V is for ‘visualisation’: a very brief note.

The Solution Focused approach is challenging for people coming to it new and with experience of other approaches. The idea that the worker does not need to know what the client thinks that the problem might be, the idea that at the heart of the approach is a maximising of ‘Solution talk’, that the worker resists the urge to develop theories about causation and so on and so on can be difficult. Solution Focus seems to deprive people, or that is how it can feel, of the foundations upon which their practice and sense of knowing their way about are based. And in such circumstances what all of us tend to do is to look for familiarity, for things that we can recognise. And so observing us negotiating the ‘Best hopes’ (George et al., 1999) people not infrequently equate the process with ‘goal-setting’ and I have to explain the difference, why ‘goal’ seems an unhelpful concept to us at BRIEF. And when people listen to or observe a Solution Focused worker facilitating the description of the ‘preferred future’ (Ratner et al., 2012), the description of the client’s life as transformed by the presence of the ‘best hopes’, they reach out for something familiar and they find ‘visualisation’. However yet again the point of stability that they are searching for merely betrays them, the Solution Focused practitioner does not invite clients to visualise. So what is the difference?

The BRIEF team started reading de Shazer’s writings, obsessively it may be said, in 1987 and we started inviting him (and Insoo Kim Berg) to the UK in 1990. Naturally we were interested in the techniques that the Milwaukee team were developing and that he and Insoo demonstrated and yet at another level we took from our contact with them a number of broader concepts that were at the heart of the way that our ‘take’ on SFBT developed. From Steve we took an interest in simplicity and in minimalism, what is the simplest and most minimal way of approaching our work that fits nonetheless with a good outcome, whilst from Insoo came the idea that we should ‘aspire to leave no footprints in the client’s life’. Indeed our experience of our work over the past 30 or so years has been learning to do with less, straightening the line as we called it (George, 2016) . So how does all this fit with ‘visualisation’?

Solution Focused workers do indeed invite clients to describe their ‘best hopes transformed’ lives in detail, often taking 35 minutes or more in a first meeting asking preferred future focused questions and it certainly appears to be the case that detailed description is associated with change. But when so doing it never occurs to me that I am inviting the client to ‘visualise’. To hold the concept of visualisation is to add complexity, to add a concept which is not necessary. It is not, it seems to me, the worker’s business to pre-determine what should be going on in the client, for the client, as they answer our preferred future questions. Who knows what they might be thinking about, what images may or may not be developing during our conversation. My job is not to develop intra-psychic theories, indeed is not to develop theories of why change is happening, it is merely and simply and minimally to ask the next question and to try my best to ensure that it is a fitting question, one that the client is able to answer.

George, E., Iveson, C. and Ratner, H. (1990; Revised and expanded Edition 1999) Problem to Solution: Brief Therapy with Individuals and Families. London: BT Press
George, Evan. (2016) https://www.brief.org.uk/blog/2016/02/02/straightening-the-line   
Ratner, H., George, E., Iveson, C.  (2012) Solution Focused Brief Therapy: 100 Key Ideas and Techniques.  London: Routledge   

Evan George
London
27^th April 2025