Caitlin’s blog on inspiring capabilities
Let me take you on a personal journey to explore the possibilities for clean questions and metaphor models and a process that I am coming to think may be a universal language of inquiry – thank you to TEDxmerseyside for giving me the opportunity to share these ideas.
Is it that when you ask Clean Questions they are adjacent to the ideas of the person speaking so that you build rapport quickly and easily, alongside them rather than trying to influence them?
Is it that the metaphors pick up and carry across the essence of what is important to each party in the group?
Is it because eliciting metaphors allows individuals to see idiosyncratic behaviours in one another within the context that allows them to make sense and therefore are more accepting of the behaviours and more able to work positively with them?
I’m struggling with what’s the least people need to know about for the concept to make sense for the TEDx talk
http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/case-studies/business-case-studies/corporate-metaphor
This year, I’m going to be playing with the themes that I am exploring with 3 different clients – how clean questions support groups to develop their own language of inquiry that then allows them to develop collective trust which in turn inspires capability to build social capital.
The way that clean questions and systemic modelling create such transformation in groups can seem to be like magic. Like magic there are strict rules to the rituals that allow that magic to emerge. There is the spontaneous and the well-thought out. If you falter at one step then the whole network can drop and you need to start again.
As I’ve started writing the Inspiring Capability book which explains the reasons behind the rituals, I’ve come to see all kinds of other disciplines that follow similar principles and strive for similar results such as Agile, Collective Trust and Social Capital.
What is lovely about Systemic Modelling is that it has emerged from a modelling perspective rather than from a theoretical perspective. By taking a naive stance with my work and using nothing but clean questions and NLP modelling to build the main body of the work, I feel I’m better able to serve real groups of people right across our society.
The clean conference 2012 should be a fantastic event. Last year I particularly enjoyed the cognitive linguist perspectives on clean questions and metaphors for time.
I look forward to finding out what other people in our community are up to.
You don’t change the hearts and minds of the nation by making demons of public figures – that just allows everyone to distance themselves from Terry or to create more drama about how PC has no place on the pitch. The very way this is being dealt with and reported is likely to result in no real learning, no acknowledgement of our own prejudices and acts of discrimination and no real shift in the way we do things around here.
One major mistake across the whole Diversity field is to put enforcement over play, curiosity and learning.
3 things are necessary to shift embedded racist thinking:
1. A curiosity, personal inquiry and small group acknowledgement of what actually is stereotyping, prejudice and how it leads to micro and macro discrimination
2. A curiosity, personal inquiry and small group discussion around stereotypes or prejudices that individuals used to have but lost and the processes by which they lost or updated their own prejudice
3. A discussion across the group, in the light of the previous 2 inquiries, into what are a couple of changes that the organisation could make to policy and procedure that would mean that more prejudices were being updated more of the time
That is:
1. We all make hold stereotypes, have prejudices and engage in discrimination, during almost every interaction we have. What are some of yours? What are some you hold about other people?
2. What are some prejudices you used to have, no matter how outrageous, and how did you update them?
3. What would have to be happening in this organisation so that more of you were updating your prejudices more of the time?
Repeat steps 1 – 3 regularly until there is a tipping point in the organisation – usually at around 60% of individuals having gone through this inquiry.
For more information about the kinds of changes that come from this process visit my training website: http://www.trainingattention.co.uk/case-studies/community-case-studies/police-national-search-centre-%E2%80%93-reducing-prejudice-amongst-police-trainers
The processes developed from 2 sources:
1. I had taken the groundbreaking work of Maori/English psychotherapist David Grove and developed it into an application for creating collective trust and inspiring capability for a group to re-learn their own thinking and to develop new ways of doing things around here
2. Patrick Weekes, a respected Police Diversity trainer, and I, spent a long time inquiring into our own prejudices, those we still held, those we’d updated and considered what was it that kept us from allowing our prejudices to cloud our thinking
We took the process and our personal inquiry into other small groups as a ‘modeling’ exercise to find out “What is the difference that makes the difference.” To systems that ARE able to work really effectively within a diverse culture.
Much to our surprise we found that the nature of the inquiry in and of itself was creating the very changes we were hoping to effect!
So if FIFA.com – Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) really want to shift the way we think around here, a series of small, non-judgemental inquiries, consisting of groups of around 15 individuals drawn from diagonal slices across the organisation: management, players, administrators etc. in order to get curious about what is happening, what could happen and what people want to have happen next.
As, long time friend and collaborator, Marian Way has announced in her Clean Learning newsletter – Liverpool John Moores University are on to their third clean cohort of University Students – they all start their year with
When you’re learning at your best you’re like what?
As you think about the past and the future, where are they? Do they have a size or a shape?
When you’re making decisions, that’s like what?
and build up a series of metaphor models, within a small network of peers, using Right Hemisphere AND Left Hemisphere learning – which I’ll talk about in my next post.
Marian’s newsletter piece is posted below – to find out more about her Clean Learning approach visit cleanlearning
Clean Success – University is on to it’s third cohort of clean learners
You may know that we work closely with another ‘clean’ company: Training Attention. And one of the projects we have collaborated on is the production of three workbooks for the Sports Development Department at Liverpool John Moores University.
Groups of students explore topics such as: When I’m learning at my best, I’m like what? Making decisions is like what? How do you organise time? etc.
The first cohort who completed the three year programme achieved 73% 2:1′s or 1st class degrees – compared with the average of 49% before they embedded Clean into their curriculum.
This year – the second run through – the students achieved a 75% success rate!
And now, a leading educational publisher has said of the workbooks:
“My initial impression is very positive – I think that the need for resources around time management and independent study is keen and looking to get even stronger with widening participation in HE and the widening gap between the learning skills required of a university course and those exhibited by students entering these courses. The content and approach of the workbooks that you have developed is excellent and comprehensive, and I think that the tone, style and “voice” are right for the intended audience.”
Watch this space for a mainstream publication of clean!
I’ve been writing up and explaining some of the fundamentals to the Training Attention approach to some colleagues in the clean community – all those things that seem to us to be givens. It’s brought up a whole range of ‘balances’ that we make micro-decisions about.
One is the age old question of pacing and leading.
When a client asks us to facilitate them then our attention immediately goes into modelling mode:
What would they like to have happen?
Currently it’s like what?
Where do the issues come from?
What needs to be true before the changes they’d like would become everyday and ‘just the way we do things around here?’
Is the way they’re engaging our services an example of what they would like to have happen or an example of the issues they’re struggling with?
Who aren’t we hearing from?
What happens just before they can have what they want?
What will they see/hear/feel as they’re changing the way they’d like to?
What would we like to have happen?
Armed with clean questions we aim to move as swiftly as possible from conflict to curiosity and from fixing problems to considering outcomes.
A big question is the balance between
practising the expertise we’re being paid to bring to the company and
building rapport with and pacing the place they’re at
Too fast on the former and we can’t build a strong enough relationship with them to help to support them to develop a different relationship with themselves.
Too long on the latter and we run the risk of joining them in the complex issues they’re experiencing and becoming a part of the model instead of the facilitating modeller.
How agile can we move between the two and how do we know when we’re being most effective?
That’s my question for this day.
