SF Activities, Tools & Methods

SF activities can be seen as examples of good practice in consulting and coaching. They can show us ways to apply sf principles and ideas to challenging situations in workshops and trainings. And our experience shows, that sf activities can translate our work from rather hard and stressful to rather light and successful. You will find examples for this in this interview.Clarke-Introduction.pdf

So talking about activities could help us to simplify and facilitate our working situations – and lead to more effectiveness and satisfaction with the clients. The SOLWorld-community with its inherent spirit of sharing has from its very beginnings focused on the exchange of experience. So it was about time to document the state of the art by compiling a collection of useful activities in a book.

Solutionsbooks has just published this collection as “57 sf activities for facilitators and consultants – Putting SF into action” and at the same time we have a German version with the title of “Solution Tools” published by managerSeminare. About 50 experienced sf practitioners from all over the world have contributed to this book, describing activities in their proper context and with personal comments.

As a book always is static this group could continue and update our knowledge about good activities. So as a member of this group you could
- comment on experiences you made with certain activities: what worked for you and your clients, what surprised you and what did you learn from it?
- add useful variations, simplifications or upgrades that you and your clients found while exploring certain activities,
- add new ideas you created and make first contributions to volume 2 of the activities book (you can download soon a template for the descriptions, that will make it easier to read and write).

And I would like to start a discussion on how we apply sf principles in our work – how far can we go in solutionising our toolbox, what else do we need to stay on track and where might be limits to convert traditional methods into sf activities. I will ask my co-editor Jenny Clarke to make an article available for download about “How do you add SF to your toolkit?” that I wrote together with Kirsten Dierolf that might be provocative enough to start this discussion.

Tools and methods are nothing without the foundation in a solid and proven approach. And - as Mathias Varga puts it “without the continuation and development of new forms of practice these foundations would stay empty like thoughts without contents”. So my best hopes are, that this discussion group could contribute to preserve the power and inner unity of our approach.

Peter Röhrig
Bonn, 30 May 2008