Clean Innovation. Marian Way. Marian began by telling us a story from a book called Blink by Gladwell. A story about a group of actors called Mother who never use scripts, and always act through improvisation. For this to work there have to be some simple rules which they all abide by. The only rule mentioned by Gladwell is that every statement needs to develop action. To explain. Marian acted out a small scene. 1st person. “My leg hurts!”. 2nd person. “Well you’d better have it cut off then!” 1st P. “But I’ve already had this one cut off! Its my wooden leg that hurts!” 2nd P. “It must be woodworm! You need to get that seen to before it spreads to the furniture!” 1st P. Falling off chair. “Oh my God its already started spreading!” We got the picture, and some of us felt this was too good a game to leave there. Perhaps something to develop later. Basically if we set the right framework it will lead to spontaneity. Marian then told us about David Grove, the Maori Psychotherapist who developed clean questions to help his clients explore their own metaphorical internal landscape. And about Penny Tompkins and James Lawley who together modelled David Grove and developed ‘Symbolic Modelling’. (If you want to know more about David, Penny & James and clean language visit the sites mentioned at the end of this report.) Marian then told us about her challenge to produce a course for assertiveness using clean language and the presuppositions of cleanness. Setting up any course always starts with our own metaphor, and cannot be totally ‘clean’. Marian gave us a cotinuum from “squeaky clean” to “filthy dirty” and hoped her course would veer strongly to the “squeaky” end. Maybe we could explore where a course based on filthy dirty might take us. Perhaps a thought for personal consumption only!! Marian is co-hosting her assertiveness courses with Penny Tompkins and together they have considered what ‘rules’ would be acceptably clean for the participants to work within. Marian shared these with us to give us a framework for the challenge she was setting us in the second half of the evening. So to set the right framework the presuppositions are:- Most people can “Zoom in and out in their imagination. (Change view to concentrate on details or to see the bigger picture). Be outside the system. (No longer involved in the action, notice what’s outside their system or map, find the boundaries). Stretch or move time. (Just before or just after an event). Identify necessary conditions. (What needs to happen). Introduce resources. (their own or borrowed from other people). Change ‘perceptual position’. (Be someone or somewhere else to gain new perspective / understanding of their current stuckness). Within this framework, and using clean principles, Marian asked us to produce an ‘activity’ for small groups, to use in her assertiveness course. We formed into groups of five and shared out the clean language skills as equally as possible and incorporated the drinks break into the process. The challenge for each group was to produce an exercise and then to get another group to play it out, and see what happened! The only extra instruction was to have as much fun as possible! I’ve noticed that when we break into smaller groups, the group that laughs the most usually has the best outcomes. In my small group as the only one with ‘Clean language’ training I quickly realised a “squeaky clean” outcome was unlikely and could prove frustrating for the group. So we changed the frame of the challenge. We set ourselves the task of finding an exercise for one of the other NLP-South sub groups to play with. Cleaning it up could follow later if the basic ‘game’ had any value. We were keen to keep the focus on people who had signed up for an assertiveness course and assumed that they had a problem with this or someone else thought they had a problem with this. We also wanted to use metaphor or stories to change perspective / perceptual position. As with everything we started from something we already knew and changed and built upon it. Soooo... We wanted to produce a way for the client’s ‘problem’ to be viewed in different forms or contexts. With the formula of “If your problem was a @@@ what would that @@@ be, or be like? Taking it in turns to think of the @@@ we finally settled on:- A shape. A place. A colour. A food or drink. Working in a group of five people these four elements were all written on a separate piece of paper and then passed to the other four in the group. The shape went left one, the place left two, the colour left three and the food left four. Each participant now held a piece of everyone else’s problem. Now for the really unclean bit! In turn each participant uses the four items and fits them into the story, “Once upon a time ...... and they all lived happily ever after! We thought this was a great game until we got another group to play with it! There was some feeling that this was making light of someone else’s problem. A fair comment. But hey in twenty minutes this may have some glitches still to be ironed out. Some of the other group had a lot of fun scrambling other people’s problems into a fairy story! What did they have for us? Thet too had started from a known place with a model known as ‘Johari’s window’. See diagram below.

			KEY TO DIAGRAM. Top left = things I know about me, Top right = things other people know about me. Bottom left = things I don’t know about me, neither does anyone else. Bottom right = things other people don’t know about me, nor do I.

This was their framework for asking some questions in the small group. They hadn’t got many questions but again this is work in progress. The question they had thought of was about our name. What name do you know yourself by? What name or names are you known by most often by other people? What name or names are you known by that most people don’t know? What name would you like to be known by that no-one knows about yet? We would have liked to play some more but had already overrun our time. We quickly reconvened, unfortunately without time for a proper ‘wash up’ of what we had learnt. And this is what the other two groups got up to! A report By Tara Randall NLP Trainer.And what kind of ‘exercise’ was ‘exercise’ like that? Our two groups set about a challenge - to create a ‘clean language’ exercise with the interesting handicap of not being able to use ‘clean language. The aim: to enable the non assertive to become assertive. The two groups set about the task in different ways being the unique beings that we are. Our group quickly got stuck into content, not that useful when trying to work with structure. However it was a good place to start. We decided to chunk up on our scenario and in doing so we created a basis for a symbolic perception of the task. Our idea - everyone draws their non- assertive self symbolically. Choosing one we asked that person to manoeuvre the rest of the group around until they physically created their symbol. (this got them being assertive and at cause for their problem without them realising it.) We then got them to move around the outside of their symbol and then climb in to their symbol and explore it. (perceptual positions) We then suggested they play (with wanton experimentation and curiosity) by moving people around until they found a new physical symbol that they felt happy with. Feeling more comfortable and assertive they were then asked to draw it. The group thought it worked very well, as did the client whose symbol turned from a tightly woven coil into a beautiful blue curved wall. Which he could walk along the top of. Thoughts for consideration : Did this exercise work particularly well for Kinesthetic learners? We also thought it would be good for visuals. We wondered if an auditory learner could ask the group to create the symbol and then play with sounds until they were playing the right tune. We had wrongly assumed (mind read) that everyone working with one person’s symbol would also be working on their own problem. This was felt not to be the case. We wondered the effect that the new symbol would have over the coming weeks. We also thought the exercise would be even better with ‘clean language’ questions being asked during the process. The other group chose a role play scenario. Asking the client with the problem to act out the scenario with others in the group as it was and then to explore it by acting out a different story, how they would like it to be instead. PS + resources = DS This had a good effect and the client was able to see how he could respond differently to create a desired outcome. We did wonder whether someone who was non assertive might find it hard to come forward and act it out. If there were some actors to play with, the non assertive person could quietly direct his own story. Hence put himself at cause and rehearse different scenarios until one worked. As with all these things the testing comes from the next real life experience – we await with baited breath… We all agreed that the symbolic nature of clean language has a huge impact and is a great way to work with the unconscious mind without having to go into content. I hope that if anyone has a different take on the evening they will let me know so I can add their comments and learnings to this report. Thank you Marian for setting us a challenge and sharing your own ‘innovation’ as a basis for us to build on. For more info on ‘clean language’, & Marian’s course on assertiveness follow the links. Marian Way. Clean Language.(Penny & James). Small Change Company. (Run workshops and teleclasses on clean language, worth checking out if you want to play and learn more). Return to NLP-South main site