Interview with Paul Z Jackson

By Gwenda Schlundt Bodien

About 8 years ago we got to know Paul Z Jackson via our work and our mutual interest in the solution focused approach. Paul is a well-known trainer, coach, consultant and writer, and co-started The Solutions Focus in the United Kingdom. Paul combines improvisation and the solution focused approach in his work. I interviewed him about his work, his views on the future of improvisation and the solution focused approach and how he combines these approaches.

Gwenda: You have written an interesting and fun book about improvisation. Can you tell us a bit about how you got into improvisation?

Paul: I came across improvisation before I came across the solutions focus. I initially worked as a journalist and as a senior producer with BBC Radio. I attended an improvised comedy theatre performance in London, which intrigued me because it was so funny and so good. It made me wonder if what they did on that stage was all planned beforehand or whether it was telepathy! So I went back the next week and it was a completely different show with different suggestions from the audience. I asked these performers how they did that and they said that it was all about responding to what was happening in the moment. I loved it and I started working in comedy and started the More Fool Us improvisation comedy team. With this team I worked with improvisation for many years.

Gwenda: So how did you start working for organisations and how did you get to know the solution focused approach?

Paul: When I left the BBC, I started working as a trainer and consultant, using improvisation techniques in my work for organisations, for example in team buildings. The advantage of improvisation is that people experience how things work between them very quickly and get insights which would otherwise take much longer to explore and understand. These methods are described in my book Impro Learning – Making Training more creative and spontaneous.

I was also working with Jenny Clarke and Mark McKergow who introduced me to the solution focused approach. In my impro work I had already experienced that I got good results when I gave feedback to people about what worked well and asked them how they did that. I got better results giving positive feedback then when I criticised them. What appealed to me in the solution focused approach was the positive, light approach to problems and to change. I have always thought learning can be a fun process and should be much more fun then it often is. People benefit from having fun and being playful in their work. It can be really useful to learn things in a positive, constructive way. As you know, the solution focused approach came from the therapeutic field and we started translating it to the world of organisations.

Gwenda: It seems to me that you have developed two paths in your work, which sometimes are combined and sometimes stand on their own. The first path is the improvisation path and second is the solution focused approach path. How do you decide what to use when?

Paul: You are right, I sometimes work with both approaches and sometimes I choose one or the other. It depends on what the client wants and needs. The solution focused approach is often easier to explain than improvisation, especially with people who may be a bit apprehensive about drama-based exercises which are used in improvisation. I have always found that improvisation and the solutions focus go hand-in-hand really well.

Gwenda: How do both approaches go together in your view?

Paul: They have a lot in common, for example in making use of what is there. Both approaches involve people responding to each other in the moment, constructing new realities together with whatever is usefully available to them.

Both methods also are the same in seeing the importance of interactions. The solutions focus embraces a systemic view on change and notes that change happens in the interaction between people. In improvisation, the scene is the interactions between people – that’s all there is.

Combining the methods helps people to make change tangible. The solutions focus asks what will be better when the problem is solved, what the future perfect looks like and how people will notice the future perfect is happening. With an improvisation, people can rehearse the future perfect and act as if what they would like to achieve has already been achieved.

People then experience the benefits this future perfect brings them. It often motivates them to make those positive changes in their daily practice.

The combination also makes complex issues as simple as possible. Working creatively with other people on topics such as ‘what we both want to happen’ inspires energy and laughter, in contrast to getting stuck on the nature and impact of problems.

Gwenda: In that sense both the solution focused approach and improvisation are means to help people achieve positive goals. I have often heard you using the term “future perfect” and I always wanted to ask you what made you decide to use that specific term. I prefer talking about a desired situation, since that is a more realistic goal than a perfect future. How do you see that?

Paul: In our book, The Solutions Focus, Mark and I tried to find words and phrases that suited the business context better then some of the solution focused therapy language. We choose the word Future Perfect because it is a grammatical play on words. The future perfect in English grammar is the tense of ‘what will have happened’ – a kind of looking back from a more distant future to a less distant future. Similarly, the SF miracle question aims at helping people to make an in-the-moment type of definition about how things will be in the future – the day after a miracle, which happens overnight. The purpose of defining the future perfect is not to achieve a perfect world, but to define how you would like things to be. People don’t have to achieve the Future Perfect - they can settle for good enough.

Gwenda: Visualising how you would like things to be is a powerful solution focused tool to achieve a desired future. To your knowledge has any research been conducted regarding priming effects of impro?

Paul: My knowledge of priming is that it is useful to get the brain working unconcsciously before consciously addressing a topic. So, in a learning environment, people will pick up information from wall-posters there at the start, and that makes it easier for them to take in the information when the topic is eventually explicitly discussed. Or you can prime people before a course to have them working unconsciously on certain questions – or with SF to be noticing certain things before/after a session.

I don’t know of any priming research related to impro. I guess priming people before an impro session would be an intelligent thing to do.

Gwenda: Can you give an example of how you combine improvisation and the solution focused approach in you work?

Paul: One example is in strategy sessions, where the methods can combine for developing a vision. I just attended a four day course conducted by Keith Johnstone, the impro guru. He showed us how quickly people can become creative using impro techniques. The beauty of impro is that it helps people see really quickly what they already have inside them. Lots of people get told they aren’t creative and they should work harder to come up with creative ideas. Johnstone helps people realise that by letting go and not forcing themselves to be creative they actually come up with better ideas. What he does for example, is ask people to name objects in the room by their wrong name. The effect of this exercise is that people temporarily shake up their perceptions, seeing colours and shapes more strongly, for example. Through this simple exercise, which takes only 30 seconds, people are encouraged to look at their own work in a different way, opening up their minds to new possibilities and new perspectives. Creative solutions then flow more easily. Many impro activities generate this profound effect very quickly.
I worked with police officers who knew that their presence sometimes provoked aggressive behaviour - for example in football crowds. In those situations they wanted to be able to just be somewhere without causing negative responses from the people around them: on the contrary, their presence was meant to calm people and keep things under control in a non-violent way. How to achieve this Future Perfect?

We did an improvisation exercise with them, in which each officer carried a card numbered between one and ten, which they held on their foreheads. The cards indicated their status level, with ten being the highest. No one knew their own status, because they didn’t see their own card. They just had to start behaving according to their unknown status by responding to how the other police officers responded to them. After a few minutes they were able to guess their own status with remarkable accuracy. This experience and the debrief discussion helped them to realise which verbal and non-verbal signs they used to indicate their status in a group. By modifying their responses to the people around them, they were able to choose and control the status they conveyed more easily. It helped them to choose which status to “ooze” depending on the effect they were aiming for at that moment in time, for example downplaying their status to reduce tensions at football matches or potentially heated public meetings. So the goal of the police officers was reached by experiencing how the interaction works and what they can do themselves to get the result they want in their work.

Gwenda: You have worked with both approaches for a long time now. Where do you see impro and the solution focused approach going?

Paul: Both approaches are gathering more evidence that they work and attracting more practitioners. People need to know the benefits that can be achieved using these methods and like to see the evidence in stories, case studies and figures. With impro it’s vital to make the practical purpose and application of each activity really clear – and create the connection to improvements in your daily work.

I hope both impro and the solutions focus are reaching a tipping point where they are accepted as mainstream change approaches. Certainly both communities are growing fast, with people finding each other on internet networks like the Applied Improvisation Network (http://appliedimprov.ning.com/) and SOL (solworld.ning.com).

Gwenda: Do you perceive these developments as positive? What are the advantages to the solution focused approach and impro becoming mainstream?

Paul: One advantage is that people can learn from each other more, which will raise the range and the quality of applications. The freedom of sharing knowledge and not tying people down will I hope always be an important feature of both communities. Improvisation and the solution focused approach have been developed and used by many and owned by no one. Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer have been good examples. Connections, and not only in terms of technology, will become more and more complex and important. Virtual organisations without traditional organisational boundaries will emerge. These virtual and sometimes physical networks will consist of people who want to work with each other and share knowledge and experience.

Gwenda: Suppose we are ten years from now and the words solution focus and impro are not being used any longer. Which elements of both approaches do you think will still stand strong?

Paul: The SF principle of not analysing problem causes but instead using what works well to reach goals will still be there in ten years time. Impro will have become more mainstream, because life will be more unpredictable and people will be less and less able to rely on ‘scripts’ and more inclined to use their own creativity and their own words. People will understand more and more that change is constant and cannot be controlled but that we can make change happen by doing it together, by using what’s there, by doing more of what is going well and by rehearsing how you want things to become.

Thank you for sharing your thought provoking views!