Using Collaborative Problem Solving to enhance GROW Model

What each one is actually for

Collaborative Problem Solving

Collaborative Problem Solving, also called CPS or Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, developed largely by the psychologist Ross Greene, starts from a specific bet: a kid who blows up over homework, transitions, or being told no is not choosing to be difficult, they're stuck on a problem they don't yet have the skill to solve, and the outburst is what stuck looks like from the outside. Instead of a consequence handed down after the fact, CPS uses a scripted three-step conversation Greene calls Plan B, run at a calm moment, not mid-meltdown. Step one, empathy: the adult asks the kid, in their own words, what's hard about the specific situation - 'what's up with math homework at 6pm?' - and just listens, no interrupting, no correcting, until the kid's actual concern is on the table, which is often not what the adult assumed. Step two, define adult concerns: the adult states their own stake plainly - 'I need you in bed by 8, and I'm worried the fighting is making that harder for both of us.' Step three, invitation: adult and kid brainstorm together until they land on a solution realistic enough that both of them actually believe it'll happen this week. You can picture doing it: sitting on the floor of your kid's room on a Saturday morning, not during the fight, asking one open question and actually waiting out the silence for an answer.

GROW Model

The GROW model, developed in the UK coaching world and associated with John Whitmore, structures a coaching conversation into four steps taken in a fixed order, so a fuzzy wish never gets treated as if it were already a plan. Goal: what do you actually want, stated specifically enough to know when you've got it - not 'get healthier' but 'be able to run three miles without stopping by October.' Reality: what is actually true right now, stated as plainly as the goal was - how far can you run today, what's stopped you before, what does a typical week actually look like, not the version you'd tell a stranger. Options: what could you do, as many possibilities as you can generate before judging any of them, including ones you'd normally dismiss. Will: which one, specifically, will you actually do, by when, and how will you know you did it. The four letters are asked in that order because skipping Reality to get to Options is exactly how a New Year's resolution turns into a fantasy - you can picture doing it as a fifteen-minute conversation, with yourself or a coach, that ends with one sentence you could text someone tonight: 'I will do X by Y.'

What you get out of pairing them

Here is what each move buys, on top of what it already visibly does. CPS buys the adult an exit from a fight that would otherwise repeat itself indefinitely, because instead of guessing at what the outburst means and escalating the same consequence that didn't work last time, you find out - directly, from the kid - what the actual obstacle is, which is very often not what you assumed walking in. And it buys the kid something separate: a solution they helped build is a solution they have a stake in defending, which is a different thing from a solution merely applied to them. GROW buys something structurally similar on the adult side of a person's own life - it interrupts the specific, familiar failure of stating a goal and immediately jumping to advice or willpower, skipping the step where you'd have noticed the goal doesn't survive contact with your actual Tuesday. Both are trading a faster-feeling shortcut - impose the answer, skip to the fix - for a slower, more durable route where the person who has to live with the outcome is the one who names it. That trade is the thing worth carrying between a parenting moment and a career conversation with yourself: don't skip the step where you find out what's actually true, and don't supply the answer somebody else needs to generate themselves.

What Collaborative Problem Solving rests on

• Externalizing makes pattern visible randomised trials
  Putting an internal pattern into an external, structured form makes it visible and available for examination instead of remaining implicit and merely enacted.
• Parts have positive intent clinical practice
  A behavior that looks like misbehavior is usually a mistaken strategy aimed at meeting a legitimate underlying need rather than an expression of badness itself.
• Collaborative solution generation increases buy in observational studies
  Jointly generating a solution with the person who has the problem produces more durable follow-through than an imposed solution.

What GROW Model rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Self generated options increase commitment observational studies
  Options a person generates themselves produce more ownership and commitment than options handed to them.
• Structured reflection clarifies goals observational studies
  Walking through Goal and Reality in a fixed sequence clarifies what a person actually wants and where they currently stand.

Where they actually meet

Both practices insert the same mandatory pause: before anyone is allowed to jump to a solution, there is a required step where what's actually happening gets said out loud - CPS's empathy step surfaces the real obstacle behind the behavior, GROW's Reality step surfaces the real starting point behind the goal - and both then insist the solution be generated by the person with the stake, not handed down by the adult or the coach.

The principle underneath both

When the person who has to carry out a solution also generates both the honest picture of what's currently true and the option itself, the resulting plan survives contact with real conditions in a way an imposed plan does not - because the diagnosis and the ownership were never separated from the person who has to act on them.

What that makes the real goal

If that is the engine, the separable objective is: build durable follow-through by having the person with the stake supply, in their own words, both what's actually true right now and what they'll do about it - rather than supplying agreement to someone else's version of either.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Several other lines of practice aim at the same objective and carry evidence CPS and GROW don't individually have. Implementation intentions, the if-then planning research associated with Peter Gollwitzer, has been tested across dozens of randomized studies and consistently finds that a person who states a specific plan in their own words - 'if it's 7am, then I put on running shoes before checking my phone' - follows through more than someone who states only the goal, because the plan pre-decides the moment instead of relying on willpower inside it. Motivational Interviewing, developed for addiction treatment and now used far beyond it, deliberately avoids ever telling the client what to do, and instead asks questions designed to get the client to voice their own reasons for changing - what MI calls 'change talk' - a distinction with a solid base of randomized trials showing that a person's own stated reason predicts follow-through better than a reason supplied by someone else, however correct that reason is. And Self-Determination Theory's research on autonomy support, across school, workplace, and clinical settings, has repeatedly found that solutions or goals experienced as self-endorsed rather than imposed produce more sustained behavior change - direct evidence for the exact bet both CPS and GROW are separately making.

A tradition that already does this

A lineage already made close to this same move, decades before either branded practice: the Adlerian parent educator Rudolf Dreikurs, working from Alfred Adler's ideas in the mid-20th century, argued against imposed punishment and for the family council - parents and children sitting down together, treating a recurring conflict as a shared problem to be jointly worked out rather than a behavior to be corrected from above - which is recognizably CPS's move, applied to family life, well before Ross Greene or the coaching world's GROW model existed.

Using Collaborative Problem Solving to enhance the GROW Model

GROW's Reality step often gets rushed, especially when you're running it on yourself rather than with a coach holding you to it - it's tempting to state the goal, nod at the reality in one sentence, and race to the more exciting Options step. Borrow CPS's empathy step directly to slow that down: before naming a single option, ask yourself the exact question CPS asks a kid about a meltdown - 'what's actually hard about this, specifically, right now' - and don't let yourself move on until you have an answer more specific than the first one you thought of. If your goal is running three miles by October and your first-pass Reality is 'I don't have time,' push it the way CPS pushes a kid past 'I don't know': what's actually happening at the time you'd run - is it a schedule conflict, is it that mornings are when you're most likely to skip anything hard, is it that running alone is boring enough that you quit at minute eight. CPS's empathy step is built for exactly this kind of resistance-to-specificity, because kids give the same vague non-answers adults give themselves, and the fix is the same: stay with an open question, without supplying the answer, until something more real than the first answer surfaces. A GROW Reality step run with CPS's patience produces Options that actually address what's stopping you, instead of options that would work for a version of your week that isn't the one you actually have.

Using the GROW Model to enhance Collaborative Problem Solving

CPS is very strong on Plan B's first two steps - finding the real obstacle, stating the adult's real concern - and comparatively loose on its third: the Invitation step just says 'brainstorm solutions together,' without much structure for turning a brainstormed idea into something that survives Tuesday at 6pm. Borrow GROW's back half. Once you and your kid land on a candidate solution in the Invitation step, run it through GROW's Options-then-Will discipline before calling Plan B finished: ask for more than one option, out loud, even ones that seem obviously worse, so the one you land on was actually chosen rather than the only one anyone thought of; then run an explicit Will step - not 'okay let's try that' but 'so tomorrow at homework time, what exactly happens first, who says what, and what do we do if it's not working by the second night.' CPS families often report a solution that sounded great on Saturday morning quietly evaporating by Tuesday, and the GROW Will step is built for exactly that gap - it forces the kind of specific, dated, checkable commitment that a warm brainstorming conversation tends to skip past because agreement in the moment feels like enough.

Saturday morning, sitting on the floor of the room that's about to become the fight

You've picked the calm moment on purpose - Saturday, 9am, cereal bowls still out, no homework due for two days - because you know from experience that trying this at 6pm tonight would just be the fight again with extra steps. You sit down on the floor, not across a table, and ask the empathy-step question exactly as flat and open as you can make it: 'what's up with math homework lately?' Your kid shrugs, says 'it's boring,' and you resist - it costs you something to resist - the urge to say that's not a real reason. You wait. Fifteen seconds of silence that feels like a minute. Then: 'I don't get it and I don't want you to see that I don't get it.' That's the actual obstacle, and it was never boredom. You state your own concern next, plainly: 'I need homework done by 7 so bedtime isn't a disaster, and right now the fighting is making both of those worse.' Then you move into Options, and here's where you borrow GROW on purpose: instead of taking the first idea either of you floats, you ask for three, out loud, before picking one - 'I do the first problem out loud so you see I don't always get it either' is the option you both actually pick. You close with a GROW-style Will step even though CPS wouldn't have made you: 'so Monday at 6, what's the very first thing that happens?' Your kid answers. You write it on the fridge.

When this is worth reaching for

Two situations: when a CPS Invitation step keeps producing warm agreement that doesn't survive the actual week, which is where GROW's Options-then-Will discipline adds the missing structure; and when a GROW conversation - especially one you're running on yourself, without a coach holding the Reality step open - keeps skating past the honest diagnosis of what's actually stopping you, which is where CPS's patient empathy-step questioning does real work. It's less about the ages or contexts either practice was built for and more about which half of the four-step arc (diagnose honestly, then choose and commit) is currently the weak one in whatever conversation you're having.

Where this does not apply

There's a real limit worth naming honestly. CPS's empathy step depends on genuinely not knowing the answer yet and being willing to sit in an open question for as long as it takes - GROW's brisker four-step pace, especially the version run solo in fifteen minutes, can pull a person toward closing the Reality step before the real obstacle has actually surfaced, just because the format expects you to move on. If you notice yourself running through GROW's four letters efficiently but landing on options that don't actually address what's been stopping you, that's a sign the Reality step needs CPS's slower, more patient questioning rather than GROW's forward momentum - and forcing the pairing before that diagnosis is honest just produces a well-structured plan for the wrong problem.

What the evidence does and does not support

CPS's core empathy-and-collaboration mechanism has real evidence behind it, including studies in school settings showing reduced disciplinary incidents, and its 'positive intent' framing has clinical support, though much of the broader Plan B protocol's evidence is observational rather than tightly controlled. GROW's individual components draw on well-supported research - particularly the implementation-intention literature and the research on commitments people generate for themselves - though the four-step GROW format itself as a package has mostly observational and practitioner-reported support rather than randomized testing. The specific combination described here - running CPS's empathy step inside a GROW Reality step, or a GROW Will step inside a CPS Invitation step - has not been studied as a combination; it is a reasoned application of two separately evidenced ideas, not a validated protocol.