Thought provoking

Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves.

You are simply asking yourself, “What’s working and how can we do more of it?” That’s the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?”

Once they’ve helped patients identify specific and vivid signs of progress, they pivot to a second question, which is perhaps even more important. It’s the Exception Question: “When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?”

You can see how easy it would be to turn an easy change problem (shrinking people’s buckets) into a hard change problem (convincing people to think differently). And that’s the first surprise about change: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.