US, and eventually evolving around the world, including Europe. The title SFBT, and the specific steps involved in its practice, are attributed to husband and wife Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, two American social workers, and their team at The Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC) in Milwaukee, USA. Core members of this team were Jim Derks, Elam Nunnally, Marilyn LaCourt, and Eve Lipchik as well as students Pat Bielke, Dave Pakenham, John Walter, Jane Peller, Elam Nunnally, Alex Molnar, and Michele Weiner-Davis. Wallace Gingerich and Gale Miller joined a few years later as research assistants. In the 1970s, Steve de Shazer, his wife Insoo Kim Berg, and colleagues conducted Brief Family Therapy at Family Service of Milwaukee, a community agency, and installed one-way mirrors to observe sessions with clients to study which activities were most beneficial for the clients. The group of therapists used to meet in the home of Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg where a therapist saw clients pro bono in the living room while the others observed. Then they would discuss their thoughts together in a bedroom. In 1978, when the administration disallowed the one-way mirrors, Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg put together a team of practitioners and students and founded the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to continue their work. The result was the eventual development of SFBT. BFTC served as a research center to study, develop, and test techniques of psychotherapy to find those that are most efficient and effective with clients. The team at BFTC was very diverse, with practitioners with various backgrounds, educations, and academic disciplines. Besides mental health professionals, the team included educators, sociologists, linguists, and even engineers and philosophers. Steve de Shazer, the director of BFTC, referred to this group as a "therapeutic think tank" . Over time people began to request training, so BFTC became a research and training center. SFBT has its roots in Brief Family Therapy, a type of family therapy practiced at the Mental Research Institute (MRI). In the 1970s, Steve de Shazer, the primary creator of SFBT, studied the work done at MRI and founded BFTC to serve as "the MRI of the Midwest". John Weakland at MRI influenced Steve to develop simple techniques in brief goal-focused therapy, and at MRI, Steve de Shazer was introduced to the work of Milton Erickson Milton Erickson which ultimately had a significant