Dr. Ablon on Collaborative Problem Solving

0:00 [Music] pick any problem you have with anybody  anybody who's doing something you don't want them to do or not doing something you want them to do  anything and you really only have three options in our approach we call these your three plans  we call it Plan A when you try to impose your will to make the person do what you want them to  do and if you have power over that person and they have decent skills related to problem-solving  flexibility and frustration tolerance you might

0:28 get away with it and it would go okay what are  your other options to try to collaborate to solve a problem in mutually satisfactory ways  and your third option to drop it solve it the way the other person wants drop your expectation  not forever but for now and parents teachers all of us often find ourselves resorting to plan a to  try to impose our will and if it doesn't work out well it gets ugly on us we revert to Plan C but  there's a third option and the third option is

1:00 what we call Plan B and here's simple but not  easy Plan B has three basic ingredients to it ingredient number one is where we teach people to  listen hard to the other person to ask questions to take guesses to reflect what they've heard from  the person and to reassure them that this is not some tricky form of plan a which we often do we  often do what I call empathy followed by plan a no first you're getting the other person's  concern or perspective on the table and it's

1:34 only once you do that you move to the second  ingredient of Plan B where you share your concern not your solution to the problem but you  are concerned and only once you have two sets of concerns on the table do you move to the third  and final ingredient of Plan B where you invite the person to collaborate to arrive at mutually  satisfactory solutions to the problem [Music]