Uk

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.

Michael Graham is a solicitor and senior leader with over 35 years’ experience in local government legal services. He has led large legal and governance teams across multiple councils, at his most recent substantive role, heading a department of 130 staff with a combined budget of over £10 million. Alongside his legal career he holds an MBA from Henley Business School and has long been interested in leadership development as a lever for organisational change.

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.

We regret that Owen passed away in January 2026 after an illness. He was a great user of the SF Approach in his later work as a careers adviser. He was also an avid supporter of SFiO events and always had insights to share, based on his extensive reading. We shall miss him. 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 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.

Rob Rave works as a team and executive coach and facilitator. Working in a top 4 global professional service firm Rob provides 1 :1 executive coaching for Executive Directors and Partners on how to effectively transition into new roles and to deliver step changes in performance (and relationships) He also has worked with teams /individuals from Vodafone , Ernst and Young , Grant Thornton, Travis Perkins, Wickes, Eddisons at Yahoo , Cushman Wakefield, Capital Hospitals Trust. Thermofisher Scientific, Phardia , Vision Capital , Change Capital, Hera Capital and Lion Capital.

I’ve been using SF since 1993, training managers and coaches in SF since 2005, mainly with Mark McKergow and Jenny Clarke’s SFWork, and Kirsten Dierolf’s Solutions Academy. I’ve created a number of SF models, including iFLOW Time Mastery, RADAR anti-procrastination, MAGIC negotiation, R4 Delegation, Brief Mindfulness stress reduction/focus enhancement and the ORA solution focus lens. My current focus is on applying SF to the world of Agile software development and Agile Transformation. In this world I’ve changed my name (back) to Roy Marriott – but many of you know me by my Buddhist name of Shakya Kumara.