Solution Focused Approach
What is the Solution Focused Approach?
The Solution Focused Approach is a practical, collaborative method for fostering meaningful and sustainable change in individuals, groups, and organisations. It is particularly effective in complex or time-sensitive situations, often delivering noticeable progress in a short time. Rather than analysing problems, this approach helps clients define their desired outcomes. Sessions focus on identifying and amplifying clients’ strengths, resources, and past successes to support their journey towards positive change. Originally developed as Solution Focused Brief Therapy by Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, and colleagues, this approach is now widely used across the globe by therapists, coaches, educators, leaders, and professionals in both public and private sectors.
Evidence Base
The Solution Focused Approach is strongly evidence-based, with over 40 years of research demonstrating effectiveness across mental health, education, healthcare, organisations, coaching, and community work.
Ethics
The Solution Focused Approach is itself an ethical stance, one that honours client autonomy, avoids assumptions, and trusts people’s capacity to determine what is right for their own lives.
Core Principles
1. Focus on hopes and preferred futures
Conversations begin by clarifying what the client, team, or organisation hopes to achieve. This orientation toward a preferred future provides both direction and motivation for change. 2
2. Strengths and resources
Rather than focusing on deficits or obstacles, the Solution Focused Approach identifies and builds on what is already working, past successes, existing skills, and available resources. 3
3. Client as expert
Practitioners work from a position of genuine curiosity, trusting that clients hold the expertise for managing their own lives. The practitioner’s role is to ask thoughtful questions, not provide answers. 4
4. Small steps, big change
Meaningful change often begins with small, practical steps. Building on these creates momentum, confidence, and lasting progress. 5
5. Questions as the method
Carefully crafted, respectful questions are the primary tool of the Solution Focused Approach. These questions invite clients to describe their preferred future, notice what is already working, and identify their next steps. 5
6. Solution-building, not problem-solving
Solutions are constructed from what clients want and what is already working, rather than from analysing problems or their causes. Solutions may be entirely separate from the original difficulty. 6
Where the Solution Focused Approach is Used
The Solution Focused Approach is one of the most versatile frameworks in contemporary practice. It is applied across:
- Health, Wellbeing & Human Services: counselling and therapy settings, inpatient and outpatient health care settings (physical health including end-of-life care and mental health), child and youth support
- Education & Learning: counselling and therapy, coaching and mentoring, supervision and reflective practice
- Organisations, Workplaces & Leadership: leadership development, management, teamwork, organisational change, consultation
- Community & Government: not-for-profits, community development, government services, corporate sector
- Justice & Safety: justice and court services including mediation, corrective services, police and law enforcement.
History & Origins
The Solution Focused Approach grew out of the pioneering work of Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, and their colleagues including Eve Lipchik, at the Brief Family Therapy Centre (BFTC) in Milwaukee, USA, during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Their work was itself influenced by the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California, founded in 1959, which had become a world-leading centre for research into communication, systems theory, and brief interventions.
What de Shazer, Berg, and their team developed was genuinely groundbreaking. Rather than asking clients about their problems, they asked about times when the problem was absent or less acute: what was happening instead, what difference that made, and what was better as a result. This simple but radical reorientation from analysing difficulties to amplifying what works created a more collaborative, respectful, and effective way of working with people.
Over the past 40 years, Solution Focused Brief Therapy has expanded far beyond its therapeutic origins and is now known more broadly as the Solution Focused Approach, applied across coaching, education, leadership, community work, health, and justice systems worldwide. 1
Timeline
- 1959: Mental Research Institute (MRI) founded in Palo Alto by Don D. Jackson. Becomes a world centre for research into communication, systems theory, and brief interventions.
- 1960s: MRI Brief Therapy Project launched, inspiring new directions in family therapy.
- Late 1970s: de Shazer, Berg, and colleagues develop Solution Focused Brief Therapy at the BFTC in Milwaukee. SFBT is a radical shift from analysing problems to building solutions.
- 1980s–1990s: SFBT gains wide recognition in clinical, hospital, mental health, and community settings. Research demonstrates meaningful change in fewer sessions than traditional models.
- 2000s: Solution Focused principles expand into coaching, leadership, education, justice, organisational development, and supervision.
- 2013: Australasian Solution Focused Association (ASFA) founded in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. ASFA was established following the founding of similar associations across Europe and North America.
- Today: The Solution Focused Approach continues to grow and evolve worldwide, while its core remains unchanged: a focus on hopes, preferred futures, strengths, and the language of possibility.
The Solution Focused Approach in Complex Situations
The Solution Focused Approach is used successfully across a wide range of complex and high-stress situations including trauma, abuse, grief, serious illness, palliative care, mental health challenges including suicidality, self-harm, separation, relationship difficulties, and organisational crisis.
Its value in these contexts lies in its respectful, hopeful orientation. Rather than requiring clients to revisit or analyse difficult experiences, it supports them to notice what is already working, identify their strengths, and take steps toward the future they want, even in the most challenging circumstances. 7
The Solution Focused Approach and Problems
The Solution Focused Approach does not ignore problems, trauma, grief, or difficulty. When clients raise these, they should be heard and acknowledged with empathy, compassion and respect.
What the approach does differently is shift the focus from analysing what is wrong to exploring what is hoped for and wanted. By helping clients notice times when aspects of their preferred outcome have already appeared, even briefly, practitioners support them to recognise their own strengths, resources, and capacity for change.
This is not avoidance of difficulty. It is a confident, evidence-based choice to build on what works, because that is where meaningful and lasting change is most likely to emerge. 6
Principles and Mindset – Extended
Focus on hopes and preferred futures
Conversations begin with clarifying what outcomes the individual, couple, family, team or organisation hopes to achieve. Hope is ever-present and provides the foundation for change.
Strengths and resources
People notice and build on what is already working. Past successes, the person’s contribution to these, and their existing resources provide the basis for progress.
Shift from problems to what works
Instead of analysing difficulties, the Solution Focused Approach identifies what is wanted or hoped for instead of the problem, drawing from existing resources and past achievements to create meaningful change.
Small steps, big change
Change emerges through small, practical steps that build momentum and confidence. The client chooses the steps they will take.
Co-creation
Practitioners interact with people, in a process of co-creation, asking thoughtful, respectful questions, while clients bring the expertise of their own lives and situations.
Client expertise
People are capable and resourceful. Practitioners never assume to know what matters most to the person; rather they support people to articulate this for themselves. Client autonomy is fully respected and upheld.
Language shapes reality
Detailed descriptions of hopes and successes shift thinking, encourage new possibilities, and lay the foundation for change. Attention to language and use of client language underpins the conversations in the session.
No need for problem analysis or history-taking
Change is possible without analysing trauma or problems. The Solution Focused Approach places trust in a person’s capacity to move forward through the identification of the outcomes they want instead of the problem.
Solution-building, not problem-solving
Solutions may be entirely separate from the original problem. The focus is on what outcome the person wants, the difference this will make, and how the client will recognise the signs of progress.
Brevity and effectiveness
The Solution Focused Approach values efficiency. Significant outcomes can occur in just one session or across several focused sessions.
Practitioner stance
Practitioners bring calm, empathy, curiosity, and genuine care. Their task is to craft questions that support people to notice change, possibilities, and the difference these make in their lives.
Capability and safety
While the Solution Focused Approach supports conversation around resources, outcomes, and the differences these make, safety remains paramount. Risks are always taken seriously and prioritised in accordance with ethical and legal requirements.
Language, change, and the brain
Developing research on neuroplasticity suggests that language may shape thinking and perception in ways that support transformation and solution-building. This is a promising area of emerging evidence for the Solution Focused Approach.
Shared responsibility
Practitioners hold expertise in structuring sessions, while clients hold expertise in their own lives. The session provides opportunity for a co-constructed conversation between the two parties.
Beyond the session
Solution Focused practitioners understand that change is happening before, after and outside of a session, and what happens in a session helps to orientate people to the hopes, progress and resources already active in their lives.
Footnotes
- McKergow, M. (2021). The Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice. Routledge.
- de Shazer, S. (1988). Clues: Investigating Solutions in Brief Therapy. Norton.
- Berg, I.K. & Miller, S.D. (1992). Working with the Problem Drinker: A Solution-Focused Approach. Norton.
- de Shazer, S. & Dolan, Y. (2007). More Than Miracles: The State of the Art of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. Haworth Press.
- Ratner, H., George, E. & Iveson, C. (2012). Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques. Routledge.
- de Shazer, S. (1985). Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy. Norton.
- Kim, J., Jordan, S.S., Franklin, C. & Froerer, A. (2019). Is solution-focused brief therapy evidence-based? An update 10 years later. Family in Society, 100(2), 127–138.