78. A Solution-Focused ‘Approach’ – meeting people anew

The way we ‘approach’ our clients – literally – is key

Mar 05, 2025

The Solution Focused (SF) approach is not just a way of working. It’s also about how we approach people (our clients) to help them into a space where new conversations can happen. That’s one insight from a fascinating new podcast out this week.

The Toward Solutions podcast is a new arrival on the SF block. It’s hosted by Dion Sing and Jason Pascoe who are both based in Australia; Dion is chair of the Australasian SF Association (ASFA) and Jason is an ASFA board member as well as a very experienced and skilled SF consultant and coach who works a lot with schools. Dion and Jason are planning to invite someone from the SF world every month for a conversation, and they’ve had a great start by asking Anton Stellamans from Belgium to be their first guest.

The first episode is entitled The Pragmatics of Hope and Respect, and there are some great takeaways and insights in the 40 minutes or so. Anton is not only a leading SF practitioner and organisational consultant, he has a background in philosophy and trained with Luc Isabaert at the Korzybski Institute in Bruges, Belgium. And he’s organising the sold-out SOLWorld 2025 conference in Belgium in May 2025. (There is a waiting list if you don’t have a ticket yet.)

An SF ‘Approach’

Anton, Dion and Jason talk about how when working with individuals and teams (Anton has a lot of experience particularly with the latter), the context is very important. This includes the physical context, the room and space. Anton and his colleagues like to arrive an hour before the session and then start ‘renovating’ the space – moving the tables, looking for plants, putting on music. Anton makes sure he is ready before the group enters and arrives.

It all starts with the invitation – Anton always asks to help drafting the email (rather than just have the organisation send out their usual stuff) – he says it can make a huge difference. He wants to get people arriving in a good state, where they are ready to have new ideas and look at things (the future, the present and the past) in new ways. Being there and set up an hour beforehand allows us to approach them to get started.

Anton says that the people who come to his groups have often been working together for many years. This can be a challenge – it’s important to pay attention to how to help them meet in new ways. (Maybe they don’t like each other much for 20 years!) How can we surprise them – the old regulars - with their interactions together, even though they’ve been doing it for year and with many inevitable biases and so on.

I think this focus on helping people to see each other anew is a very interesting perspective. And it’s in the SF ‘approach’ – the way we approach them. And we do so in a quite distinctive way… Here are some thoughts about how we can do that.

Open

For me, this is a key starting point. Sometimes people come to us (or are even sent to us) with stories of how they are lacking, deficient, awkward, difficult and so on. While the people who tell these stories may think they are being helpful, our role is to set all that to one side and meet people anew ourselves as they appear on the day. SF starts from a not-knowing position – not-knowing about what the clients might want or be hoping to do, and certainly not-knowing about what they ‘ought’ to be doing. Of course, this can be a challenge sometimes – but it’s vital. If we are ill disposed to our clients before we start, then a great deal is already lost. There’s a skill to hearing bad things about people and then setting it aside, at least for the time we are at work.

Prepared (or at least ready)

There’s a useful tradition in the SF world about not knowing much about your clients before they show up. That’s a helpful way of not falling in to the traps of buying into all the stories about them. And of course this not-knowing way does not mean unprepared.

Making sure that the space is ready, we have what we need (I always like to have pen and paper to hand); if it’s a group then there may be pens and flip charts or cards, having the right number of chairs suitably laid out, making the environment clean and ready… This all shows care for our clients, that we are valuing out time together and that they are worth some basic consideration. (They may come into the room feeling like this has been lacking in the past.)

Anton offers the idea on the podcast that “it’s not about preparing the room, it’s about enjoying preparing the room”. I can empathise with this. You’re not doing it because you ‘should’, you’re doing it because you care for the people who are going to arrive shortly and you want them to be relaxed, surprised, even delighted that the space is clearly ready, and ready for THEM (not just any old stranger who walks in).

Connecting

Sometimes people say to me that SF is a ‘positive’ or ‘optimistic’ approach. While I am too polite to disagree with them face-to-face (most of the time), I think SF is better described as a disciplined approach where we are quietly confident in our clients’ capabilities. My friend and colleague Evan George from BRIEF in London wrote about ‘no need to be an optimist’ in one of his regular weekly Facebook reflections recently, and I think he hits the mark very well. This kind of connecting, listening, open stance is not down to what we see in front of us or not or not – it’s something we do. And it takes some skill and practice. Quoting his colleague Chris Iveson, Evan writes

‘you have to be able to take a very pragmatic position – a position that is nothing to do with optimism or belief or anything – it is just a very pragmatic decision that anybody can change – you have to believe that the person in front of you can do their life differently – that has to be the position you take, your basic assumption’.

And of course it’s not always easy to hold onto this position when things are really stuck and nothing seems to be happening. And yet we hold it because something might begin to happen in the next 10 minutes. As soon as that thought goes, we might as well pack up and go home.

In the podcast, Anton Stellamans compares this position with being a musician listening to the music going on around them. Is it a major or minor scale? How can we start to join in with it? And not just reflecting it but also offering space for something new.

Conclusions

At the end of the podcast, Anton quotes a French saying: “When you change the music, the dance will change”. Having approached people in an open, prepared and connecting way, perhaps they will be open to hearing some new music from others and of course themselves too? In terms of humane and effective organisations, this way of approaching people – particularly people who you want to work with – seems fundamental.

Dates and mates

The Toward Solutions podcast is very well worth subscribing to. The main page is

https://www.enactive.com.au/blog/104377-toward-solutions-the-pragmatics-of-hope

And it’s on Apple, Spotify and Amazon (and maybe elsewhere too)

The organisers of SF24, the annual global online festival of Solution Focus, are looking for more workshop presenters for the event on Friday 2 May 2025. Apply here. And if you simply want to join in, you can book a free ticket here.