59. Signs and steps in coaching and therapy: To use both, one, other or neither?

The focus on signs of progress in next-generation Solution Focused practice is subtle and well worth exploring in practical detail.

May 15, 2024

After last week’s news of the publication of The Solutions Focus in its third edition, Trudy Graham from Australia has been in touch. You may remember that Trudy has prompted me before; she wrote in to connect my credit/blame matrix with the work of Jim Collins in Good To Great. This time she had joined an online session about the new edition of the book and the changes we’ve included. She writes:

I have a question for you… during the recent SF 24 conference I heard about a greater emphasis on the client identifying signs of progress, rather than articulating actions or next steps. Almost to the point of not being concerned about next small steps.

I understand it’s not necessary for the client to articulate or commit to next steps or to check if the client has taken any steps, but I see a lot of value in identify potential next steps alongside signs of progress. I even love thinking about a range of possible small steps, being creative trying to stretch the possibilities in this space. The User’s Guide to the Future [from my book Host] seems to reinforce both signs and steps.

What’s your take on this? Are there different schools of thought in therapy applications compared to SF in organisations?

What a perceptive question! And there are several answers. Let’s get stuck in.

Back to the beginning

We might say that all Solution Focused (SF) practice is about helping to create movement when people are experiencing stuckness. This goes back to the roots of SF in family and brief therapy in the 1960s; indeed, one of the key revolutionary premises of this tradition was (and still is) that there IS something that can be done here and now to move things forward or create a difference for the client(s). No endless problem analysis, seeking of insight, exploring hidden forces and emotions, etc is required. A long-standing saying in the SF world (which we included in the first edition of The Solutions Focus book) is:

“Change the doing or change the viewing.”

In other words, effective change comes from somebody changing their (behaviourist) doing or reframing the situation which then permits a different response.

In the original Mental Research Institute model of brief therapy, the client is experiencing stuckness because they persist in doing something (unwittingly) that is holding the problem in place. The challenge for the practitioner is to get them to stop doing that, in order to open up new possibilities. That means a ‘sales job’ (in the words of Sky Chaney who ran the intensive MRI training Jenny and I joined in 1994) – convincing the client to stop doing what they think ‘ought’ to be helping (but actually isn’t) and doing something different. Once something seems to be working, the stance shifts to doing more of that. This was about changing the doing and viewing, with the clients being asked to do something (now) or view something in a new light (now) that would alter their stance towards it, their relationship to it and (of course) what they did when it showed up.

Arrival of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT)

It was out of this form of practice that SFBT appeared. Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg set up their ‘therapeutic thinktank’ in Milwaukee, the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC), in 1978 to advance these kinds of practice. They discovered, serendipitously (they said later), that if clients were asked about when things were going better and the problem didn’t show up when it usually did, that provided a leap-frogging of the ‘sales job’ and led directly to conversations based around doing ‘more of what worked’. This was, at least initially, still broadly in behavioural terms – “what are you going to more of?”. At this point (through the 1980s), SF practice was led by exception-finding, discovering the times when things were better, and building on that. The famous Miracle Question came later, and was initially deployed as a last resort if no exceptions were appearing.

From past to future

Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the power of the miracle question become clearer. Practitioners, including at BFTC, started to use it before exception-finding. This makes a lot of sense; a conversation around what life would be like without the problem prepares the ground for looking for little bits of that which may be occasionally happening already. And this shift started to bring with it a change in emphasis. Because the future hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t make sense to talk about it so much in concrete doing terms. The client hasn’t ‘done’ it yet. However, the emphasis on clear, concrete everyday detail persisted. So we start to find the miracle question (for example) phrased in terms of signs rather than actions. In the 2013 SFBTA treatment manual, the question ends:

So, when you wake up tomorrow morning, what would be the first tiny sign that will let you know the miracle happened?”

The ways scales were used were also changing. Originally (and this was the case when Paul Z Jackson and I wrote the first edition of The Solutions Focus around the year 2000), the focus was often on what to do to reach one point higher on the scale. We called one of our six ‘solutions tools’ Small Actions not simply because doing something different is a good strategy to get change, but also aiming to do something small, rather than large, is such a great way to proceed. In a complex system small changes can lead to much bigger effects, particularly when they are building on something that’s already working, Doing something small as an experiment, a learning exercise, to see what happens and then reassess, is a powerful way to escape stasis. (And, of course, this challenges the conventional linear assumption that big problems require big plans and large actions – a misunderstanding that has held much of the world captive up to this point).

The ‘Small Actions’ graphic from The Solutions Focus book (all editions)

Fast forward 22 years…

The original The Solutions Focus book appeared in 2002. There was a second edition in 2007 with a new subtitle, the OSKAR coaching model and a much improved selection of case stories. At that time Nicholas Brealey, our publisher, refused to let us touch the first eight chapters in order to keep costs down – meaning that the chapters describing our six SIMPLE principles and six solutions tools had to be left alone.

Then in 2023 the publishers, now part of the Hachette group following the retirement of Nick Brealey himself, noticed that the book was still selling going on for 1000 copies a year, more than two decades after publication. Moreover, someone wanted to buy the Turkish rights for the second edition! They offered us a complete revamp. At long last, the opening chapters could be reconsidered.

Paul and I quickly decided that the six SIMPLE principles and six solutions tools should stay unchanged. They were the heart of the book, and to change them would basically mean a new book! So, the Small Actions tool remains. But we also wanted to include shifts in emphasis that had appeared in SF work in the interim. One of these was the rise of talking about signs, not steps. And yet, a version of the Steps graphic was promoted to the front cover! The idea of emergent, step-at-a-time, one-thing-leads-to-another change is still key.

Front cover, The Soluotions Focus, third edition

Signs before (or instead of) steps

Talking about ‘signs of progress’ is a very interesting and a quite distinctively SF way of working. A sign is something to notice (and perhaps respond to). It’s not necessarily the same as something to do (although it might be directly actionable). ‘Signs of progress’ is a bigger class of events or realisations than steps to take. It might include:

Things that might appear, that would be relevant and important
Things that other people were doing, which would be useful to respond to
Things achieved, but without definite reference to how
Things you might ‘catch yourself doing’ when the right circumstances came around
And things you might start doing, or do more of (or even do less of, which needs more work to elaborate)

Now, of course we could go on to ask about small next steps. But do we have to? In my take on the latest developments (‘Next generation SF or SF 2.0), talking about small signs of progress ‘stretches the world’ of the client; it opens new doors and creates new possibilities for interaction which weren’t seen as relevant, important or valuable before. This is a precursor to action, rather than action in itself.

One way to look at this is that the set of possible steps is contained within the set of all possible signs. In other words, asking for signs is a broader question than asking for steps, and can open up more possibilities.

There are other advantages of starting with asking about tiny signs or progress:

It can take the pressure off. A client who has been struggling might not want to (or be able to) rush towards actions easily. Openness and space to think is a key part of the SF approach.
It allows the client to think more interactionally – about other people and other things. This is something that’s definitely encouraged in SF work.
It allows for things not yet within range to enter the conversation. Something could be a tiny sign of progress even if right now it feels out of reach. And remember, we assume that change is happening all the time and so it may start to get closer…

Evan George (and his colleagues) from BRIEF in London writes on Facebook every Sunday with reflections about SF practice gained over some 35 years. It’s always worth reading so do look him (and BRIEF) up on the platform. Evan wrote in January 2024 about signs and steps, and why he prefers to ask about signs only. Here’s part of what he wrote:

How does the change that people are describing in their preferred future descriptions happen? Do we not have to identify the steps that people will take after the session? Do we not need to action plan? Surely without this our sessions risk being nicey-nicey chats? These concerns emanate naturally, indeed logically, from a problem-solving paradigm, but the change process in the Solution Focused approach is different. By the end of a Solution Focused session the client has already changed. Change is not dependent on somehow planning what the client is going to do after the session, or indeed even identifying what action the client is going to take. By the end of the session the client has changed, and so a change of behaviour after the session is expectable and thus the only interesting question is ‘where will the change start and how will it manifest itself’...

This seems to me to fit with the idea that the SF conversation itself ‘stretches the world’ of the client. Change has already happened during the conversation, but the impact of that change can only fully be felt when the client is ‘in situ’, back outside the consulting room and re-experiencing their world anew in all its richness and interconnectedness. To ask what they might notice is coherent with this picture. To ask what they might do seems to be jumping ahead.

Going on to ask about steps?

Of course, one could go on to ask about next steps. Particularly in organisational and business contexts the idea of agreeing next steps may be seen as the norm. People may somehow get the idea that if they don’t ‘take an action’ (or some other phrase) then they don’t have to do anything, which is not where we want them to be at all. If the context requires you to move on to talk about steps, here are some pointers about making that part of the conversation as useful as possible. Aim to make the steps:

Small (I usually suggest people think in terms of the next 48 hours)
Not needing permission from anyone else (though of course the seeking of support can itself be a useful action)
Generative (starting something rather than stopping something)
Interactional (visible to others, and allowing them to respond and build on it)
Feeling tractable (the person is confident they can do this, or something like it)
An experiment rather than the answer to everything (in a complex world there is no silver bullet which will put an end to all woes. Moving in the right direction is about as good as it gets.)

So, should we go on to ask about steps? Those of a minimalist bent will worry about adding an extra and possibly unnecessary step into the process. Others may worry that the clients will do the steps out of some misguided wish to please us, rather than follow their own judgement. We want them to be doing things because they think it fits for them, the thing that’s open to them now, the thing they created (or at least played a key part in creating). We don’t really want them doing it because they are trying to please us, because they don’t want to let us down, because they are under the impress that WE think it’s the right thing to do. This is part of taking client autonomy seriously. If clients start thinking we know better than they do about their lives, all kinds of complications can ensue.

Conclusions

In her question, Trudy asked about the value of identifying possible small steps alongside tiny signs of progress. I think it’s dependent on the context. At work where conversations about actions are quite normal, it could well be a useful addition. In therapy and other settings where we are encouraging clients to take their own steps, it could be seen as extraneous at best and interfering at worst. This is one aspect of SF work where some focused research might be interesting. And, of course, every case is still different and there are no absolutes.

You might experiment in your own work with talking about tiny (and detailed) signs of progress, leaving it at that and not following up with steps, and seeing what happens. You might get a pleasant surprise.

Date and Mates

I will be in Sofia, Bulgaria for the Host Leadership Gathering 2024 on 3-4 June 2024. We have an excellent programme for the first day including a keynote from me, and the second day will be an Open Space exploration of relational, post-heroic, solution-focused leading, following and connecting. Come and join this amazing opportunity.

There’s a new SF podcast series on the scene! And this one is different. In Family Therapy: The Podcast Elliott Connie works with a couple, together and separately, in a series of sessions. and talks afterwards about the session, what he was doing and how he responded to his clients. These sessions are no walk in the park, and Elliott has to draw on all his experience, skill, patience and persistence as he works. Go listen now - free on Apple and other places. https://lnkd.in/eDpUZ9Hr.