Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) methods have been around for well over thirty years, and have become used in many fields including coaching, education, social work, healthcare and organisational change. This efficient and effective approach has remained somewhat unappreciated; the pragmatic ‘not-knowing’ stance of practitioners treating every client as an individual can seem odd to those accustomed to conventional diagnosis and treatment. How is one supposed to treat mental illness with an approach that appears to discuss neither ‘mental’ nor ‘illness’?

Mark McKergow reviews the development of SFBT from its origins in the 1950s through the landmark work of Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center, Milwaukee to more recent shifts in practice. He shows how this tradition has always been changing and continues to change. In this book he shows how a newly coherent form of SF practice has appeared in the 21st century based on ‘focused description development’. This offers both clarity to the practitioner and a new picture of how the practice works to build change by ‘stretching the world’ of the client.

This fresh take on SF work shows how practitioners can bridge the apparent gap between focusing on their clients (to the apparent exclusion of theory) and having a story about how it works. New ideas from enactive cognition show precisely how skilled attention to the client and their words can immediately open new possibilities for attention and action.

The book includes detailed session transcripts with commentary to show how these ideas appear in the nitty-gritty of practice. Practitioners from all fields will find fresh perspectives on why they do what they do, and how they might do it even better.

In this special online session, Mark will present why he thinks these latest developments are both important and necessary to recognise, and how next generation offers a great opportunity to engage a wider audience of professionals and practitioners. There will be plenty of opportunity for conversation and discussion, and the chance to chat with other SF folk from around the world.

More about the book (and the chance to buy it at 20% discount) at https://www.routledge.com/The-Next-Generation-of-Solution-Focused-Practice-Stretching-the-World-for/McKergow/p/book/9780367428839

Dr Mark McKergow is director at the Centre for Solutions Focus at Work in Edinburgh, Scotland. Mark has been involved in SF work for decades, both as a pioneer of SF in coaching and organisational settings and as a thought leader. He is the co-author of five books including The Solutions Focus (with Paul Z Jackson), Solutions Focus Working (with Jenny Clarke) and Host: Six new roles of engagement for teams, organisations, communities and movements (with Helen Bailey). His most recent book is Hosting Generative Change (BMI, 2020). Mark sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Solution Focused Practice and the Journal of Systemic Therapies, and has written dozens of articles over the years. He was involved in founding the SOLWorld community of organisational SF practitioners, and sits on the UKASFP accreditation review panel. Mark calls himself a ‘recovering physicist’ and plays jazz clarinet and saxophone.