🎙️ Toward Solutions Podcast | Episode 4: The Power of Not Knowing with Chris Iveson

So we have to have a radical trust in our clients. That's not just, or I believe that you've actually trusted and active something that you have to perform each time you have a client. At that end, once you bring in any sort of expertise, then that takes away some of the trust in the client, going back. Hello and welcome to the Toward Solution Podcast, where creativity meets practical application. I'm Dee on Sing, and I'm Jason Pasco. Together, we dive deep into the world of solution focus, exploring its transformative power across a variety of contexts. Come join us each month as we engage in enlightening conversation with experts and practitioners who are applying solution focus in their unique environments. Whether you're looking to enhance your personal life, professional practice or community projects, our discussions will provide you with valuable insights and actionable ideas. Tune in to discover how you can implement solution focused strategies and practices in your own context, unlocking new possibilities and creative solutions. Let's embark on this journey of exploration and innovation together. Subscribe now so you don't miss an episode of the Toward Solution Podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us for a bit of a chat. And by way of a little bit of backstory, you did a workshop in Australia, and I had the time I was working for St. Luke's, and they got you out to do a workshop with us. Yes, I was fairly well steeped in strength-based practice, and your introduction was really the first time that I'd kind of really got a good idea of what solution focus was. So, and that was a real turning point. I've kind of gone on to do different things that I probably would have otherwise. So, thank you for coming and thank you for sharing. And thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Chris, what is it you love about the solutions focused approach? I like it without the S. I think the S was brought in by Mark Riccardo and Paul Z. Jackson really to sort of distinguish a little bit. Oh, okay. Okay. Way, way, way back. So, you can tell who's, and so it's gotten to the sort of culture, organizational world. Well, you can tell who trained me. So, yeah, that was just a little bit of marketing, esposal, distinguishing some messes with, yeah, with the essence of the whole thing. I think that's important. So, let me ask the question again. What do you love about the solution focused approach? Well, I was just thinking about that yesterday, in fact, I was thinking about something. And when you say, well, since about 1987, and you're looking back that far, you think, come, why isn't the boat fed up with it? And I think the, it's because it's from the start we've had this commitment, which was part of Steve De Chais' commitment to continually think about what's necessary, what's not necessary, what are we doing, works, and so there's a constant, almost, sometimes almost indecernable movement. I was thinking, well, how they've done, what I've done recently, what's changed over the past few years. And I realise the thing that's changed is, but I'm really pleased about, is working at being neutral with my clients. So not having a view about what they should do tomorrow, not trying to encourage them, not trying to do anything that influences their choices, but simply to leave them at the end of a session with a sense of more choices. But the choice they take is there, but it's simple, but it's very, very hard to do. So it's not a, not something you can just do, it's something that's sort of struggle through every session, it's just sort of trying to keep that to the road, that's why it's really pleased that someone noticed recently compared me with someone else. And I said, not that I didn't show emotion, but I didn't show any kind of encouragement and clients sort of reported things as interesting what they did. But there wasn't a sense of encouragement and wow, and I was, I was pleased about that. Some people would be horrified. Please. Well, it's interesting, because every so often, before we do these, I drop some things in the chat. And because you joined after me, you probably can't see them. But one of the quotes that I put in there from your writing is, from a client, and the client said, "I know that if we hadn't met, I would now be dead." But it is important to me that you know that you have not touched my life at. Yeah, I've spoken to one thing. So, there's been a droshiver, and it's like, again, that's what it gave me when I read it. So, is that, is that kind of what you're talking about? I guess it is. It was quite a long time ago, and I may have been, I, who knows, I might have been encouraged, I might have done lots of things that I tried not to do now, but clearly that woman wasn't having any of it. Yeah, she took from it what, what we thought my clients do to make a comment, just a sense of their own, agency, their own achievement. And she was saying, "What have done? I did it. That was what's so brilliant about it." Definitely something that I took away from that workshop that I attended with you was, for me, there was a difference in how people were scaling, and really just using a scale, but only looking at, you know, what's keeping the score, where it is, what's working, and leaving it at that. And with something that I think, yeah, definitely stood out and something that I took away. And, the way that it builds the history, the history that fits with clients, hoped for future. I think sometimes social focus people forget or imply that the past isn't important. The past is absolutely crucial to all of us, and what would we do without our past? But I think we can use this scale to help people see other possible ways of viewing their past, and, um, with future hopes. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on what, how do you think, what's the simplest explanation of solution focus? Oh, we can go there. If there are any explanatory, any explanation is going to turn your into an expert. So, I'm going to go there. I think there are obvious connections, influences between, which we have between each other. And, but they're too complex and too, um, idiosyncratic to have any real explanation for. Of course, I would be, I assume it works when the clients, I answer, opens a door for them. There's no way we can make that happen. We just have to bang away with our questions of hope that it does. So, there's obviously an association between, questions of the client's answers and improvements in their lives. But it's not, it's not a scientific, not something that would be understood in a scientific way, and we can explain it in a way that leads you to, do it differently. Is there a problem? And would you, I guess, how would you explain it to a friend or a neighbor, someone who, who has, you know, was I sad to ask you questions? Hopefully some of your answers will open doors. Yeah. And, hopefully they will, but they might not. There's no way of knowing. And statistically, the chances are that, it will, it's more like it opens doors than it. And, then that isn't. And the rest of it's a mystery. I love that. I love that. I love that because Chris, you're the first person that, that hasn't answered the question. And I'm not saying you haven't answered it in, we're like to say, I wouldn't go there. No. Because what I'm really enjoying is that, that your respect and honor for the process. And even in my first question, just by adding an S, that distinction of standing out, when we're actually having a conversation about not leaving a footprint. Yeah. So thank you. I love the way you answer that. Might work. Might not work. Statistically it does. And it's that invitation. Maybe you'd like to have a go. And it's a good. So. A good gamble if you like. (laughs) If you want to, I love that. I love that because my 20 year old son's just discovered poker at the local club where he's 25 dollar buy-in and he's like, "I reckon I can come home, dad, tonight." But this is probably a better game when I hold bunch of ways. No, that's awesome. So, 1987. How did you even hear about the approach in 1987? - I got a couple of books to review from the, I was a family therapist. I mean, so as a family therapist, Evan and Harvey, my two colleagues were a family therapist. So I should work with family therapists in quite a prestigious clinic, working with pretty heavy duty, child and a child protection and adult mental health issues. Solution focus started to appear in the family therapy journals in '84, '85, '86, along with narrative. Right, we're interested in both. And we decided we better teach ourselves both of these approaches that we could add them to our family therapy teaching over 12, or three, so that was, I first came across as a book. So got it here somewhere, might have it somewhere. As I was to review, two books. One was a book edited by Don Efron, who was an editor of the German systemic therapies and he'd written, edited a book of different family therapists, journeys and one of them was the Milwaukee team describing how they'd divine up solution for it. It's a unique little paper describing the processes of the clinic worked from its starting point in Stephen Insus dining room through a world famous clinic. And Nina's also a bit of a hamlin, a bit of hamlin became a world famous belief therapist instead of killing himself. And along with that, I got to go to my hands first book as well to really shift in the context. So it was my first taste. And then when I went to my hands and was in, doing a workshop, his first workshop in Britain, which I heard about, so I went to see that. I went to a two-day workshop with 30 people, with his unknown boy, that there's an eye open already. And then, having an unhappy, we decided to teach ourselves these two things. We chose solution for us to start with and taught ourselves how to do it. And we're Wednesday afternoon, three clients, initially with keys to behind the screen, one with a client, initially with keys when 1988 clues came out, not became our Bible. And after a few months of doing that, we found we couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't even get around to doing the similarities. But, I think, and we made a conscious decision, when we realized, we couldn't really continue to teach family therapy. Because we just couldn't go along with it. We couldn't go along with it. Explanations as much as anything. We started doing it, of course, as a local people, our own solution was decided to take it out of a family therapy arena. Because we saw it as something that we hadn't much wider occasion, anybody could do it, even though to be a hot shop, world-run therapist at a time. So we made a decision to take it outside to find a family therapy arena, which is why we're here, right, really. Because those countries, it didn't, like Spain, it's just stayed a minor element of family therapy. A subscription of a subscription, a subscription of strategic family therapy. So, we're saving Italy. So it's something, probably a bit more, initially, there was a decision to take it out so that more people have access to it. - It's, I find that a common theme. I find that as we, as we talk to people, there's kind of this, you said it was an eye-opener, the workshop with Bill O'Hanland and 20, 30 other people in there. And then almost this view of a wider horizon on this could work in so many places. What was the eye-opener piece for you in that workshop? - Remember, I've stuck, I mean, the workshops set me off during some solution focus things, which looked crazy that worked, and I was at the time, one of my projects at the time was working with a family therapy colleague in a great, or mostly children's hospital, which is sort of the children's hospital in the UK, working with children who were, some of whom were suffering life-threatening physical symptoms due to a worrying parents. So parent families are just spittered. And so we were working with the parents on time to do this mediation. And which is really well the hardest work I ever done, much harder than the child's expectations to have when you've got parents that have been fighting for years with the children in the middle. Then I came back from this Bill O'Hanland conference, full of jolly, her own positivity. And my colleague thought I'd gone crazy, but people started to change after one session. And then that coincided with Eminem Harvey, I want you to look at solution-focused stuff and I joined them and then really getting hold of the Shazor stuff. I just felt I'd come home with this, that is what I've been striving for. I've already done lots of hypertension teaching at university courses, social work courses. And one of my things there was about labeling. One of the exercises I would do is to have all the negative labels and then have people work at what's the positive aspect of this, what's the bit of this behavior which you can endorse. Already it was a bit into some sort of crude, strength-based work anyway, was someone else was doing. And it was just by personal antipathy towards the labeling. So solution-focused, solution-wise, felt like the language that I've been looking for and not just really just like the massive coming home. - Wow. - Awesome. - What does it feel like today? - A bit comfortable. More minimally furnished than it was originally. - Given that we've, what does Shazor did to a traditional therapy, we've more or less done to solution-focused therapy, which has thrown most of it out. - And I had a conversation with someone on the New Yorker's Soulgo, I was staying with Mark and Jenny in London in 2014. Jenny was heading off to a meeting and it was about the conversation on their front porch was this could be even better. But no one had even come up with solution-focused 2.0 or anything like whatever. People are labeling things as now. They just, and it was that sense of keep looking for how we can do it better, help the client more or in a simpler way. The only way and it's essentially old parts of the approach now and the ex-generation and generation after will be keeping it going in different ways. So though I'm very wedded to what we do. I know that it's just a place on the track really. Things will move on. In all sorts of different ways, both making more complex and going into developing into something else possibly making it even simpler. - Do you have any thoughts on, you know, what is next? - No. Because you buy not new commitment. Obviously there will be, there's lots of people doing all sorts of things alongside and with solution-focused adding bits, taking bits from here and there. Some of which fit, most of which don't fit. Most things that have introduced don't fit because they are based on some expert knowledge. If you've taken the client being expert really seriously, then it also requires you to trust the client to know best. So we have a radical trust in our clients. That's not just our I believe. that you've actually trusted and backed if something you have to perform each time you with your client and once you bring in any sort of expertise then that takes away some of the trust in the client knowing best you have an idea of your own which is going to be helpful to the client and that breaks the trust. So for us if you want to be fully solution for our customers you really do have to trust the client which means in the end that's what makes sense of being neutral. Being neutral is one of the best ways you can trust the client is trying not to put our ideas in what might be good for them to do which is really hard obviously but every client we know exactly what we need to do in order to have a happy life. I'm really interested in how you so obviously part of what you do is you teach solution for focus and how do you reconcile and balance the you know you know teaching people and holding obviously as much as you know you are an expert you are you know you're held in the field as a knowledgeable person. How do you is there a difference of how you kind of balance that relationship or that knowledge in that space? Yeah we're teaching it's different teachings is a different process you deal is different you come to me because you want to learn something about what I do so it's a craft and the solution for us to mean it's a craft it's something you can learn to do and as you learn to do it everything else falls into place around it we never teach anything any of the traditional plants in skills like I don't know empathy and whatever whatever all this that we teach people I'd ask questions and the rest falls into place we ask questions in the way that we teach then you will have a very very very intense relationship with your clients while it's happening and not be too bothered about them when it's not. Can I go back to my can I can I re ask my first question? In the how would you so how would you describe some the craft what would you say you know you said ask questions in a in a very particular way what is the particular way in which you ask questions. It's not so much the way you're asking it's the reason you're asking whichever way you're like as long as you're asking solution both questions which is why someone who's just done a two day course yesterday and have a conversation with your client today and create enormous lead to enormous change in a client's life because as long as the questions are asked as long as the client can answer them because it's the answer that make the difference. So if you look at earlier tapes and how are they very clunky, incredibly clunky but they work. Our first book retreat wrote before we met Steve DeShay so this is just cases in it, incredibly clunky but they work. So so what we do is teach the questions in a simpler way as possible. Can you tell us and and I I have a little bit of an idea but for people listening who who might not what are you doing and how are you applying solution focus in your context. For 30 years or more we saw most of our clients for free because we wanted to work with the same clients of the people we talked so any public sector professional from childrens, adults, drug and alcohol whatever whatever we would see their clients free they refer to to key interesting clients where things are stuck. So we've stayed very committed to that. No, everything's online, occasionally I'll show you that I call from a public sector and a social work organisation or mental health so when I see somebody otherwise we just see people on the grape boat. I've been seeing quite a few people recently with post-traumatic stress because that's got around and I've been doing some workshops on post-traumatic stress that's vision focus. We would deal with severe post-traumatic stress in a single session very often despite the experts trying to tell us so but is another little mission of mine is to counter this developing industry into trauma which is trying to make it a very specialist subject which means lots of people suffering from trauma won't get the help they need because it will be too specialized so people will feel that they're competent to work with that issue in fact it's cases where that's an issue and it never gets mentioned. I'm relying on the woman who said you haven't touched my life that's what she came with. Not that she said it she said she knew that her past had created these problems but if I talked about her past should be ahead. I saw research with Bolivian child protection workers in the general of solution focus practice around bicarious resilience so there's an interesting conversation that's developing or emerging around learning solution focus conversation. We know that having solution focus conversations not only moves and helps the people that you're having the conversation with. The research from last year suggests that it also decreases burnout in the people who are having the conversations with clients and gets a bounce in this idea of their own resilience. We've haven't had a lot of evidence in this since the first Christmas policy at the clinic that we were working in after we'd started our solution focussed. So we've been three months into our project teaching ourselves solution focus our wise men for the first time and they said all the notice that we've become easier to live with in the past three months. Not long after that Peter Sunderman in Finland brought out a paper I can't remember the title of it now but in 1991 to 1992 something like that comparing outcomes in two social work teams one having a two day solution focussed so there's no difference in outcome in relation to the work that the social work team was happier and their clients were more satisfied. So that's been around for a long long long time. There's been the stuff that come out of the Canary Islands by again Richard Detection and with you Spurn Out I um Oh sorry I forget my name is now I'll cover them with the name of the guy but been around in tenery for a long long time along with Mark Bearback. There's one of the big researchers in solution models so now I think it's a well-established like the solution focus professionals are happier even before that when we were training when we teaching ourselves we had a trainee social worker with us who learned solution focus with us and she was a woman she was a um a Bangladeshi woman employed to care for the local Bangladeshi community there was 600 Bangladeshi families mostly in abject poverty and there's one of the assistant social worker who could speak by language and she said at the end of her placement with us she said her husband wanted to thank us because he'd got his wife back. Wow and she said and it's true before this I used to go out and worry or night worry or weekends about my clients now when I say goodbye to my clients I leave them and I get on with my own life well sorry I mean there's a little sort of anecdotes which I credibly dramatic really anything about. If we can listen to the people we're interacting within a solution focus way and we have the questions to ask them so that they're talking about an outcome that they want a preferred future and we can help them find instances of that happening not only are they leaving the conversation differently but so are your leaders rather than putting out fires dealing with problems feeling like the sandwich in the middle and just even that anecdotal stuff for them to be going home and their partner saying it's nice to have you back. That's a good evaluation. So I think it's incredibly important that we don't make trauma this narrow line using a trauma informed response which is x, y and z and I know that's going to be controversial but I love what you're saying about that. I want to get trauma. I mean trauma's happening all the time. I'm a great one for leaving cupboard doors open so I can't sleep traumatized to the head as I bang my head on the full of lumps everywhere. In trauma something that we mostly deal with and I think that's the whole thing about the resilience. Item in cover is that we look after each other, makes a big difference to how we deal with traumatic experiences and let's look at stories back to any sort of trauma or one of the factors, I think, between trauma that doesn't lead to post-traumatic stress is the support you get after the traumatic incident. But resilience is a relationship, I think, in that sense. So resilience and school in any workplace, the way people support each other, the way people interest in each other, makes a difference. That's where resilience comes from, I think, a solution for some of these people as a way to do that. Absolutely. Even in a corridor, a car park or a playground conversation, it doesn't have to be long. Absolutely. I was actually just thinking about, so most of what I do now is working with Aboriginal organisations in Australia. I was having a discussion today actually about lateral violence. Anyway, that was where my mind went, which is where a traumatized group of people tend to perpetrate that on each other. I was just thinking about the context. I was talking to this person about solution-fogus practice and how it might be a really good fit in their organisation. Do you have any thoughts on that in that context? I'm just a purely, a generalised solution-fogus approach. We'd be interested in not only the violence, but in the ways people have of looking after each other, which also exists. Which exists that they might be not as obvious because they're not being looked at, but I would be looking for exceptions, if you like. I'm going back to early solution-fogus, if I'd be looking for exceptions, because these will be also groups of people who look after each other. That would be a start for me documenting care. Great thought. Stepping back a little bit in our conversation, Chris, you said that you and Evan and Harvey saw so many possibilities for using the solution-fogus approach. That's been something that's helped not only broaden it, but at last in terms of what you do. When you were talking about in Spain, it got stuck in a subset of a subset of a subset. It sounds like you and Evan and Harvey tried it therapeutically in lots of different contexts. From my understanding, just reading the history of what Steven, Insu, had done and looking at transcripts and videos and stripping back the language to only questions that would move the client to where the client said they wanted to go. Your broadening across, not just staying in one area and doing it in job protection or in these areas. You think that helped you make it simpler? It made me just realize something Steve Toshese had said anyway, is that the problems irrelevant. So in sense, whether you're saying a heroin or was a heroin user or a teacher sort of struggling with burnout, it's the same process. So in that sense, we just knew there wasn't any, there was no distinction, if anybody, any problem didn't matter. What mattered was somebody wanted something to be different. Signed that sense. So the difference it made to us was more a business difference if you like, because it meant we could train anybody and we'd have examples of work. That was partly why we decided to do most of our therapy free so that we could continue to have examples of any group that came for training, which we have examples, usually video examples of work with their sorts of clients. So it was an economic element to it as well. That's fair. That's great. It's one of the things where a solution-focused approach can do well in business. There's the saying, it's not a very good business approach because you see somebody once and then they don't need a kick-home. Broadening made sense. Very good. One of the things Chris that we were really keen on in doing this podcast was that people who listened to it could learn something and then go away and try it and practice something. Is there something that you could teach us, teach people that are listening, that they could go away and try? A simplest thing to try is to find a friend or something that you don't call a project scale where you scale a project that you involved in, a project being anything that you decided to embark on at some point in the past and you hope to achieve finish at some point in the future. So it could be work related, domestic related, socially related. It could be writing a book, it could be learning an instrument, it could be setting up a new service. It could be your dissertation, clever, something that's engaged in fraudulent scale. Zero is when you first decided to embark on it. Ten is you completed it satisfactorily, where you're on the scale. Twenty-five things that you've done. So put you at this point on the scale. Five small signs, five things that you might notice if you move at one point. Not clever enough, how are you going to move at one point? Just five things that you might notice if you do. So it's description of what's done, the mainly description of what's already been done in a little bit of description of what might be. That's a very, very effective little interviewing sequence. Absolutely. You could do it, only if you do it, because it's some high numbers really. So put it down. Make sure you get the twenty-five things that somebody's done. Why, what, what, what 25? All right, 35. I think it's because you, you have to start, twenty-five is a lot if you've never done it before. Whereas no 100 is perfectly possible once you kind of, once you realize that there's no end. I was, I was down in Sydney at an appointment with my, my son and he's got a pub that he likes to go to afterwards. We're sitting at the bar to the waitress and she's a she's doing psychology at university and anyway, we were talking about solution-fogus brief therapy. I said, "I've been exposed to that at all." What is this solution-fogus brief therapy stuff? And I said, "Well, can I give you an example?" And she said, "Oh yeah, and she's poor and bees for people and she's coming back over." And I said, " just think about something you'd like to get better at." I said, " all right." And I said, "Don't tell me, don't tell me, just think about something you'd like to get better at." And I said, "Ten is as good as you could hope to be and one's the opposite of that. I just want you to come up with a list of five things that would describe a ten. Don't tell me, she's poor, some more bees and comes back." And I said, " now I want you to think of five more things." And she comes back and I said, "On that scale, where do you think you'd be right now today? Don't tell me, I'm going to go to the bathroom." And when I come back, I want you to have seven things that get you between a one that are working in your favor that get you up to that number. So I went to the bathroom, she came back to poor, some more bees and she said, "Yeah, I've got seven." I said, "can you, think of three more, but don't tell me." And she said, "All right, she nodded, she said, "yeah, I've got three more." I said, "All I'd like you to do now is just think about three tiny signs that you might be one point higher and who you'd most like to notice that you'd made at one point higher and think about what they might put us." And she came back, she's gone, "yeah," and I said, "so there's something clearer to you now." She said, "yeah, I know what I'm going to do, do next and I said and I still don't even know what we're talking about. I love it because that's such a powerful example of Scalic and Nick and exactly what you just described to us, Chris. That's so helpful. You won't believe how helpful that is because next week or a week off, sometimes soon anyway there's the 24 SF 24. Yeah, yeah. We're a conference. I'm doing something on there and um, thinking could I do a message interview? You can. And I've done it. I've done it all. It just comes into me. I won't do it with a scale. I've got something else in mind to do it. But yeah, let's just think of this. I'm doing it. I'd love to hear how it goes. I would love to hear that goes because I, that's what I think is magic to me about this. I don't have to know. So in wrapping up Chris, because we don't want to keep you, you know, too long and we really, really appreciate your generosity with your time. You know, you said, and I'll use your words, getting on a bit, you and and and half the end of it. What would you say to the next generation of practitioners? I'm not sure I'd say anything. Some people are following close to us and trying to keep it simple. Some people are just seeing connections on around and blowing their minds with that. I think that's, you know, enjoy it. What I'd say is enjoy it. I'm sure you need to enjoy it. Thanks again for taking the time. Well, very happy. Happy to. Well, nice to see you both as well. Yeah, it's great to meet you Chris. I really appreciate your time. Have an enjoyable day. Thanks. Thank you for joining us on the Towards Solutions podcast. We hope today's insights inspire you to apply solution focus in your life and projects. Whether you're applying these strategies in your personal life, professional practice or community projects, we're excited to see the impact you create. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with others who might benefit from our discussions. Your support helps us to reach more people and continue to bring you quality content. Stay tuned for more enlightening conversations and make sure you subscribe and let's continue this journey towards solutions together.