A mind-expanding exercise that expanded around the world

by Guy Shennan

The first in a series of blog posts that explores the theme:

What might collective solution-focused practices for social change look like?

This post shows how a little idea – an exercise that nine people took part in that lasted only a few minutes at the beginning of a medical teaching day – has the potential for growing and encompassing many social, political and national contexts.

I was on my way to gym on Thursday morning last week, when I received a text from George, asking me if I could come up with an opening mind-expanding exercise for the day’s session. I said I would have a think while on the cross trainer.

George is a GP I work with one day each fortnight, when a group of seven graduate medical students come to his surgery for their Medicine in Society module. We focus on a particular topic each week, and on this day it was to be mental health.

I remembered a talk I had given a couple of months ago, in which I had shared some thoughts about how solution-focused practices might enter a more social arena, and suggested that we could facilitate public conversations, perhaps with a question like,  “Suppose we woke up tomorrow to a world that was socially just, what would we notice?”

This seemed to be an opportunity for a question of this type, and the exercise took shape as I went to work on my physical exercises.

An hour or so later, as the nine of us sat in our customary circle, I asked if everyone knew the game, ‘I went to market’, when the person who starts says “I went to market, and bought …” and adds something they bought, some apples, say, and then the next person says, ‘‘I went to market, and bought some apples and…” and adds what they bought, and so on. Of course everyone had, so I explained we were going to play a version of this, and wrote the amended opening on the white board:

“If I woke up tomorrow to a world whose conditions were just right for good mental health, I would notice…”

And so we went round, with just the smallest of interventions from me to encourage people not to paraphrase previous responses, but to echo them closely – after all if someone went to market wanting to buy some apples, it wouldn’t do to generalise this to buying some fruit, otherwise someone might come back with some oranges.

Michael was the ninth to go, and he must have been listening closely, for he was able to recount what we would all notice. And following the lead of George, whose go it had been just before him, he nicely changed the “I” to “we”:

“If we woke up tomorrow to a world whose conditions were just right for good mental health, we would notice less stigma towards mental health, more freedom to talk about mental health together, better social services and housing, geared towards alleviating bad mental health, more green spaces, less pressure to be a certain way, kindness on the streets, less pressure from social media, and a world where we listened to each other, and maybe a better education in terms of recreational drugs”.

As George said afterwards, as well as beginning our day on mental health by describing part of a context which would support the mental health of us all, it was also an exercise that required us to listen to each other – given that we had to repeat what each person before us had said – and this was one of the conditions for good mental health that was on our list.

So that was Thursday.

The flexibility and applicability of a question like this showed themselves the next day, when Marcos, a solution-focused psychologist from Bolivia, contacted me on Messenger. He told me that later that day he was to participate in a public conversation, with lawyers and psychologists, and that he would be talking about solution-focused mediation, for national reconciliation. The event had been organised by university students interested in political psychology.

This was to follow a month of unrest and terror, with looting and deaths on both sides, during which time Marcos’s personal involvement had included being on a roadblock defending his neighbourhood. The attacks had been at night, and it was only now he could sleep well.

Marcos apologised (unnecessarily) for contacting me only a few hours before the event, but it was only now that things were being organised again since the end of the immediate conflicts. He wondered if I had any suggestions for what he could share with his fellow Bolivians.

As it was fresh in my mind, I shared with Marcos the exercise I had done with the medical students the previous day, and said that even if this wouldn’t fit into what he was doing, I hoped it might trigger some ideas.

I wondered whether Marcos could somehow ask a question, or encourage others to ask a question, like –

“If we woke up tomorrow morning, to a country where there had been national reconciliation, what would we notice?”

– and somehow adding this into the public conversation, people taking it in turns in asking and answering it perhaps.

As Marcos had also written “everything here has just begun to organise since the end of the conflicts”, I also wondered whether he could ask “How have we managed to begin to organise again?”

And, “Since we have begun to organise, what tiny signs of hope have we noticed?”

In his messages to me following the event at his university, which had been attended by about 50 people, students, academics and the general public, Marcos wrote:

Not knowing is a creative place to be, especially sharing our “not knowing” together, and I am excited about the possibilities here, and about learning from what Marcos and his students do in Bolivia, and being able to apply this to my work with students and others here in London.