In this wide-ranging and quietly moving episode, we sit down with Dr Gil Greene, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University's College of Social Work, after a thirty-eight-and-a-half-year academic career, and one of the field's most dedicated (and best-read) students of Solution Focus.
Gil found his way to the approach the long way round: starting in psychiatric social work at a Veterans Administration hospital in Nashville, through transactional analysis and Gestalt therapy, into the work of Milton Erickson and the Mental Research Institute, and eventually to Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg's work in Milwaukee. Along the way he built one of the largest personal libraries of Solution Focused material anywhere, and has spent decades writing, teaching, and researching the approach from every angle.
In this conversation we explore:
- How Gil discovered Solution Focus through the Mental Research Institute lineage, and why the approach "sold itself" once he saw the results
- The neuroscience of change: Hebb's principle, neurons that fire together wire together, and why simply asking someone to imagine a different future is a genuinely creative act
- Why we can never unilaterally empower a client, and what a truly collaborative, co-created conversation looks like instead
- Gil's recent work connecting Solution Focus to patient activation and resource activation research in healthcare settings
- The simplest and most powerful lesson from nearly fifty years of practice: go slow
This is a conversation that moves from history to neuroscience to the kind of hard-won, practical wisdom that only comes from decades in the room with people. Whether you are brand new to Solution Focus or have been practicing for years, there is something here worth sitting with.
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Show Notes Resources
Gil's Books
Coaching for Person-Centred Healthcare: A Solution-Focused Approach to Collaborative Care by Elaine Cook, Gilbert J. Greene, and Joanne Maxwell (Routledge, 2024)
Routledge: routledge.com/Coaching-for-Person-Centred-Healthcare-A-Solution-Focused-Approach-to-Collaborative-Care/Cook-Greene-Maxwell/p/book/9781032539560
Solution-Oriented Social Work Practice: An Integrative Approach to Working with Client Strengths by Gilbert J. Greene and Mo Yee Lee (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Oxford University Press: global.oup.com/ushe/product/solution-oriented-social-work-practice-9780195162622
Integrative Family and Systems Treatment: A Strengths-Based Common Factors Approach (Oxford University Press), co-developed by Gil Greene with Mo Yee Lee and colleagues
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