When we think about the overall process in Solution Focused Practice we could describe it as facilitating a shift out of ‘problem talk’ and into ‘solution talk’ and the idea that informs us is that maximising the percentage of ‘solution talk’ in sessions seems to be associated with the client reporting change sooner. Eve Lipchik’s version of this reads ' . . . change occurs sooner, and therapy is shorter, when the therapist initiates solution talk as early as possible in the first session.' (Liphik, 2002, p 44). However if we are meeting with a client for a first session and they were to say, even before they sit down, ‘I’ve been clinically depressed for 28 years’ as a client of mine did very many years ago, how do we decide what to ask, how do we know what to ask. There are many potential pathways into ‘solution talk’ so how do we decide which to take. We could respond ‘so how will you know that things are just beginning to improve’, ‘we could ask ‘so when was the most recent day that was a little bit better for you’, or ‘goodness so how on earth have you kept hope alive over such a long period of time’, or ‘so how have you managed to keep yourself going, to put one foot in font of another’ or any one of many other possibilities. All of these responses represent invitations into ‘solution talk’ but how do we decide which pathway to invite the client to take? The answer to this question, it seems to me, is that most experienced practitioners of the approach have an internalised map for their Solution Focused conversations, default frameworks that ensure that we do not have to work out what sort of question to ask next in relation to everything that the client says to us.
These frameworks, these maps tend, I suspect, to be somewhat idiosyncratic, somewhat different for each and every practitioner; most of us shape the model, and thus our own mapping of the process, to suit both us and our setting and the clients with whom we work. For the BRIEF team the core elements of a first session are ‘best hopes’ (George et al, 1990), preferred future description and a scale. So why do we not, for example, start our session with a scale question or with the preferred future description, which of course we do not. Were we to start by asking a ‘best hopes progress scale’ ‘on a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 standing for your best hopes from our talking together all happening and 0 standing for the furthest away from 10 that you have ever been, where do you see things at the moment (or now or today)?’; were we to start like this then the client’s 10 has not yet been defined or indeed framed in the conversation. Many people come to see us wanting to get rid of problems, whilst we invite them to frame their best hopes in terms of the ‘insteadness’ of what will be happening when the problem is not. So were we to ask our scale prior to this ‘re-negotiation’ then all that the client is likely to include in their 10 would be times when the problems was happening less and they would be less likely to consider days when more of the preferred future was happening. Their frame for seeing significance would be considerably more limited, significantly narrower, whereas a richly described preferred future allows the client to frame their 10 much more broadly, to include many more possibilities.
So why not start with the preferred future description which allows for this more productive scaling? Well clearly the difficulty is that without the ‘best hopes’ negotiation we have no starting point for the ‘preferred future’ description. The ‘preferred future’ is not a description of ‘things going better’, it is not a description of a ‘perfect day’, it is not a description of a ‘day lived as the best version of you’, it is a description of the client’s real life as transformed by the coming into being of the client’s ‘best hopes’. Until the ‘best hopes’ are established we have no starting point for our conversation, and neither we nor our client can necessarily know what we are talking about. Indeed in our view we have no business talking with people about anything that is not related to their ‘best hopes’ from our collaboration; to do so would be both impositional and intrusive. And so we have to start with the ‘best hopes’ question, since the preferred future description can only take place when a focus has been established and the scale naturally follows the preferred future since until the preferred future has been described the client’s ‘10’ will tend to be a narrower and more limited entity. And of course at the end of the scale question we can invite the client to identify what the signs of ‘one point up’ might be, how the client would know that there has been progress in the direction that the client seeks. This allows the session to draw towards its conclusion with the client describing small possible signs of ‘better’.
And so we have a flow:
Best hopes from our talking together
Preferred future description – life as transformed by the presence of the best hopes
Scale question pt. 1 –progress already made, ‘the history of the preferred future’
Scale question pt. 2 – one point up, smallest signs of further progress
Ending sequence
The only addition to this ‘natural’ framework is the invitation to new clients to watch out for changes prior to the first session ‘often people notice changes between making an appointment and arriving for that appointment – if you watch out for them it will be easier for you to describe those changes when we meet’.
And as we become more and more experienced our work tends to fall into rough repeated patterns and so for me I notice that not infrequently the pre-session change description and the best hopes negotiation take about 10 minutes, sometimes a little more, the preferred future description takes 30 minutes or so, the scale 15 minutes which allows typically 5 minutes to end.
So in answer to the question how do you know what to ask we can start by saying that most practitioners carry a map of the process with them and that for most of us those maps ‘work’ well most of the time! Of course when they do not we have to do something different – we have to think!
George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press
Lipchik, Eve (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution-Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.
Evan George
Liverpool
16th November 2025
