Outline:
What is BOREMO?
Its three dimensions
Examples from the fields of coaching:
I. Two examples of career coaching
II. Sports coaching
III. Life coachingBenefits of the model for work
1. What is the Bonn Resource Model?
The Bonn Resource Model is a model that consistently follows its constructivist origins.
Derived from the communication sciences of Palo Alto, through systemic developments in networking towards autopoiesis and the self-organisation of systems, and the work of Milton Erickson on trances, suggestions and the implications of interaction, it incorporates the strengths of these approaches and forms three dimensions of practice from them.
Many colleagues are already familiar with parts of this systemic-constructivist, Ericksonian work, usually integrated into other models.
What sets this model apart is its clear consistency, which makes it highly effective. It applies to all communication within change work and can be used in any context.
In doing so, the contextual requirements ultimately determine the conditions and shape contextual communication, contextual wording, contextual constructs, contextual classifications, contextual explanations and contextual implications.
And it is precisely this context-specific approach that defines the BOREMO model.
2. Its 3 dimensions
Its 3 dimensions are all intended, in the same way but with varying emphasis, to guide a shift towards a new shaping of reality.
This is achieved through ideas and exploratory processes triggered by investigations within clients. Illustrations, the use of favourable focus and suggestion further consolidate this.
1. Process dimension. It takes account of the self-evident yet usually overlooked changes that occur in the course of a process; it directs attention towards ideas and future possibilities, evaluates favourable developments that have already taken place, scales them up, and thereby confirms them within the established course of development.
2. Loop dimension: It utilises what is uniquely individual, what is easily overlooked, and what can be harnessed. It takes into account connotation, reframing, implication and the use of trances, favourable reinforcements and analogue reinforcements in non-verbal, analogue and linguistic forms. In doing so, it also re-individualises the process orientation.
3. Meta-dimension. It views the situation from above and, in doing so, takes into account the wider interconnections in interactions and influencing factors.
3. Coaching areas
All dimensions apply not only to the field of coaching, but must be adapted and modified to suit each specific context.
This is because the perspectives relevant to the contexts are what define them. For example, the overarching framework for psychotherapy is the healthcare system. Consequently, the defining variables are those of a medically-pathological diagnostic system used for classification by health insurance providers according to disease responsibility. This has historically evolved from the role of health insurance providers in making cost decisions in this manner. One must be familiar with this contextual or field-specific expertise.
In contrast to the healthcare context, however, the context of coaching in the workplace is different:
For professional coaching, it is the workplace with its specific themes of optimisation, economic imperatives and the resulting human disruptions, conflicts and challenges. In this context, the focus is on maintaining or optimising the organisation, its key personnel and their roles.
Topics indirectly concern the facilitation of strategic leadership, issues relating to structural and procedural organisation, staff management, team building and related topics such as conflict coaching, presentation coaching, mediation and presentation coaching, optimising collaboration, meetings, conducting staff appraisals, etc. Even though many different facets arise within this framework, the three dimensions of the model are generally helpful.
Let’s look at four different examples of coaching contexts.
I. Professional coaching
First example: Supporting a manager to ensure a successful staff appraisal
1. Current situation and direction for development: What is going well? What needs to be, or can be, improved? What could be covered in the next staff appraisal? What is the employee’s perspective, and what is the manager’s?
2. What makes this employee unique: What are this employee’s distinctive qualities, and how can these be incorporated and utilised? What is their perspective? What is their role, and how do they understand it?
3. Taking a broader view: How do they function within the system and the team? What do they contribute? What support do they need? What do they see from their perspective, and what does the manager see?
I. Second example: Supporting the manager in announcing the new strategy:
1. Transparency – why, and to what end? What specifically makes the difference?
2. Distinctive features of the situation and the proposed solution: advantages, necessities, consequences
3. System overview: How will this cause the system to develop differently? What does this mean for everyone, and what are the benefits of this development?
In the context of sports coaching, we again find a different overarching context, different wording, different constructs, but the same three dimensions of the framework:
II. Specific example: Overcoming a performance inhibitor
Problem encountered: Results are achieved in training, but in competition they fall short of the training successes. We go through the three dimensions again.
1. Process dimension: Leap to the desired target moment. Recall the training benefits. Expand on the athlete’s own explanations. Anchor the state, increase focus, enter a goal-oriented trance. Focus on the desired outcome through self-hypnosis
2. Identify the player’s specific strengths: physical, mental and in terms of their training progress. Mitigate unfavourable self-suggestions and introduce favourable ones.
3. System: Identify what converges internally and externally in the ‘current’ state and how this changes in the ‘target’ state. Take into account influencing systems such as the coaching team and the support network surrounding the player.
The next context takes us into the growing field of life coaching:
III. Example: Overcoming exam anxiety
1. Exam situation: previous experiences, learning process to date. Scales to assess current knowledge level (as a percentage), confidence and self-belief? What will increase these? Jumping into the imagined exam scenario whilst in a trance-like state
2. Specific features: of this individual, of this exam; visualisation to anchor retention, the trance of recall, focusing on oneself and one’s self-efficacy, including a self-hypnosis guide.
3. The system afterwards: What follows from passing the exam? What happens next? What development arises from this? Anticipating this in advance, including the systemic influencing factors that will then be in place as an adult.
4. The benefit for the work
With the help of these three dimensions, we as coaches can therefore better orient ourselves within the framework of the coachees’ process-oriented development work. We can better identify coaching tasks and then incorporate the necessary feedback loops at the process level, whilst also facilitating an overview of the overall systemic situation.
This is not about externally rectifying deficits and requires an underlying philosophy of coaching as the framework for self-organising development. It therefore consistently aligns with process coaching.
Process coaching, then, means that clients drive their own development within this framework in a self-directed manner right from the start.
To do this, however, they need a consistent and coherent framework. This is where the expertise lies that coaches must acquire, so that they can implement this framework appropriately.
To do this, coaches require different skills and a different kind of expertise than purely technical knowledge, interpretative knowledge, knowledge of hypotheses, technical classification and the rectification of deficits. They therefore need the meta-interventions of framework facilitation, as provided by the Bonn Resource Model. If, in this process, the work does not arise from an understanding of the narratives, and does not become superfluous within the narrative of the ‘problem cloud’, but rather arises from the initiation of self-organising development, then we have the advantage of being repeatedly guided back to the essential points of these frameworks through the three dimensions.
In this way, the dimensions support one another like a plait and merge into one another.
Their shared constructivist orientation therefore reinforces one another.
Literature:
„Ressourcen für die Wirtschaft“ Publisher Anne M. Lang DPTV Verlag
„Konstruktivistische Psychotherapie- prozesshypno-systemisch. Das Bonner Ressourcen Modell, Anne M. Lang, Elsevier 22
About the author
Anne M. Lang
Dipl.-Psych., Licensed Psychotherapist, Senior Coach, Trainer, Educator, Author
Director of the AML Institute Bonn
Institute for Systems & Milton Erickson Institute
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