Clean Language and Outcomes

“Why did you keep asking me what I wanted to have happen? What’s that got to do with anything?”

This struck me as a surprising statement from a coaching client – and it’s got me thinking quite hard about the relationship between Clean Language and “desired outcomes”.

I do ask my coaching clients what they would like to have happen, and I think it’s usually important in a coaching context, particularly if I want to get paid. Clients generally engage my help to achieve something specific, and I assume they expect me to deliver.

But I don’t believe – as it seems certain people have suggested, I suspect with some mischief – that Clean Language practitioners are “obsessed with outcomes”; that all Clean Language work is “about outcomes”; or that asking about outcomes is always the right thing to do.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about how and why to explore “negative” metaphors, and I think it’s important, as a practitioner, to develop that skill and to use it when appropriate.

One of the most-read posts on this site is on a similar topic, David Grove’s idea of “drawing the arrow back“.

And when I use Clean Language in a journalistic interview, I rarely ask about outcomes. They’re just not relevant.

The client whose comment is paraphrased above, Kata Tamas, is very experienced in using Clean Language as a therapist, but is from a completely different “lineage” to mine, and had booked a session with me to compare and contrast. Her training has been with Cei Davies-Linn and Stephen Briggs, ex-wife and close friend of Clean Language creator David Grove.

Of course, Cei and Stephen learned from David directly, rather than through Penny Tompkins and James Lawley. And, as I understand it, their context is entirely therapeutic – they’re not into coaching, working Cleanly to help groups collaborate, or applying Clean to sales or research. (I wonder if they think I’m dumbing Clean down by exploring these “practical” avenues.) Maybe these factors influence their approach to outcomes?

I also know from personal experience that David Grove didn’t show much interest in outcomes in his later work. By the time I met him, he was already exploring Clean Space and Emergent Knowledge processes, which tend to begin with the client identifying “something to work with” rather than an outcome.

In the trainings I used to run with Wendy Sullivan, we certainly encouraged our students to “Go for the good stuff”. As we explained in Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds, “Asking Clean Language questions about a person’s experience tends to bring it to life for them, so that it feels very real. This is particularly true when asking about a person’s metaphors…  As a beginner, it’s best to avoid using Clean Language to explore problems or unhappy experiences, since asking the questions can bring these to life, too. This can lead to the speaker becoming stuck in their problem and feeling that they have few options, and so is likely to be less effective at helping them to change things.” I say the same to new students on my Advanced Metaphor Mastery programme.

I also teach, and we taught, students to grasp Penny and James’s definition of “desired outcome”, which falls a long way short of most NLPers’ definition of the term.

But I don’t think that’s the same as saying “always go for outcomes”. I think it’s part of a much richer mix.

I think Clean Language (in the Grovian meaning of the word) is a precision toolkit for exploring autogenic metaphors – the metaphors which are the “stuff of thought” and which drive our behaviour. It can be used for a bunch of different things, in different ways. It can even be used to ask about stuff which, on the face of it, is non-metaphorical. But it certainly doesn’t have to be used in relation to outcomes.

• What do you think? Am I kidding myself here? Please comment below.

• Many thanks to Kata Tamas, who is doing Clean Language and metaphor therapy in Hungary, and to Danny Saunders, James Tripp and Brian Birch, for the conversations which prompted this post.