Where does the solution-focused approach come from?

It emerged in the early 1980s at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, co-founded by Steve de Shazer and his wife Insoo Kim Berg. It draws its roots from the work of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, from the work of Milton Erickson and from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This approach belongs to the movement of second-order cybernetics and rests on several convictions:

Building on these convictions, the practitioner’s task is to create the conditions of an accompaniment that allows the client to use, in a creative way, all their personal skills and capacities for adaptation.

One of the great particularities of this approach is that it offers no theory about the client: it relies solely on a theory of accompaniment built from clinical practice.

The practitioner’s work is not devoted to assessment, diagnosis and the elaboration of typologies of problems or clients in order to design the interventions that would follow from them. It aims instead to create a relational space open to the emergence of new meanings favourable to change, giving the client every chance to identify and amplify their personal resources, so that they keep mobilising them to move towards what they want.

Six guiding principles orient the therapist’s interventions

1 — Reality is co-constructed in interaction through language games

The SFA regards therapy as a linguistic process: it gives words and language games a central place.

The practitioner is not an external observer in charge of discovering a reality whose meaning would already be fixed outside the encounter: they take part in the co-creation of meaning and of a reality through the exchanges.

What happens in the conversation is not considered to be determined by intrapsychic laws and/or social constructions, but as a moment of creativity in a context carrying the influence of everything that has happened before and of what may come.

The solution-focused therapist therefore knows that the question they ask does not come to discover a reality but, in part, to co-create one: reality is created at the very moment the question is asked.

The therapist will use a new, so-called “solution-focused” language, making it possible to develop a narrative of progress with the client. To do so, they question the client in particular about what they want, what is already working, their resources, their aspirations, their capacities for adaptation… It is considered that therapists must search for their questions as hard as their clients must search for their answers.

2 — Interventions aim to create and maintain a relationship of cooperation

Several anchor points help the practitioner adopt a stance conducive to cooperation.

First, they hold an unconditional positive regard for the client. Any behaviour, opinion or intention, even those socially considered “inappropriate”, is questioned from positive presuppositions: they are seen as “solutions” or attempted “solutions” serving something important for the person.

Second, the practitioner adopts a stance of not-knowing for the other. The client is considered the expert on themselves in every area of their life: the working space is a space of co-expertise. The solution-focused approach also presents itself as a non-normative approach: no intervention signals to the client, explicitly or implicitly, whether what they are doing is right or wrong, nor what they should or should not do.

Finally, third, since interactional reality is co-created, the client cannot be designated as responsible, let alone guilty, for what happens in the working space! This systemic, interactional vision allows the practitioner to stay attentive to the nature of the relationship and to adjust their contributions accordingly, to foster a climate of cooperation.

3 — Interventions no longer aim to diagnose, solve or repair a problem, but to create and maintain the conditions for movement

As we said earlier, the SFA has no theory about the person, and the solution-focused practitioner is aware that they do not discover reality but co-create it in interaction, through language games. Their role is not that of an “observer-expert” in charge of diagnosing, solving or repairing a problem, but that of a “facilitator” who, while continually remaining in a stance of not-knowing for the other, works to develop with the client a narrative of progress in which the person can connect with their aspirations and mobilise their own resources to serve them.

The “anti-theoretical” position shows in this narrative of progress through the fact that the practitioner is not there to give their opinion, but rather to allow the person to enter a process of elucidation about what works for them. This process of elucidation, in Wittgenstein’s sense, does not consist in explaining and finding underlying causes for what is functional, but rather in clarifying and describing it. In this work of description and clarification, what the person will see, understand and retain as useful belongs to them alone.

4 — Interventions are guided by the changes the client wishes for

When a client seeks a professional’s help for a problem, it is most certainly because they want this work to give them access to a more satisfying future. The working dynamic is therefore at the service of what is wished for, and determined solely by the client.

The solution-focused practitioner holds two intentions:

• To allow the client to determine the changes they aspire to, and to have them describe in every detail the landscape of this preferred future — this work being considered, in itself, one of the means of getting there.
• To allow the client to explore their steps forward, however small, towards their preferred future. The only orientation of the work will be about these advances! The client can thus strengthen their sense of competence and keep entering a positive autobiography.

5 — The client themselves holds the means-solutions to move towards the desired change

This fifth principle is rather counter-intuitive: how can we think that a person asking for help with a problem actually already holds their own solutions?! It should be recalled here that the SFA considers that the person holds their own solutions for moving towards the changes they wish for.

The SFA starts from the observation that the set of factors contributing to the formation of a problem is different from the set of factors that will help the client move towards what they want. Noticing that the means-solutions for reaching this preferred future usually have nothing to do with the solutions to the problem frees both the person and the practitioner from the “imprisoning” idea that one must imperatively find the causes of the problem in order to solve it.

Since the practitioner does not wish to give the person any solution or advice, they must know where the client’s own solutions may be found. These can be explored in the exceptions to the problem and in the examples of the preferred future, for they contain the seeds of means-solutions; and then, of course, in all the progress made by the client towards their preferred future.

6 — The practitioner adopts an interactional vision and works from a systemic perspective

The working dynamic is not oriented towards what happens inside the client, but towards a broader, inclusive, ecosystemic consideration.

Problems, best hopes, preferred futures and effective means-solutions are considered in their relational, social and cultural context.

Moreover, still from this systemic perspective, since a small change in one part of the system can bring about changes in other parts of the system and strengthen the hope of change, the only thing aimed for is the possibility of setting things in motion, however small.

By way of conclusion

In summary, we can say that solution-focused therapy is a therapy:

• based on the idea that change results from the negotiation of representations through language games within the therapist-client system;
• based on the idea that the client wishes to see a different, preferred future emerge from the work, which will give the direction of the accompaniment;
• based on a relationship of co-expertise and cooperation;
• based on the skills, behaviours and ways of thinking the client already has when things are working in their life;
• based on the client’s creative capacities to build their own solutions.

Even if the principles of this approach seem simple, it requires particular dispositions given the shifts in paradigm, stance and language games it proposes. This stance in fact rests on a foundation I detail in an article devoted to the nine postulates of the solution-focused approach.

Bibliography and resources

Modalités d’entretien de l’approche centrée solution (interview modalities of the solution-focused approach), Marie-Christine Cabié, Jean-Paul Durand, Marion Detell, Jean-François Croissant (open source).

A few websites to go further: ifaacs.com, alternatives-acs.fr, ebta.eu, pegase-processus.fr.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Jean-Paul Durand for the whole scripting part: a huge thank you for the care given to this precise, meticulous and rigorous writing work. A state-registered nurse by first profession, Jean-Paul Durand is now a trainer in the solution-focused approach (Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg) and holds a university diploma in positive psychology from Université Grenoble Alpes. Learn more.

The full presentation — in French — can be watched below.