I is for Inviting (not intruding)

BRIEF has long taken the view that the Solution Focused approach can usefully be thought of as a craft, and as with any craft it is practice that makes perfect, or if not perfect at least more fluent and flexible. And so it is hardly surprising that on our training programmes there are lots of exercises, lots of opportunities to try out this very particular, perhaps rather unusual, form of talking. When participants emerge from these exercises and share their experiences with the whole group it is not unusual for the ‘conversation leaders’ to express concern that the process may have felt intrusive, that they were asking too many questions, often acknowledging that it felt uncomfortable for them. It is equally common for the ‘conversation responder’ to say that the conversation felt in no way intrusive, indeed often commenting that they had enjoyed the process and sometimes even adding that they had found the short talk somewhat surprisingly useful. This clear and obvious discrepancy, this apparent gulf between the ‘leader’ and the ‘responder’ experience, can perhaps be explained by focusing on the question of worker’s ‘intention’.

Questions in the worlds of psychology, psychiatry and even psychotherapy have generally been thought of as vehicles towards understanding, serving the worker in developing an understanding of the client, an understanding of ‘what is going on’ or perhaps ‘what is REALLY going on’. Workers are trying to figure their clients out, trying to understand them and the nature of the predicaments within which these clients find themselves. However in Solution Focused Practice there is no interest in understanding anything about the client, indeed there may even be some scepticism about the possibility of ever REALLY understanding what is REALLY going on. Indeed it could be argued that the Solution Focused practitioner is not actually interested in the client. Now let me hastily add that of course Solution Focused practitioners tend to be nice and kind people, just like the practitioners of other approaches, and of course we want the best for our clients and are willing to work hard such that clients achieve what they want, but that is not the same as being interested in the details of the client’s life. It is not the worker’s job to be interested. Indeed to be interested might actually be rather intrusive, nosey perhaps, even, at its worst, voyeuristic. The worker’s responsibility when  talking with people is to ask questions which invite clients into very specific ways of describing their lives, ways of describing that are associated with clients making changes. So when the worker asks a question and the client answers that question the worker is not listening for the content of the response, the worker is listening for ‘hooks’, for ‘opportunities’ as Simon and Taylor say (Simon and Taylor, 2024); we are listening for words to which we can connect our next question – the specific content is secondary. Another way of putting this is to argue that the work is going on in the client – all the worker does is to ask, hopefully good, questions. The worker’s intention therefore is never to intrude, never to seek even to understand, merely to invite. As Steve de Shazer summarises “Questions, once thought of as functioning primarily to gather information, have been re-thought as interventions” (de Shazer, 1994, p 96).

So in Solution Focused Practice questions are best thought of as invitations, invitations to a particular way of describing and if we are indeed going to think about questions in these terms then it might be worth spending a moment considering the way that that invitations work. Under what conditions do people accept an invitation? Surely an invitation is accepted when it is attractive, interesting and relevant. If an invitation ‘fails’ in relation to any one of these criteria then it is likely that it will not be accepted, and if that is the case then the worker will turn their gaze back onto their own practice and search for a more fitting question. A Solution Focused conversation is thus a partnership and the client’s response will invariably shape the next question; the client is being taken account of at every point. Indeed it is not unusual to say to clients ‘there is no need for you to answer any question that you would prefer not to answer – you are in charge!’.

So when we put together the worker’s intent, the idea of questions as invitations, and the focus on partnership it is perhaps not surprising that people do not experience Solution Focused questions as intrusive. This non-intrusiveness seems to be to be confirmed by one further thought. Silent sessions could, theoretically, work perfectly well. Even were the client to say nothing out loud, were the worker to keep asking questions and the client were to answer the questions ‘internally’ the conversation, as it were, would be likely to make a difference. As our friend Bill O’Hanlon was wont to say, we ‘have no right to go sight-seeing in people’s lives’ and there is no ‘sight-seeing’ in Solution Focused Practice.

de Shazer, Steve (1994) Words were Originally Magic. New York: Norton.
Simon, Joel., Taylor, Lance. (2024) Opportunities in Solution-Focused Interviewing: Clients’ Key Words and Therapists’ Responses. New York: Routledge

Evan George
London
21^st January 2024 and re-written 1^st December 2024