Ben Furman is a psychiatrist from Finland who is very well known in circles of solution focused practitioners. Among other things, he invented the technique of 'positive paranoia'. He works both in the therapeutic setting and as an organizational consultant. Kirsten Dierolf, solution focused practitioner from Germany, interviewed Ben. 

How did you come across Solution Focus?

When I started working in the field of mental health, I was at first going to be trained as a psychoanalyst. However, it did not take long for me to realize that we were not very efficient especially in treating severe cases. So we were looking for alternative ways of helping people. At that time, family therapy was a promising new approach with a new basis. Psychoanalysis is oriented at analyzing the past to help people deal with their present problems. Family therapy aimed at creating a social environment that would be beneficial for people, and thus help them recover. In family therapy, the role of the therapist is also more active. You end a conversation with designing an intervention for the client.

From family therapy to brief therapy it is only a small step. Brief therapy also assumes that analyzing the origins of problems in terms of the past is not essential for solving problems. In brief therapy, they were rather looking at the vicious circles of the client in which the attempted solutions keep the problem going. I thought this idea of the MRI (mental research institute in Palo Alto) was absolutely marvelous because it was so optimistic and promised to help people get better faster by changing those vicious circles.

Together with my colleagues, we became quite fond of the MRI approach and started an MRI brief therapy training program in Finland in 1985. After 2 years, we came across the new trend of solution focused brief therapy and were fascinated by it. It was even more user-friendly than traditional brief therapy because it was based on the idea of extracting solutions from clients rather than delivering therapeutic interventions.

We had guest speakers from different countries at the time and Bill O’Hanlon came for a workshop. He managed to sell the idea to us. At that time we were still very much operating on the ideas of the Milan group. I had taken a two week course in Italy, and our approach was tilted towards the idea that symptoms have functions in the family system or in a wider system. Bill O’Hanlon suggested that the idea that symptoms have functions is nonsense. Symptoms don’t have to have a function at all. We fell in love with this revolutionary idea. That was our introduction to solution focused brief therapy.

How did you find out that this was relevant for business, too?

This is an interesting one. When I enter the world of business as psychiatrist, I feel like I owe an explanation. So I tell a story to provide a bridge between these two worlds. This is how I tell the story to the public – I might want to tell it differently to colleagues.

There were people from companies taking our courses in solution focused brief therapy. You see, in Finland, we have a rather highly developed occupational health system. So there were doctors and nurses in our classes, and people asked me to come to their companies to give a talk. So I said: “I cannot come”. They replied: “Why?” I answered: “Because I am a psychiatrist. If I come to a company, everybody will start looking around and will try to identify the person who needs the psychiatrist.” But they objected. Then I said: “But who is interested in solution focused brief therapy? It is not relevant”. So then they said: “Why don’t you talk about burnout?” Finally, I agreed and said, I’d try my best. So I started to talk about burnout. The more I talked about burnout, the better I got at it. Eventually I got so good at it that I could guarantee that after my talk everybody would have it. Actually, after one lecture, a participant called me later to tell me that even his neighbor’s dog appeared to have burnout. Once you have identified the problem, you start seeing burnout all over the place. I use this example to introduce the idea of vicious circles, a concept not only relevant in the clinical field but also in organizations.

One way of understanding what solution focus is all about is to explain the difference between traditional psychology, original brief therapy, and solution focused therapy. Traditional therapy is based on the idea that our problem is not our real problem. The problem is merely a symptom of an underlying, bigger problem. The MRI approach, is based on the idea that our problem is not the real problem. The real problem is the attempted solution, or the way in which we try to solve it. Solution focused therapy is based on the idea, one might say, that the problem is not the real problem. The real problem is how we talk about the problem. The way we talk about problems makes a huge difference and this is very relevant for organizations. People are not trained in discussing problems productively or constructively, creatively. That is where I think that business people have an advantage. Because when I explain that to business people, most people buy it without many objections. They immediately understand it, and it makes sense to them intuitively.

This is my favorite example to explain this in presentations: „Early on when we started working in the field of problem solving, we made a realization: It is not easy for people to talk about problems. Have you noticed this, too?“  The people in the audience start to think. When they are thinking, I say to them “I have a suggestion. Why don’t you do an experiment to find out whether this is true. Today, when you go home after the workshop, when you open the door -- if you happen to live with someone, a spouse or a lover, -- say to him or her: ‘Can we reserve this evening to talk about our problems?’“ The audience usually starts laughing. “How many of you will have this kind of a response: ‘O what a wonderful idea! Talking about our problems has always brought us so much closer to each other’“. I use this playful idea to introduce people to solution focused psychology. It is a fact that it is difficult for people to talk about problems. So we should try to consciously create a platform that facilitates talking about problems creatively and constructively.

My English colleagues have introduced me to a very nice new word: „Blamestorming“. When people start to talk about problems, they easily fall into the trap of “blamestorming”. Now I have been asked a lot about why we tend to do this, why we have the tendency to blame one another when we are trying to solve problems. But what do we benefit from trying to answer that question. The risk is that we only end up starting another round of blamestorming. We would do blamestorming about blamestorming. I tend to think that the tendency to blamestorm rather than brainstorm isbuilt into our  system. When we are faced with problems, we tend to analyze them and once we start doing that, we naturally slide into blamestorming.

Now we talked a bit about where everything came from and the development of solution focus. What do you feel are the new ideas? What could be the next steps in solution focus?

I have the feeling that 10 years from now, we will not have solution focus any more. The ideas relevant to solution focus will have been disseminated into the culture and will emerge under a variety of new names and labels. We will be the „oldtimers“ and hang on to the term but the next generation will come up with new terms and new sexy terminologies. The term will probably vanish into history while the insights will bloom because they are valuable and even self-evident. The ideas of solution focus that are so dear to us are already being well received and highly appreciated today. Similar ideas are emerging. A well-known example is appreciative inquiry, but there are many others. Particularly the people who keep track of the SOL conferences, surf the internet looking for new ideas find similar ideas everywhere. Solution focused organizational development is simply one of many under this umbrella of various positive and empowering approaches to human change and development.

You are 50 years old now, right? So, in 25 years, when you are in your rocking chair…

O thank you for reminding me… actually, I’d rather see myself on my skies then…

Ok, so when you are 75, on your skies, on top of a mountain and you are just teaching your grandchild how to ski, or have just come up again after racing downward with your grandchild. You are looking at the beautiful mountains, down into the valley and look back on twenty five years of development in the solution focused field. What do you see?

I look back, and I am surprised that my skies left no trails at all. Don’t leave any footprints, as Insoo Kim Berg’s favorite saying goes. It would be a delight for me that the ideas that avoid blamestorming, our ideas have proven to be useful. Maybe they are not as revolutionary as we thought. They are more revolutionary in psychotherapy probably than in business but I am not sure about that. If really good things start to emerge, for me this would mean that we, all of us who are interested in solution focus, succeed in extrapolating it so that it applies to conflicts. We are good at future work, we are good at helping people to imagine a good future, to brainstorm toward a desired future. So we are experts on future work. I would like us to become experts in conflict resolution as well. In many situations, future work is not enough. It does not help when conflicts are very acute and virulent. There are several people who are already excited about using solution focused thinking to develop practical approaches to helping people who are in middle of a conflict. 

Actually, all psychological movements are facing this challenge. They should all be judged according to their ability to help people resolve conflicts. In my view, resolving conflicts is the pivot, the key to making this planet a better place. It is not about therapy approaches or organizational development. The real challenge is answering the ultimate question: How do you help people who are fighting, who are at war? That is the challenge. I know that there are already people dealing with the issue. I, myself, have been invited to a conflict resolution conference in Norway this year. They are approaching us and are sensing that there might be something. The job might be done.

Even our TWIN STAR program for work environment improvement includes some sprouting ideas of  how we might become better at solving conflicts, such as the idea of how to deal with hurts constructively and how to give and take criticism .That’s where we are heading, that’s where we should be heading. It is a tough challenge. When you are ready to leave this mundane existence, you ask yourself: „Did you have a beneficial impact, did you contribute to conflict prevention and resolution?“ It would be lovely to be able to say: “Yes”.

I was invited to be a writer for a new textbook on health for children in schools. In the middle school now, here in Finland, mandated by law, kids need to take one hour every week on the subject of health during the three years of middle school. The textbook is brand new and schools will start to use it next fall. I am one of the authors of this book. It was my task to write the chapter on human relationships. In this chapter, I delve into the area of conflict. I don’t actually use the term “conflict” but I write about “How to influence people in a constructive way”, “How to take and give criticism”, “How to deal with hurts”, “How to express disagreement constructively”. I dissected „conflict“ into manageable slices. Along with the textbook comes a resource book for teachers. This book includes quite a few exercises, in fact the very same exercises that we use when we teach the Twin Star ideals to organizations and companies. I believe that through role plays and practical examples we can teach the world how to deal with conflicts better. That’s as far as I have come. I am personally quite excited about moving from therapy and problem solving to the area of conflict prevention and resolution. 

Is there anything you would like to say to wrap things up? A saying or a proposal?

I propose that the Nobel prize in the future should be given to a group of people who have taken the challenge and actually created a technology or an approach to conflict resolution based on solution focus. It should be an international team with people from different backgrounds and different religions, and they should create a highly practical approach and develop hand on measures that will help people who are faced with conflicts of all kinds. Let’s create a team like this, let’s get results, let’s test them to see that they work in different contexts and cultures. Then we should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Kirsten Dierolf M.A., (1965) has American and European university degrees in theology and linguistics. She is a Lecturer at two private German management schools / universities and works as solution focused trainer and coach mainly for banking, IT, and pharmaceutical industry: Kirsten is interested in creative chaos, devine pranks, art and adventure. She can be contacted a www.speaking-gmbh.de or in her workshop at the Solutions in Organisations Conference in Stockholm 2004.