Over the last 15 years I have been involved with organizations undergoing major change. For all of those years I have tried to discover why change, that appears so essential to these companies, fails most of the time. I have searched for years for a logical answer.

I happend to notice the title of this book at a donated book sale at our local library.... I picked it and others up and proceeded to add it to the pile of books I would some day scan. On a long business flight I started to read this book.

I could not stop. As the authors laid out their ideas I covered the pages with notes.

Finaly a logical explanation of why change, even obviously necessary change, fails. Even more the begining of a method on how to make it work.

Knowing the difference between first-order change, and second-order change can change your life! See if you can figure this out: "It obviously makes as difference whether we consider ourselves as pawns in a game whose rules we call reality or as players of the game who know that rules are 'real' only to the extent that we have created or accepted them, and that we can change them." This is pretty much what this book is about. And this, "When a person enters therapy, he is fully entrenched in a dilemma: what he wishes to attain has become all the more important and urgent ... and because of this urgency it is all the more important that no risk of falure be involved in the eventual action." Complex stuff. I read it once, and now I'm back to read it again. It's hard to absorb it all the first time even though you know you're reading some pretty radical stuff that you probably ought to be acting upon!

This is a great book on the mind. It shows us that we don't really need to know the mechanisms of things to make it work. Just like we don't have to know how a car works in order to drive it. The mind is the same way. Never mind the mechanisms it involves but if you do this and this, a person will do this and this. And surprisingly, although most of the suggestions are counterintuitive, most of the things discussed in the book actually work when we try it out on others. Try it and you will see! If you want to know why these things work, I'd suggest you read "Rhythm, Relationships, and Transcendence" by Toru Sato. It is a very insightful book about relationships and consciousness. If you get the message, you will know why the things suggested in Watzlawick's books actually work. Happy reading!

This book is well-written, well-organized, and gives the reader a good idea of some methods that can be valuable in brief therapy.

This is not a recent text, published first in 1982, but is one of the BEST on the topic. It explains accurately, with great case examples, the Brief Therapy model developed @ the Mental Research Institute. Am presently in process of developing a doctoral level course for clergy in counseling and will include this text.

This is the second book that I have read coauthored by Richard Fisch, he also cowrote "Tactic of Change." I enjoyed the authors perspective of looking at the clients attempts to solve the problem as a focal point of change. The clients were stuck in their solutions to the problems. In these case studies, "the cure was indeed the disease." You can see Fisch's influences - Milton Erickson, Paul Watzlawick and John Weakland. The cases were indeed intimidating and all were handled in 10 sessions or less. The author's approach of illiminating what has been tried and changing the circular solutions attempted, in a paradoxical manner, is a major contribution to the field of brief therapy. This cofounder of the Mental Health Reaserch Institute is one of the inovators for an creative approach to solution and complaint based therapy. This book gives some great exampes of counterintuitive and paradoxical methods, with tips on how to facilitate the client into action. I only wish that it could have been longer then its puny 151 pages.