In 2016, Mark McKergow proposed calling the practice of BRIEF in London “SFBT 2.0”, and Milwaukee’s “1.0”: the language of description had replaced that of action, best hopes had replaced goals, the break and end-of-session compliments had disappeared. Harry Korman replied, McKergow answered back, and the question shifted to boundaries: what is, and is not, solution-focused? This collection gathers the eleven texts of that conversation.

Suggested reading order. The foundation: Chris Iveson and Mark McKergow, “Brief Therapy: Focused Description Development” (2016). The proposal: McKergow, “SFBT 2.0” (2016). The exchange: Korman, “Reflections on Mark McKergow’s Paper, Version 3.0” (2019) and McKergow, “Response to Harry Korman’s Reflections” (2019). The question of boundaries: Michael Durrant, “Confessions of an Unashamed Solution-Focused Purist” (2016), and the empirical groundwork both sides invoke, Janet Beavin Bavelas et al., “The Theoretical and Research Basis of Co-Constructing Meaning in Dialogue” (2014).

The second movement concerns theory and social commitment. Korman, De Jong and Smock Jordan, “Steve de Shazer’s Theory Development” (2020); Guy Shennan, “Towards a Critical Solution-Focused Practice?” (2020) then “Narratives of Distinctiveness or Similarity and Connection” (2021); the Solution-Focused Collective, “Solution-Focused Collective Action” (2021); and the reply by Korman, De Jong and Smock Jordan, “We Don’t Want to Blur the Boundaries” (2021). All these texts are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence; each page links to its original.