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To conclude this book, we take stock of the state of the field of clean language interviewing (CLI). The field has matured considerably in 20 years and yet is still young and emergent. Through articulating the principles of CLI and exploring its application in many fields of practice, we hope this book might come to be seen as a milestone on its path. From its informal beginnings and earliest applications, we believe we can claim with justification that clean language interviewing has developed into a well-specified, well-tested and well-appreciated method that can be used to access both explicitly- and tacitly-held knowledge in a wide range of research projects.

As editors of this volume, we have been gratified and humbled by the ways in which CLI has been used by the contributors. Part II has demonstrated the value of clean language interviewing in both academic and applied research. The applications presented illustrate that CLI has breadth – given the diverse fields in which it has been applied – as well as depth, due to the various levels at which it can be used.

Our aim in this chapter is to reflect on themes that have emerged from the contributions in Part II and the experience of compiling the book as a whole. We begin by reviewing the frameworks that we regard as essential to CLI, then discuss three issues of practice and theory that have emerged from Part II. We sum up the key benefits and limitations of CLI for interviewers and interviewees before indicating some possible directions for future research.

In this book the terms ‘clean language’ and ‘clean language interviewing’ are written using lower case, according to the convention of the American Psychological Association (sixth edition). ‘Clean language interviewing’ is sometimes abbreviated to CLI.

The aim of this chapter is to explore clean language interviewing (CLI) for incidents where a serious injury or fatality (SIF) has occurred and to identify what difference this type of interviewing can make where high risk and high efficacy must co-exist. The primary focus is non-criminal SIF investigative interviews in North American utilities and the use of CLI in root cause (RC) accident investigations.

Nearly 900,000 serious injury or fatality accidents occur annually in the US, which are quite literally a matter of life and death for individuals, distressing for loved ones with grave consequences for organisations in which they occur. Despite the gravity of these accidents, training for interviewers is woefully lacking. This chapter describes how 11 experienced root cause analysts conducted investigative interviews and reports on their experience before and after learning skills in clean language interviewing.

Findings show that when investigators learn how to ask cleaner or non-content leading questions, there is a higher level of confidence in the data elicited. The analysts noted several advantages of conducting interviews with clean language including: appreciably easing interviewee's response to questions; creating an environment of trust and non-blame for injured individuals and witnesses; and a non-interrogative approach that provided psychological and emotional safety. Transcripts of an interview prior to and post training in clean language interviewing methods illustrate the difference that questions make. The chapter concludes by highlighting some benefits and challenges of using clean language interviewing in serious injury or fatality interviews.

This chapter illustrates the elicitation of metaphor using clean language interviewing (CLI) from a study with a population of 30 business leaders to find out what they could learn through articulating and exploring their metaphors about leadership. This responded to claims in the literature on leadership that mental models are the key to leadership and yet leaders are largely unaware of their models. The aim of the study was to encourage leaders to pay attention to their metaphors and to understand if this could help develop their self-awareness. The entire phenomenological study was based on clean language principles to guide the research process. The chapter includes an extract from one interview to illustrate the use of clean questions to elicit verbal and visual metaphors. It shows the application of the cleanness rating to the interview as a method to understand the relative extent of clean or leading questions and facilitate researcher reflexivity. Moreover, the chapter illustrates the use of drawings as integral to clean language practice. The chapter concludes with findings from the study about facilitating self-awareness through CLI and shares some lessons learned about using CLI with business populations.

There is currently no case study for how clean language interviewing (CLI) might be useful for journalists. This chapter addresses that gap by discussing the value of CLI in journalistic interviews within the scope of a profile story interview. A profile story is akin to a mini biography, usually of a public figure or an interesting personality. This chapter was written drawing on my experience as an award-winning journalist in Malaysia for 20 years.

The chapter first examines the experience of CLI for both the interviewee and the interviewer. It then considers how the experience is similar to or different from other ‘standard’ media interviews both have been involved in. The chapter concludes that CLI is a method of interviewing that exceeds the criteria for what constitutes a good journalistic interview, within the context of a profile interview.

Modelling is a research methodology that has received little academic attention since it began to be formulated in the 1970s. On the spectrum of clean language interviewing (CLI) applications described in Chapter 1, the most sophisticated is modelling, and especially modelling that takes place in real time during the interview.

This chapter defines what we mean by ‘a model’ and ‘modelling’ and explains how they are related to CLI. We situate the chapter by recounting how modelling became linked to CLI. To conclude we consider some of the methodological challenges faced by both the interviewee and interviewer involved in a modelling research project.

We also explain how interviewee metaphors discussed in Chapter 3 can support the modelling process. Much of the modelling that takes place during an interview resides in the background of the interaction. To illustrate modelling we provide an annotated transcript of a symbolic modelling interview that uses clean language to model the skill of ‘knowing what is essential’.

Metaphor is an important concept for clean language interviewers. This chapter describes what metaphor is and overviews the experimental research showing the potential for metaphor to influence interviewees. It expands on the brief introduction to metaphor in Chapter 1 and describes the role clean language can play by enabling interviewees' metaphors to be elicited, explored and modelled without the influence of the interviewer's metaphors. It justifies the value of a heightened awareness of the ubiquity and variety of metaphors and their involvement in the different phases of qualitative research; and builds an argument for how a clean language interviewing approach to metaphor can enrich the research process.

Clean language is the foundation of coaching work delivered by Genius Within, a non-profit company that provides assessment, coaching, training and HR consultancy for neurodifferent adults and their employers. Genius Within works with thousands of employed and unemployed clients each year as well as those who are incarcerated. Evaluation of clean language in coaching for neurodifferent clients has formed one doctoral thesis (Doyle, 2018) with a further study in progress. The method's utility in drawing out experiences of mastery is in line with self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1997) and has been demonstrated to be particularly successful with this minority population (Doyle, 2021; Doyle & McDowall, 2015). The staff of Genius Within apply clean language fluently in a range of contexts, across multiple research activities, training and awareness initiatives, as well as workplace intervention programmes. In this chapter, two Genius Within employees who are also involved in academic research describe the use of a clean language interviewing (CLI) approach to evaluate a psychometric tool used in recruitment. The authors were commissioned by the test designer to identify the prevalence of implicit biases within the tool, which might constitute hidden barriers for neurodifferent applicants. The chapter is introduced with a brief history of neurodifferences and a contextual frame for the study, followed by outlining our process and results. We will conclude with proposals for the utility of CLI more broadly within neurodiversity as a method of facilitating innovation and dismantling socially constructed norms.

This chapter describes an application of clean language interviewing to organisational change work through a process we call modelling shared reality (MSR). This process was developed in 2006 by Stefan Outober, James Lawley, Annemiek van Helsdingen, Wendy Nieuwland and Maaike Nooitgedagt (Van Helsdingen & Lawley, 2012). It is based on the clean language & symbolic modelling process (Lawley & Tompkins, 2000). MSR has been applied in a multitude of settings over the last 15 years in the context of organisational change and development, as well as policy decisions and evaluations and other participative processes.

We believe that how people in organisations behave is steered mostly by how they perceive ‘reality’ (Nieuwland & Nooitgedagt, 2018). MSR aims to facilitate movement and change in organisations by enabling participants to explore their individual and collective perceptions of reality.

In this chapter, we describe the principles and steps of the MSR process, highlighting the role of clean language interviewing (CLI). MSR represents a form of action research, the aim of which is to facilitate organisational change rather than to produce abstract knowledge. Illustrated by a case study of a finance department in a social housing corporation, the chapter shows how CLI can be used to work with shared constructs of reality.