Coaching Practiced

Section 8 Solution-Focused Coaching Introduction

David Tee & Jonathan Passmore

This section features a series of papers based around the solution-focused approach written by several different writers including Mark Adams, Anthony Grant and Stephen Palmer. In this introduction, we will review the nature of brief solution-focused therapy, its adoption as an approach now commonly used in coaching and finally summarise the four papers in this section. Let us start by exploring the origins and nature of brief solution-focused therapy and its development into solution-focused coaching.

Solution-focused coaching draws on the work of Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, two family therapists working at the Milwaukee Family Therapy Center. The two therapists noticed their practice centred around helping clients to move away from destructive or problematic behaviours. They wondered, what if they flipped this approach and started to work with what their clients wanted, that is moving towards a desired state as opposed to away from an undesired one. The second aspect they started to test out came from necessity. As a team, they were constantly overworked. What if, instead of working for months with a family, they refocused their work around a limited number of sessions? Out of these ideas was borne brief solution-focused therapy. As we think about these components, a solution-focused approach has much in common with coaching, with a fixed or limited number of sessions and a goal or aspiration ...