People ask me what solutions-focus *is* exactly.
“What’s that about? What do you really do? Isn’t this just another flavour of coaching?”
In order to respond to this line of questioning, I had to think back over my learning and career. I can see that solutions-focus is an outlier theme that I was drawn to early in the 1990s. I have been using it as a program designer, educator, and facilitator for awhile.
Solutions-focused *coaching* has really caught on since the mid-2000s. This coaching flavour of solutions-focus is packaged in clear language with a simple, practical method, has roots in therapy, and recently has been picked up by International Coach Federation (ICF).
In the list below, coaching is only *one* of nine flavours of solutions-focus that influence my own approach (+there’s more). I classify the following thinking tactics as solutions-focused because they share a pattern of asking:
‘What do we want instead?’
+ ‘What’s better?’
+ ‘What’s working?’
+ ‘How have we done this before?’
+ ‘What do we need?’
+ ‘What next?’
Plus, tapping the power of mental models and reframing.
In my view, these are the basics of realistic optimism, with an emphasis on the realism side of things. That’s my agenda as a facilitator. That’s what you get, whether I’m working 1:1 with a client in a Solutions Session, leading a Strategic Refresh process with an organization, or designing a cross-sector partnership for social and economic change.
The people behind the approaches below developed these different heuristics out of necessity, across an array of sectors and fields, often in isolation. They did this to address challenges in their specific niche when traditional tactics let them down, wasted their time, or created unnecessary barriers to generating solutions to pressing complex problems that mattered to them as professionals.
These heuristics generate a solutions-focused mindset.
Knowing that these heuristics exist and that they can be thematically linked creates space beyond typical analytical thinking when we are tackling a challenge.
There’s a whole new compartment in our toolkit for solutions-focused skills.
These approaches all can be learned. We skill up by getting in the reps. That’s what my own professional practice is about.
I have worked with these tactics in different roles over the last 25+ years as a researcher and independent professional. They are listed roughly in the chronological order of when I found out about them. They are the basis of my facilitation style and my values at work.
Here’s the list.
1 Community Economic Development – Fogo Process / Challenge for Change with the National Film Board of Canada and Colin Low at Rural Extension, Memorial University, Newfoundland. A key community-based decision method supporting the Fogo Island community to stay put rather than resettle. My first conference papers were on this topic.
2 Journalism – Solutions Journalism Network, for people who report on what’s working even in times of disaster. My first documentary project was on a top-down land planning disaster that fractured a rural farming community. After that I vowed never to work on a hardship story focused on disaster again.
3 Energy Planning – Backcasting to plan under extreme uncertainty. The 70s global energy crisis led to adoption of this alternative to forecasting by large energy companies, including scenario planning. Useful now that the stable patterns of the 20th century are gone and they are not coming back.
4 Business Ethics – Giving Voice to Values: How to speak your mind when you know what’s right by Mary Gentile, a thought leader I learned from and trained with during my decade+ of work in business and economic ethics, and leadership development.
5 Program Evaluation – Most Significant Change Technique for monitoring outcomes without indicators. A participant-focused, story-based alternative to top-down ‘first-world-first’ evaluation approaches in sustainable development programs, or happy-face satisfaction surveys.
6 Resource Management – Polycentric Governance by Elinor Ostrom, winner of a Nobel Prize in Economics for crushing Garret Hardin’s right-wing, unhelpful Tragedy of the Commons. Ostrom’s Principle: “If it works in practice, it can work in theory.”
7 Coaching – Solutions-Focused Coaching. Check Solution Surfers and the Canadian Centre for Brief Coaching.
8 Game-based Learning – Collaborative serious games research by Katsuya Yamori, Kyoto University, for community-based -VS- top-down tsunami disaster management in Japan.
9 Organizational Learning + Development – Success Case Method for for finding out what’s working, fast. This was my favourite new method to learn during my Adult Learning and Development certificate in 2021 at OISE, University of Toronto.
So that’s nine to start, and BONUS: My favourite problem-focused method:
10 LEAN – The Five Whys, classic root-cause analysis technique.
Combined with a solutions-focused mindset, it’s a gem.
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