What is Clean Language?
Clean Language questions, developed by counselling psychologist, David Grove, are a simple set of questions designed to accept and extend what someone is saying without unduly influencing the content of what they say. They were originally developed for counsellors to be able to work with a client's experience without bringing the therapist's logic, mental structures or assumptions into the session. By working directly with the content of the client Grove discovered that symptoms held the seeds of a client's healing and that by doing less and supporting the client to self-generate a metaphor landscape for their symptom, the client's system could create its own insights, transformations and learning.
In the late 1990s, Penny Tompkins and James Lawley were using their NLP skills to observe Grove at work and to build a learnable model of his innovative approach. They called their model Symbolic Modelling and it is down to their work that so many people are able to learn how to apply Grove's work in new areas. Caitlin Walker was assisting Tompkins and Lawley and took the principles of his Clean Stance and the Clean Language and adapted them for use in a group setting.
In business, education and community development, Clean Language is a great tool for anyone wanting to keep their assumptions to themselves and ensure that a client's information is their own.
The questions might include:
- What kind of ...?
- Is there anything else about ...?
- Where is ...?
- What happens just before ...?
- What happens next?
- Does ... have a size or a shape?
- That's like what?
Clean questions can have a huge impact at a group level as they can be an antidote to micro-aggressions. Instead, they are micro-connections. In order to ask a clean question, the questioner must listen carefully to what has actually been said while at the same time keeping their own bias, assumptions and expectations to themselves. This creates a level of safety in the interaction. Then as the the questioner listens to what is being said, they consider the purpose of the interaction, the content and the structure of what has been said and then choose a word or phrase to invite the listener to share more about. This creates a level of belonging in the interaction, the meta-message being, what you are saying matters to me. Once a clean question has been asked, the listener has complete freedom to answer in whatever way their attention has gone AND it means that the questioner is likely to learn something new because they didn't restrict the content of what was going to be said.
Clean questions are most effective when used within a culture of psychological safety. We recommend, within Systemic Modelling, supporting groups to detect, acknowledge and be able to work with contempt or drama across a group so that the group can genuinely share what they are thinking and the group's attention is open to updating their model of reality.