Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about questions. Well there’s nothing new in that. We Solution Focused practitioners spend all our time thinking about questions. But I haven’t been thinking about the questions that we ask in sessions. I’ve been thinking about the questions that other practitioners ask us about the Solution Focused approach. And what I have been wondering about is this – has the type of questions that we are being asked changed and if it has changed what does that mean? And I am really really interested in your experience. What sorts of questions are you being asked about Solution Focused Practice by your colleagues, acquaintances and by clients?
Chris, Harvey and I started teaching the Solution Focused approach in 1989. All three of us had started our trainings as Family Therapists, or Systemic Psychotherapists as people might say these days, back in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, and out in the therapy world at that time Systemic was very much the new kid on the block, it was a ‘challenger’ model for those discomfited by the established dominants which were Person-centred, Behaviour Therapy and Psychodynamic, with the last of these still probably the most influential. And then we came across Steve de Shazer and his colleagues and their work and just as Systemic had been perceived as a challenger model in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Solution Focused approach was perceived as a challenger to Systemic and rather than embracing its potential many in the Systemic world adopted a somewhat disapproving position, whilst the wider therapy world was still disapproving of Systemic! So what sort of questions can we be asked? At one extreme we can have ‘outrage-informed questions’ and then we can have ‘scepticism-informed’ questions and then we can have ‘curiosity-informed’ questions.
In the early days all of us who presented Solution Focus experienced some ‘outrage-informed’ responses and questions. These often took the form of statements disguised as questions ‘you can’t really believe that . . . ?’. Not only, people argued, would what we were doing not work but we should not be doing this, in some ways it was unethical, dishonest. Our clearest experience of this was when Steve de Shazer visited us in 1996 and presented for BRIEF at Regent’s College, showing a teaching tape entitled ‘Coming through the Ceiling’. A large group of mental health workers responded by attacking de Shazer for staying focused on what the client wanted, to sleep, and failing to challenge, as they framed it, the client’s persecutory delusions. The heated discussion that took place was not merely sceptical, ‘your work won’t work’, but out-raged , ‘what you are doing is wrong’. This sort of response, albeit in milder form, was experienced by all of us at times in the early days.
‘Scepticism-informed’ questions often take as their starting point the asker’s own model of practice. They tend to take the form ‘we do x in my model and it works, you don’t do x and therefore what you do cannot work’. Of course there is a logical inconsistency in the form of the question. Just because what you do works it does not prove that doing anything else will not work. All it proves is that what you do does work. These sort of questions often focus on history or on the ‘underlying causation’ - If you do not ‘deal with x’ how can change last.
‘Curiosity-informed’ questions come from a place of genuine interest in the model, what it is and how it works in the context of specific applications. How do you decide what questions to ask? How do you structure a session? How do you use this approach with mandated clients? How do you use the approach with children? How do you know when to end? How do you decide whom to invite? There are an infinite number of ‘curiosity-informed’ questions but what they have in common is that they are based on an acceptance of the validity of the Solution Focused approach.
Over the years that we have been introducing people to the Solution Focused approach, many tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people since 1989, I think that the questions that we are asked have changed. In the early days there were a lot of scepticism-based questions, some ‘out-rage based’ responses and some ‘curiosity-based’ questions. Since then the ‘outrage’ has withered away, the scepticism-based questions have also significantly reduced in frequency although of course they do still occur and ‘curiosity-based’ questions have taken centre stage and now predominate. This shift, it seems to me, is significant and point to changes in our field and wider changes in society.
People no longer regard long-term individual psychotherapy as the gold-standard intervention.
‘Insight’ is no longer regarded as a prerequisite for change.
Centering the client’s best way of making change rather than assuming the rightness of the worker’s way has become much more mainstream.
There is less deference towards so-called experts in society.
The recognition and the valuing of difference between people has undermined the grand-theory type approaches.
The concept of ‘neuroplasticity’ has led to more optimism in regard to people’s capacity to change.
The concept of diagnosis has been contextualised and has come to be regarded as just one way of describing what is going on amongst many possible ways rather than as 'truth'.
These perhaps are some of the changes that have led to the easier acceptance of the potential of the Solution Focused approach and indeed it may be that the spread of Solution Focus has underpinned and supported some of these changes.
So back to the beginning – what questions do you get asked and do you think that the questions that you are being asked are changing. I do!
Evan George
London
07 December 2025.
