A Solution Focused Approach

PUBLIC COURSE IN 2012: Our next public course is on 25th September 2012 in London - please see our Training & Events page

"A fantastic course that was a pleasure to be a part of. It has provided me with invaluable tools to use in a school environment. The strategies have already been put to good use. I can not thank you enough. Best course I have ever attended, so useful and so much fun". Lauren Seal, Head of Year 8, English Martyrs, Leicester 

The Solution Focused Approach is a competency-based approach that owes its origins to Milton Erickson. Erickson was known for his innovative approaches to helping people. Holding no theory of pathology, Erickson was interested in what helped people to change -  he worked with the innate abilities of each person to bring about the desired changes they envisioned.

Milton Erickson's work was harnessed by  the psychotherapists Steve deShazer and Insoo Kim Berg in the 1970s to create a collaborative approach encouraging people to talk about preferred futures rather than only tracing the pathology of the problem - the Solution Focused Brief Therapy Model.

The approach allows for future-focused, strengths based conversations to help individuals and groups to create change.

The Solution Focused Approach is not as stark as the title suggests, "just focusing on a solution to a problem": it is much more than this. It's a way of working that helps people move forward rather than remain stuck in a problem or in a behaviour. The approach encourages the worker to be "curious" in their work: curious about times, for instance, when the problem behaviour has not been displayed or the individual has dealt with the difficulty differently. The worker is not distracted by the motivation for this exception but focuses on "how" the person achieved this.

Our training equips delegates with the tools and resources of this approach and the confidence to utilize them. 

"It is in the Solution Focused conversation that the individual is encouraged to think anew about themselves and their capacity for achievement or change..When human beings are experiencing difficulties, we often get lost in a fog of failure but when someone investigates the exceptions to this, elicits our strengths, asks small, detailed questions about how we achieved - we can regain some experience of any small success and build on this. Phrases like "catching people doing something right" can often be considered as a bit glib or lightweight - but it is a truism that little encourages changed behaviour, increased skill level or new thinking, quicker than someone noticing even the smallest of successes and building our confidence in that moment". 
Eileen Murphy 2006

Our own experience, as practitioners, is that people are more attracted to talking about the start of new behaviour rather than talking about the stopping of old behaviour. Simple conversations can often be instrumental in helping people move on – who, what, where and when are not only good journalistic skills, they are extremely effective therapeutic skills.

The focus of our work is always that of collaboration with the client. The client is the expert on what works for them; what worked a little in the past; what might work a little in the future - we strive to harness that expertise in the work towards repair and change.

In addition to Solution Focused Approaches, we use the resources and visuals of the Examine, Repair & Move On Approach (Murphy ’93) which Eileen Murphy first devised when working with challenging young people in 1993. These simple effective tools offer the client the opportunity to identify the change that needs to happen and who can do what to help change take place. We also utilize our Optima Communication Skills (Murphy '06) - devised over 25 years of working with challenging and disaffected client. We include all three models in our training.

Our practitioner work includes a great deal of experience of working with individuals and families within the Public Sector and working with individuals in the Private Sector.

One of our specialist programmes, The Prevention & Intervention Programme- a whole-team training and project set-up programme, providing a positive and collaborative framework to reduce the numbers of young people and children coming into the care system under Section 20 of The Children Act 1989. Nineteen Local Authorities have implemented this programme as a front line, gatekeeping resource, making considerable savings on budget while attracting social care awards.

Our ethos is about acknowledging what has gone wrong and offering people a new place to start from. People need to be heard and need to have their problems aired - but it would be a sad intervention that kept them there.

Our training includes a framework that provides workers with a reminder that successful outcomes rely on establishing what works for the client; what doesn't work for the client; what attracts; what repels and what the client's preferred future looks like. We can then ensure that we use our expertise in collaboration with the expertise of the client - the real expert on how they live their life.   Below are some examples of the language tools included in our training:

SCALING:
Steve deShazer's 1-10 Scaling Question is a useful therapeutic tool to gauge where the client currently placed themselves in relation to  their desired outcomes.
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When working with people who may be resistant to the idea that change is possible or that change is necessary, we place the 10 as a "maybe":

"On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being: you have no interest at all in looking at change and new behaviours and 10 being: maybe.....you might be interested in looking at that. What number are you on right now?"

In our experience, this vague "maybe" is more attractive to a resistant young person for instance than "and 10 is you are preapred to make changes".  Taking the scaling up in quarters gives both the worker and the young person the opportunity to hear small, practical, real details of any small changes or progress that has already been made and how further progress or change would look further up the scale.

If they are at any number higher than a 1, then of course we are very interested in what brought them to that -  because there is a clear, if small, difference between 1 and 2, for instance. The approach encourages a curiosity about that small difference and encourages further discussion about the moves that have already been made towards a better outcome for the individual. 

REFRAMING:

deShazer's use of "Reframing" offers an opportunity to allow the client a new viewing of themselves and their behaviour. If we only work on the label a client has for themselves, or has been given by others, as "stubborn" for instance -  we would miss the opportunity to reframe to "determined".  This reframe can lead to discussions about "how determined the person is to make progress in their lives".

FUTURE TALK:
Harnessing deShazer's focus on preferred futures and visualisation of the small detail about tomorrow rather than tracing the pathology of yesterday - this method allows for all to examine what change would look like; what the benefits will be, including physical, emotional and practical.  If we ask questions about the past - the client will seek them out too or will resist the question: asking about what is working today and what would a better outcome look like tomorrow are helpful to the client in the move forward.

THE SILENT SESSION (Murphy '06)
Eileen Murphy developed the Silent Session method when working with extremely resistant clients, including young people who had been referred through statutory services. Since then, many clients have made use of it as a non-intrusive way to be guided on a journey of change. These Silent Sessions do not , of course, take precedent over safeguarding practices - it is a tool to engage and to offer an opportunity for reflection before the move towards action tasks.  All of our training courses now include a slot on this tool and its benefits.  The SIlent Session harnesses Solution Focused language; NLP , the communication resources of the Examine Repair & Move On Approach (E.Murphy '93) and the Placebo principles of "expectation". 

PRESUMPTIONS
Having spent many years working with young people to encourage them to protect themselves around drug misuse; inappropriate sexual relationships; gang recruitment etc - Eileen started "asking" rather than "advising", i.e. "given that you will come into contact with lots of people who may offer you drugs - how do you keep yourself safe around that?"

The presumption is always that they are doing so and young people often proceed to tell exactly how - for instance a young man recently told us "well I just say I had a bad trip last time - they give you less hassle if you have had a bad experience rather than if you just dont want to get involved". When he was asked if this strategy worked for him all the time - he replied that he had just thought about it and had in fact not used it before but would now use this as it seemed a good idea to him.

The "presumptions" strategy allows for people to think more deeply about issues affecting their lives and can certainly reduce the "I don't knows....."  than can occur when young people are trying to avoid the question. Eileen maintains that she doesnt mind, if all else fails,  if  the young person is "making up the answer" because, she says, "he would only make them up from his own ingredients - and this alone can offer a starting point of change".

VISUALS AND MONITOR CHARTS:
The Consultancy have devised very effective visuals for use with clients across all fields but these are especially useful with young people. The Monitor Charts allow for a simple, recording for the young person on how they reached their goal? who else did what to help? what difference did it make? These visuals and Charts are always uniquely tailored to the individual.

The language and collaborative ethos of the three methods used, allows for its application across diverse fields - the menu bar on the left of this website gives further information about our specialist training and development programmes. Please contact us for details of our training and direct work at Tel: 0208 947 8093 or on the office mobile 07779 242 289 or email us at info@brief-therapy-uk.com