The Degrees of (Epistemic) Pre-Structuring via Questions for Solution...

Institutionalized helping transpires between a help-seeking client and a helping professional and is mainly realized in and through (talk-in-)interaction. Its primary goals are to nurture personal growth and learning by addressing help-seekers’ physical, psychological, intellectual and/or emotional constitution and problems related with it in a series of helping conversations (Graf et al. 2014: 1). Pick and Scarvaglieri (2019: 28; see also 2022) conceptualize such verbal helping as the “helping professionals’ tackling of activities and/or stages of an activity in a goal-oriented process, which their help-seeking clients cannot carry out themselves (in the same quality, speed etc.) at this particular point in time.” This (partially) taking over of activities for the help seekers’ benefit involves the professionals’ pre-structuring of (action) plans, solutions, or problem-solving interventions. This is done via (epistemic) practices such as i) transmitting new or activating pre-existing knowledge, ii) introducing alternative patterns of thinking or behaviour, iii) providing assessment criteria for the help seeker to evaluate such alternatives; and/or iv) the professional’s weighing of alternatives in respect to their potential for goal attainment. As such, at the core of (professional) helping reside endemic epistemic asymmetries: the helping professionals’ expert knowledge in tackling and addressing potentially problematic aspects of solution generation, and the help seekers’ experiential knowledge regarding their concern and, indeed, what constitutes an adequate goal and solution for their own needs (Graf & Spranz-Fogasy 2018: 427f).

Verbal helping presents structural similarities across a variety of counselling formats (Pick 2017; Pick & Scarvaglieri 2019/2022). Yet, it differs in form and dimension, particularly on the level of pre-structuring which is undertaken by the helping professional, i.e., expert-oriented interactions include more pre-structuring than process-oriented helping does (Miller & Considine 2009). In work-related coaching, a process-oriented and client-centered format (Graf 2019: 2, 59), coaches are generally conceptualized as “change-process facilitators” (ibid.: 2), who, within a goal-oriented dialogue among equals (Jautz 2017), accompany and guide their clients on their path to finding individual solutions. In this talk, we investigated how a coach’s verbal helping is realized in solution-generating questions and to what degree coaches pre-structure clients’ solutions, i.e., alternative ways of thinking or acting therein. To do so, we analyzed how coaches’ (epistemic) practices (pre-)structure the formulation of solutions and interim results. We focus on authentic systemic/solution-oriented business coaching processes, which have been video-and audio-recorded and linguistically transcribed following cGAt conventions (Schmidt et al. 2016).