Forest of Dean CLPG: Reports of Meetings

[phil]

Here are the reports of meetings of the Forest of Dean CLPG.

[phil]

Present: Lise [hostess with the mostest!], Alan, Kay, Ned, Phil

Theme: Pulling back - 'What happens just before?'

We started as ever with a good chat which it's fair to say is a pattern by now! The comment was made at some point in the evening to the effect that it would be good to have enough time to chat and catch up on what everyone is doing and to get all the practice we would like in as well.

The chat seems to be an important part of these evenings and we usually manage to get on to CL practice before too long. Most of us are running busy, deadline-oriented lives and it is good to be able to be a bit more relaxed about these meetings.

At the same time, some people journey a goodly distance to get there so it should be worth the travel, especally on a winter's evening - the log fire and lovely tea (exactly the right strength...) and great biscuits certainly helped in that regard - thanks Lise.

Ned proposed some practice at pulling back in time during a session. There were five of us so when we split up Phil co facilitated with Kay and then with Alan. Ned worked with Lise. We were all in Lise's parlour and the voices were over-lapping and at one point one facilitator carefully used the client's words... except that it was the client in the other group! At that point another location was found and it was easier to work then.

We then had a feedback session where we discussed what we had experienced as facilitator and client and that was it. Ned proposed a full day session in spring or summer which seemed a popular idea - we'll look for some dates and let people know.

Other attendees, if you have anything further to add, please add it to this post as a reply.

Next date: 11 March at Ned's I think

Phil

[Ned]

Snow welcomed Kay and Frank to Ned's.

The discussion was around facilitating a client so that they know rather than responding "don't know" and the importance of developing a context for the knowing seemed to be important. Strategies for dealing with "don't know" included "And when you don't know, is there anything else about that don't know?" (a meta position to the don't know) as well as developing the known boundaries around the don't know and using clean space.

Frank has offered to host the April meeting

[Ned]

Thank you to Gavin for his hospitality
The main exercise was using only one CLQ to develop an issue: And is there anything else about..? The learning was mainly around:
1. The client answers what they want despite the question
2. The benefit was that the facilitator was restricted in imposing their 'solution strategy' which allowed the client more room to find their own.
3. It did not matter to the client that the same question was being asked
4. Surprise at how effective the process was
We concluded that this makes life for the facilitator even easier in that question selection is not so important and that they can concentrate on modelling & rapport.

Other issues dicussed included: 'Levels of Outcomes' for a client and how to select where to operate.

We debated whether allowing in a very experienced NLP trainer into the group who did not meet the 2-day criteria and agreed that we would not for reasons of 'minimum group-member competence' and treating everyone fairly

[phil]

Penny and James invited us to their new home in Bath - plenty of room for a training, as they put it! Lovely house - leave plenty of time for parking...

In attendance were Penny, James, Carole, Ned, Gavin, Ann, Lise, Clare and Phil. Wendy was also coming but had to turn back because her car was alarming - that is, it it was flashing and hooting as she drove along the motorway! The car is now fixed after the application of attention, experience and several hundred pounds.

Penny and James had a couple of good exercises for us to get our teeth into (as well as good biscuits). They demonstrated in the group first, using the group to ask the questions of one person then we split into groups of 3 with one 'client' and 2 facilitators.

Exercise 1

The first exercise required the client to answer the question:
"What would you like to have happen?"
and to frame their response very simply using the structure below (in a practice group, we can do this - with a real client we wouldn't constrict their reply):
Perceiver + Relationship Between + Perceived or
Subject + Desiring Verb + Object or
A + C + B (for those familiar with David Grove's current work)

e.g. "I want an extension" which was my response as demo subject.
Then the facilitators alternated asking the following questions just once each, in any order always returning to the Object of the original response thus:
"And what kind of extension is that?"
Listen to their response, repeat some of their words, then:
"And is there anything else about that extension?"
Listen to their response, repeat some of their words, then:
"And where is that extension?"
Listen to their response, repeat some of their words, then:
And whereabouts is that extension?"
The next thing was to recap as much of the new information as possible then move on to the Desiring Verb and repeat the process:

just those 4 questions
asked just once,
in any order,
always returning to the original Desiring Verbe.g.
"And where is that want?"
"And what kind of want is that?"
And whereabouts is that want?"
"And is there anything else about that want?"
Then recap as much of the new information as possible then move on to the Subject and repeat the process using the same rules:

e.g.
"And is there anything else about that I?"
"And where is that I?"
"And what kind of I is that?"
And whereabouts is that I?"
Then finally recap as much as possible of the new information from all 3 cycles of the process and ask:
And when all of that, that's like what?"
That completed the exercise.
[Phil: I called this approach 'radial' as the questions radiated out from the focus of attention but always went back there.]

Exercise 2

In the same groupings, we started the process in a similar way, got a subject-verb-object response and asked the 4 questions, just once each in any order, starting with the object, then the verb and then the subject.

What was different this time was that we only asked the questions of the new information in the most recent response, for example:
"And where is that want?"
"It's in my chest"
"And what kind of chest is that?"
"A strong chest"
"And whereabouts is strong?"
"In the ribs"
"And is there anything else about those ribs?"
"They protect my heart and lungs"
We finished off, as before with a recap and 'that's like what?'.

[Phil: I might call this method 'sequential' or 'chaining' rather than radial.]

Feedback

I didn't know I was going to do a report and I didn't write down the feedback, so I'll write what I remember and if others remember differently or more, then please email me and I'll incorporate it.

What we generally found from the first exercise was that we were able to 'go deep' and that information emerged that was directly related to the word or symbol that was the focus of the question.

From the second exercise, the information modelled was more wide-ranging, leading off to surprising places, often far from the original, even with just 4 questions.

Someone said that the second exercise was probably closer to what many SyM/CL facilitators are habitually doing than the first.
[Phil: This may be because it is easier to remember what someone has just said than what they said 3 sentences ago (try it!)]
It was also mentioned that, using the method in the second exercise, it was easy to 'wander off' from the subject matter the client had shown interest in.
[Phil: If this was a desired outcome this might not be desirable for the client since to do so might also mean wandering out of the contractual basis of the work with the client.]

[Phil: What I learned was that, like choosing whether to be clean or to make suggestions, there is a choice to be taken about whether to stay with the first words and 'burrow down', developing what's there, or to follow a chain of related information to perhaps find a new area to pay attention to.

And like the clean/not-clean choice, it's not that there's an absolute right or wrong way but a way that fits the context of that time, that space and the intention of the facilitator and the intention of the client.]

The evening concluded just after 9.30pm and we all exchanged festive wishes before heading off.

Thanks to Penny and James for a warm and stimulating winter's evening!

Phil Swallow
12 Dec 2005

[phil]

Hi all

Phil, Kay, Rod and Frank at Phil's house. Kate (Phil's partner) kindly helped providing drinks, hospitality and the inevitable chocolate biscuits.

Apart from attracting one piece of feedback, the directions seem to have been successful. 2 members had travelled from over an hour away on a winter's evening for a good, congenial evening in front of a log fire.

We started off updating each other on our involvement with Clean Language. Then we looked at a clip from a newspaper. It was a poem in quite an RD Laing style but seasonally biased, shall we say. I'll post a link when I can. We noticed what we noticed about it, including relationships, how the meaning of a sentence was affected by what preceded and what followed it, language patterns, repeating patterns forming a regular sequence, perceptual positions, metaphors, the importance of context and so on.

Discussed necessary conditions and commitment and, when a commitment is not met, modelling what 'stops' them. Then we started practising using the CL questions with personal outcomes. One member had a first experience of facilitating without taking notes which, having been the client, I can say was very successful.

There was some feedback and discussion afterwards before closing somewhere after 9:30pm.

Thanks for coming everyone.

Next evening: 8th January. Venue unknown at the moment.

Merry Christmas all!

Phil

[phil]

This is my subjective impression of the evening - others who were there will have experienced it differently or learned other things; please add your own comments in a reply.

We met in Carole's comfy chairs on a gale force winter evening. The road to Bath had been blocked twice during the day due to blown-over lorries. Despite this, the storm-tossed Clean fraternity blew in and when we finally forced the front door shut, there were 10 of us wild-haired and ready to ponder a subject proposed by James (paraphrased here by me - sorry!)"If we categorise parts of a client's communication in terms of conceptual, sensory or metaphorical, do we ask different questions depending on how we categorise these parts and what difference does it make if we do?"
We took three sentences and put them on the flipchart and gazed at them thoughtfully. Then we went round the room and people said what Clean Language question each one would ask of which part of the sentence.

Some also offered explanations about whether they deemed that part conceptual, sensory or metaphorical, and why they chose that question.

After a while and after someone :rolleyes: suggesting provocatively that maybe it didn't matter what question someone asks, a lively debate ensued.

It was observed that we did not have outcome statements and that that might make a difference. So we elicited outcomes for two of the statements (well, in fact a remedy and a bind, but it was a windy night!).

Various themes and learnings seemed to surface (for me):

Delving into the minutiae of a sentence as we were in the group is not practical in a client session - and it is a useful thing to do 'offline'. Several commented that they felt that doing this kind of analysis and debate fed into their more intuitive way of working when 'live' with a client.
Having a client outcome description is more guidance to me about where I place my questions than deciding between conceptual, sensory or metaphorical.
It is not easy to categorise words or phrases or whole sentences as being exclusively conceptual, sensory or metaphorical.
It was possible to group words into 'sayings' that could be treated as one, as a holon and might then be in a different category to some of the words that form the holon.

For example, take the sentence:'Tax forms do my head in', The phrase 'do my head in' is a British English idiomatic phrase. As a phrase it is a metaphor, assuming there's no physical contact: 'they don't physically do my head in but its as if they do'). At the same time, the metaphor is linked to a sensory experience of the speaker's i.e. 'I am having an emotional or sensory response to tax forms'.

Similarly 'Tax forms' is a conceptual description of a real-life object, unfortunately. However, it can also be seen as a metaphor or metonymy if, for the speaker,'Tax forms' represent ALL forms, bureaucracy in general, the fascist state oppressing the workers or whatever.

What I take from this is that though we may assume that a particular word is a label for, say, a metaphor, the client will take our question and do with it what they will. They will take our question and may only use its interrogatory nature, it's 'question-ness', and introduce that to whatever their attention is on at the time. As John Farrell points out else where in the forum, David Grove has been experimenting with simply saying: "And now I'm asking my next question". It doesn't get much cleaner than that!
It is possible to ask any Clean Language question of any information, regardless of whether we regard it to be conceptual, sensory or metaphorical - the client can still make use of it.There was plenty more but that will do for now. A stimulating evening - thanks to Carole for hosting us so graciously, to James for his thought-provoking question and to the rest of us for a lively, not to say breezy, debate!

Next meetings:

25/1 - Clare Green Stroud <O></O>
8/2 – Martyn Thornton<O></O>
22/2 – <U1><ST1>Lise Lewis</ST1></U1>, Churchdown <O></O>