ABSTRACT
David discusses the development of his ideas that led to his application and use of the ideas of semantic polarities and positioning, and reflects on his consultative work. CB
You were very well known for your writing about the Milan method. How did you decide to move on from that idea and develop something new?
DCThere are different strands to that. One is the clinical strand; I gradually began to feel that there was too much emphasis on the technique of interviewing and people fell in love with the idea of circular questions, and gossiping in the presence of, and so on, and after a while, it was being done in a way that was losing touch with some family members. You’d see puzzled looks in terms of: “What are you talking about?” and I thought we needed to revisit the question of what is family therapy and what does it mean to conduct an interview. So I tried to develop a model that was more responsive to feeling and tone in the room, but at the same time using some of the questioning techniques. I’m also interested in how family therapy takes its place in relation to other types of therapy, and how we train people to be working in the NHS or other settings. I began to think that the ideas were 172getting little bit stale and was looking for something that would take the Milan model forward, so Ros Draper and I wrote a book about applications of the Milan model (Campbell & Draper, 1985) which opened the door for me to apply the ideas to organisational systems. Another strand to this question is that I’m intellectually restless and I would feel kind of bored with repeating myself, so if I’m doing some training event or seminar on a topic I’ve done before, I will always do it differently, because I think it communicates much more intensively to people if you’re fresh about your own thinking.
CBAnd your book Applications of Systemic Family Therapy: The Milan Approach (Campbell & Draper, 1985) was applying it in many different settings. What effect do you think the feedback from the book had on the field and on you?
DCI think it was a very important book because it gave the Milan model a profile and developed systemic thinking beyond the world of therapy. It said, we can apply these ideas to how organisations change and develop. I was pleased to bring so many authors into the book and I got interested in doing a series through pushing the authors to articulate what they were doing in their own setting.
CBCan you say how the transition from Milan to post-Milan and the connection with other postmodern ideas influenced your work with organisations?
DCI make the association between post-Milan and second-order cybernetics. I got very excited about the work of von Foerster (1974, 2002) and others who put the therapist in the centre of the process. I thought this was a real leap and go back to Lynne Hoffman’s (1985) phrase/idea that we used to think that the family had a problem and now we think that the problem has a family, or the problem has a system around it. That was a seminal idea that represented turning a corner into post-Milan work. In relation to organisational work, I think organisations are purer systems than families because they have to accomplish something. The system has to work together to produce a widget or a service and you can judge the effectiveness on the basis of what they’ve produced and whether they have come in under budget. So it lends itself to a systems model in the purist, theoretical sense. I’ve always been interested in organisations and teams, and how people work. To have a team working together to produce something is exciting, intellectually and emotionally. I like the idea of having to 173produce something, so when I started here at the Tavistock, there were lots of seminars and writings on how the organisation had to fit together to maintain a primary task. Then I moved away from psychoanalytic thinking to work more on the application of systemic ideas to organisations.
CBAnd then you wrote some influential books about the application of social constructionist thinking to organisations; can you say a little bit about how you developed those ideas?
DCWith families, you’re intervening as a therapist, in organisational life, you’re intervening as a consultant, so I got interested in the interventions that can help an organisation and these ideas seemed to fit. As a family member, you’ve got to fit in with the family group to feel you belong, and similarly, with an organisation, you’ve got to feel you belong or you begin to drift away and think more about yourself. If you don’t feel a part of the system, the system begins to break down, because it’s a group of individuals rather than an organisation pulling together. That central idea helped me move into the organisational work from a conceptual point of view. Organisations don’t like the reflective spaces that clinicians are used to, so you have to find a way to intervene that’s more active, suggesting certain types of structures or meetings. For example, I may suggest that they end their meetings with five minutes to discuss the question about how we did as a group today, which I’ve passed on to lots of organisations. You’ve got to present systemic thinking in a different way as a consultant; they want more expertise and direction, so a lot of the time is spent defining your role in a way that fits into that environment.
CBSo you are paying attention to the kind of language that would fit best for the kind of organisation you’re working with?
DCYes. They often say, “Are we going to increase our profits if we hire you?” If people are prepared to take an indirect answer, that in the long run, profits will improve if people are more aware of the process they’re in, then yes. If they want, they want to see profits shift within the next few months, you’re probably not the right person; they probably need a more traditional management consultant.
CBWhat do you think distinguishes your approach to consultation to organisations from, for example, the Tavistock Consultancy Service, which has a psychoanalytic approach?
DC174The biggest difference is that I’m not particularly interested in the interpretative style or in trying to understand why things are the way they are in organisations. I’m not looking for causes. My approach is based in the present and leaning into the future, so I would be more interested in thinking of what structures can be set up, what kind of conversations can you have within your organisation that will help you dis-solve these problems rather than making interpretations about the history and why things have got the way they are. Organisations are more complicated than families, and if you’re spending a lot of time pursuing that line of thinking I don’t know how productive it is. I’m not a psychoanalyst, so I’m not trying to transfer psychoanalytic concepts from the consulting room into the organisation. I don’t think that they work that well. Maybe if you’re doing one-to-one coaching, or working with a small team and certain rivalries and Oedipal feelings are getting stirred up, maybe that would be helpful. But in terms of organisational process, I think it’s more helpful to work with a model of helping people listen and talk about differences and difficult things that are getting swept under the carpet. They need structures to be able to do that, rather than just somebody telling them what’s going on.
CBIn that book, The Social Construction of Organisations (2000) the first chapter pulls out ideas from quite a number of thinkers from outside the systemic field. How did you get drawn to their ideas?
DCI’m curious to pick up ideas from related fields. So I gathered bits and pieces over a few years and didn’t know how they all fitted together, but thought there must be a way of bringing these ideas together. So I set myself a little project one summer and read original texts in more detail, putting together a framework that was more social constructionist than Milan, and that was the basis of doing more organisational work and having a model that I could fall back on. I believe that the attempt to maintain a power structures stops people listening to one another. The idea that you needed to have words in order to have thoughts and feelings was a revelation; it sounds so obvious, but I had trained with a psychoanalytic framework and the assumption that feelings emanated from internal states, so the idea that you can only have certain thoughts if you have the words to express them was an exciting part of the linguistic turn for me.
CB175How did the work that you then developed in consultation with organisations affect you as a clinician?
DCI always felt that the work with families is satisfactory at an emotional level in a way that work with organisations isn’t, and the work with organisations is more challenging at an intellectual level. So I like to do both. When you’re doing organisational work, it’s harder to get close to people’s emotions and maybe it’s not appropriate anyway, so I think it’s a privilege when families allow us to come into their lives and to be vulnerable. I’m probably needing to move back and forth on that polarity, because I do see them doing different things for me.
CBI wonder whether we should go into those ideas you developed about polarities, which, I think, came about for their use in organisations rather than clinical work?
DCIf I follow a social constructionist model as a therapist, I would just keep asking “how can we help people construct meanings together?” Then I began to study how dialogue works, because it’s a vast field and if you can help people listen to each other, you’re nintey per cent of the way there. So I saw family therapy differently, that it’s not so much about the formulation that you make, it’s whether or not people can strip away some of their biases, their anger and preconceptions, and let themselves hear something new. The Public Conversations project (Becker, Chasin, Chasin, Herzig, & Roth, 1995) was a big influence on me as they’ve got rules which people have to follow in order to have dialogue. That got me interested in what needs to happen for dialogue to work. I was looking for a more intellectual model, which led me toward positioning theory in that if you can appreciate the positions people are coming from and use that as the basis of a dialogue, you’ve got some tools that you can use as a therapist or as a consultant. I was in Italy doing some work with Valeria Ugazio, and she had been looking at semantic polarities in clinical families with a member with anorexia or depression or OCD, and she had identified semantic polarities in these families, such as winning and losing, and she would work with these and other polarities that families use to explain the world [see Ugazio, this volume]. If you have to be a winner in this family, then everybody else is a loser, if you have to be in control, then you’re seeing the world as being out 176of control, and that, for me, was the kind of thing I was looking for because it linked positioning with clinical work and therapeutic process, so I spent some time with her and started writing it up and pulling those bits together in the semantic polarities book. Subsequently, I was doing a seminar in Denmark and trying to present these ideas about semantic polarities when Marianne Grønbæk came up to me and said, “I’m very interested in this idea about polarities and maybe we could work together.” So I went to Denmark a few times to work on this model and do some more training and consulting. She was an organisational consultant, mainly in schools and social services, so we tried to clarify some of the concepts and the way they held together so that we could link dialogue, positioning theory, and semantic polarities into one framework [see Grønbæk, this volume]. I liked working with her because she’s very creative and it’s nice when you work with somebody who’s picking it up and running with it in the same way that you are.
CBAnd then you can develop things in conversation as well. I remember early on in your work you always asked the question: “What if you think the opposite?”, so I think it’s quite interesting that you are now using this in a different way under this term “semantic polarities”.
DCI always thought that was a good clinical technique to always ask yourself and your families about the opposite to create space for other ways of thinking. But I suppose positioning theory gave it a philosophical or theoretical basis and of course if you talk to anybody who’s a philosopher, they’ll say, this is about 3,000 years old and the Greeks were talking about this on Mount Olympus and all kinds of people have used this dichotomy. I’ve been interested in dilemmas since I started working as a therapist, I’ve always wanted to bear in mind the point at which you feel you’re pulled in different directions, what’s the issue, the feeling you get and how can we study it and get interested in it, because the more I use this model, the more I think if you just get to that point and just step back and support people with it, they’ll find their way through the dilemma, you don’t have to do anything.
CBTo take a slightly different tack, you once gave a lecture here called “The ideas that divide the Tavistock” and people were very 177interested in that topic, and I wonder whether your ideas have changed about that since then?
DCI’m interested in the fault-lines in organisations, the things that are not able to be said, and as I’m in this organisation, I’m feeling the power differentials and the fault-lines, so there’s also a personal way to kind of get something off my chest, get something into the discourse. I think I missed some opportunities to go more deeply into the differences and really challenge people conceptually and in terms of organizational oppressions and boundaries. I sometimes regret that I didn’t push it further, but it felt a bit risky. I thought maybe I should tone it down so they’re not actually going to stop speaking to me in the corridors, and I did tone it down a little bit, and then I wondered afterwards whether I probably could have pushed it a bit more, maybe I would have ruffled a few more feathers, but I would be interested to go a little bit further and push some of these issues, you know, in a stronger way.
CBHow do you think you would use those ideas now in relation to the work you’ve developed around semantic polarities?
DCYes, we could organise another one, which is part two. It would be interesting to identify three or four of the polarities that are really important and that would help diffuse, because the power of the polarities model is that it’s respectful and it’s egalitarian. We’re all here together, we’re all taking positions, and it’s just a position, it’s not the truth, these are not tablets of stone, and people relax and listen differently when you put it to them that way. I suppose an important polarity would be: “We must preserve the purity of our way of thinking” as one strong position that’s held here, and the other would be, “We must preserve the ability to co-create new ways of thinking with strange people and strange ideas”; those could be really interesting polarities and then you could have the discussion across the polarities, that would be interesting for people. But they’d have to commit themselves to wanting to be interested in the polarisation process first, so you’d need a preliminary one which is about “Why did you come into the room today”? and, “Do you really want to be here?”, “Is it more helpful to stay in your office or is it more helpful to come up here and be a part of a lecture/seminar that is talking about the interface between ideas?” That’s where you may need to start.
CB178Can you think of other semantic polarities that are central to this institution?
DCPossibly maintaining positions of power, which everybody’s interested in in different ways, or “We’ve had the power, we want to hold on to it”, and “We haven’t had the power and we want more of it”—I wonder what that would be like? Power is expressed in many different ways here in terms of courses and budgets and the models of thinking, and I’m interested in how people preserve power by ignoring certain questions, or getting confused, or being unclear, or all these techniques for preserving things and at the other end, to start off with clarity and understanding and openness and as though that would give us more power, that would be interesting. Transparency would be a good polarity line. It’s very important and it’s something we should aspire to.
CBWe haven’t talked very much about the term “discourse”, which is another concept that’s been really important.
DCI think British psychology is well known for being the leader in developing discourse in psychology and critical realism that are very much models of the way realities are presented and conveyed in society. That was an interesting development, because it combined the political and the personal very neatly, and some of those early papers by Potter and Wetherell (1987) describing the oppressiveness of certain discourses were very challenging and new. I’m probably more interested in the micro-level of creating dialogues between people, because I think I can do more with that as a therapist and as a consultant. I’ve always liked models that combined theory and practice and that’s what I liked about the Milan models, and I think that this polarities model is similar in that I’ve used it, mainly with organisations and, to some extent, with family groupings, and it has a profound effect on people because it can be a dramatic demonstration of the way people are connected when they don’t think they are connected, and it also has a way of easing people off their own stance and their own position, which is done by being able to say, it’s just a position. If you do it in a respectful way, they will let go of some of the power of their position and begin to look around and consider themselves as being connected to other positions. The other thing that I’ve been struck by is the visual component, which I hadn’t appreciated before I started 179using it, but there is something about getting a flip-chart and putting people’s marks on a line that has a big impact on them, because they can see themselves being connected and somehow it’s different than if you just say it. The challenge is to get people in the room in the first place. That’s why I was interested in the Public Conversations project, but they had to be self-selected in the sense that they wanted to take part, so they must have been open-minded enough to take part.
CBMy understanding of the way they worked is that they spent a lot of time meeting with people individually to prepare them
DCI presume, then, some people were deselected in that process. The challenge is to get people to take the first step to want to take part in a project to see the relationship to other people they don’t agree with. In order to get to that point, sometimes you have to do preliminary work like individual meetings or polarities work with people that don’t want to be there and let them talk about why it’s important for them not to take part in the study and other people why it is important to take part in the study. I would give them a little talk about how we as individuals grow and develop by seeing differences and getting a distance from differences so that we feel safe, but can also be curious about how other ideas, other people, other views, could be helpful for us. I make it very much centred around the self, rather than you’re going to be holding hands and going off into the horizon together. So that’s the kind of thing I would probably need to do to get people involved in taking an interest in these other positions.
CBBut how does that work, David, because giving people pep talks doesn’t always work? I imagine you must use other methods to get people engaged in the process.
DCYeah, well, I would, I would use it with people that I had some kind of contract to work with and probably offer it to them as a different way of working, different way of talking. You could say, “I have a technique or a method here that we could use; it’s called dialogical conversation, would you like to try it? It requires a particular way of working, it’s got some ground rules we can think about and then if you like, we’ll try it, and if not fine, we’ll carry on with the work we’re doing.” So I would probably make it a separate activity that they could pick or choose. Then, if there’s enough interest, you’re halfway there because the question is to try to learn why it’s so important for 180those people to take the other position. I want to come back to the point you raised earlier, that in using this model the thing that is the most difficult is to find the polarity line that everybody wants to join, and I keep digging and thinking until I find one that people voluntarily want. I work with organisations and they’ll say, let’s have a meeting and we’ll have a polarity line about open management or open dialogue, and some people don’t want it so they’re not going to want to explore positions on that theme, so you find another theme that they do want to explore, which might be, how can I avoid being influenced by other people, or something like that. It might be a theme, if they all want to be independent and autonomous, that’s probably what they want to talk about and all of the different ways or the different positions in that theme.
CBBut what’s the process of finding a theme that’s going to be significant for most of the people?
DCWell, I just keep asking that question until something clicks and it takes a while and when you’ve got there you feel, oh yes, that would work. If I don’t get that I need to go back and start with something very basic, like how to win, how to become the most prominent member of this team without upsetting my colleagues, you know, something that’s a bit closer to the bone, maybe a bit cheeky, and you just have to kind of gauge at what level of honesty and openness and realism they want to present themselves.
CBCan you give an example of using polarities that you feel has worked well?
DCThere was a multi-professional service of about ten professionals who had some bitter experiences of going to a tribunal because of complaints within the team of one person harassing another. This split the team apart, with people taking sides. I was asked to work with them and felt they were really stuck. It occurred to me that a polarity might help. I went to the flip-chart and made a polarity in which at one end I wrote, “This is wrong”, and at the other end, I wrote, “This is understandable”, and I said that as their consultant I would help them move back and forth on this continuum and assume that people would take different position at different times. But it was up there on the flip-chart and I asked them each to mark “where are you now”, and most people were clustered down at the “this is 181wrong” end and were furious, and I said, “Fine, I want to hear how you feel about it and, if you’re furious, please share it and we’ll stay with that as long as we need to, but remember that you’re on a continuum and you’re taking a position, and if and when you’re ready, there are other positions available to you.” That’s all I needed to say and then they felt safer about being angry because they knew it was part of a bigger process; we would come to some kind of resolution, but neither was I pushing them away and saying “I don’t want to hear about your anger”, which would have been also a mistake. But it’s putting in front of them that possibility of being connected to this process that empowered them. I said, “It’s up to you, I’m a facilitator and I’ll help you identify where you want to go and what position you want to take, but my lead always comes from you.”
CBIt strikes me that part of the process is that it validates people in the position that they’re in at the time and it leaves something open to be different, doesn’t it?
DCI think that visual presentation is important. They can be talking away for five minutes and, just out of the corner of their eye, they look up and think that’s me and I’m in that position and there are other positions down there and it just begins to kind of be part of their consciousness. It wasn’t articulated.
CBSo it’s as if you gave them a new possibility of a different place to be …?
DCYes, and the final bit of the application of this model is to make it possible for people to have dialogue, so it would eventually be helpful for the people who think this is wrong to want to talk to those who say this is understandable. If they have a dialogue and appreciate the others’ positions, then they’ll broaden the base for their position, so that each will have a little more understanding of the other and start to fill the blank void of anger.
CBAnd do you have a structure?
DCI’ve got a handout with rules saying why it’s important to another person to try to let go of your own ideas and just listen and try to be respectful. Sometimes, I say other things, like, how can you talk to each other and make it a little bit more possible for people to disagree with you, or to present a different point of view, but that’s 182actually when we’re in the preliminary stages in order to get people to respect positions.
CBDo you think there are some situations in which you wouldn’t be able to use semantic polarities, or do you think it’s something that, as long as you’re able to identify a semantic polarity, everybody could get connected to, that it could be applied to almost any situation?
DCI can’t think of one where it wouldn’t apply when you’re in a situation where people don’t agree. The only caveat might be about language and whether everybody understands what the word position means. It’s a little bit of a jargon term, and you might have to use “point of view”, or something else. It might vary in terms of whether you get to a dialogical process with people talking to each other in a room, or whether you just raise it with kind of a flip-chart map and let people get on with it. That would depend on the organisation, what they want, and what their experiences have been with you. I’m pretty active, it’s more of a facilitating a process than just stepping back and letting it happen. I really steer it.
CBWhat do you think Rom Harré would make of the developments?
DCHe wrote the foreword for the book (Harré, 2006) and talked about appreciating the clinical application because he’s not a clinician. I haven’t met him since the book came out, but I think he’d probably be quite pleased with the way it’s been used. I don’t go as far into the conceptual framework as he does; he’s into the morality of positioning, and I’m just not going there because it makes it more complicated than I need. This is a very good tool to get people to slow down and listen and it builds in a lot of mutual respect.
