Using Solution Focused Brief Therapy will not even impress your colleagues. Case conferences can be an arena within which the professional ‘pecking order’ or hierarchy of esteem can be negotiated. The worker whose approach allows for the possibility of hypothesising can develop an impressive formulation which will, in all likelihood, relate the presenting problems to underlying issues of causation developing a strikingly consistent new ‘narrative’ of explanation from the often limited facts available. Examples of this are commonplace, the client’s case history being presented to the conference and one of the group responding with “I wonder if this client’s father wasn’t a sailor?” or “I wonder whether (the client) wasn’t separated from her
