Regular readers will know that I am a sucker for acronyms – although I don’t always love them.  This one, I particularly like, and it comes from the heart of a change management and coaching process, called Solution Focus.

What the authors, Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow, offer is a change of focus from the problem to the solution.  A nice shift in perspective and one that chimes well with another interesting change management methodology, Appreciative Inquiry (AI).

SIMPLE

The acronym encompasses the authors’ attitudes nicely:

Solutions
– not problems

Inbetween
– the interaction between people is where to look

Make use of what’s there
– very much the AI approach

Possibilities
– look in the past, present and future

Language
– keep it simple (and ‘clean’?)

Every case is different
– so don’t try stock solutions

The Solution Focus

In an exceptional book, the authors take us through a set of tools that will help you move from the present towards a future you design following these six principles.  Another feature of the book is its introduction of the authors’ own coaching model, OSKAR Model.  This makes a feature of the importance of getting a perspective on the scale of the problem, which the GROW and its many variants do not explicitly include (although Sir John Whitmore certainly uses the principle.  Oskar was one of my ‘infinite number of coaching acronyms’ in an earlier blog.

Outcome
Scaling
Know How
Application
Review

So here’s the deal

If you are interested in either coaching or the management of change, and you are not familiar with The Solution Focus, it is a worthwhile read.  The authors offer a distinctive and insightful take on the change process at a personal and group level.