Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT) was developed by Steve de Shazer (1940-2005), and Insoo Kim Berg (1934-2007) in collaboration with their colleagues at the Milwaukee Brief Family Therapy Center beginning in the late 1970s. As the name suggests, SFT is future-focused, goal-directed, and focuses on solutions, rather than on the problems that brings clients to seek therapy.
Solution-Focused Therapy is a short-term goal-focused evidence-based therapeutic approach, which incorporates positive psychology principles and practices, and which helps clients change by constructing solutions rather than focusing on problems. In the most basic sense, SFT is a hope friendly, positive emotion eliciting, future-oriented vehicle for formulating, motivating, achieving, and sustaining desired behavioral change. Solution-focused therapy places focus on a person's present and future circumstances and goals rather than past experiences. In this goal-oriented therapy, the symptoms or issues bringing a person to therapy are typically not targeted.
Since that early development, SFT has not only become one of the leading schools of brief therapy, it has become a major influence in such diverse fields as business, social policy, education, criminal justice services, and child welfare. Described as a practical, goal-driven model, a hallmark of SFT is its emphasis on clear, concise, realistic goal negotiations.
SFT has continued to grow in popularity, both for its usefulness and its brevity, and is currently one of the leading schools of psychotherapy in the world.