Clean questions and metaphor models | Caitlin Walker | TEDxMerseyside

Caitlin graduated in Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies and did four years post graduate research in Strategies for Lexical access including fieldwork in Ghana. She has since developed her linguistic and non-verbal modelling skills from small scale group development to whole scale organisational culture change programs addressing diversity, conflict, leadership, managing mergers and creating learning organizations. She is passionate about trusting in the wisdom of groups.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Thank you.

It's lovely to follow that last talk

because I think that
what I'm wanting to present to you

is a language of inquiry,

a way that we can inquire
into our own and one another's experience

in a completely different way
to any that I experienced growing up.

What I'm going to do with this talk

is I'm going to tell you a tiny bit
about my background

and why this was so important to me,

a little bit about David Grove,
who originated clean questions -

this is not my tool.

What I've done with it is my work.

And it is shareware;
that man gave it away.

He said, "Take it.
Do what you want with it,"

and we did.

And I'm going to offer the same thing
to you at the end of this.

I'll talk a little bit
about a couple of case studies.

One of them - interestingly,
being here at Liverpool John Moores -

has been a big project here
at Liverpool John Moores University

using clean questions, using metaphors.

I'll talk to you about that.

And then we'll end up
with "What would you like to have happen?"

So, tiny bit about my background:

I am American by nationality,

but I've got a British father
and I was born in Africa,

so what that meant was
that by the time I was nine years old,

I'd been born in Africa,
I'd gone over to Newcastle,

I'd lived in Newcastle for a bit,
where it was very cold and gray,

and I'd moved to California
and lived there for a bit.

By the time you've lived
in three continents,

one of the things that you work out
very quickly is that rules aren't true.

When you move into a new society,

they are governed by a whole load of rules

about the way that we
do things around here,

and you learn them
and then you do those things,

and they affect the way you think,
what you do, what you speak,

who you hang out with, who you talk to;

and then you go somewhere new,
and it all changes.

So when at the age of nine,

I find myself in California being told
that I can't be friends with Tui -

who's the only kid
I've connected with so far -

because he's black.

I go, "But that's not true.
That's just a set of rules you made up.

We could just make up some new rules
and then that doesn't matter anymore,"

but you can't,

because when you're in that society,
those rules are true -

they're embedded so deeply
that they're not easily challengeable,

and certainly not
by a very earnest nine-year-old.

So, I set off on a bit of a quest,

which was what was some way that -
some tool I could get

that would allow me to see my own rules,
help other people see theirs,

in a non-judgmental way
that would make us go, "Hey, hang on.

Which of these are working?
What's not working?

What would we like to have happen next?"

So I went and studied
anthropology, linguistics

at the School of Oriental
and African Studies.

But while I was doing that,

there was a man in New Zealand
called David Grove.

And then David himself -

he's got a Maori mother
and a British father,

and he was raised in the Salvation Army,
and he was raised to serve.

Now David had been studying
reflective psychotherapists,

he was looking at people

like Virginia Satir,
Milton Erickson, Carl Rogers

and studying their transcripts.

These were people who were supposed
to be listening to other people,

sorry, were listening to other people;

they were very, very
brilliant psychotherapists

and reflecting back their experience

so that the person
built up a sense of themselves

without the psychotherapists interfering.

What David looked at was -

he said, "You know, if you look
at the patterns in their transcripts,

you can still see how they start
to shape their questions

based on their patterns,
their rules, their ideas;

and if you look over a series of these,

you can get the feel for the
internal patterns of the psychotherapist

that are not to do
with the person they're talking to

but are to do with them."

And he said,

"What if we only asked questions
that had no content in them.

What if we only asked questions like -

about location, about attribute,
about what happens next:

What kind of a thing is it?

What is it? Where is it?

Where does it come from?

What happens next?

It's like what?

What if that's all you did,

then what happens to the people
that you're working with?"

So that was his quest

that his job particularly
was looking with people

who got things like child sexual abuse -
he worked a lot with Vietnam vets -

people who had experiences

that were too difficult in many ways
for them to just express.

What David would do is he would help
to build a landscape around their systems.

I won't tell you about it.

I'll just tell you a story;
it's easier to do it like that.

So he'd been developing this for 15 years,
I was on my little quest,

and some people who knew me
and knew him said,

"You must go and see this man;
he's unbelievably good," so I went along.

I'd just come back from Ghana.

I was doing a PhD
in artificial intelligence.

I was doing a lot of computer
programming at the time.

I came in.

He was working on a stage,
and a client had come up.

He said, "Anyone want to come
and work with me?"

Somebody said yes.

He said, "What would you like
to have happen?"

I'll let you see what he said.

He said, "What would you like
to have happen?"

She said, "Oh, whenever I'm
public speaking, I just lose my voice."

He said, "And you just lose your voice.

And when you lose your voice,
what kind of lose?"

She said, "It disappears."

"And it disappears. And as it disappears,
where is the disappears of that voice?"

She said, "It goes in a hole."

"And is there anything else
about that hole?"

"It's got my father."

"And it's got my father.

And when that hole has got my father,
is there anything else?"

She said, "I'm stuck."

You can see whatever the
public speaking thing is that she had,

she ... (Gasps) she says, "I'm stuck."

"And you're stuck. And what kind of I
is that I that's stuck like that?"

She said, "I'm holding my breath."

"And I'm holding my breath. And is there
anything else about that breath?"

And as I watched him work -
and she was just there on stage -

and I saw the ... (Gasps)
the physiology of the symptom,

and what he did,

slowly and surely, with clean questions,

is he built the landscape
around the symptom,

which induces metaphors.

So, I don't know
if you're thinking about -

We have both winced
at what we've just watched.

And the rites of passage

was that one thing is expressed
in terms of another.

So with that woman - she was in her 40s -

what she got was that as a child,

she'd walked into a room
and watched her father shoot himself,

and having internalized that

and not having had the community
to grieve, to share, to let that go,

that had taken up residence
in her psyche space:

Simply, every time she went out somewhere,
she did what she did -

especially when there was
something big and important to do -

she did what she did in that moment,
which was to hold her breath to stop time.

As I watched, I thought,
"This is phenomenal!"

What I'm really enjoying here

is he takes what's negative
like a symptom,

but when it's in the right context,

when you see how and why
and where it comes from,

particularly in the metaphor landscape,

it compresses its strengths;

you get to see how it works.

And I watched her on stage

reintegrate the power
and the will of a little girl

who didn't manage to stop time

but still to hold that power
and that will in the body,

to watch that get reabsorbed,

and then off she went.

And I sat at the back, thinking,
"That was phenomenal!"

But it's psychotherapy,
it's not what I do,

it's not what I'm interested in.

But that was "Whoa!

I don't know what that guy does,
but that's phenomenal."

And then he said,
"OK, let's do an exercise."

Here's the exercise:
You've got four questions.

Go and find somebody
in the audience and ask them,

'What would you like to have happen?'

'Is there anything else?'

'Where?'

and 'What kind of?'"

So, I said okay.

And I looked around and there was
some really dull man over here.

And I was like "Please, not me,
please, not me, please."

And he came straight over.
I was like "Uh, Okay, okay."

I looked at everybody.

I did it with him first:
"What would you like to have happen?"

He said something. I said,
"What kind of thing is that thing?"

He said something. I said, "Where is it?"

He said something.
I said, "Anything else?"

It was actually pretty good.

I felt a bit awkward;
it was weird questions,

but it was all right.

And then he turned to me and said,
"What would you like to have happen?"

And I said, "I'd like to find my path."

He said, "What kind of path is that?"

I said, "One that I absolutely know
I have to follow."

He said, "Where is that path?"

And I went ...

"It's there."

And he said, "Is there anything else
about that path that's there?"

And I said, "It's not where I'm going."

And that was the end of it.
Everyone went home.

I went to the bar,
and I went, "Oh my goodness!

A man I don't like
that I didn't want to talk to

with four clean questions

has got me more information

about why I'm generally
depressed, unhappy, miserable,

and drinking too much -

it's because I'm doing a degree
in artificial intelligence,

I spend all my time in front of screens,

with a partner I don't even love anymore
and haven't done for years,

and I need to be over here.

Now, if he can do that in four questions,
I can teach anyone to do this.

That completely changed my life.

And I sat in the bar,
and I didn't have a drink;

I sat there with a glass of water.

And a week later,

I left my partner of 12 years,

I left my PhD,

I made many people
unhappy with my move,

and I turned up at his doorstep

and I said, "You need to teach me
what you're doing.

I need to understand how to do this

because I think, with a tool like this,
you could change the world."

So, I had to get a job

because I've clearly lost my ESRC grant.

And I got a job with the Home Office.

I was already a Youth worker -

one of the ways I paid my way
through university

was I'd run as a street
Youth worker in Kings Cross.

And so, I went and got a job
with the Home Office -

10 of the worst kids
in the worst school in Hackney.

I thought, okay, this is his tool.

There are rules to the tool:

Whatever they say, you accept
and build a question relating to it,

you have no outcome,

you do not decide
what they do and don't want to do,

you do not decide what's good for them.

So I've got the 10 worst kids
of the worst schools in Hackney;

they're outside of the school system -
they're young criminals.

What I decided to do
was to break the rules.

I was supposed
to do baseline assessments

and give them individual learning packages
and everything like that;

I didn't.

I got them together in a group

and I said, "What would you like
to have happen?"

And they said -
they said lots of different things.

One of the main things
most of them want to have happen was -

they said, "I keep losing my temper."

"And you keep losing your temper,

and when you keep losing your temper,
losing your temper's like what?"

And you can answer this.

I'm not used to presenting; I'm not sure
if you're used to facilitating.

I'd really like you all
down here doing this

so one of us can
ask the kids the questions,

or you can answer them
for yourselves.

So I said, "When you're losing
your temper, that's like what?"

"I go red."

"You go red. And when you go red,
what kind of red?"

"Blood red."

"So you go blood red.
Who's not like that?"

"I switch." (Fingers snap)

"You switch. Anything else
about that switch?"

"It's really quick.

I'm walking. Next thing I know:
someone's lying down there bleeding."

"OK, who's not like that?"

"Uh, me, Miss."
" You're like what?"

"I never get into trouble."

"You never get into trouble."
"No, never."

"He's right. He never gets into trouble.
He's never fighting."

"Alright. So when you go red,
what happens just before you're red."

He doesn't speak English very well.
He points to a maroon.

He said, "It's like that."

I said, "When it's maroon, where is it?"
He said, "It's here."

I said, "OK. Whenever
it's maroon, it's here."

"With a switch? What happens
just before you switch?"

"Oh, I don't know, Miss.

I'm just walking down the street
and then it's just all over."

"Okay. Who's not like that?"

"Me, Miss. I go cold."

So all we're doing, very gently -

two or three questions
of any one person at any one time -

and they start to build up bits of models.

With the kid that goes red,
I do a couple of rounds.

Now I didn't know then

that this was going to be crucial

to the processes
that we developed later on.

But because they were teenagers,

I couldn't spend too much time
with one person,

because it would go too deep
and the rest would get bored,

and these were wild kids.

So two or three questions
with the kid that goes red.

So before that, I said,
"Before it goes maroon, it's like what?"

He said, "It's blue,
like the sky, like my mum."

I go, OK. I think, God, the kids
are going to take the piss out of him.

They never did.

Whenever we did
this clean-modelling stuff,

one of the things I noticed

was that the kids rarely,
rarely made fun of each other;

it was like a creation of a sacred space.

So, we do it, they all go home,

and I think, "Oh my god,
I'm going to get the sack,"

because I haven't done anything
I was supposed to do

and it's really weird

and what if they go and tell their parents
and I don't even know what I'm doing.

But they came back the next Wednesday -
it was a voluntary class -

and the kid that went red said,
"You know what, Miss?

I was been thinking - that stuff we did -

when I get up in the morning,
my dad's drunk - red.

And I have to pick my clothes up,
and they stink of sweat

because my dad hasn't taken the laundry -

red.

And I haven't got enough to eat,
and I haven't got any money for the bus.

Miss, when I get to school,
my red's right here.

Is that why I hit people?"

And I said, "I don't know why.
I don't know."

He said, "What I was thinking

was if my red's up here and I'm
going to be late for school anyway,

I'm going to Clapton duck pond

and I'm going to look at the water
and breathe in blue

and I'm going to make myself purple,

and then I think I can control my temper."

I said, "Okay."

And then they all wanted one.

The one with the switch said,
"That's not fair, mine's too fast."

I said, "Okay, let's just find out.
Just before you switch, what happens?"

"You're walking, somebody gives you
a look, and it's all over."

"Aha, a look. What kind
of look is that look?"

"One that just goes straight into you."

"And whereabouts into you
does that look go?"

And they all got a metaphor.

So I've got one metaphor for tempers,

but also they started
to be able to manage the tempers.

And next day, Jamie comes in and says,

"Miss, that stuff you did.
Could you do it with math?"

I said,"Math? What do you mean?"

He's a big lad.

He said, "Well, you know,

when I start trying to think of numbers,
Miss, they just spin."

"Alright, let's find out.

Come on, lads. Get together.
We're going to do math."

"Oh ... !"
"No, no, listen to me.

I'm will ask you some questions;

I don't want to know the answers,
I want to know, How do you know?

What's two and three?"
"Well, it's five, Miss."

"What kind of five is that?"

"Well, it's just, um,
it just comes out, Miss."

"Who doesn't do that?"
"Me, Miss."

"What do you do?"

"Well, it's like - it's like
two plus three and then five.

It's like I can see it
in chalk on the blackboard."

I said, "Alright, who's not like that?"

And we started to model.

But by the time we've done
temper, math, spelling,

and "What are you like
when you're at your best?

What are you like when you're
learning at your best?"

something phenomenal started to happen -

they took over past me
and their ability to self-model.

So they'd start to say things like
"You got to slow down, Miss.

You got to slow down, Miss,
because you're talking too fast."

"I'm from New Castle ... I do talk fast,"

I said, "What do you care,
Mary Lou? You're Nigerian."

She talks so fast. She's like -

"So what do you care?"

She said, "Yeah, but Miss,
it's not for me. It's for Naomi.

Remember what she said? -

when she's learning at her best,
it's like an idea has to come into a pond,

and then all the ripples have to go flat
again before the next idea comes.

Well, Miss, you're just
chucking stones at her."

And I went, "Okay, so let me just check.

Within, well, it must have been
about six sessions,

you're going to teach me
how to teach you."

Now what have we got?

So,

I didn't know what to do with it;

we won Community Safety Awards,
the kids went back to school,

but nobody would listen to what it was
that we were trying to do with them.

They'd say, "Here's more bad kids.
Do that magic again."

And I'd say, "Well, no.

Learn how to do it,
because it's not difficult."

They said, "How do you
control them like that?"

I said, "I don't.

I give them the ability to reflect
on themselves in a non-judgmental way

and so that somehow they start
to become peer coaches.

I don't really know,
but it's a kind of magic."

And so I've tried and spent 15 years
with the head down,

trying it here, trying it there,

and then Liverpool John Moores

has been one of the first
big comprehensive times

that we've had to really test it out.

So, what they did here -

Is that me or you're doing that?

What they do here

is that they get
the students together

and they've developed some workbooks.

They took some heroes
in the sports development world -

Beth Tweddle and Kate Walsh,
who're real fantastic elite athletes -

and they used the
clean questions to model them:

"So Beth, when you're at your best,
you're like what?"

And then they use some
clean questions to work that out,

or they'd say, "Kate Walsh,

what's the time when you've really
had something terrible happen

and you'll be able to pick yourself up
and go forward again?"

She'd think for a bit, and they'd say,

"When it was like that, that's like what?"

And they developed metaphor models

for those themes there for these heroes.

But then the students, every other month,
they develop those for themselves.

And the thing about those models is

when you develop one,

you get to know yourself
and you can understand somebody else;

when you develop two,

that becomes quite a kind of an intrigue -
this is a bit like that;

when you've got three,
then you start to develop a pattern,

an understanding of yourself
and of the other group members,

that is a completely different level;

and when you get six, you become
what I call now a self learning system,

where you start to be able to predict
what one another would do,

what you're likely to do
in any given situation

and then foresee things

and then create stuff together

that you had no idea
that was going to be possible.

So,

[When you're learning at your best,
you're like what?]

those are the themes they learnt.

[When you're making good decisions,
that's like what?

Where does your inspiration/
motivation come from?

What happens just before you learnt
from past mistakes?]

With clean questions,

one of the things you can do
with them is anything.

You can inquire into death.

So when somebody has died,
you can use them to help you express it -

"Right now, this is like what?"

And you can use them
to express your grief.

I used them a lot with birthing.

I was very, very, very lucky
I had three births at home.

One of the ways that I managed that

was to explain very, very clearly
with clean questions.

I used clean questions to work out
what people wanted to do to me

so that I could say "yes" or "no" to it

but also to develop a real sense
of the kind of birth I wanted

and to maintain my boundaries around it.

They're used, at the moment,
with multinationals.

I've got a project on at the moment
where they're trying to work

with economists,
philosophers, and sociologists

to say, "If we were going
to re-model the way that we do business

so that we didn't destroy the world,

that would be like what?"

And they've taken the different themes
that they think are involved in that

and developed them together.

So, the questions are very, very simple,

they're really easy to learn,

they're very tricky to apply

because it means giving up being yourself
and everything you normally do,

but they're very, very effective,

and it's shareware.

Lots of people are doing it;
David gave it away.

If you can think of new things
to do with it and new places to apply it,

then that'll be yours;

that'll be your new field.

So I really encourage you
to go and do some search around

if you like the idea of them,

and think, What would you like
to do with such a tool.

And that's us.

Thank you.

(Applause)