December 15th 2008

Welcome to Mark, Rob, Anthony and Graham, who all came a long to the group for the first time this month. We started, as usual, by attempting to explain our group metaphor to the newcomers. This made us realise that it's got a bit unruly and so we will start a new one in January - using a Clean Language process for groups, devised by Caitlin Walker and Nancy Doyle.

Jenny Heath led the meeting. She wanted to have a go at cleaning up an NLP process devised by Gemma Bailey, of People Building. The idea that Gemma presented at NLP South a few months ago was to 'personify' a problem (e.g. 'the monster') and then have an interviewer (Gemma suggested Jerry Springer) ask questions of the 'monster', with the audience offering encouragement. Towards the end of the interview, the 'monster' would be asked how things could change, and interviewer would check with the monster's owner whether this would work. This is a fun way of doing a 'parts integration' process, which Gemma has devised for when she works with children.

In our cleaned up version, we worked in threes. We each came up with a metaphor for a problem (by asking, And that's... like what?), which were not always people. Some of the chosen metaphors were:

• Dennis the Menace
• ideas jumping up in the air
• a dark tunnel
• a small boy
• sand running through my fingers and shoelaces tied together
• a runaway train

Next, the 'interviewer' asked Clean Language questions to develop the metaphor, before asking, What would you like to have happen? and What needs to happen? Next, we each drew our metaphors on card and then we discussed our drawings in (new) pairs. Finally, we wrote a message to the problem on the back of the card.

What did we learn as a result of doing this activity?

• Most people in the room experienced a shift in their perception as the person with the problem, with our newcomers being pleasantly surprised by what they experienced / discovered. One described it as 'an unbelievable journey'.
• Nigel had been unable to think of a problem, so chose a 'random metaphor' to work with (a large leaky umbrella), which also transformed into a resource metaphor (a hovercraft). We talked about how this 'random metaphor' idea could work alongside Clean Language questions to help the 'real' one emerge.
• Jenny noticed that the 'parts' which were a big feature of the NLP exercise did not really feature at all in the cleaned up version. Of course, the idea of 'parts' is itself a metaphor which would need to be introduced by the interviewer - and that working cleanly prevents this from happening so that was bound to happen. To keep the concept intact would mean being much more directional - e.g. asking the client to think of a time when part of them wanted one thing and part wanted another, and then developing two metaphors - one for each part.
• In general terms, we agreed that cleaning up a process involves thinking about the questions you want to ask, and your intention for asking them, and then swapping them for clean (or cleaner) versions. For example: "What would you like to have happen?" is cleaner than "What are your goals?" Lisa said she has used this idea with the Core Transformation process, and it worked well.

We spent the last few minutes of the meeting adding to our list of possible topics for next year:

• Group metaphor process (we'll do this at our next meeting on January 19th)
• Emergent Knowledge / Power of Six
• Use of Lego to build metaphor models
• Clean answers (a topic at a recent meeting of the Bath / West Country Practice Group)
• Developing a random metaphor into a resource metaphor (as Nigel did)
• Use of Clean Cards
• Clean Feedback model
• Clean Set Up

A big thank you to Jenny Heath for providing a stimulating topic - and to everyone who came along. It was another great meeting, and I am looking forward to seeing you in January. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas.