The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE

As a counseling student, and nearly certified Life Coach; I have found that having a solutions focus in my sessions is one of the most helpful things for me, and is very beneficial for my clients. I am all on board with the SIMPLE acronym and use it frequently when I am working with my clients.The only down side I have with this book is that it is too wordy. The ideas and model the authors propose is SOLID, but I feel like they could have written a much smaller book that got to the point much quicker. You spend much of the time in each chapter reading about stories (which are helpful) about the point the authors are making, but they seem to have too much fluff; which seems quite unnecessary.I highly recommend this book because it is extremely useful, practical, and is beneficial for anyone; regardless of whether or not they work with people on a daily basis.

This book was very simple yet pragmatic, and I will cZpZainly be incorporating all the lessons learnt here into my life coaching practice.

Solutions Focus is not just a great book for everybody who want to learn Solution Focused approach to consulting and coaching, this is also a great book to understand the essence of Solution Focused Brief Therapy. I recommend this book to everybody who wants to learn about the solution building paradigm. The real life examples presented in the book makes easy and fun to understand what SF is.

I am currently reading this book for my Executive Coaching MS program at UT Dallas and I am already using the information contained in the book to help resolve some issues I am having with my current organization that are experts in the problems but amateurs in solutions.

This book is the book for coaching. It teaches and models the Solutions focus approach thoroughly and competently.Here at New Vibe Training, it is one of our three textbooks used for our six month Coach Traininng courses.We have used it for 11+ years.

An excellent book for coaches!

The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE (Second Edition) by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow (Nicholas Brealey International, 2007) ISBN 1-904838-06-5When the first edition of The Solutions Focus came out in 2002 it marked a genuine step forward in thinking about organisational change. It brought the insights of Solution Focused Therapy (developed in the late seventies by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg) into the workplace. The second edition, published in 2007, broadens its usefulness to coaches with the addition of new chapters outlining Jackson and McKergow's OSKAR coaching model, manager as coach, team coaching and solution-focused approaches to management consulting.The beauty of the solution-focused approach is twofold; firstly, like the compatible Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach, it focuses on what is working and what is desired rather than on problems and trying to solve them, so it tends to have a heartening and morale-raising effect on individuals, teams and organisations that experience it.Secondly, and rather unlike AI (or my own background discipline of NLP for that matter), it emphasises the need for simplicity and is refreshingly free from academic or humanistic psychology jargon and what many people in organisations, desparate for practical ways of dealing with ever-increasing demands, may view as "tree-hugging hippy crap" (as one participant at a recent AI event I helped facilitate put it recently).The book's writing style does justice to its subject. I knew from taking an accelerated learning course with them about 10 years ago that Jackson and McKergow would present the material in an intelligent and brain-friendly way (the "reformed physicist" McKergow in particular is possessed of the proverbial "brain the size of a planet", while Jackson's background in improvisational comedy adds immediacy and lightness of touch) - and so it proves, with each chapter divided into short, easily digestible sub-headings, and plenty of illustrations and practical examples.The book gives us six principles of what they refer to as `The Solutions Focus', organised under the acronym SIMPLE:Solutions not problemsInbetween - the action is in the interaction (between people)Make use of what's there (the parts of the solution that are already happening in the current situation)Possibilities - the resources and possibilities that will take us towards the solutionEvery case is differentSomething like the "Inbetween" principle (the idea that some aspects of the solution exist in the interaction between people or as emergent qualities of the system, rather than being owned by any one individual) must have been present in solution-focused therapy as it applied to families. It was a new one on this reader though, as I had previously only used solution-focus in therapy and coaching with individuals. By emphasising the principle here, Jackson and McKergow build a very useful bridge between using solution focus with individuals and applying it to teams and organisations.We are also given a clear description of the various tools of the Solutions Focus approach. The present situation, the starting point for change, is described as the `Platform' (with its connotations of somewhere to depart or lift off from). The desired outcome - what it would be like if the problem disappeared completely - is the `Future Perfect'. Resources, things that are already working, and times when parts of the solution are happening already are called `Counters'. This metaphor didn't work quite as well for me. I suppose in some kind of board game analogy. The other tools are Affirming whatever is helping, taking Small Actions (which can make a big difference, and in any case add up), and the extremely useful Scaling (of progress towards a solution, confidence in a chosen option working, or commitment to a course of action) on a scale of 0 to 10.The part of the book from which I got the most value is the new material added for the second edition. The authors give many practical examples of how to use the Solutions Focus approach in coaching individuals, team coaching, and organisational consultancy. There is also a useful chapter on coaching as a manager.One of the most helpful insights (no news to experienced managment consultants, I'm sure, but very helpful to someone like me with a background in individual coaching who is increasingly moving into organisational changework) is about the need to find a `customer for change'. This is someone in an organisation who is aware that it is time for a change, and prepared to do something about it. If the consultant can't find one, their change interventions are unlikely to get very far.Also new to the second edition is the OSKAR coaching model. The acronym stands for Outcome, Scaling, Know-How, Affirm and action, and Review. In some ways this seems to have been bolted on to the rest of the book; looked at from one angle, it seems merely a relabelling of some of the tools described earlier. `Know-How', for example, seems to be much the same as the resources and abilities described as `Counters' earlier in the book.My other quibble with the model is that it is more a description of tools than a process model; although the authors say it can be used as a process ,the Scaling, Know-How, and the `Affirm' part of `Affirm and action' might be used both when eliciting what is working in the current situation (the `Platform'), and when deciding what to do to get closer to the `Future Perfect'. Also, the authors say that the `Outcome' stage would include both establishing the Platform and envisioning the `Future Perfect', while the sample questions they give are exclusively about the future, which might lead the careless reader to skimp on exploring the current situation. These are however minor caveats, which I hope a third edition will eventually resolve.The book finishes up with a short history tracing the evolution and intellectual roots of the Solutions Focus model, placing it in a lineage which includes Bateson's work on paradox and levels of abstraction, Erickson's concept of utilisation, and complexity theory.All in all, The Solutions Focus is an eye-opening book for anyone looking for greater simplicity and effectiveness in coaching, team-building, or organisational change.

A great tool for your coaching tool kit - this approach drives home the importance of the coachee doing the heavy lifting in solving problems.

This is the theory of no theory no less!Doable first signs which produce feedback (hint - grand visions don’t). The emphasis is on finding a direct route of momentum, by designing enquiries to produce helpful answers. In its practice, coaching and change become SIMPLE, an acronym standing for six principles (Solutions - Inbetween - Make use of what’s there - Possible - Languaging - Ever unique). These principles are applied with the help of six solution tools (based on a set of question categories) which form the engine of the model: starting with the ‘Platform’, a problem reframed as a point of departure towards a ‘Future perfect’, by accumulating ‘Counters’ (resources, skills, know-how and expertise) along the way; measured against a ‘Scale rating’; then ‘Affirmed’, and pivoted around ‘Small actions’. Surprisingly, there is no recognised acronym for these solution tools In the book, but I managed to come up with one of my own - PASCAF.The Solutions Focus (Making Coaching & Change SIMPLE:2002) borrows its lineage from Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), a system based therapy, attributed to husband and wife team De Shazer and Kim Berg (founding the Brief Family Therapy Centre in Milwaukee (1978)). They reversed the focus of treatment from pursuing patterns of ‘make wrongs’ to establish ‘make betters’ (my terminology) with the presupposition everything needed to produce solutions are already in the client’s environment of change (surfacing factors). SFBT refrains from typical psychoanalytic biographical analysis - therefore, avoiding making interpretations - and it neither employs Gestaltian confrontational methods. Instead “enquiries are utilised as tools (e.g. miracle, exception, coping, scaling questions) which focus on identifying the client's goals, and generating a detailed description of what life will be like when the goal is accomplished, and the problem is either gone or coped with satisfactorily.” (Wiki)Helping the client to envision their preferred (perfect) future is very similar to the granddaddy of all coaching models, NLP, and It is fairly safe to say Bandler & Grinder’s (the 1970s) contributions have their roots in SFBT. I also thought the same about the Appreciative Inquiry model (Cooperrider and Srivastva (1980)). I mention these inferences, more to state when you delve into SFBT, it is patently manifest much of its methodology has been ported across to the Solutions Focus coaching model too.It is stated another of the world’s foremost coaching models, GROW (Whitmore), focuses exclusively on the performer, and misses alternative viewpoints of others' involvement. This highlights Jackson and McKergow’s systems-thinking credentials (born of cybernetics, complexity and chaos theories). To be taken in plain evolutionary terms, random things happen plus selection; while the areas of highest leverage are often the least evident until discovered by chance. Hence, determining the 'elusive obvious’ is one of the keys to maintaining a solutions focus approach.Though the book sets out to break down in some detail each of the SIMPLE components, slightly confusing is the unexpected meeting with OSKAR halfway through, which turns out to be a framework for solutions-based coaching too! (Outcome - Scaling - Know-how - Affirm/Action - Review). OSKAR came before SIMPLE. Confused? There is also a handy example of a coaching conversation using OSKAR, but not of SIMPLE in operation (with PASCAF questioning) - this did not seem to make sense. However, the similarities between PASCAF (Solutions Focus tools) and OSKAR are almost indistinguishable, and possibly I may be getting my knickers in a twist here, but it is worth putting the discrepancy out there to serve as a point of clarification.To summarise, SIMPLE stands for a set of Solutions Focus principles, which contain a questioning toolkit (PASCAF - my made-up acronym) that can be set in motion using a coaching framework called OSKAR. There is a lot to like about Jackson and McKergow’s model, even if it is far from revolutionary or a long way off being unique; nevertheless, in the business training environment, where I first encountered OSKAR, having this book to hand has certainly expanded my horizons.

I enjoyed reading TSF, the principles within have been very useful in our problem management process in the workplace. However, I did find some of the writing quite dry, more like a textbook than a novel, which at times was a little draining to read. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who works in management and is looking for new ideas to reach solutions quicker.

I started my journey as a Solutions Focus Coach and practitioner relatively recently and I found this book the perfect accompaniment to other training I am doing. Simply stated, it’s the best SF book I have stumbled on so far, you will find lots of simple explanations and examples of working and practices which really helped me get more familiar and confident with the method and it’s approach.

This is a well written book based on much practical research. I have not found a more useful business book in thirty years. It is full of simple yet powerful tools and a philosophy that works.I used the original book material for a year in my own business and it worked brilliantly well. I then went to be trained in SF. If you are a facilitator or trainer you will find this book invaluable.

This book offers an introduction to, practical application of, and lots of stories to illustrate Solution Focused Practice. This was one of my introductions to the practice and the principles and tools shared are still relevant to this day. If you are interested in making rapid progress towards what you want, I recommend this book.