Jeff Matthews is a coach and facilitator with his own consultancy company, The Madison Group. He has been practising as a coach for nearly 20 years across a very wide range of UK and European organisations and sectors from banks to retail, from local authorities to health and charities. He styles himself as a “tax deductible excuse for a great conversation”. His particular interests at the moment, are applying SF to the challenging world of performance coaching and appraisals and also in developing an integrated model of coaching.
Jenny Clarke is the co-Director of the Centre for Solutions Focus at Work (sfwork). Following a long career in the energy industry she has spent the last 15 years as an independent facilitator and coach. She works with large organisations, groups and individuals adapting to change and as a personal coach to managers and directors. She loves travelling and has worked in both hemispheres and east and west of the Greenwich Meridian.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR Joe Lettieri and Ayse Adil founded Family Based Solutions in 2012 after they came across a family experiencing child to parent abuse. They have since expanded their services to include family domestic abuse recovery and working with adult offenders of domestic abuse.
In their workshop they invite four parents who been through the service to discuss their experience of solution focus coaching. The parents all named after fictional characters were asked to be very honest about the approach and explored not only what went well but also what could be better.
John Brooker has over thirty years experience of collaborating, facilitating collaboration and training people to become better collaborators and leaders.
He joined Visa International as an ATM technician in 1985, becoming a Senior Vice President in 1996. John collaborated with banks and colleagues internationally to develop Visa’s ATM network in EMEA, conceive and run a Visa education business for banks in EMEA, pioneer payments on the Internet and consolidate technical support in to a single call centre, for the banks in the EU region.
John is an experienced and reputable solution-focused practitioner who again demonstrated in this piece of work his mastery of the art of solutions focus. Throughout this work he showecased an sf teaching and learning philosophy and “walked the talk“ with his clients. In a difficult situation he showed great awareness of the needs of the participants and adapted to the challenge by becoming a “tourist“ in their working environment and building a solid platform with them. His non-defensive and co-operative stance won them over. He succeeded in co-constructing the training content with them and involved the participants as co-trainers with great success.(Stanus Cloete)
Dr Mark McKergow is co-director of sfwork – The Centre for Solutions Focus at Work, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He is an international consultant, speaker and author. Many people around the world have been inspired by his work in Solutions Focus – presented wth his inimitable blend of scientific rigour and performance pizzazz. Mark was instrumental in starting the SOLWorld network of organisational SF practitioners in 2002. He is a reviewed SFiO contributor and supervises coaches and SF practitioners.
Morgan Lewis is a Sports Coach who uses SF in grassroots sport and with one professional football club. He also uses SF as a telephone volunteer with a Liverpool-based mental health service.
Natasha is the Deputy Manager and Community Wellbeing Lead for Learning Space, a children and young people’s mental health charity based in Surrey, England. She has twenty years of experience in youth and community work and completed her MA in Youth and Community Studies in 2016. She completed her advanced certificate in SF with BRIEF in 2022 and was recently accredited by the UKASFP as an accredited SF practitioner. Natasha is passionate about bringing together SF and participation to co-produce innovative early help and mental health services, putting the child’s voice, young person and family at the centre.
“Owen Charnley has over 35 years in the military, financial and training environments.
All of these roles had responsibilities for training, coaching, mentoring and facilitation.
After spending 22 years in the Royal Air Force and reaching a Non-Commissioned Officer rank, he then went into the financial services industry as an Independent Financial Adviser. In his last role Owen gave careers advice. In this role he was also responsible for the training of other careers advisers.
After successful careers in journalism for Thomsons and as a comedy producer for BBC Radio, I have been a trainer, facilitator, keynote speaker, author and consultant.
SF has been central to my work for many years. The concepts of SFBT were so inspiring that they not only informed my own practice, but I was determined to promote them to the wider world. This has included writing three books about SF: The Solutions Focus, co-authored with Mark McKergow, and Positively Speaking and The Management Pocketbook of Resilience, co-authored with Janine Waldman.