Welcome to the 2019 Edition

John Brooker, Carey Glass and Annie Bordeleau

A special edition featuring the SOLWorld 2019 Conference!

This year, we met in Budapest from the 23-24 May to explore “Signs of Progress”. It was a beautiful setting for the international SF community to reconnect, share ideas, talk about developments and work on common projects.

SFiO collaborated closely with the SOLworld organisation team to record workshops and SOLTalks and to conduct interviews to share here in this edition of InterAction.

One of our missions at SFiO is to capture the valuable contributions people make at different events. We want to make them accessible to inspire Solution Focused practitioners in organisations across the globe. Collecting these in one place over the years is somehow also a small sign of progress!

The contributions in this special edition reflect what people experienced at the conference. In contrast to the format in previous InterAction Journals, we chose to let the conference attendees ‘review’ the contributions live, rather than have separate peer reviews. For lack of time and space, some very valuable contributions will be featured in future InterAction issues.

We start with this first video which will transport you to Hungary, on a beautiful site up in the hills surrounding Budapest, to sense the atmosphere of this year’s conference

To further grasp the spirit of the conference, in this issue, Katalin Hankovszky Christiansen introduces two twists around progress and how they generate hope in organisational change.

Haesun Moon and Kendra Reddy‘s presentation of the DOQ, the Dialogue Orientation Quadrant, can drastically change your way of teaching SF. Could you move away from training “SF Questions” to instead invite newcomers to spot relevant progress and shift their curiosity from one quadrant to the next?

Mark McKergow and Peter Röhrig demonstrate the “Users Guide to the Future” with Victoria Spaschenko’s live case on making the Ukraine Solution Focused.

SOLTalks have become a tradition since starting in 2013, and between SFCT and SFiO we have recorded all of these. You can see the 2019 talks on Page 6.

Faced with the challenge to facilitate a large group introduction to SF in a short workshop, Janine Waldman and Paul Z Jackson designed a very innovative session. Janine demonstrated this at the conference.

Many contributions were SF compliments the Agile approach. On page 8, you will find three workshops that focused on building an interactive space that fosters agility.

Using the “Signs of Progress” motto, Simone Gaio and Fabienne Stalder present many innovative ways of spicing up a workshop. We share 5 of their exciting ideas. Before viewing their video, you might want to get a white piece of A4 paper, a pen and a pair of scissors.

Finally, though not presented at the conference, we have included:

• Marika Tammeaid’s brilliant article on the use of SF in developing the top leaders in the Finnish Government. A great example of the use of SF in large scale change
• A review of Wendy Van den Bulck’s book, ‘Connective Clarity’ A- new feature on what is trending in the SF World, kicking off with the audio of Jonas Wells giving his version of SF history.

For more presentation links and resources, do visit the SOLworld 2019 website http://www.solworldevents.org/. In the spirit of supporting what is there, the site is available to all future SOL event organisers to promote events.

Learning highlights from the conference

We are very grateful for the great collaboration with Attila Kovarcsik, a skilled cameraman from Budapest who has made sharing these resources and videos possible.

One Thyme Pictures – www.onethyme.com

To continue broadening our library of resources and making such Online InterAction Journals and video recordings possible, SFiO welcomes your contribution here.

Large Scale Change

2019 has been a pleasing year for SFiO, with, amongst other initiatives, opportunities to capture the knowledge of our contributors in nine Global Chapters meetings and our first ‘Unconference’ on SF in Large Scale Change in December. We took the opportunity with this eleventh edition of InterAction to capture some of the output from the Unconference, with pieces by Wendy Van den Bulck, Susanne Burgstaller, Paul Z Jackson, Roy Marriott and Marika Tammeaid.

Continuing the theme of large scale change, we have interviews with Frank Gollas of DeutscheBahn Systel in Germany, Bjorn Cerasa on working with SF at Oost Brabant, a care organisation in the Netherlands, and Emma Burns, who is the Psychology Advisor for Eastern District Police, in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.

Frank explains to co-editors Annie Bordeleau and John Brooker how he and his colleagues are using SF as part of a radical transformation to a more agile organisation. This is a huge programme, still in progress, and Frank shares useful tips on how SF is helping. SFiO contributor Sieds Rienks (Netherlands) discusses with Bjorn, how Bjorn used SF to help transform the way of working at GGZ Oost Brabant, a care organisation for those with mental health issues, despite severe budget-cuts, a shortage in health-care professionals and large reforms in the Dutch social health care system. In this conversation, recorded at a Solution Focus conference in New Zealand, co-editor Carey Glass asks the questions as Emma talks to both the power of leadership and grass roots in ‘stop start’ organisational change. We also include ways to enhance your day to day SF knowledge with:

A story of innovative and fast SF interventions in Vodafone Hungary as contributor Eniko Tegyi interviews ‘SWAT team’, Dora Solymar, Gyorgy Kovacs and Viktor Magyaros of Vodafone, Hungary New insights on styles of SF working from Dave McKenna and Paul Z. Jackson in the UK Leah Davcheva from Bulgaria who explains how you can provide a valuable service using SF to conduct final stage job interviews. Finally, we have:

A ‘Treasured Article’ review by Carey Glass (Australia) of Frederike Bannink’s (Netherlands) ‘SF Conflict Management in Teams and in Organisations’ A book review by John Teager (Australia) of Ukrainian contributor, Victoria Spashchenko’s book, “How to Solve Problems without Discussing Them” A new feature on Research Initiatives, with a call for help from Karen de Waele in Belgium and Joe Chan in Singapore Altogether, a very international set of contributions. If you would like your work to be included in the Summer 2020 edition, would like to conduct an interview, or know of a good story or case study we can follow up, let us know at zoom@sfio.org

John Brooker, Annie Bordeleau, and Carey Glass – Co-editors InterAction