused coaching takes us miraculously - ping! - straight to a perfectly resolved future; which might be more possible than we think. These two approaches, underpinned by theory and years of experience, give structure to some applications of positive psychology in coaching.

This events reports draws on ideas and materials from the following events hosted by the British Psychological Society Special Group in Coaching Psychology

• An introduction to using Appreciative Enquiry in Coaching Psychology: Indrani Choudhury.
• Solution-Focused Coaching in Coaching Psychology: A method for applying positive psychology in the workplace: Carey Glass.

‘The art of crafting questions is crucial.’ Bringing an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach to co-constructing her workshop, Indrani Choudhury suggests that instead of asking ‘What are the difficulties of having such a large group?’, a more powerful question would be: ‘What would we have done today that would make you tingle with enthusiasm?’

She describes AI as ‘a powerful, purposeful method of change, with roots in positive psychology’, and points out that, while the approach looks for ‘the life-giving forces of a system’, it is not simply ‘wishful thinking. We work from what is there: It engages the whole system. Data from the past is analysed for common themes (including data from the client’s conversations with selected colleagues).’ This establishes ‘What is’. The client then articulates ‘What will be’ and ideas are put into practice. These are energised with ‘stories, metaphors, vivid descriptions, doodles, provocative statements.’

While doing all this, we need to be aware that ‘what we focus on creates reality’ Five principles apply.

David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastava (1987) developed the fundamental ideas behind AI at Case Western University as an Organisation Development method; application of the process to the individual is a more recent development. Under the guidance of his advisor, Dr Srivastava, David Cooperrider, a doctoral student in 1980, had the insight to shift from the identification and analysis of what was working and not working in a clinic he was studying to a focus on the identification of the factors that were contributing to the clinic's effectiveness. This became seen as the start of a paradigm shift in understanding organisational systems.

Indrani Choudhury leads her AI workshop participants through energising pair coaching exercises bringing to life the 4-D Model of Appreciative Coaching also outlined in Orem, Blinkert and Clancy (2007), in which the following three steps form a continuing cycle for coach and client:

• Discover: Appreciating that which gives life.
• Dream: Creating shared images of a preferred future.
• Deliver: Sustain the change.

Feedback from exercises suggested this form of strengths-based enquiry resulted in outcomes and learning not only for whoever was the ‘client’ but also for the ‘coach’, including a positive impact on motivation.

Solution-Focused Coaching

‘If today was really useful to you, how would you know that afterwards?’ asks Carey Glass at the outset. ‘And what else would you notice?’ We might be using new words, new ideas, new stories over the course of the next week. We might notice new motivation and energy. We might have met people who would help us make or revisit connections.

At the very least, ‘I hope everyone will have a lazy step to take away today that will take you towards your solution. Spy on yourself and look for tiny things that are helping: think baby food and it turns out to be caviar!’

In solution focused coaching, the coach hears the client on the subject of the ‘problem’ only as far as this conversation helps ‘develop rapport, show empathy, and enable the client to move on’. It is quite permissible to experiment with not talking about the problem at all as it is ‘irrelevant to the solution’ and the coach also has ‘no idea where the solution will come from’. As Gregory Bateson (1972) pointed out, the solution comes from a second, or higher, order of thinking.

At the heart of Solution-Focused (SF) coaching lies the miracle question as rephrased by Carey Glass: ‘Suppose you leave at the end of the day and return to your office or home, and later go to bed. And in the middle of the night, when you are fast asleep, a miracle happens and the problem you came here to solve is no longer a problem. The catch is that you were asleep, so how are you going to notice that the miracle happened? ... What else are you going to notice? What else?’

Here the coach or ‘study-buddy’ offers the following:

• A focus on positive goals - what the client will do, rather than what they will not do: ‘So you’ll be feeling less ‘put upon’ how will you feel instead and what will that feeling help you to do?’
• Scaling questions, much used in coaching, have their roots in Solutions Focus: ‘Where are you now towards that solution on a scale of 0 to 10? What would it take to move you from a 4 to a 5 on this? How much is good enough?’.
• Coping questions enter in if the client finds they are at zero: ‘I can see that things have been really difficult for you, yet I’m struck by the fact that, even so, you manage to get up each morning, get yourself to work and get your job done. How do you do that?’ Genuine curiosity and admiration can help to highlight strengths without appearing to contradict the client’s view of reality.
• Exception-Finding Questions: the insistence that there will be exceptions for the client to find in terms of instances in which the problem did not occur. The client is invited to identify these and to work out what they themselves did differently in that case. If they did it then, they can do it again in future.

Unlike Appreciative Inquiry, which originated as a way of looking at organisations, Carey Glass reminds us that Solution Focus (SF) was developed at the Brief Family Therapy Centre in Milwaukee as a form of individual therapy. Instigated by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg and colleagues, and also known as ‘brief therapy’, it only later spread internationally into the fields of management and consulting ‘for which it is brilliantly well suited as it works directly with solutions, is future focused, fast and measures change’, says Carey Glass who sees SF as a form of ‘positive behaviourism’.

Early empirical research based on a comparison between what therapy proposed to do and its observable results, began to establish SF as an evidence-based approach (de Shazer, Berg et al., 1986), suggesting that this kind of therapy was effective ‘within a short period of time and a limited number of sessions’ and ‘even when complaints and/or goals are vague and not well defined’.

The work at the Milwaukee Centre built on that of a number of other innovators, such as Milton Erickson and the group exploring patterns in communication as well as family therapy at the Mental Research Institute at Palo Alto: Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, Virginia Satir, Jay Haley and others (e.g. Watzlawick & Weakland, 1977). The work that arose out of these collaborations came to be seen by some as a revolution in the way we think about social functioning and wellbeing.

Broaden-and-Build

Both workshop presenters refer extensively to the higher motivation and wider possibilities generated by a positive outlook and accompanying emotions.

Carey Glass points enthusiastically to the work of Barbara Fredrickson at the University of Michigan and more recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the work of Fredrickson and colleagues (2005), positive emotions are hypothesized to undo the ‘cardiovascular aftereffects of negative emotions’ (commonly known as ‘stress’!). Their studies have randomly assigned participants to watch films that induce positive emotions such as amusement and contentment, negative emotions such as fear and sadness, or no emotions. Compared to people in the other conditions, participants who experience positive emotions go on to demonstrate heightened levels of creativity, inventiveness, and ‘big picture’ focus in further tasks, giving rise to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

In Appreciative Inquiry Coaching and Solution Focused Coaching, the focus on strengths and possibilities builds positive emotions while the questions of the coach further serve to expand the thought-action repertoires.

Jennifer Liston-Smith
SGCP Conference & Events Correspondent

SGCP events are reported regularly in The Coaching Psychologist, enabling readers to pick up on some of the essential elements conveyed, either in single events or drawing together themes. Feedback would be welcome to: [email protected]

References

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cooperrider, D.L. & Srivastva, S. (1987). Appreciative inquiry in organizational life. Research in Organizational Change & Development, 1, 129-169.

de Shazer, S., Berg, I.K., Lipchik, E., Nunnally, E. et al. (1986). Brief therapy: Focused solution development. Family Process, 25(2), June, 207-221.

Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Pavesi, G. & Rizzolatti, G. (1995). Motor facilitation during action observation: A magnetic stimulation study. J. Neurophysiol, 73(6), June, 2608-2611.

Fredrickson, B.L. & Branigan, C.A. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 313-332.

Orem, S.L,, Blinkert, J. & Clancy, A.L. (2007). Appreciative coaching: A positive process for change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Rizzolatti G. & Craighero L. (2004). The mirrorneuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169-192.

Watzlawick, P. & Weakland, J.H. (Eds.) (1977). The interactional view: Studies at the Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, 1965-1974. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.