Coaching practices for Solution Focused Scaling
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Solution Focused Scaling, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- When someone asks how I’m doing I just say "okay" or "overwhelmed" and it carries no real information
- We keep piling new initiatives on top of old ones we’ve outgrown but never stopped, so the team is overloaded and there’s no room to start anything fresh
- It feels like this is just how I am
- I’m forever fiddling with the surface
- I keep pouring effort straight at the spot where the problem shows up, grinding away for results that barely budge
Practices that may help
- Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
Solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT), developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, directs attention to what already works — client strengths, past successes, and desired futures — rather than to analyzing problems. Meta-analyses report small-to-moderate positive effects across a range of presenting issues, with particular strength in behavioral problems and depression in adult populations. - Scaling Questions
Use a 0–10 scale to make progress visible, identify what’s working, and define one small next step.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works - Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement
Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.
The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus - Exception Finding: When Is the Problem Already Less Severe?
Identify times when the problem was absent or less severe — these are evidence that solutions already exist.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works - The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits (updated in Scaling Up) distill John D. Rockefeller’s management practices into a system of priorities, data, and meeting rhythms that keep growing companies focused and coordinated. The framework is practitioner-developed and widely used in scale-up companies; the evidence base is primarily case-study and clinical rather than controlled trial. - Identify high-leverage points rather than effort-intensive low-leverage ones
Most productivity interventions target low-leverage points; find the structural places where small changes have large effects.
Systems Thinking for Personal Productivity - Find the high-leverage intervention point
Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
Systems Thinking - Change the metric you’re optimizing
Shift which outcome you measure and the problem often dissolves or transforms entirely.
Problem Reframing: Solving the Right Problem First - Rank intervention options by structural depth before choosing
Before deciding where to intervene, map the options from "change a number" to "change the paradigm."
Leverage Points - Run a daily team huddle
Hold a brief daily standup to sync on what’s happening and surface stuck points before they become crises.
The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
Related concerns
- Scale Thinking Innovation
Scope insensitivity is the tendency to react with nearly the same emotional intensity to problems of vastly different scale — to care about 2,000 birds in danger nearly as much as 200,000 birds. Identified by Kahneman and colleagues, it is one of the clearest demonstrations that moral and decision-relevant emotions respond to the image of a problem, not its magnitude. The bias has strong empirical support and has important implications for charitable giving, risk assessment, and resource allocation.
- High Leverage Change
Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
Find the high-leverage intervention point
- High Leverage Intervention
Look for the structural change that produces large effects for small effort.
- Highest Leverage Action
Once you know your high-leverage 20%, invest more time and energy there — not less.
Multiply time and resource investment in the vital few
- Highest Leverage Change
Leverage points are places in a system where a small change can produce large shifts in behavior. Donella Meadows ranked them by structural depth in her widely cited 1999 paper: numbers and parameters are low-leverage; feedback loops, goals, and the rules of the system are medium-leverage; and the paradigm from which the system arises is highest-leverage of all. The counterintuitive finding is that people’s intuition about leverage is often backwards.
- How To Scale A Company
Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits (updated in Scaling Up) distill John D. Rockefeller’s management practices into a system of priorities, data, and meeting rhythms that keep growing companies focused and coordinated. The framework is practitioner-developed and widely used in scale-up companies; the evidence base is primarily case-study and clinical rather than controlled trial.
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