Why This Therapy is Good for Creative Thinkers
And can help unlock new solutions.
Imagine yourself in the following scenario.
You are an interim head teacher who has been asked to support a failing school. The previous head teacher has left without notice. The staff are understandably demoralised. This is your first staff meeting.
What do you do? How do you run the meeting?
Do you give them an inspiring talk about how change is possible and how you will pull through together? Do you do an analysis with the staff of what’s gone wrong and how to put it right? Do you focus on the here and now and come up with a hit list of things to do and who will do them? What might you have done?
In the real life version, the interim head teacher asked them to do something different. The thinking behind it is based on a therapeutic system which can provide both insight and practice to anyone interested in creative thinking.
‘Good Things List’
His opening gambit was a ‘good things list’
The head asked the staff to come up with a list of 20 things that the school did well and the strategies behind them.
Put in context, what he was saying was ‘Despite how difficult things have been here, what have you still managed to do well and how (on earth) have you managed to do them?’
The staff came up with the ’20 Good Things List’ which was displayed in the staff room and could form a base for the changes that would be needed. A more positive energy in the school started to show soon. At the end of the school year, the school received a letter from the school inspectorate that it was in the top 100 schools in the country in terms of its SAT results (1).
Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)
In SFBT the focus is on what’s working rather than what’s not. On what are your best hopes for the future rather than what are you struggling with right now, or what’s gone wrong in the past.
So in a SFBT conversation with a deeply depressed person, the conversation might start with ‘what are your best hopes for our conversation today?’
This disarmingly simple question has depth. It meets the other where they are. It invites thinking about what is wanted and responsibility for the purpose of the session.
And once an answer had been given, the therapist might follow up with, so ‘if these hopes were realised, what difference would that make?’ The underlying theme is to enable the description of the desired future and then to ask the person to notice what it would like, how other people would react, how they would notice that something had changed. In short to be building up a picture of change from the inside and the outside.
SFBT was originated and developed by Steve Shazer and Inzoo Kim Berg in Milwaukee, USA in the 1970's. In the UK, the organisation BRIEF took up the SFBT baton and has been teaching and further developing SFBT for over 30 years. BRIEF is a great source of materials and courses.
SFBT shows up in other places. A great example is in ‘Switch — how to change things when change is hard’ (2). One of the book’s strategies is ‘Look for the Bright Spots’ which is pure SFBT. No matter how bad things are, there are likely to be some examples of things going better. Look for them, for they can contain solution seeds that can be applied more generally.
Read the story in ‘Switch’ about Jerry Sternin in Vietnam for an inspiring example of finding bright spots even in the most unpromising circumstances.
The Miracle Question
This exemplifies SFBT thinking. Imagine you had come for a SFBT session and are sitting with the counsellor. You have described your best hopes for the session— perhaps to improve your relationship with one of your parents and be able to talk about some difficult things in a constructive way.
You might then be told, ‘Imagine that, unknown to you, while you are asleep tonight a miracle occurs. Everything that you have hoped for has taken place.
‘When you wake up, what’s the first thing that you notice that tells you the miracle has happened? And what else? What would others notice that is different about you? How would you feel about that?’
Gradually you would be building up a detailed picture of the future of things that you would notice.
The Miracle Question can help unlock new ideas and be a great stimulus to achieving desired changes.
You don’t need to be a therapist…
…to start using some SFBT tools in your work and life. You could begin by trying out the ‘Good Things List’ in situations where things are difficult — and the ‘Best Hopes’ question where you want to help someone in a supportive or coaching situation.
More generally, looking for ‘looking for what works’ is a valuable strategy for any creative thinker. Use it in addition to specific tools that encourage new ideas to emerge, as a parallel track.
And there’s also a tool that does both — to create your own Back to the Future!
Peter Redstone and his artist wife live in South Devon, UK in a converted cowshed. Their 4 children all grew up on the farm before spreading their wings. Peter was a management consultant in the 1970’s, an organic dairy farmer and ice cream maker in the 1980’s and 90’s and now delivers science leadership training. He teaches creative thinking and admits to being a mind mapping missionary.
- Solution Focused Practice in Schools: 80 Ideas and Strategies by Harvey Ratner and Yasmin Ajmal (Routledge 2019) pp 89–90
- ‘Switch — how to change things when change is hard’. Chip and Dan Heath (Currency 2010)
