🎙️ Toward Solutions Podcast | Episode 8: Say Yes, And... Improvising Change with Paul Z. Jackson

It's still a case, I think, in traditional ways of going about creating change that you have to do something like push it, get it started and work hard to change in organization. If you take this idea that change is happening anyway, you can explore it, examine it, look at it, interact with it, and see what change is going on and find who are the people, for example, who are already committed to making things different and work with them. So you amplify the useful things that are happening and even the most unpromising looking circumstances can result in a lot of shift surprisingly quickly. Hello and welcome to the Towards Solution podcast where creativity meets practical application. I'm Deon Singh 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 conversations 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 focus practices in your own context, unlocking new possibilities and creative solutions. Let's embark on this journey of exploration and innovation together. If you like this podcast, leave us a review and subscribe now so you don't miss an episode of Towards Solutions. Paul Z. Jackson, thank you for joining us. I'm really glad to have you here. I'm trying to think was it 2014 maybe you and Jeanine Walman came out to Australia and around about that. Yeah. I remember sitting in the back of a taxi with you. Two ideas. One was we should watch as many TED talks as possible and see how many resemble solution focused and maybe then set up some watch parties or something like that. I'm really glad to see that happening with SF-24 which you've been a big part of. The other idea was training facilitators in improv skills. The last time you and I saw each other, I was doing your, was it reaching through the screen or beyond the screen improv course? Both those things have happened in some way shape or form since 2014. That was a good taxi ride then. It was a great taxi ride. So what sort of things have you been doing lately with SF? SF-24 is probably a good one to say a little bit more about. So this was during COVID which was popular a few years ago if you remember. Yes. And it was impossible to meet people in person and we'd already started doing some online work and thought it was a good moment to expand that and various conversations with solution focused people were going on as to what this might look like. And so we took the ambitious view and said let's make it global 24 hours nonstop online and organize it in all of the different time zones and have anyone wanting to present something about solution focus or have discussions about SF topics offer a session and be part of that. And it was surprisingly well straight away first year with more than a thousand registrations which was quite surprising. I didn't know that there were that many who would commit themselves to spending some time doing that through their day. We had a bit of a technical issue on the very first one where a hundred people had arrived in the waiting room and that turned out to be the limits on the zoom that we'd hired at the time. So we had to find ways around that with Facebook live and so forth. But gradually we got the hang of it and started recording the sessions as well right from the outset. And it's been going every year by one since then with terrific sessions, almost all of them recorded and now available as a giant free archive of solution focused work around the world. So it turned out to be a tremendous asset and very surprising outpouring of SF in all its glorious manifestations and so many people doing so much with it now. It's wonderful to see. So why do you love solution focus? I've liked it from when I first encountered it because of its elegance and simplicity. This really appeals to me. I've got a philosophical student background and the idea of Occam's razor to do things as economically as possible and slice away any unnecessary pieces of explanation that just aren't required. So how elegant and simple can things be? And the solution focus ideas when I encountered them seem to be simple, elegant and effective when undergoing any kind of change. If it's a change process with humans and complexity. So not something that can just be done because we know how to do it already but something where you have to find your way forward in difficult, swirly waters. How do you do that? It would be easy just to think, well, we leave it to chance or we're lost and there's no particular way forward. But SF provides a way forward and then later having used it and described it and studied it for a long time, I also like it particularly because it seems to me to be comprehensive that you don't need anything else. You can do SF, some would say be a purist with it and it can accomplish whatever it is you're trying to do in the field of change as well as or better than other methods. So you don't need to add other stuff to it for the change part. You might need contextual information and certain forms of knowledge and ways of talking with people but it'll do the job and it will do it in a very neat and practical, pragmatic way. I liked all those things about it and still do. How did you, so how did you come across it? A via Mark Maccurgo and Jenny Clark. I was working with Mark particularly Jenny as well. We were doing accelerated learning for trainers, presentation skills, these different topics as organisational trainers. Mark had been looking at solution focus as part of that so started talking about it and we decided we'd hang out at therapists conferences and events. So we went to Ebta in Bruge for example. That was one of my first exposures to global solution focused therapists and I took some training at brief then then as the brief therapy centre with the gentleman that were running that. Harvey Ratner was the course tutor and that made a deep impression on me. I saw a psychiatrist who had these very complicated ways of looking at the world suddenly go well this is very simple. It seems to work. So I didn't need all those years of training then. They didn't say yes or no but he had this realisation that he could have got to where he was a lot fast. Of course nothing went to waste in his background or his practice and I was very struck by this and took to it very quickly. I must have chimed with one of those other things he mentioned my improvisational background and of course these were all therapists so the contribution that Mark and I made were probably two contributions. One was to rewrite it all in the language of organisations and coaches and took out all of the therapeutic language. So we re-described it and re-worded it but used exactly the same ideas stole them some may say. But we continued to hang out with therapists but for one particular venture we said no therapists welcome and that was the establishment of the sole conferences, sole world which were aimed purely at people who were working in organisations as coaches or consultants or change agents whether internal or external and we didn't really know if anyone would show up for the first conference which we held in Bristol in the UK but about 80 people signed up Peter Jabo was the first person to register and it turned out that mostly unbeknownst to us a few that we did know that there were people who wanted to do this and were committed to spending some time and effort in gathering to do it. So we organised the first two sole conferences and then the Swedes said we'll have one in our country for the next year and every year since then, apart from Covid of course, which other things happened as we mentioned with SF-24, there has been a soul world or other managerial or organizational type of conference ever since. What would you say, you know, are the kind of the things that you've learned along that, I mean, probably hard to summarize, but interested to hear, you know, what stands out over that period of time? I've been struck by how the foundational principles keep applying. So for example, we say change is happening all the time. And our job is to notice the useful change and amplify that. And it's still a case, I think, in traditional ways of going about creating change that you have to do something like push it, get it started and work hard to change an organization. If you take this idea that change is happening anyway, you can explore it, examine it, look at it, interact with it and see what change is going on. And find who are the people, for example, already committed to making things different and work with them. So you amplify the useful things that are happening. And even the most unpromising looking of circumstances can result in a lot of shift, surprisingly quickly, with what seemed like very little effort. With my business partner, Jeanine Waldman, we say conversation is the fundamental units of change. It means that you can change things with any conversation with anybody in a interconnected system and start making useful difference. And we're working on a new thing at the moment, single sentence interventions. Oh, it's the one question you can ask or the one statement you can make in any conversation with anyone that will suddenly pivot things from being problematic, looking at what's not working to solution focused, what is working, what resource we've got, what progress might look like. So you might in a team meeting say something like, remember when we did this last time, this thing that we did worked really well. And people will say, oh, yeah, I remember that. And suddenly the conversation is about the resource you've got from a previous experience, rather than all the things that are about to go wrong or have gone wrong or complaining at each other and the other things that take up a lot of wasted time in team meetings. Amazing, amazing. Because I mean, we've, we've heard about single session therapy last podcast. We talked about silent, silent sessions, but single question or single statement interventions. I think that's fascinating. Well, there's two things that come to mind for one is changes happening all the time. And you said, this is a comprehensive approach to change. You don't need much else. And you mentioned that even in really, really tough situations, you can be surprised at how quickly things can shift. Where is it surprised you? Give us an example of where it's surprised you. Oh, we have a organization we're working with. I won't mention that again. Who are where they are. But they, they seemed in a pretty rough state. Not just about getting the things done that they needed to get done, but how they were communicating with each other off more accurately, probably failing to messages, weren't getting through people, weren't getting on with each other. And they fortunately committed themselves to doing some SF work and have continued to do so because it made such a difference. And it would have been very easy to go in and say, this is too difficult. What on earth do you do? How do we start? But because we were starting without having a conversation about how to start, we just dived in and asked when, when have things worked well, even a bit? Can you agree on something that you're aiming towards together? What does that look like? Introducing concepts like the future perfect, what does good look like before you decide what to do? All of these techniques and methods started paying off. They started doing it. Now they're flourishing and winning prizes and not with a huge amount of intervention. This is stuff that they've committed to finding out how to do it themselves. So I think that's fascinating because I've just finished a pilot with a group of executive leaders in a school. And we did the pre and post-solution building inventory and four hours. We had two 75 minute sessions and a 90 minute session and we saw up to a 12 and a half percent shift from problem focused to solution building. So I think it is a very comprehensive and lean way to do things. Yes. You've talked about single question and single statement. You've given us an example. How in general are you using solution focus now? In my work time, I'm a solution focused consultant and a solution focused trainer. So there are two different things that we offer. One is we can train people to be solution focused. It's usually managers becoming more coach like within their organization. That makes a difference, particularly if you get a cohort of them that start doing that together. And we're also offering a 90 day leadership challenge where we work as consultants and work alongside the group for a very short three months on something that's worthwhile and see how much change we can get going within that period of time. So do the work with them and they'll learn some SF along the way. Plus plus writing. I'm still keen on expressing the ideas and doing that in podcasts like this. It's great to be reminded of some of the things and to rethink them and reflect on them. And in blogs, which sometimes build up into books. That's getting very interesting as to how much can you collaborate with artificial intelligence on a blog and still think that's my own work. If it's a good question you put in and then you review and edit the answer. Then it still yours in my view. I know that's quite contentious. It's an interesting world we're living in, isn't it? But you know, it's only as good as the pilot asking the questions and and coaxing it at this point. Well, I remember a long time ago in one of the sole conferences, Dominic Godat, who's a terrific practitioner, but it was unknown to us then came in a decision that he called random coaching. And he had a list of 20 questions that were solution-focused questions. And a client would be facing the coach. The coach could only ask these random questions, according to a number that somebody in the audience called out. So ask question number four. When has this been a bit better in the past? And I was the coach in this. I volunteered to ask these random questions. And I asked them as sincerely as I could and took it very seriously. And asked random questions completely under the control of the audience who didn't know which question was which. So there was absolutely no knowing what order or sequence the questions would be asked. And they asked the client at the end, how was that? And the client said, "That was fantastic." Made an overreliant session. And it just brought home to me how, how little part the coach as a personality or a person has to play. If I could say the questions that were required, look like I was listening. This would provide a very satisfactory experience. And it was humbling, I think, for me and for the other coaches in the room to see how that could be done on a crude basis. And it can be done so much more sophisticatedly now. So we immediately started bringing into our trainings, ask the questions as written. Don't start inventing your own great ideas at this point. The thinking that's gone into the design of solution focused processes is so good. You can let that carry the burden. And you're not going to be a personality in that moment. I mean, you could be a flash or whatever you want to be beyond that. But it's not needed for the work. That was great. Also, really like the solution of August was developed by two such completely distinctive personalities as Steve Chesa and in Sukinburg. So there was no, this is the style with which you should do it. You could be very moody, quiet, tassie turn like Steve or fantastically outgoing and cagarius and warm like in two and both counted as good solution focused work because they were doing the questions, the processes, listening carefully, putting the client as the expert in their own lives. That's something that's always strong. struck me and stayed with me that we're not coming in as experts in what the clients should do. We're looking after a process, creating space for possibilities for them and they'll know what to do. You mentioned before the kind of core principles that still, you know, changes happening all the time. You just mentioned then about, you know, putting the client as the expert. What are the, you know, what comes to mind when you think of those core, those core things that we should be, you know, building, building on? Yeah, that's a great question. The core is crucial. Those two are significant parts of it. Having a stance that solution talk is likely to be more effective and more pleasant than problem talk. That way you can always stay on track or get back on track that you develop these solution is a radar for are we diving into problems unnecessarily here? Or are we looking at what it is we want to have happen and switch back from one to the other? So that awareness and stance is the fundamental thing. And then it expresses itself because you're thinking that way, you're acting that way all the time. In either a model like Oscar Coaching or the back model or some process that you have with a group or in these single sentence interventions that immediately you find a transition point or a point of leverage that can change conversation around because you know that you favor solutions, solution talk over problems and problem talk. And that's still incredibly rare that people I know you do and our community does. But we're a minority that that thing can act in that way because there's so many entrenched systems that work otherwise. We're in a problem saturated world. We could all list off plenty of problems without any trouble at all. So to do that is unusual and salientry and takes some consistency and some sense of community that other people will support you in that and can have ideas and share those and help you to do that. That we are maybe slowly bringing some of that kind of thinking along with some other positive ways of change. It's not solution-vacus it isn't the only one if you look at positive psychology and appreciative inquiry and so forth. You can find some other positive and constructionist approaches to change that work very well. We sit very comfortably within that wave of positive change and it needs to grow because there's so much work to do. So change is happening all the time, placing the client as their expert. Solution talk is more useful and more enjoyable than you know the alternative. Are there any other you know you're reminding me of simple which was the acronym of the Mark and I device for our book, the solutions focus that brought this approach into organizations and to coaches. So we were really pleased to have the opportunity to rewrite it about two years ago for third edition and we changed almost every word I went through sentence by sentence and thought we could be a bit more definitive and less tentative in how we phrased it as well as updating it to take out all of the become outdated over the 12 years since second edition. So it's based around this core principle set simple and that's remained the same throughout all the editions. So simple was solutions not problems. The eye was in between in between not individual so classic psychology tends to look between the ears. What's going on in someone's head often what's going wrong in someone's head though positive psychology looks at what's going right in someone's head when they're functioning well and we said not between the ears between the noses the interaction world between people what's visible and manifest in behavior and activity between people and that's the field that we're working in things will of course be going on in the head but until they manifest themselves outside in the world then we don't really need to deal with them directly unless we're doing brain surgery which is not one of my hobbies and looking at interactions you get a grasp on how teams are working or how one person's working with another and what they can do differently how the other person would notice how they would then respond how that response would then change your response. So we have a very fast, emergent co-creation of the new set of circumstances and this prompts creates helps us to notice change very rapidly which is I think one of the ways that it succeeds. The M make use of what's there also an improvisational principle what can we do with what we've got so we don't worry about gaps we look for bridges we use what is available to get closer to what we want. P for possibilities I've already mentioned that we're expanding that sense of possibility that anyone might have for how they are dealing with the things they need to deal with their issues or their problems their projects their ambitions. Broaden that possibility and lots of ways that we know about to do that language clear not complicated a lot of change methods have a lot of technology and structure that's complicated take years to learn you can learn solution focus and practice it within half an hour and use the client's language is another linguistic point they know what they mean by what they're talking about we don't have to convert it into a oh that's a case of this or all that something different that we know about and they don't it's their words they know what they mean by them and E for every case is different so it's not a stock way of knowing how to solve each problem that presents itself in the same way that you've solved all the others by doing this or doing that the remedy to my time management problem might be quite different from the remedy for yours depends what we mean by how we best want to use our time for example and we use the metaphor of Cinderella's slipper it fits only Cinderella so that slipper is discarded and we we make a new slipper co-creator new slipper for each subsequent customer even if it looks like the same problem it may well not be such a I know a really useful book for for me so I'm much appreciated your your and Mark's time and effort and you know updating and keeping it current it's yeah it's a really a great resource for thank you particularly I wouldn't say it's not just for non-therapist but you know both myself and Jason are you know not from the therapy world and so having a resource that's really geared towards to that is you know really really useful to think that's the much appreciated thank you we're still hang out with therapists yeah we do if you're you know I think that's like the acronym is really you know really useful if you were to have a conversation with a neighbor a friend someone who doesn't you know doesn't know kind of the world that you work in or how would you describe what solution focus is in a you know in a in an over-the-fence conversation I describe it as an approach to change so that immediately says when we do and when we don't use it only if you've got a customer for change would we start doing SF I use the sorts of words I've been using here that it's simple it's direct it's conversation-based so if we treat conversations of technology it's a very cheap and effective technology compared to an IT system or other technologies that organizations use because it's one that we've all got we're all familiar with and it's a very forgiving technology if you don't get a useful answer first time you can ask the question again or ask it in a different way so very flexible technology and it is probably underappreciated particularly for people that are drawn towards complex ways of making change I can it really be that simple I have a t-shirt with that slogan on it can it really be that simple and it can and that's constantly surprising and I would add one more letter to that acronym if I had a chance which is something towards an answer to your question there as well which is an R simpler with the R standing for relative not absolute a lot of people treat a lot of problems and issues in their lives as blunt either or and take this digital approach rather than analog. If we're looking at an on-off switch rather than a volume switch that can can turn around. A lot of issues can be recast as to what extent. And of course the scale that's familiar to solution focus does that very elegantly by saying on a scale of one to ten where are you. So we're not at one end or the other typically we're looking for somewhere between. And if we've accepted the idea of a scale, we've accepted the idea of progress potentially because if we can be at a four we could also be at a five and maybe we could also be at a seven on a different day or have been in the past. It's a very much more fine-grained way of exploring what people are up to rather than either or approach. Awesome. I'm so glad you brought up the idea of SF as a conversational technology because I was going to ask you a question about that. I've seen you write about it. I've heard you talk about it like that before. So if we think about that and a lot of the people that listen to the podcast are great SFs, they love the approach and then there are other people that we've heard it's been recommended to like you should listen to this and maybe have a go. What would be something that you could share with our listeners that they could actually go away and try? To use in a conversation if there are. Yeah. This conversational technology style. So many answers spring to mind. So let's try a few of these. Having a conversation with someone and asking them what do they like about the thing they're doing? What's attractive about it? So it means that you remind why they got involved. It's something that chimes with their values or their wishes. What do you like about it? What's gone well recently? What's going well for you? It's not a neutral question of how are you? So that's neutral tends to get negative answers sometimes. You can presuppose things and we construct questions with presuppositions in them and they're not just for those sort of special moments when you're doing doing SF. You can have presupposition in your everyday language with family and friends. It it amazes me whenever we're training this that the say we have a dozen people on the course and we do a two day introduction. They come back on day two having experienced one day of solution focused training and they say I tried it on my husband, I tried it on my children and it worked it worked really well. They'd asked the child what went well at school today and had a very different conversation than what didn't go well at school today. And the bit that amazes me is not that it works but that they're willing to test this completely unknown thing on their most significant and often most troubled relationships immediately. We say good for a minute ago, how about you test it on something that's not so important. But they'll go straight for it with these conversations and usually fortunately with a degree of success. So they see the possibility of using it with their nearest and dearest everyday stuff and do it. And they don't have necessarily enormous level of skill after one day of training in it but it starts working and getting quick results is a very good way of people being inspired to do more of it. So we look as you know that small steps, first sign of progress, one thing you'd notice that would tell you that you were on the track you wanted to be, experimental approach of try something small. So it's low risk. And if it's working, do more of it. If it doesn't work, don't do any more of that. Do something else instead. This is also of course, grandly how evolution works. So it's well founded in philosophical and logical terms too. Fabulous. I've had the question buzzing around. So I'm interested in so obviously you know your experience and improv and creativity and and then the principles. I'm interested in how you see those two, you know, interact and what's more important. Lovely and then tricky question. I was involved for those who don't know an improvisation for sometime before encountering solution focus. It was a shared interest in improvisation that brought me and Mark together. So I was running improv theatre comedy groups. I think I was on my third one by the time I met Mark. Mark was running an improvisational jazz orchestra. So these had a lot in common even though they were different forms of expression for the audiences. And there's a huge amount of overlap between the improvisational way of thinking and solution focused approach. There aren't that many people who have taken an interest in both. So they're two different and separate communities. Perhaps because they're trying to do different things or appeal to different people in in some way. But for me, they've always been totally harmonious and overlapping. So with improvisation, you don't know what's going to happen at the end when you're at the beginning. And this is the characteristic of complexity and solution focus, as we've discussed, offers a way forward in complex worlds. So it has a foundational overlap there. But then on the level of principles, we've got make use of what works. That's pretty much a definition of both improv and SF. And when I'm talking about improv, I'm not talking about performance in probable comedy, but how we improvise in everyday life. So we're already experts in that kind of improv. We don't have a scripted conversation with the exception of some podcasts. We don't know what we're going to say to it. We're saying it until we find out how the other person responds. And so for them, everyone does this perfectly naturally every day. So it also has this non-expert stance. We're engaging in it together rather than one person's teaching another one what to do or how to do it. And I would do activities with coaches where the next question had to include a word or phrase from the previous answer of the client. And this is an exercise in listening carefully with a view to being able to use the client's words. So it's an improv type activity because we're not formulating our next question until the moment has arrived when we need it. And it's a very good solution for practice because it's that close listening for something. So they have practical overlaps as well. Which one's better? It's so I hope you got that. Yep. Love it. How? How? Because you, I mean, you've written a book on training was a 57 and a half 58 and a half 58 and a half. I've got the book. It's somewhere. So 58 and a half activities. And my experience is that improv and SF sort of coming together has really helped with facilitation and getting the multi-duck off. What, to say a little bit more about that. That's, that's right. The, the, the other contribution, if you like, has been developing, making conferences and trainings really interesting for the participants. I've written about ways you can tell a conference is any good. And I still go, not very often, there were many years in which I have been to conferences that are so poorly designed. As in you sit and listen to a series of PowerPoint lectures with interaction limited to some questions at the end that suddenly lead to the whole conversation being off track. And no activity or there's an icebreaker that nobody wants to do and has no relevance to, to what's going on. And because I came to training quite late, I've been a comedy producer and a journalist before that. I didn't know how training was supposed to be. So it was designed for things that I had enjoyed and that I thought I was going to enjoy. It was just highly experiential. Lots of small group activity, movement, variety of modalities that you do, you do some writing, some listening, some speaking, some presenting, some games and exercises, whole mix that would fully engage people through what could be lengthy days. And so we started doing this at conferences as well that instead of there being long, long keynotes, that there would be more exciting forms of activity and questions for a panel maybe with different perspectives and each panelist would lead a short game or activity that would illustrate or exemplify or give us an experience of the point. And all of that is meet and drink to anyone who's been teaching improv. That's how we do it all the time. And this turns out to be a good way for people to learn. And it's increasingly appreciated, but still not, I would say dominant in conferences. I love the expansion of open space technology, for example, from Harrison Owen, Australian, where he turned conferences upside down. He said the breaks were the best bit. How do we make the whole conference like breaks and people choose their own topic? Who they're going to talk to and how long they're going to talk to them for? And that's completely improvisational and it's completely solution focused. When I said that these aren't the only initiatives that are useful in the world, and open space to be a great example of one that's come from a completely different place and overlaps with it absolutely, perfectly and beautifully. Amazing. We can teach facilitators these kinds of principles and techniques. And that's been fair bit of my work is working with facilitators and designing conferences and designing events. And I got to do this with the COP talks on climate change for a number of years through the climate centre of the Red Cross, Red Crescent, by working with them and then advising them on how to design sessions that would be more engaging. So that more people would attend and listen to these great ideas that they had about how to improve things in the humanitarian sector for the most vulnerable people on the planet. So this stuff is not just for fun, if you think of improv as fun or one-to-one conversations if you're SF therapists, it can make significant useful differences on global issues. Yeah. And I heard you and Janine when you were in Australia and I was in one of your sessions talking about what you're going to learn can be applied one-to-one, it can be applied to groups or teams or organisations or communities and you had kind of this hierarchy on a slide. But still still the case. All you as a practitioner need to is retain the stance. I'm being solution focused with this and then it's a different context of conversation while that's fine. You may need to learn something about those contexts and it might be a bigger audience or talking to more people at one time or it might not. It doesn't change any of the fundamentals. It's definitely one of the things that I've enjoyed learning is, I guess starting out using it in leadership or in supervision in those sorts of contexts and then more in facilitation and workshops and how the same principles apply and it's quite an enjoyable journey. I think it's so true what you're saying in that. It's a very good fit for many different contexts and many different stages. So I think it can be really useful right across the board. I'd like to see that taken up as an ambition maybe by the SF community. We have a community. We have things like SF24 and some really great conferences around the world in person. And of course most of what we're doing is still one-to-one stuff or one-to-team, one-to-organisation. And the ambition to be to use this really effective and necessary way of going about things with the world on larger scales. And to do that we could be thinking on a larger scale. Where can we get involved more ground in? There have been excursions into politics and humanitarian work and community work. In Australia and many other places. But still not enormous numbers of those. And we have lots of individual practitioners, very small teams of SF practitioners working together and we've got a community but there are any big consultancies. There's no KPMG or Ernst and Young of solution focus as yet. In fact there aren't any medium sized ones that's alone giants. And maybe there's a phase in which we'll get to that where having more of us together in some kind of organised arrangement, some sort of institutional gathering could do more effective work on a bigger scale because we're meeting people on that bigger scale. That's my hope and ambition for the community. What's um say you know for us as um you know we we're experimenting somewhat with this podcast. We thought it might be a fun idea to have some conversations with people. What advice would you give us about you know pursuing that that vision? Unsurprisingly it's like keep doing it. Podcasts of brilliant example of how the world suddenly changes. I worked for the BBC as a producer and there were a couple of commercial stations and a few local stations but access to the airwaves if we can still call them that was hugely restricted and we were in this very privileged position of who got to write, who got to produce, who got to speak and that's turned completely on its head by the absolute open access to anybody with tiny bit of equipment that can now podcast. And we have an explosion of podcasts, hugely rich variety and it may not be perfect that how do they get listened to, who still gets heard, what are some of the filters, where's the good stuff, how do you find the good stuff when there's so much stuff. Those are questions that we're dealing with but the fact that you can make this podcast then it can get heard and you can put it out there and at some point some of these new ways of expressing ourselves and using media will catch on maybe this podcast is the one that does it so keep doing it that's a useful small step and it may turn very rapidly into escalation and a capital cage of podcast glory that spreads that word and influences loads of people. It's it's positioned to do it so keep doing it keep doing what we do well. It's easy in any enterprise to lose quality because you lose enthusiasm or you don't treat each case as different. Those are things that SF and other approaches to how we live our lives will cater for but you're doing the good work and I wouldn't have advice as such as to here's what what your next phase should be. You'll discover that that's the work for you to do. Good advice sound advice in as much as it is. Yeah thank you. Where can people find out more about you and what you're up to best place to buy the by the book your blog. Best place to buy the books is Amazon because it's I don't love Amazon but it is international and very accessible and it's it's stocks the books and to reach me there's the solutions focus.co.uk proudly UK and if you're interested in my improv there's an improv website in pro.org.uk and you can reach me personally by putting Paul at the front of either of those. I'm curious what you said blogs turning the books what's the next book. I've written a book about the last two years teaching a new improv group to perform. That's a bit niche. That will be coming out soon I hope electronically probably and I don't know about another solution focus work and we did work hard on the rewrite of the solutions focus so that's very current and maybe the single sentence interventions will become the next stretch. and to expand enough to be book worthy. It'd be nice to have a popular bestseller. (laughing) That could be the one. Do you want one more funny story? - Yes, please. - Assuming that there's been any funny stories so far. This one amused me. So it was with my mum recently and she'd moved and had put books on bookshelf. I said, look, you've got all my books. Thinking proud son, we're proud mother. And she said, I always thought you'd write a novel. (laughing) If you did, what would it be? - Ah, that is the trouble. I started and got as far as page two of something that had submarines as one strand and something higher up on a mountain as another. - There's a very poor idea and I couldn't think of anything else to do with it. So the novel will have to wait. - Have you ever read Stephen King's on writing? - Yes, brilliant book. - Yeah, I've read it on part one. - He goes into horror and everything. I read that a long time ago, it was lovely. - Yeah. - Yeah, really, but really useful. - I guess for me, my writing is mostly, I've written a lot, I wrote about a million words as a journalist and then seven books so far. And business books and books of my ideas is expressed as well as I can manage, seems to be the thing. And there was definitely a comedic strand to a lot of my journalism. - Yeah, that's my area. - Where could we find an earlier piece of your journalism? - I very occasionally put them on my LinkedIn or Facebook page. It was of its time. - I'll have to go have a look. - But yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for taking the time and sharing stories and wisdom, much appreciated. - Thank you for joining us on the Toward Solutions podcast. We hope today's insights inspire you to apply solution focused in your own life and projects. 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