Not every solution begins with the why

A scene repeats itself regularly in my coaching sessions, whether the person across from me is an emerging leader or a managing director. The client describes a behaviour that bothers them. They get loud too quickly in meetings. They put off uncomfortable conversations. They cannot switch off. Almost always the next sentence carries the same move. "I'd like to understand why I do this." The gaze turns backwards, into childhood, into earlier roles, in search of the one cause that explains everything.

The wish makes sense. We are practised at looking for causes. In technical and commercial contexts this is a strength. Whoever knows the cause of a fault can put it right. We carry this logic over to ourselves and assume that we can change a behaviour only once we have seen through its origin. Understanding appears as a precursor to change, as though without the diagnosis we had no access to the treatment.

What de Shazer observed

This is exactly where an observation is worth a look, one that unsettles at first. Steven de Shazer, who in the late 1970s founded solution-focused brief therapy with Insoo Kim Berg at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, noticed something that runs against the familiar cause-and-effect logic. The route to a solution need not run through the cause of the problem. The two are more loosely linked than we assume. A pattern can change without its origin being fully understood.

De Shazer and Berg had noticed in their work that a large part of conventional conversations went into analysing symptoms, problems and their origins, while the actual change often arose somewhere else entirely, in the moment when clients began to speak about a possible desired state and about exceptions that were already present. Out of this observation came one of their best-known lines: problem talk creates problems, solution talk creates solutions. Attention, as they saw it, helps to shape the outcome. Whoever dwells long enough in the cause deepens the groove in which the problem runs.

Causes are therefore not meaningless. The explanation is still rarely the lever we take it for. It satisfies a need for order. Whether it brings about the change we want is a separate question.

The question that turns the view forward

I take the wish for an explanation seriously, then, without following it straight away. Before we look into the past together, I ask a question that examines the wish itself. "Suppose you found the explanation you are looking for. What would then become possible?"

The question borrows the hypothetical "suppose" from the solution-focused tradition, where it usually paints a distant miracle, and turns it onto the explanation the client is seeking. It compels nothing. It only opens a space behind the actual concern.

The answers are almost always telling. A client recently said: "Then I could stay calmer." That sentence already holds the real goal. What was sought was the calm, and the explanation was only the path on which they hoped to find it. My follow-up question is then a simple one. "Shall we work on the calm right away?"

The answer is usually yes. In the moment the real goal becomes visible, the detour through the cause loses its urgency. The client notices for themselves that they do not first have to explain the calm in order to work on it.

When the answer is no after all

Sometimes a no comes. The client senses that understanding genuinely matters to them and does not want to skip it. I respect that objection, because it carries information. In that case I set out de Shazer's insight openly: that cause and solution are less firmly tied together than it feels, and that we need not block the work on change with an explanation that is still outstanding. Often this knowledge is enough to turn the search for causes from a condition into a companion. We are allowed to want to understand and to act at the same time.

If the wish for the reason persists even then, I follow it for a stretch, while taking care that we do not get stuck in it. The touchstone is always the same question. Does the understanding bring us closer to what is meant to become possible, or does it take the place of the movement towards it?

Perhaps the real question in coaching therefore lies less often with "Why did I become this way?" and more often with "What do I want to be able to do, and what stands in my way today?" The first question can occupy a lifetime. The second can be answered, and usually sooner than the wish for an explanation suggests.