OSKAR is a solution-focused coaching conversation framework developed by Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson, introduced in The Solutions Focus (2002) out of their work applying solution-focused brief therapy principles to organizational coaching. The acronym structures a session in five moves: Outcome, Scaling, Know-how, Affirm & Action, and Review. Its defining feature is what it refuses to do. OSKAR is deliberately, almost stubbornly, uninterested in analyzing the problem. It starts with where the client wants to go and stays there.
Step | The move | Sample question |
|---|---|---|
Outcome | Establish what the client wants, for this session and beyond | "What are your best hopes for this conversation?" |
Scaling | Place current reality on a 0–10 scale against the outcome | "On a scale of 0 to 10, where are you now?" |
Know-how | Surface skills, resources, and past successes already in play | "Why a 4 and not a 3? What are you doing that accounts for that?" |
Affirm & Action | Reflect genuine strengths; agree one small concrete next step | "What could you do this week that would take you from a 4 to a 5?" |
Review | Open subsequent sessions with progress, not problems | "What's better since last time?" |
The scaling question is the engine, not because the number matters but because of what it unlocks. "Why a 4 and not a 3?" surfaces existing resources that problem-focused questions walk past. "What would a 5 look like?" defines the next visible step without requiring the full route to be mapped.
The OSKAR model emerged from an unusual path into coaching. Mark McKergow, a physicist by training, and Paul Z. Jackson, a writer and facilitator, spent the 1990s applying the principles of solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) in organizational and leadership contexts.
SFBT was developed in Milwaukee by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, refined across thousands of sessions at the Brief Family Therapy Center from 1978 onward. De Shazer and Berg's core insight was that clients already possess the resources to build solutions; the therapist's job is to surface and amplify those resources rather than analyze the problem. Their "miracle question" and scaling techniques became the foundation of the approach.
McKergow and Jackson recognized that the same techniques, reframed for a non-clinical coaching context, suited the conversations that managers and coaches actually need: brief, focused, and forward-looking. The Solutions Focus was published in 2002 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing, with a second edition in 2007. McKergow went on to co-found sfwork.com, the Centre for Solutions Focus at Work, which remains the primary community and training hub for practitioners working in the approach. OSKAR is now taught across organizational coaching programs in the UK, Europe, Australia, and North America.
Outcome. The session begins with a question about what the client wants, not from coaching in general but from this specific conversation. McKergow and Jackson borrowed the "future perfect" from SFBT: inviting the client to describe the desired state in concrete detail. A coach might ask "What are your best hopes for today?" or "Suppose this conversation goes really well. What happens for you?" Establishing the destination first is the structural choice that makes the rest of the model work.
Scaling. The 0–10 scale question places the client somewhere between nothing and the outcome. The number itself matters less than the two questions that follow: "Why that number and not lower?" and "What would one point higher look like?" The first surfaces Know-how. The second defines the next step without requiring the full distance to be mapped in advance.
Know-how. This is the move that distinguishes OSKAR from frameworks that treat the gap between current state and goal as the problem to analyze. Know-how asks what is already working: what skills, strengths, past successes, or support structures account for the client being at their current number rather than zero. Most clients underestimate what they are already doing that works. Making it explicit converts a passive asset into something they can choose to deploy more deliberately.
Affirm & Action. The coach reflects back genuine strengths observed in the conversation, specific observations rather than general encouragement, and then agrees a small concrete next step the client can take before the next session. The emphasis is on small. In both SFBT and OSKAR, the size of the action matters less than the fact that it is chosen and owned by the client rather than assigned by the coach.
Review. In ongoing engagements, each subsequent session opens with "What's better?" rather than "How are you doing?" The wording is deliberate. "What's better?" presupposes forward movement and builds a cumulative account of progress across the engagement. Over months of coaching, that accumulation becomes visible evidence of a direction, which strengthens the client's confidence and the coach's ability to track what is actually shifting.
OSKAR earns its place in three situations. With stuck or problem-saturated clients, people who have analyzed their situation to exhaustion, its refusal to re-examine the problem is itself the intervention; the energy of the conversation changes within minutes. In momentum and accountability work, the scaling-plus-small-actions loop suits clients who know what they want and are not executing: each session opens with "what's better," building a progress narrative rather than a compliance report. In time-boxed or workplace coaching, such as manager-as-coach conversations and brief check-ins, its lightweight structure delivers a complete and useful arc in fifteen minutes, which few frameworks manage honestly at that duration.
Relentless solution-focus can skate past what needs to be sat with. Where the real work is identity, values, or a pattern the client cannot yet name, moving immediately to solutions risks addressing a symptom while the underlying structure stays in place. The model has no explicit mechanism for surfacing and examining beliefs. Coaches working at developmental depth often use OSKAR for accountability sessions and frameworks like CLEAR for conversations that require something to shift below the surface.
OSKAR also works less well when the client lacks a clearly articulated outcome. The Outcome step requires some direction to orient toward; where the coaching task is discovering what the client actually wants, a different framework fits better at the start. OSKAR is most effective as one gear in a larger toolkit, not as the only tool.
OSKAR itself is a practice framework, adopted across two decades of organizational coaching but not validated by controlled outcome trials as a distinct model, which is the standard epistemic status for session structures. It sits on an unusually solid foundation. The solution-focused approach it operationalizes originates in de Shazer and Berg's SFBT, which carries a meaningful evidence base across published clinical research, and solution-focused coaching more broadly is among the better-researched coaching methodologies in the practitioner literature.
The fair claim: the underlying approach has real empirical support. The specific five-step sequence is craft, valued because it reliably turns that approach into a conversation any coach can run. It is not validated because a randomized trial isolated OSKAR against an active comparator. It is validated because practitioners have found it works, built on a therapeutic tradition that has been studied seriously for more than four decades.
The useful question is why you're a 4 and not a 3, and what a 5 would look like by Friday.
OSKAR stands for Outcome, Scaling, Know-how, Affirm & Action, and Review. It is a solution-focused session framework from Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson. Its defining move: instead of analyzing the problem, it interrogates the solution that's already partially present, using the 0–10 scaling question as the engine.