Solution-Focused Coaching

Overview

Solution-Focused Coaching is a future-oriented, goal-directed methodology that helps clients build solutions rather than analyse problems. The approach emerged from Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), developed in the late 1970s and 1980s by social workers Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg with their team at the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2005, Berg co-authored Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions with Swiss Master Certified Coach Peter Szabó, formally translating the approach into the coaching profession. Since then, Solution-Focused coaching has become one of the most widely-cited evidence-based methodologies in the field, with active research traditions in both clinical and coaching contexts.

The methodology rests on a contrarian premise that has held up under three decades of clinical observation: the solution is not necessarily related to the problem. Where most coaching frameworks ask the client to define the problem, analyse its causes, and design an intervention, Solution-Focused coaching asks the client to describe a preferred future and the small instances when the desired state is already happening. The coach's work is to amplify those instances, scale them up, and help the client construct progress through the deliberate use of language. The approach owes part of its philosophical anchor to Wittgenstein's view that people construct realities through the language they use — making coaching dialogue itself the primary instrument of change.

For coaches, the appeal is twofold. The methodology is unusually short — most engagements are measured in single-digit sessions rather than months — and it works particularly well in the demand contexts where clients arrive ambivalent, overwhelmed, or stuck in problem analysis: burnout, goal-momentum gaps, transition decisions, and behavioural change that has resisted insight-led approaches. The approach makes no diagnosis, requires no problem history, and treats the client as already in possession of the resources the change requires.

At a glance

• Originators (therapy) — Steve de Shazer (1940–2005) and Insoo Kim Berg (1934–2007), husband and wife

• Coaching adaptation — Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions (Berg & Szabó, 2005)

• Original setting — Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC), Milwaukee, Wisconsin (founded 1978)

• Established as distinct practice — Mid-1980s; formal naming around 1982; SFBT recognisable as a methodology by 1986–87

• Core techniques — Miracle Question · Scaling questions · Exception-seeking questions · Coping questions · Compliments · "What's better?" follow-up frame

• Foundational coaching texts — Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions (Berg & Szabó); Solution-Focused Coaching (Greene & Grant); Coaching Plain & Simple (Szabó & Meier); Brief Coaching: A Solution Focused Approach (Iveson, George & Ratner); The Solutions Focus (Jackson & McKergow)

• Philosophical anchor — Wittgensteinian language-as-reality construction; influence of Milton Erickson and the Mental Research Institute brief therapy tradition

• Evidence status — One of the most-researched methodologies in the field; close to 150 randomised clinical control studies and eight meta-analyses in therapy, with a growing coaching-specific RCT base (Grant & O'Connor, 2010 and successors)

Key figures

Steve de Shazer (1940–2005) — American social worker and clinical theorist; co-founder of BFTC and the methodology's principal philosophical voice. de Shazer's work — particularly Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy (1985), Clues (1988), and Words Were Originally Magic (1994) — anchored the approach in language and minimalism, applying Wittgenstein and Occam's razor to therapy practice. Until his death in 2005, he was the methodology's leading conceptual voice.

Insoo Kim Berg (1934–2007) — Korean-born American social worker; co-founder of BFTC and the methodology's primary teacher and translator into adjacent fields. Berg's work extended the approach into family therapy, child welfare, organisational settings, and — through her 2005 collaboration with Peter Szabó — coaching. Tales of Solutions (with Yvonne Dolan), Children's Solution Work (with Therese Steiner), and Interviewing for Solutions (with Peter De Jong) are among the canonical references.

Peter Szabó — Swiss Master Certified Coach (ICF) and lawyer-turned-coach; founded Solutionsurfers, a coach training company, in 1997. Personally trained more than 3,000 professional coaches before selling Solutionsurfers in 2016. Co-author with Berg of Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions (2005), the landmark text that brought the methodology into coaching, and with Daniel Meier of Coaching Plain & Simple. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Anthony M. Grant — Founding Director of the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney and one of the field's most-cited evidence-based coaching researchers. Grant's randomised studies (notably Grant & O'Connor 2010) provide the empirical anchor for the coaching-specific evidence base for Solution-Focused approaches and are widely cited in the coaching psychology literature.

Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson — UK-based proponents and co-authors of The Solutions Focus (2002, 2007), the most influential text on solution-focused practice in business and organisational settings. McKergow's later writing on "SFBT 2.0" represents the methodology's contemporary evolution.

History — from Milwaukee living room to global coaching methodology

The approach began in the mid-1970s in Milwaukee. Steve de Shazer had returned home and joined a community family service agency where Insoo Kim Berg also worked. Berg installed a one-way mirror in her office to allow colleagues to observe live therapy sessions — a then-unusual practice that would become foundational to the methodology's empirical orientation. When the agency disallowed the one-way mirrors in 1978, de Shazer and Berg founded the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) in Milwaukee with a small team of practitioners, students, and academics drawn from psychology, sociology, linguistics, engineering, and philosophy. de Shazer described it as a therapeutic think tank.

The team worked inductively rather than from a starting theory. They identified traditional elements of therapy and removed them one at a time to test whether outcomes degraded. They discovered, controversially, that analysing and diagnosing problems could be removed without negative consequences for client outcomes. In 1982, a watershed session — a family arrived with a list of 27 problems, and the team, lost as to how to intervene, suggested they come back with a list of what they wanted to keep happening — produced unexpected progress. The insight that the solution is not necessarily related to the problem became the methodology's structural break with prior brief therapy traditions.

Through the 1980s, the team formalised techniques like the Miracle Question (often credited to Berg, who picked it up from a client's spontaneous remark), scaling questions, exception-seeking questions, and coping questions. SFBT emerged as a recognisable methodology by 1986–87. Through the 1990s, the approach spread through North America, Europe, and East Asia, and began to be applied beyond therapy — in education, social work, organisational consulting, and emerging coaching practice.

The formal coaching adaptation arrived in 2005 with Berg and Szabó's Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions. Szabó had founded Solutionsurfers in Switzerland in 1997 and had been adapting the methodology to coaching practice for nearly a decade. Around the same time, Anthony Grant at the University of Sydney built the evidence-based coaching psychology field on a foundation that included substantial Solution-Focused research; UK-based Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson published The Solutions Focus (2002), bringing the methodology into business and organisational settings. By the late 2010s, Solution-Focused coaching had become one of the most cited evidence-based methodologies in the field, with active research traditions and an international community spread across SOLWorld, BRIEF in London, Solutionsurfers, and the Journal of Solution Focused Practices.

How it works — the structural method

Solution-Focused coaching is structured around a small set of conversational moves that, used in combination, produce the methodology's characteristic effect.

Preferred future first. Rather than asking the client to describe the problem in detail, the coach asks for a description of the desired future state. Berg's Miracle Question — which asks the client to imagine they wake up tomorrow and the problem has been solved without their knowing how, and to describe what would be different — is the methodology's most-cited single move. The question routes the client around problem analysis and into solution construction.

Exceptions and instances. The coach asks the client when, even briefly, the desired future is already happening. Every problem has exceptions. Solution-Focused work amplifies those exceptions, treating them as evidence the client already has the capacity for the change they want.

Scaling. The client rates progress on a scale (typically 0–10) and the coach asks small-step questions: what would 0.5 higher look like, and what would already need to be in place for that? Scaling translates abstract progress into observable behaviour and makes the next step proportionate.

Coping and compliments. When clients are stuck in distress, the coach uses coping questions (how do you keep going given how hard this is?) and direct compliments — not as flattery but as recognition of resourcefulness the client may have stopped noticing. Both moves restore agency.

Follow-up frame: "What's better?" Subsequent sessions begin with this question rather than "How are you doing?" or "What's the issue today?" The frame presupposes progress, and the client's response routes the conversation into amplifying what's working rather than rebuilding the problem narrative.

The session arc is short — the Brief in Solution-Focused Brief is structural rather than incidental. Engagements typically run between three and eight sessions, with many concluded in fewer.

What makes the methodology work in coaching

Three structural choices explain the approach's reach in coaching practice.

No problem ownership required. Most coaching frameworks ask the client to articulate and own the problem before working on it. Solution-Focused coaching skips that step. This translates well to coaching contexts where clients arrive defended, ambivalent, or unable to name the problem in language that gives them traction. The Miracle Question lets a client describe the change they want without first describing the wound it would heal.

Future-oriented language. The methodology is built on the linguistic insight that the language used to describe a state shapes the experience of it. Sustained problem-talk reinforces the problem; sustained solution-talk constructs the solution. Coaches working with clients in burnout, overwhelm, or chronic ambivalence often find that the conversation itself is the intervention — long before any plan is made.

Empirical, not theoretical. SFBT was built inductively, by removing elements of therapy and observing whether outcomes changed. The coaching adaptation inherited this orientation. The methodology has more outcome research behind it than most coaching approaches, and the research has been replicated across populations, settings, and cultures over four decades.

Evidence base

The Solution-Focused evidence base is unusually deep for a coaching methodology, anchored by extensive clinical research and a smaller but growing coaching-specific literature:

• Therapy meta-analyses — Eight meta-analyses across SFBT outcome studies, with overall effect sizes ranging from small to large across child, adolescent, and adult populations. Coverage includes depression, stress, anxiety, behavioural problems, parenting, and psychosocial issues.

• Randomised clinical trials — Close to 150 randomised clinical control studies in different clinical settings and multiple countries, almost all showing positive benefit (Kim et al., 2010; updated 2019, Families in Society).

• Coaching-specific research — Grant & O'Connor's 2010 randomised study (Industrial and Commercial Training) compared solution-focused and problem-focused coaching questions and found Solution-Focused questions produced higher positive affect and goal-approach motivation. Subsequent work has replicated and extended these findings.

• Foundational coaching texts — Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions (Berg & Szabó, 2005); Solution-Focused Coaching (Greene & Grant, 2003); The Solutions Focus (Jackson & McKergow, 2002, revised 2007); Brief Coaching: A Solution Focused Approach (Iveson, George & Ratner, 2012); Coaching Plain & Simple (Szabó & Meier, 2009).

• Active research community — Journal of Solution Focused Practices (UNLV); SOLWorld international community; BRIEF Centre for Solution Focused Practice (London); Solutionsurfers global network.

Use cases

• Burnout and overwhelm coaching — When the client cannot face another conversation about how bad things are, Solution-Focused coaching offers an entry point that doesn't require additional problem analysis. The methodology's what's already working, however small frame pairs well with the demand context where clients arrive depleted.

• Goal-momentum and accountability gaps — The methodology's scaling and exception-seeking moves directly target the gap between intent and execution. Clients who know what to do but aren't doing it often respond to Solution-Focused work where they have stalled in insight-based coaching.

• Time-bounded coaching engagements — The brevity of the methodology fits coaching budgets and time horizons that don't accommodate longer developmental work. Engagements typically run three to eight sessions.

• Behavioural change without psychological depth-work — Where the client wants change but explicitly does not want to "go into the past" or work with parts, trauma, or developmental themes, Solution-Focused coaching provides a method that respects that boundary and still produces movement.

• Cross-cultural coaching — The methodology's avoidance of pathology language and culturally-specific therapy constructs makes it portable. It has been translated widely and is used extensively in East Asian, Middle Eastern, and European coaching practice.

Less suited for — clients whose stuck pattern is genuinely about identity, deep ambivalence between competing parts, trauma, or developmental capacity. In those contexts, Solution-Focused techniques can feel premature or superficial, and approaches like Internal Family Systems, somatic work, or Adult Development often do the heavier work better.

Known limitations

Risk of premature closure. The methodology's bias toward future construction and exception amplification can foreclose meaningful exploration of the problem when the problem genuinely needs to be heard. Skilled practitioners know when to slow down; less experienced practitioners can rush past what the client actually came to discuss.

Limited fit with depth work. Solution-Focused coaching is structurally short and explicitly minimises the role of insight, history, and pattern recognition. For clients whose stuck point is identity, trauma, or developmental capacity, the methodology can feel as though it has skipped the work the client most needs to do.

Risk of formulaic application. The Miracle Question, scaling, and exception-seeking are easily reduced to a sequence of techniques applied without the underlying philosophical orientation. When that happens, the methodology becomes a rote interview rather than a way of seeing the client. de Shazer and Berg both warned against this drift in their later writing.

Cultural framing of "preferred future" language. The methodology assumes the client can describe a preferred future when asked. For clients in acute crisis, severe depression, or some cultural contexts, the assumption does not hold. Coaches working in these contexts often pair Solution-Focused techniques with other modalities rather than relying on the methodology alone.

Related frameworks

• Motivational Interviewing — parallel short-form methodology. Both arrived in the field around the same time as evidence-based, brief, change-oriented approaches; pair frequently in coaching work with ambivalence.

• GROW Model — complementary structural model. GROW provides a session arc; Solution-Focused provides the language and conversational moves. Many coaches teach GROW as the structure and apply Solution-Focused moves inside it.

• Positive Psychology — complementary research tradition. Both treat the client as resourceful and the future as the working terrain. Many of the questions overlap; Positive Psychology brings empirical infrastructure for character strengths and well-being.

• Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider) — parallel organisational methodology. Treats organisations the way Solution-Focused treats individuals — as already containing the seeds of the desired future, to be discovered and amplified.

• Multi-Perspective Brain — complementary parts-aware frame. Pairs with Solution-Focused work when ambivalence between competing parts is producing the stuck pattern.

• MRI Brief Therapy and Milton Erickson — foundational lineage. The Mental Research Institute's interactional brief therapy and Erickson's strategic clinical work are the methodology's two principal antecedents.

• Wittgensteinian language philosophy — foundational philosophical influence. de Shazer cited Wittgenstein's view of language constructing reality as one of the methodology's philosophical anchors.

Where it's taught

Solution-Focused coaching is taught widely. Solutionsurfers, the Swiss-based training company founded by Peter Szabó in 1997, was for many years the largest dedicated Solution-Focused coach training organisation; it now operates with international partners across multiple continents and languages. BRIEF in London is the principal UK centre for Solution-Focused training, both in therapy and coaching. The University of Sydney's Coaching Psychology Unit (founded by Anthony Grant) is the principal academic home for Solution-Focused coaching research. SOLWorld is the international community of practice for Solution-Focused work in organisational settings. The Journal of Solution Focused Practices (UNLV) is the methodology's primary peer-reviewed publication. Foundational reading includes Brief Coaching for Lasting Solutions (Berg & Szabó), The Solutions Focus (Jackson & McKergow), Brief Coaching: A Solution Focused Approach (Iveson, George & Ratner), and Coaching Plain & Simple (Szabó & Meier). Many ICF- and EMCC-accredited coach training programs incorporate Solution-Focused techniques as part of their core curriculum, even where the program is not exclusively Solution-Focused.