Evan George is a co-owner of BRIEF. He set up BRIEF in 1989 with Chris Iveson and Harvey Ratner and they have worked together ever since.
Their core interest has been not just the solution focused approach itself but also the remarkable differences that the application of the approach can make to people’s lives, to organisations, to performance, to well-being, to energy and to creativity in teams. And all of this achieved within strikingly short time-spans.
Gill is the manager of Learning Space, a children and young people’s mental health charity based in Surrey, England.
She is a trained secondary school teacher with a background in special educational needs.
Gill achieved her MA in Emotional Factors in Learning and Teaching at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic.
She is one of the founding members of the Learning Space team and has been using solution-focused approaches to support children, young people and families since the beginning of the charity in 1997.
Greg has been using the Solution Focused approach for over ten years now with a particular focus on family work.
He is currently the Training Team lead in the D-BIT service within Essex Social Care, where he helps to keep families together where it is safe and appropriate to do so.
Greg is a published author, and he is also a co-founder of Solution Focused Possibilities where he provides sessions, supervision, training, etc. Greg has a passion for supporting others to develop their practice to a high standard, which has led to him being the co-lead for UKASFP Accreditation.
Guy Shennan is an independent solution-focused therapist, coach and trainer who has used the solution-focused approach for nearly 30 years. He is based in London, England, where he worked with BRIEF between 2004 and 2010. He created and co-led BRIEF’s Diploma in Solution-Focused Practice, which began in 2005.
Guy trained originally as a social worker and was the Chair of the British Association of Social Workers from 2014 to 2018. In 2018, Guy co-founded the Solution-Focused Collective to explore ways of using solution-focused ideas and practices for social change.
I have two major passions in business:
coaching, training and developing people to achieve their true potential excellence in dealing with people, both internally and externally, is the way to deliver sustainable increases in results
Janine has over 20 years’ experience in executive coaching and training. Having previously held senior HR positions in the UK and New Zealand, she also has a wealth of expertise in organisational development and change management.
Her speciality is bringing about positive change and implementing constructive ways of working. She is a frequent conference presenter, contributes to management journals and has co-authored two books.
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.