Solutions Focused Coaching
Solutions Focused Coaching asks what's already working and how to get more of it, instead of diagnosing what's wrong, on the view that people build solutions faster than they solve problems.
A short run of steps starts with what's already working and builds outward from there.
Reach for this when…
- A client or team is stuck rehearsing the problem without moving toward a fix.
- Analysis of the problem has gone on for months with no change in behaviour.
- You need a light, fast approach for a single session with no deep history.
How to run it
- Open with 'what's better?' instead of 'what's the problem?'
- Use exception questions to find when the problem is already less severe.
- Ask the miracle question to describe the preferred future concretely.
- Use a scaling question to locate today and name the next small step up.
- Set one small behavioural experiment before the next conversation.
A worked example
Situation. Aoife Byrne ran Cloverfield Studio, a small design agency in Cork, Ireland, where two senior designers had stopped collaborating after a project went badly.
Applied. Instead of re-litigating the failed project, Aoife asked each of them what was different on the days they did still work well together, then used a scaling question to find the smallest next step from a four to a five.
Result. The next step turned out to be a fifteen-minute weekly check-in, not a mediated conversation about the failed project. They restarted it themselves within a week.
The catch
The method's speed is also its risk - it can skip past a problem that genuinely needs to be understood, not just bypassed, and some situations, a serious conduct issue, a structural conflict, need more than a reframed question. It works best on stuck patterns, not on decisions that need new information.
If people keep raising the same problem after several sessions of 'what's better', the problem may be real and unaddressed, not just badly framed.
Origin: Steve de Shazer & Insoo Kim Berg