Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

You also need a monitor. All of you have had the following experience. You're in an organizational meeting or a family system. And no matter what anyone says, there's one person who takes issue with it. No matter what the proposal is, there is someone who behaves as if it were their function in that system to challenge the formulation that has just been offered. It's a useful thing to be able to do, but it can also be very disruptive. What techniques do you have to utilize what's going on at that point? Does anybody have a way of dealing with that effectively?

Woman: You can escalate it; ask them to do it more. So you would use the gestalt thing of exaggerating. What's the outcome you typically get?

Woman: Ah, they stop.

They stop doing it. That's a nice transfer from therapy. She's using one of the three patterns which are characteristic of Brief Therapy therapists, the pattern of prescribing the symptom. For instance, when somebody comes to Milton Erickson and asks for assistance in losing weight, typically he demands that s/he gain exactly eleven pounds in the next two weeks. That might seem to be irrational behavior on his part. However, it's quite effective, because one of two things will happen. Either the person will lose weight—a polarity response— which is the outcome he is working toward anyway, or they will gain eleven pounds. Typically they don't gain ten or twelve, they gain eleven. Since they were able to accomplish that, the behavioral presupposition is that they can control what they weigh. In either case it unstabilizes the situation. I've never heard of people stabilizing. Something always happens. It's the same kind of maneuver that Salvador Minuchin makes when he allies himself with a member of the family to throw the system out of kilter. This is a really nice example of a transfer of a therapeutic technique to the organizational context.

Let me offer you another utilization. As soon as you notice that the challenging behavior is disruptive, you can interrupt the process, and say "Look, one of the things I've discovered is that it's useful to assign people specific functions in a group. In my experience of consulting and working with organizations, I have found that this is a useful way of organizing meetings. One group member keeps track of the ideas, and so on." Then you can assign this person the function of being the challenger. When a well-formed proposition is brought before the group by anyone, or by a sequence of suggestions, his job is to challenge that formulation at some point. You explain that by challenging the formulation, he will force the people making the proposal to make finer and finer distinctions and to hone their proposal into a form that will be effective and realistic. You've prescribed the symptom, but you have also institutionalized it. I've had the experience of simply prescribing the symptom, and at the next meeting the same thing happens, and I have to do it again. One way to make sure that you don't have to make that intervention over and over again is to institutionalize it by assigning the function of challenger to that person.

You've essentially taken over the behavior. Now you can control when the challenges will be made. This is an example of utilization. You don't try to stop the problem behavior, you utilize it. The primary metaphor for utilization is the situation where I never fight against the energy offered me by anyone, or any part of them. I take it and use it. Utilization is the psychological counterpart of the oriental martial arts, such as Aikido or Judo. This is a parallel strategy for psychological martial arts. You always accept and utilize the response, you don't fight or challenge the response—with one exception, of course. If the person's presenting problem involves their running over people then you clobber them, because the presenting problem involves the very pattern that they are using: namely, they get their way. But, of course, that's a paradox, because if they were really getting their way, they wouldn't be in your office.

So let's say that Jim here makes a proposal and Tony is the guy I have assigned to be the challenger. When Tony begins to interrupt, I say "Excellent! Good work, Tony! Now, listen, Tony, what I think you ought to be sensitive to is that we haven't yet given Jim enough rope to hang himself. So let him make a more complete proposal and get responses from other people, and then I'llcue you and you jump right on it. OK?" So I've essentially delivered the message "Yes, but not yet."

Woman: That works if you are the outside consultant coming in, but what if you are already in the system?