When I started working in corporate in 1994, one of the first three books I bought was Edward de Bono’s Thinking Course, the source of his Direct Attention Thinking Tools (DATT). Three decades on, it is still on my shelf, still underlined, and still one of the frameworks I reach for most, both personally and in my coaching work.

I have written before about what the ten tools are and how they work, so this article does not repeat that ground. What I want to explore here is narrower and, for a coaching practice, more useful: not what the tools are, but when and how to bring them into a live coaching conversation, and what changes for the client when you do.

Why direct attention matters in a coaching conversation

De Bono’s central claim was a simple one. Most unproductive thinking is not a failure of intelligence, it is a failure of attention. Left unguided, a mind under pressure runs the same loop it has always run: the same two or three angles, the same familiar objections, the same emotionally loaded framing. The tools do not add new intelligence to the thinking. They redirect where the attention goes, and that redirection is often enough to produce a genuinely new thought.

This maps closely onto what happens in a coaching session when a client is stuck. Stuckness is rarely a lack of insight. It is usually a narrow aperture, the client circling the same one or two considerations because that is where their attention has defaulted under pressure. A coach’s job in that moment is not to supply the missing insight. It is to widen where the client is looking. DATT gives a coach a set of deliberate, named places to point a client’s attention, one at a time, without the coach having to invent the direction from scratch in the moment.

That last point matters for how the tools sit inside a non-directive coaching stance. You are not telling the client what to think. You are naming a direction of attention (consequences, other people’s views, values, priorities) and asking the client to look there. The content stays entirely theirs.

Matching tools to coaching moments

In practice I have stopped thinking of DATT as a set of ten interchangeable tools and started thinking of it as a set of answers to specific moments that recur constantly in coaching work. Here is how I map them.

When a client cannot decide

The classic case is a client who has narrowed a decision down to a binary, and every conversation about it just restates the binary with more feeling behind it. Two tools open this up. Alternatives, Possibilities, Choices (APC) interrupts the binary itself, asking what other options exist that have not yet been named, including the option of doing nothing or doing something entirely different. Consequences and Sequels (C&S) then takes whatever options are on the table and asks the client to run the tape forward: what happens six months after this choice, and what happens after that. Binaries feel stuck because they are being held in the present tense. C&S moves the client’s attention into the future, where the decision usually looks different.

Five questions worth asking:

  • What options exist here that we have not named yet, including doing nothing?
  • If this were not a straight either/or, what might a third path look like?
  • If you made this choice, what would things look like in six months?
  • And what would follow after that, a year or two further on?
  • Which of these paths would you most regret not having tried?

When a client only sees one side

Some clients arrive certain. The plan is right, the colleague is wrong, the reorganisation is a mistake. Certainty is not itself a problem, but it often means the client has stopped looking. Plus, Minus, Interesting (PMI) is the direct corrective: before we go further, what is genuinely good about this, what is genuinely not good, and what is simply interesting or unexpected about it, regardless of whether it is good or bad. The “interesting” category does most of the work here. It gives the client permission to notice something without yet having to decide what it means, which lowers the defensiveness that a straight pros and cons list can trigger.

Other People’s Views (OPV) does something related but different. It does not ask the client to weigh the idea, it asks them to temporarily leave their own position and occupy someone else’s. Who else is affected by this, and what do they see that I do not? This is one of the tools I use most often in stakeholder and conflict coaching, because it gives a client stuck in their own frustration a concrete task rather than an abstract instruction to “see it from their side.”

Five questions worth asking:

  • What is genuinely good about this, even the part of it you do not want to admit?
  • What is genuinely not good about it?
  • What is simply interesting here, whether or not it turns out to be good or bad?
  • Who else is affected by this, and what might they see that you do not?
  • If you stood in their position for a moment, what would look different from there?

When a client is overwhelmed by the size of the issue

Some presenting problems arrive as a single dense block: “the team isn’t working”, “I’m behind on everything”, “the restructure is a mess”. Recognise, Analyse, Divide (RAD) breaks the block into its component parts and asks the client where the boundaries actually sit. Consider All Factors (CaF) then works alongside it, checking whether any relevant category, people, resources, timing, external constraints, has been left out of the picture entirely. Together they turn one unmanageable problem into several smaller, addressable ones, which is often the difference between a client leaving a session with an action and leaving with the same fog they arrived with.

Five questions worth asking:

  • Where does this problem actually begin and end?
  • If you had to name the separate pieces hiding inside this one big issue, what would they be?
  • Which of these pieces is genuinely yours to solve?
  • What factors, people, resources, or timing have we not yet considered?
  • If you had to name the one factor most likely to derail this, what would it be?

When a client has lost sight of why

Aims, Goals, Objectives (AGO) is a tool I bring in less often but more deliberately, usually with clients who are deep in the operational detail of a plan and have quietly lost contact with what the plan was for. Pulling attention back to the vision, and to why it matters to the client and to the people around them, frequently reframes a stalled tactical conversation into a much more energised one. It is also a natural fit alongside long horizon coaching questions, and I sometimes bring it into the same session as a values conversation.

Five questions worth asking:

  • What was this plan originally meant to achieve?
  • Why did this matter to you when you first set out on it?
  • What did success look like before the detail took over?
  • Who else cares about this outcome, and why does it matter to them?
  • If you reconnected with that original aim right now, what would you do differently today?

When there is a clash of values

Key Values Involved (KVA) is the tool for the moment a client says some version of “I know what I should do but it doesn’t feel right.” That gap between the sensible answer and the felt resistance is nearly always a values conflict sitting underneath the practical decision. Asking directly what matters to the client here, and why, and how that sits against what matters to the other people involved, tends to surface the real obstacle, which is rarely the one the client opened the session with.

Five questions worth asking:

  • What matters to you most in this decision?
  • What would you be giving up if you took the sensible, obvious option?
  • Whose values are actually in tension with yours here?
  • Where do these values genuinely conflict, and where do they actually overlap?
  • If both values had to be honoured, what would that look like in practice?

When it is time to move from talk to action

First Important Priorities (FIP) and Design, Outcome, Channels, Action (DOCA) belong at the close of a working session rather than in the middle of one. FIP asks the client to sequence what has come up: of everything named, what actually needs to happen first. DOCA is the more complete version, taking the client through what they are trying to achieve, what success looks like, what routes are available, and what specific action follows. I tend to use FIP when a session has produced a lot of good thinking that needs ordering, and DOCA when a client wants the full arc from a still-fuzzy goal through to a concrete next step, in one pass.

Five questions worth asking:

  • Of everything we have discussed, what needs to happen first?
  • What are you actually trying to achieve here?
  • What would success concretely look like?
  • What routes or channels are available to you to get there?
  • What is the very next action, and when will you take it?

When a group conversation is going in circles

This one sits slightly outside the ten core tools but comes from the same body of work, and I use it constantly in team coaching and facilitated sessions. Agreement, Disagreement, Irrelevant (ADI) is a reset for a group that has been talking past itself. Rather than letting the debate continue on its current, usually repetitive, track, you stop and map three columns: what does everyone actually agree on, what is the real point of disagreement, and what has been said that is not actually relevant to the decision at hand. It is astonishing how often a team discovers the disagreement is much narrower than the volume of talk suggested, once the agreed ground and the irrelevant noise are set aside.

Five questions worth asking the group:

  • Stripping away everything else, what does everyone in this room actually agree on?
  • What, precisely and narrowly, is still in dispute?
  • What has been said that does not actually bear on this decision?
  • If we set the noise aside, how narrow is the real disagreement?
  • What would it take for everyone to feel heard on the point that remains?

When a belief is being treated as a fact

This is a tool of my own, built in the same spirit as de Bono’s work: FOG, Fact, Opinion, Guess. I use it whenever a conversation, whether with an individual client or between two people or a team, is stuck because something is being asserted with more certainty than it actually carries. “The client is going to walk”, “he doesn’t rate me”, “this project is dead”. Statements like these get treated as settled facts long before anyone has checked whether they are.

The tool is a simple sort. Take the statement on the table and ask: is this a fact, something that can be verified and checked? Is it an opinion, a judgement that someone holds and could reasonably be argued? Or is it a guess, something being presented with the confidence of a fact but that is really an assumption about what someone else thinks, feels, or will do? Sorting the statement into one of these three categories, out loud, does most of the work on its own. Guesses dressed as facts lose their grip the moment they are named as guesses.

It is particularly useful with two people or a team in disagreement, because arguments often continue past the point of usefulness simply because both sides are treating their own guesses as facts and arguing from there. Running the sticking points through FOG together, rather than one person doing it privately, turns a dispute about who is right into a shared task of working out what is actually known, what is genuinely a matter of view, and what is still just an assumption waiting to be tested.

Five questions worth asking:

  • Is this something that can actually be checked or verified?
  • Is this an opinion you are entitled to hold, even if someone else disagrees with it?
  • Is this really a guess about what someone else thinks, feels, or will do?
  • What would you need to know to move this from a guess to a fact?
  • Whose assumption is this, and has anyone actually asked them directly?

Bringing the tools into a live session

A few practical notes from using DATT inside coaching conversations rather than teaching it as a standalone model.

Name the tool out loud, briefly. I will say something like, “Can we try something called consequences and sequels? I want to take whatever you decide and run it forward a few months.” Naming it does two things: it signals a genuine shift in direction, which itself interrupts the stuck loop, and it gives the client language they can reuse on their own between sessions.

Use one tool at a time. The temptation, especially early on, is to reach for the whole menu in a single session. That defeats the purpose. The value of DATT is the deliberate narrowing of attention to one direction at a time. Introducing two or three tools in quick succession just recreates the scattered thinking you were trying to resolve.

Let the client do the thinking inside the frame. The coach’s role is to hold the direction (what are the consequences, whose view have we not considered, what is actually a priority), not to generate the content. This is what keeps the tool inside a non-directive coaching stance rather than turning the session into a consultancy exercise.

Sequence tools across a session rather than within a sentence. A session that opens with CaF or RAD to lay the ground, moves through PMI or OPV to test the client’s current position, and closes with FIP or DOCA to convert the thinking into a next step, has a natural arc that mirrors how a good coaching conversation already moves from exploration to commitment.

Where the tools fall short

DATT is a thinking framework, not an emotional processing one, and it is worth being honest about that boundary. A client who is stuck because they have not yet let themselves feel the loss in a decision will not be helped by another round of consequences and sequels. If anything, over structuring at that point risks giving the client a sophisticated way to avoid the feeling altogether, dressed up as productive thinking. My rule of thumb is that if a client is emotionally flooded, that gets attended to first, on its own terms, before any tool comes into the room.

There is also a subtler risk with clients who already default to over analysis. For someone whose habitual pattern is to think their way around a decision rather than feel or act their way through it, introducing more structured thinking tools can reinforce exactly the pattern that is keeping them stuck. With those clients I am more likely to use DATT sparingly, and to notice out loud when the tool itself has become another form of avoidance.

Used with that awareness, the tools earn their place precisely because they are simple. A client can carry a two letter or three letter label like PMI or OPV out of the room and use it unprompted the next time they hit a similar wall. That portability, more than any single session outcome, is what has kept this body of work on my shelf for over three decades.

Questions to reflect on

Where in your own coaching practice do you notice clients circling the same ground without new thinking emerging?

Which of the coaching moments above do you meet most often with your clients, and which DATT tool from this article might fit it?

Where is the line, for you, between a client who needs a thinking structure and a client who needs space to feel something first?

References

De Bono, E. (1994) De Bono’s thinking course. Rev. edn. London: BBC Books.