‘More than half the effect is placebo: As a coach you can just hum along’. Well yes, and the other half is important too - the client’s attitude, the coach’s method, the context, for example.
 
At this year's Wales Coaching conference, Eric de Haan spoke about what we know about what makes an impact in coaching. He was presenting headlines from the quantitative research that finds patterns in data - usually after the coaching sessions. It’s the sort of research that sees the coaching work as a lab experiment, ideally comparing clients with control groups of non-clients.
 
Most of what we can say about coaching research is derived from the more extensive research on therapy. 

​When was the last time you did something well and greeted it with a Success Analysis? 
 
Here’s how to do a Success Analysis when you have a team with accomplishments to its name.
 
Gather everyone around, and share stories of when this success happens. The stories will ideally touch upon:

• What prompts it?
• What’s each contributor doing?
• What conditions are helping to maintain this success?

 
Then task the team to work together to generate a list of 10 (home grown) tips you could give to a new member of the team so that they will also know how to do this.
 
We tend to over-rate how much we can learn from mistakes and failures - mostly, the learning consists of ‘Don’t do that again'.

​But the real gold of knowing what to do (instead of the mistaken behaviour) is only found when we discover what works. Then we can analyse and re-apply it.

The problem might be hard, but the solution can be easy. That’s a central insight of a solutions-focused approach. If we get too tangled up in thinking about the problem, analysing it and talking about it, we might miss the simplicity of doing something different – which may well be unrelated to the problem in any obvious way, yet improve things quickly. A nice example here, in this Guardian Weekend column by Oliver Burkeman.
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​Here are 6 thoughts about goals:

1. It’s unethical to hold people to goals that they have set, because much of what happens after you set a goal is unpredictable.
2. Watch out for when goals turn counter-productive. Like prescription drugs, they can have unwanted side-effects.
3. It’s important to give yourself permission not to stick to goals when circumstances change and you need your wits about you to deal with uncertainty.
4. Perhaps if goals are modest and short-term, they will not be so delusional. 
5. A deadline by which you have to produce a piece of work can be very productive. I write here as a trained journalist. 
6. If you work with others, instead of setting goals ask them what they would like to achieve. Then when you meet again, ask them what progress they have made.​

In SF coaching sessions, we start by asking what the client wants. That’s the plan, and that’s as far as the plan goes. The rest depends upon the answer you get and whatever is needed to get a more detailed description of what’s wanted, descriptions of resources and descriptions of progress.
 
And the value of that? These questions will produce change. And they will keep you as the coach in the moment and on your toes.