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.
[GROW](/frameworks/grow-model) examines current reality on the way to options; OSKAR deliberately walks past the problem. 'Why a 4 and not a 3?' surfaces what's already working; 'what would a 5 look like?' defines the next step without mapping the summit. For problem-saturated clients, that refusal to re-litigate is itself the intervention.
The specific five-step sequence is craft, validated by two decades of adoption rather than controlled trials. But it operationalizes [solution-focused](/frameworks/solution-focused-coaching) practice, which originates in de Shazer and Berg's brief therapy work and is among the better-evidenced coaching methodologies. The approach has empirical support; the acronym is the delivery mechanism.
Three situations: clients who've analyzed their problem to exhaustion and need forward energy; momentum and accountability work, where the scaling-plus-small-steps loop builds a progress narrative; and time-boxed conversations, where it delivers a complete arc in fifteen minutes. Where the work is identity or meaning, other models fit better.
Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson created OSKAR, introducing it in their 2002 book The Solutions Focus. Both developed the model by applying solution-focused brief therapy principles to organizational and leadership coaching. McKergow is a co-founder of sfwork.com, the Centre for Solutions Focus at Work, which remains the primary hub for OSKAR training and community.
Know-how surfaces what's already working: the skills, resources, and past successes that account for a client being at their current scaling number rather than zero. A coach might ask 'What have you done that's got you to a 4?' or 'Think of a time you were closer to a 6 — what were you doing differently?' The purpose is diagnostic and energizing at once. Clients who stay focused on what is broken often overlook existing resources; Know-how makes those resources explicit so they can be deployed deliberately toward the next step.
Review opens subsequent sessions by asking what has improved since the previous conversation: 'What's better?' This is a deliberate structural choice rather than a neutral check-in. Opening with 'What's better?' builds a progress narrative; 'How are you doing?' leaves the door open to problem-reporting. Over a coaching engagement, Review creates a cumulative account of movement in the valued direction, session by session.
Yes. OSKAR translates well to team contexts, particularly for teams working toward a specific shared goal. The scaling question works with groups: 'On a scale of 1 to 10, where would you say we are as a team on this?' followed by 'Why a 5 and not a 3?' surfaces collective Know-how. Teams that have been cycling through the same problem often respond well to OSKAR's deliberate refusal to re-examine it in depth. Team settings require more facilitation skill than one-to-one coaching, particularly in the Affirm step, which works differently across multiple participants than with a single client.
The three frameworks take meaningfully different stances. [GROW](/frameworks/grow-model) (Whitmore) examines current reality on the path to options: it is diagnostic as well as generative, and does not avoid the problem. [CLEAR](/frameworks/clear-model) (Hawkins) goes deeper, working with underlying beliefs, emotional material, and systemic dynamics. OSKAR is deliberately uninterested in problem analysis: it starts with the outcome and moves immediately to what is working. The choice comes down to what the client needs. GROW fits exploratory conversations; OSKAR fits clients who have already analyzed their situation and need forward movement; CLEAR fits developmental coaching where depth and pattern disruption are the goal.
Ask them to describe how an OSKAR session starts. A coach genuinely trained in the approach will describe the Outcome question: asking what you want from this conversation specifically, not just in the long run. They should be able to explain the scaling question without jargon — why it works, and what they do with your answer beyond recording the number. The Know-how step is the move most coaches underuse: ask how they work with what you are already doing well, and listen for whether they seem curious about your existing resources or whether they default to advice and new strategies. OSKAR-trained coaches lead with interest in what is working, not solutions for what is not.