Solution Focused and Narrative Coaching Ethics

Years ago, I came across a lovely exercise at a conference. People were asked to visualize (in as much detail and as much meditative state as they wished) their own country; a country in which everything was exactly as they would like it. The journey started approaching this country: What is the landscape like? What are the borders like? How is immigration? Entering the country: What are the settlements like? What is nature like? What are the people like? Observing the people: What is celebrated? How do people make sure to live together well? What are daily interactions like? What are music and art like?

After imagining their own country, participants shared with another person and listened to the description of their story. People were asked simply to listen and observe, but not to judge. In a second step, they were asked to enter the country of the other person “with touristic curiosity and a benevolent eye”: What would they love about this country? What would they have difficulties with? What would be ok to live with and what could they only stand for a few weeks?

This exercise invited people to a sense of awe and wonder regarding what different people hold dear. They were asked to enter a stance of a “participating observer”. They were not asked to judge or categorize the country of the other person – the task was only to observe the description and their own responses to the description. The description of “my own country” invited vulnerability in a safe space created by the instructions: no judgment, no categorization or comparison – just participating curiosity.

“Participating curiosity” is at the core of Solution Focused and Narrative Coaching Ethics. Of course, the other global ethical standards of coaching of ICF, EMCC or AC also apply, but our view of the centrality of interaction and relationship rather than “neutral” observation, categorization, diagnostics is a differentiating factor.

Here are some of the ethical dangers of stepping out of participation:

Privilege raises its ugly head

When one person “observes” another person “neutrally” (of course, we know this is not possible) and this person is “the coach”, it is easy to fall into the trap of privileging the coach’s point of view. The coach somehow gets a stronger say in what reality is like than the client. This can be very subtle through slightly suggestive questions like: “You were crossing your arms as you said this – what does that mean?” In this question, the coach’s observation can give relevance to topics that the client did not want to discuss. A more ethical and interactional way might be: “I am noticing that you were crossing your arms when you said this – is this relevant in any way?” When the coach engages in “diagnoses”, the subtlety appears: “You are an ENTP and therefore…” clearly sets the coach and their interpretation of the client through a tool as a privileged describer of “what really is”.

Solution Focused and Narrative Coaching Ethics would frown on this. Having a relationship at eye level in which both people, the coach and the client, have equal rights to the descriptions of their realities is a very important factor.

There are no human objects

When we forget that coaching is a co-constructed conversation, we can fall into the trap of treating human beings as objects. Narrative and Solution Focused Coaching are both social-constructionist approaches in which relationships are significant rather than “individuals”. In a coaching relationship, the coach is “decentered yet influential”. The influence of the coach comes from their skill of inviting certain conversations rather than others.

The client is centered in the conversation – this means that the conversation is centered around what the client wants to talk about (and not around the stories and insights of the coach, for example). The coach, however, is still fully there as an interacting, participating human being. The skill of the coach is to invite conversations that enable the client to tell their stories in ways that make them stronger: conversations about hope, preferred futures, relationships, preferred identities, resources etc.

We fundamentally object to treating human beings as the object of our analysis. It is simply not appropriate. We have seen in the past where this may lead to and I, personally, feel very strongly about “never again”.

Reflections on the relationship are more generative

Taking the relationship between coach and client as the relevant unit also allows for more generative reflections than reflections on our “neutral” observations. A coach who reflects on the relationship between them and their clients moves beyond the space of “right” and “wrong”. The question is not whether their observations and analyses are “correct” and how to get better at them. The question becomes what the coach is bringing to the relationships that is helpful to their clients, how they show up in sessions, how they would like to show up, how they respond to clients etc. The onus of creating a positive coaching relationship is also not entirely on the shoulders of the coach: clients can give feedback on what works for them and coaches can learn and develop.

“Participating observation” is well known in anthropology and ethnography. These disciplines discovered that observing other peoples and categorizing them into the systems that the observers devised was an act of colonialism privileging the western academic view, robbing people of the right to tell their own stories in their own word and in the end, not fostering communication and understanding.

Imagine that in the exercise I described above the instructions would have been: Listen to the other person’s story and then analyze whether this is a task or relationship-oriented culture. The listener would not have engaged with the other person in a connecting way but rather separated themselves from the conversation.

I personally think that coaching has a lot to learn from anthropologists and ethnographers – these disciplines have thought about the ethics of human interactions for a long time. They take care to explore rather than privileging one viewpoint and interpretative system and they include the observer as a relevant factor in their research taking care that interactions are at eye-level.

If you would like to ponder questions like these with some likeminded people, why not join one of our free coaching meetups and exchanges?

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