40 Context December 2011 Some assumptions of solution focused practice training days in Hong Kong and Beijing are on the ‘China’ page at www.usefulconversations. com. The site also contains video clips in both English and Mandarin of comments from several Beijing students who had utilised their learning with friends and service users, made two days after the training had ended. However, my favourite memory is of a teacher who had come from the Sichuan region, smiling and laughing as she engaged in the exercises and thanking each of us for the possibilities we had given to her to take back to the children and parents she worked with. Lastly, during a quiet part of an evening in Hong Kong, I finally managed to ask Sai what led him to become interested in solution-focused practice in the first place. He explained that he had been given an assignment to write about a model of therapy and had picked out Bill O’Connell’s (2005) book Solution-Focused Therapy from the Beijing Normal University library. He found the approach interesting and began to apply his learning in both his personal and professional life. My curiosity got the better of me so I asked, “How come you chose that particular book?” to which he replied, “I had to submit the assignment the following day and it was the thinnest book on the shelf”. The various implications of his answer for brevity in therapy, writing and training has remained with me ever since. Acknowledgements The training days would not have taken place without the support and commitment shown by many people including Professor Sun and her staff at Shue Yan University, Professor Hou and her staff at Beijing Normal University and the generosity of Dr John Chan and the Hui Yeung Shing Foundation, to whom we give many thanks. Reference O’Connell, W. (1998) Solution Focused Therapy. London: Sage. Greg Vinnicombe is a qualified social worker and has been employed as a front-line worker and manager in the private, public and voluntary sectors. He holds an MA in child protection and acts as an accredited expert witness. Over the past 12 years, Greg has conducted solution-focused practice sessions with a wide variety of service users and lectured in the approach at several Yorkshire and Chinese Universities. Currently, he runs a solution-focused consultancy business www.usefulconversations.com and can be contacted through his website. Introduction e assumptions underpinning a particular approach can be useful to practitioners in a number of ways. • Clarifying the thinking behind the techniques of the approach so that they are used in a manner consistent with what the originators of the approach had intended. • Positioning the approach so that others who are unfamiliar with it have an opportunity to decide whether the approach is more consistent with their values and beliefs than ones they are already using – as happened to both of us. • Providing a template for practitioners to self-evaluate how close their use of the techniques of the approach is to what the originators of the approach had intended. Whilst solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) has oſten been claimed to be based on some simple ideas, the simplicity appears to have been somewhat difficult to capture in words. When one of us, John, started training others, he initially used the ten assumptions from O’Hanlon and Weiner-Davis (1988, pp. 32-50). • Clients have resources and strengths to resolve complaints. • Clients define the goals for change. • Change is constant. • e therapist’s job is to identify and amplify whatever is useful to the client’s goal achievement. • Rapid change or resolution is possible. • Complaints can oſten be resolved without knowing a lot about them. • Cause or function of the complaint may not have to be known for resolution to occur. • A small change is all that is necessary – a change in one part of the system can lead to change elsewhere. • ere is no one right way to view things – other views may fit the facts just as well. • Focus on what is possible and changeable, rather than what is impossible or intractable. Over time, he discovered that some of the words in these assumptions brought about entrenched positioning by some practitioners, which risked closing down their curiosity. On deciding to work out his own list of assumptions, he came up with the following that he found were more likely to invite agreement from some and curiosity from others. • Lasting change is more likely to happen when you find out what’s working and help people figure out how to do more of it. • People are more likely to behave and/or think differently when you work with their goals for change. • Rapid change or resolution can happen when people hit on ideas that work. • A change in one part of a system can lead to changes elsewhere. In a similar manner, Greg, through his background of child protection and experience of delivering training to practitioners in a wide variety of public sector seings, developed the following seven assumptions. • e client is not the problem. e problem is the problem. e problem occurs in the interaction or lack of interaction between people rather than residing within people. • Clients have the ability to find their own solutions to the difficulties that they have. An effective solution-focused worker can assist in this process. • A client’s solution is more likely to fit their particular situation and more likely to be implemented and maintained. • Small changes can make a big difference. • Problems that appear complex, may not necessarily require a complex solution. • Problems are not always present, or at their worst. Exceptions occur. • Try to identify what’s going well (rather than what’s going wrong). When one of us, John, interviewed social workers in Gateshead (Hogg & Wheeler, 2004) to clarify the assumptions they drew John Wheeler and Greg Vinnicombe Some assumptions of solution-focused practice
Transcript
40 Context December 2011
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training days in Hong Kong and Beijing are on the ‘China’ page at www.usefulconversations.com. The site also contains video clips in both English and Mandarin of comments from several Beijing students who had utilised their learning with friends and service users, made two days after the training had ended. However, my favourite memory is of a teacher who had come from the Sichuan region, smiling and laughing as she engaged in the exercises and thanking each of us for the possibilities we had given to her to take back to the children and parents she worked with.
Lastly, during a quiet part of an evening in Hong Kong, I fi nally managed to ask Sai what led him to become interested in solution-focused practice in the fi rst place. He explained that he had been given an assignment to write about a model of therapy and had picked out Bill O’Connell’s (2005) book Solution-Focused Therapy from the Beijing Normal University library. He found the approach interesting and began to apply his learning in both his personal and professional life. My curiosity got the better of me so I asked, “How come you chose that particular book?” to which he replied, “I had to submit the assignment the following day and it was the thinnest book on the shelf”. The various implications of his answer for brevity in therapy, writing and training has remained with me ever since.
AcknowledgementsThe training days would not have taken
place without the support and commitment shown by many people including Professor Sun and her staff at Shue Yan University, Professor Hou and her staff at Beijing Normal University and the generosity of Dr John Chan and the Hui Yeung Shing Foundation, to whom we give many thanks.
ReferenceO’Connell, W. (1998) Solution Focused Therapy. London: Sage.
Greg Vinnicombe is a qualifi ed social worker and has been employed as a front-line worker and manager in the private, public and voluntary sectors. He holds an MA in child protection and acts as an accredited expert witness. Over the past 12 years, Greg has conducted solution-focused practice sessions with a wide variety of service users and lectured in the approach at several Yorkshire and Chinese Universities. Currently, he runs a solution-focused consultancy business www.usefulconversations.com and can be contacted through his website.
IntroductionTh e assumptions underpinning a
particular approach can be useful to practitioners in a number of ways.• Clarifying the thinking behind the
techniques of the approach so that they are used in a manner consistent with what the originators of the approach had intended.
• Positioning the approach so that others who are unfamiliar with it have an opportunity to decide whether the approach is more consistent with their values and beliefs than ones they are already using – as happened to both of us.
• Providing a template for practitioners to self-evaluate how close their use of the techniques of the approach is to what the originators of the approach had intended.Whilst solution-focused brief therapy
(SFBT) has oft en been claimed to be based on some simple ideas, the simplicity appears to have been somewhat diffi cult to capture in words. When one of us, John, started training others, he initially used the ten assumptions from O’Hanlon and Weiner-Davis (1988, pp. 32-50). • Clients have resources and strengths to resolve complaints.• Clients defi ne the goals for change.• Change is constant.• Th e therapist’s job is to identify and
amplify whatever is useful to the client’s goal achievement.
• Rapid change or resolution is possible.• Complaints can oft en be resolved without knowing a lot about them.• Cause or function of the complaint may
not have to be known for resolution to occur.• A small change is all that is necessary – a
change in one part of the system can lead to change elsewhere.
• Th ere is no one right way to view things – other views may fi t the facts just as well.• Focus on what is possible and changeable, rather than what is impossible or intractable.
Over time, he discovered that some of the words in these assumptions brought about entrenched positioning by some practitioners, which risked closing down their curiosity. On deciding to work out his own list of assumptions, he came up with the following that he found were more likely to invite agreement from some and curiosity from others.• Lasting change is more likely to happen
when you fi nd out what’s working and help people fi gure out how to do more of it.
• People are more likely to behave and/or think diff erently when you work with their goals for change.
• Rapid change or resolution can happen when people hit on ideas that work.• A change in one part of a system can lead to changes elsewhere.
In a similar manner, Greg, through his background of child protection and experience of delivering training to practitioners in a wide variety of public sector sett ings, developed the following seven assumptions. • Th e client is not the problem. Th e
problem is the problem. Th e problem occurs in the interaction or lack of interaction between people rather than residing within people.
• Clients have the ability to fi nd their own solutions to the diffi culties that they have. An eff ective solution-focused worker can assist in this process.
• A client’s solution is more likely to fi t theirparticular situation and more likely to be implemented and maintained.
• Small changes can make a big diff erence. • Problems that appear complex, may not necessarily require a complex solution. • Problems are not always present, or at their worst. Exceptions occur. • Try to identify what’s going well (rather than what’s going wrong).
When one of us, John, interviewed social workers in Gateshead (Hogg & Wheeler, 2004) to clarify the assumptions they drew
John Wheeler and Greg Vinnicombe
Some assumptions of solution-focused practice
41Context December 2011
on when they were using a solution-focused approach with families, he and they came to a conclusion that perhaps it was impossible to come up with a set of assumptions that would make sense to social workers working with families everywhere, and the best they could come up with would be the “Gateshead” assumptions. Th e sett ing in which the approach was used appeared to be having a major infl uence on how the assumptions could be put into words.
Teaming up with a training colleague, Greg, to design validated training in solution-focused practice has brought us both back to the challenge again. We needed to design training we could both deliver with consistency. We needed to base the training on the same assumptions. One of us had his four assumptions and the other had his seven. Th e diffi culty we faced led to a re-viewing of solution-focused assumptions that fi nally gave us a set that described the approach equally well for both of us. We share the outcome here, not in any sense that this could be a fi nal word on the defi ning of the approach, but in the hope that this set
of assumptions may help some enrich their current understanding of it and might invite curiosity in those who are less familiar.
MethodTo arrive at a shared set of assumptions,
we looked at lists that were already in use. Walter & Peller (1992) had listed twelve; Lipchik (2002) had listed eleven; Jackson & McKergow (2002) had listed seven; deShazer & Dolan (2007) listed seven; Nelson & Th omas (2007) listed seven; Hanton (2011) has listed fourteen; McKergow (2011), who asserts that solution-focused brief therapy is a manifestation of a more general paradigm shift for which he has coined the word “Rutenso”, listed seven in a recent meeting of the Association for the Quality Development of Solution Focused Consulting and Training. We then independently gave each of the assumptions in the lists, including our own, a range of 0 to 3 points. When one of us looked at the assumptions that had gained 3 points from each of us, it was noticed that some were unique to one list and many were common to most, albeit with slightly
diff erent wordings. It then appeared that the assumptions we both favoured could be organised into four groups.• Assumptions about service users.• Assumptions about problems.• Assumptions about change.• Assumptions about practice.
When the favoured assumptions were organised into these categories the following list emerged.
Assumptions about service users• Every client is unique.• Clients come to us with resources and
strengths, both personal and in their social network.
• All clients have the ability to fi nd their own solutions to the diffi culties that they have. • You cannot change clients; they can only change themselves.• Th e therapist is not the expert on the
clients and their social network, the client is.
• A client’s solution is more likely to fi t theirparticular situation and more likely to be implemented and maintained.
Some assum
ptions of solution focused practice
Just a perfect day.
42 Context December 2011
Assumptions about problems• No problem happens all the time; there
are always exceptions that can be found and built on.
• A focus on the possible and changeable is more helpful than a focus on the overwhelming and intractable.
• Th e client is not the problem. Th e problem is the problem. Th e problem and solution occurs in the interaction between people rather than residing within people.
• Problems that appear complex, may not necessarily require a complex solution.
Assumptions about change• Change is happening all the time.• Small changes can make a big diff erence.• Rapid change or resolution can happen when people hit on ideas that work.• Th ere may well have been some pre- session change.
Assumptions about Practice• Lasting change is more likely to happen
when you fi nd out what’s working and help people fi gure out how to do more of it.
• Change is happening all the time. Our job is to identify and amplify useful change.• People are more likely to behave and/or
think diff erently when you work with their goals for change.
ConclusionIn a conversation with Insoo Kim Berg
in 2006, one of us (Wheeler, 2006) heard that she and her partner, Steve de Shazer, had still been talking about the “it” of solution-focused brief therapy even close to the time of his death in 2005. Insoo
refl ected that they had both been able to recognise the “it” of the approach in the practice of others. Steve’s seminal accounts were his way of describing the approach that emerged at the Brief Family Th erapy Center, in Milwaukee, and became known as solution-focused brief therapy. Since then, many others have found their own ways to put the approach into words. In the conclusion to an article in 1994, one of us (Wheeler, 1994) refl ected, “Perhaps the greatest value of searching for essential ingredients is not so much in fi nding them but rather in the process of searching”. We hope our list of assumptions help you in your understanding of the “it” of solution-focused brief therapy, and that reading this article contributes to your search so that your practice develops in ways that are useful for you and those you work with.
Referencesde Shazer, S. & Dolan, Y. (2007) More Than Miracles: The State of the Art of Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press.Hanton, P. (2011) Skills in Solution Focused Brief Counselling and Psychotherapy. London: Sage.Hogg, V. & Wheeler, J. (2004) Miracles R them: Solution-focused practice in a social services duty team. Practice: The News Magazine for the British Association of Social Workers, 16.4: 299-314.Jackson, P.Z. & McKergow, M. (2002) The Solutions Focus: The Simple Way to Positive Change. London: Nicholas Publishing.Lipchik, E. (2002) Beyond Technique in Solution Focused Therapy. New York: Guildford.McKergow, M. (2011) http://sfworkblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/rutenso-the-art-of-thriving-in-times-of-constant-changeNelson, T.S. & Thomas, F.N. (2007) Handbook of Solution-focused Brief Therapy: Clinical Applications. New York: Haworth Press.O’Hanlon, B. & Weiner-Davis, M. (1988) In Search of Solutions: A New Direction in Psychotherapy. New York: Norton.
Walter, J. & Peller, J. (1992) Becoming Solution-Focused in Brief Therapy. New York: BrunnerWheeler, J. (2006) Personal communication.
John Wheeler is a UKCP-registered systemic practitioner who works as an independent practitioner providing therapy, supervision, training and consultation. John is co-director of Solution Focused Trainers. He can be contacted on [email protected]
Greg Vinnicombe is a qualifi ed social worker with an MA in child protection and acts as an accredited expert witness. Over the past 12 years, Greg has conducted solution-focused practice sessions with a wide variety of service users and lectured in the approach at several Yorkshire and Chinese Universities. Currently he runs a solution-focused consultancy business www.usefulconversations.com and can be contacted through his website.
John and Greg are both directors of a company providing accredited solution-focused training www.solutionfocusedtrainers.com
