Thérapie Brève et Intervention Systémiques (modèle de Palo Alto)

Communication à la XIVème Journée de Rencontre de  Paradoxe, 17 octobre 2015, VO
Karin SCHLANGER psychologue, directrice du Centre de Thérapie Brève du Mental Research Institute de Palo Alto (Californie)

All interaction is communication because it is impossible for humans NOT to communicate. Since we are prisoners of words, why not use them in the most effective way to promote positive change? We will discuss implicit messages, positive communication and how to use influence with a beneficial purpose of solving problems presented to us in various settings”
In order to begin talking about ‘words are magic if used strategically’ we need to practice what we preach. I want to set the context of how we think and what we are looking for. I will give a quick overview of the problem-solving model in which we focus on… problems! It sounds negative by California standards AND, we all get called into a consulting or coaching when something is not working or when there is the threat, real or perceived, that something is going to not work. Problems, by our standards, always happen in a context. A human context. It is in that context that the solution will emerge from, as well.  Of course, a given situation or problem, when it occurs in different times or contexts, requires a different solution.  Because we are only human and our ‘construction of reality’ is informed by common sense, we tend to apply the same solution that has worked with one kind of problem not only to problems of the same kind, the same family but also to problems that look similar.

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This is how we lay for ourselves what becomes an involuntary trap from which we don’t know how to extricate ourselves.  In order to see things more clearly, we need to be able to confront complex situations, not necessarily by making them simpler – because human interactions by definition are always complex – but by being able to use strategies – techniques is the word that other models use to refer to this – to be able to see the situation in its simpler version: being able to reduce complexity to something that is able to be managed in a simpler, clearer and therefore changeable way.

How do we accomplish this?

Science analyses all the attempts that fail to reach a given goal in order to finally succeed by separating that which will fail again from that which will succeed. With this process, science slowly but steadily finds what works most of the time.
There’s a common story that you probably have heard about « success and failure »  The story goes that « Thomas Edison failed more than 700 times when trying to create the light bulb ».  When asked about it, Edison allegedly said, « I have not failed 700 times.  I have successfully discovered 700 ways to NOT make a light bulb. »  The idea is that — even if you try and fail, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t learn something.  Never mind the fact that Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb (as they’d already been in existence for fifty years prior to Edison’s patent date). Hiram Maxim, Joseph Swan to mention but a few had an important role to play. Again, Edison used the context and may have been the first to patent it.

Invention is a very complex social process. Edison was in a very competitive race where he borrowed—some said stole—ideas from other inventors who were also working on an incandescent bulb. What made him ultimately successful was that he was not a lone inventor, a lone genius, but rather the assembler of the first research and development team at Menlo Park, New Jersey – (The Age of Edison: Electric light and the invention of modern America, Ernest Freeberg, Penguin, 2014. )
I could go on a different detour about the prevalence of the individual vs a team in America and the motto of “time is money”. It is not a coincidence that the problem-solving approach was born in the US. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work in other contexts and countries though. So let me skip for the moment the concept of “problem definition” to the concept of “attempted solutions”, as a reducer of complexity, which is what makes it so valuable.
The concept of attempted solutions is important because solutions are something that can be observed in a simple way, by anyone who cares to look and listen. It happens to all of us, all of the time. I find myself in front of a problem – writing this speech to present to you for example – and I can sit and evaluate how I have tried to solve it until now (actually writing this paper) and look at all the ways in which I have not succeeded or failed.

  • Mañana
  • I have plenty of time
  • I will do it
  • Responding to Irene and Chantal: “The paper is almost done!” too many times.

The same happens at a meeting in an organization: once you are clear on what the goal is to be achieved, you can take the next step in looking at all that has been tried to reach that goal that has not worked. The beauty of the concept of attempted solutions is the ease in finding what has failed, what has not worked, with the best of intentions. Very often, the trap in finding a solution to a common problem is to think and think and think in circles: we tend to find complexity and get lost in it: the more I try to find a solution, the more I get myself trapped in a quagmire. Sometimes finding a better solution has to do with creativity, which happens as a spontaneous episode. As “change agents” we will never see this situation in our office because a solution has been found. I would argue that being able to look at attempted solutions, makes the process of ‘accidentally’, spontaneously finding the difference that will make a difference – to quote Gregory Bateson – more structured and organized.
These situations are the ones that will require our intervention because by definition a system that has a problem is “stuck” implementing the same solution over and over again.

To “cross over” to my original professional field, everyone is aware of Einstein’s definition of Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.–  In traditional therapy this gets translated as a psychotic client who ‘resists’ change, or a family who negates that they have to change. There are all kinds of EXPLANATIONS about why a family or a client does not change and becomes ‘resistant’ to change. In our way of looking at things it is more that the person  attempting to implement the change – the consultant – is not listening closely enough to what is being said, to how this family functions, what is important to them. So the problematic system gets ‘blamed’ for not changing in the face of the good attempts by the consultant, while it is never mentioned that the way in which the change is trying to be implemented does not fit the system it is trying to influence.  I was recently supervising in a complex situation. My colleague was working with 2 different but connected families. The one family is composed of a mother, Mary, her 2nd. husband, Harry – her first husband Bill is in jail. Mary has 3 kids from the first husband and Harry has 2 daughters with an ex-wife – Anne—who is diagnosed bipolar AND schizophrenic. Mary and Harry also have a child in common. The second family, in a way ‘invented’ with the best of intentions by my colleague is that of Harry, Anne – his ex-wife—and their 2 daughters. These 2 daughters live, mostly with mom but spend time with Mary and Harry at their house with the other 4 kids, at least 2 week-ends/month.  Both mothers have been referred  for therapy separately because they are trading reports to Child Protective Services and that agency doesn’t want to get involved. The situation with Mary’s family is progressing well: when they first came to therapy, one of the older girls was cutting herself and being very rebellious. That situation is much better but my colleague presents in supervision a situation in which ‘Mary cannot accept that things are better. Every session she comes in complaining of something new, which varies from one child to another. She is under a lot of stress and, as a consequence, she explodes and yells at everyone in the family. The husband, poor things, doesn’t know what to do any more’. So I asked: ‘and what have you done?’. To which my colleague responds, with all the honesty in the world: ‘I keep trying to show her that things are better but she won’t listen to me! She has to keep telling me how bad things are. She is also very intrusive as to my work with her husband and his ex-wife and the work we are doing there. I keep telling her that she cannot do that and that I will not tell her’. When I pointed out that maybe she was arguing with Mary, my colleague was initially not able to ‘see’ it.  By ‘arguing’ I meant, she was not using strategic communication:

What Mary needs to hear from you is that you ‘get’ her, that you are in her corner, that you are really hearing how hard this whole ordeal is on HER. How can you do that? One way would be to start the session by asking ‘how BAD have things been this week?’ No matter what Mary responds to that it is a winning question. If she says ‘things were not that bad’, then my colleague can come back with ‘how come?’ and after that, any explanation that Mary gives will be framed, by herself, in the ‘not so bad category’. If she chooses to say they were horrible, then my colleague can either say that she is glad things have not improved too fast OR ask her elaborate, at which point, Mary is telling my colleague how bad things are, but on demand from the therapist. In any of these situations, the language presented by my colleague is one of: ‘I hear you when you say things are bad’, rather than trying to convince her that things are no longer so bad. In addition to this, I suggested to my colleague that she no longer see Harry with Anne, his ex-wife, and their daughters because in doing so, she is unwittingly conveying the message to Mary that the therapist sees them still as a family, which makes Mary feel more unsupported and misunderstood. There is plenty of work to be done with Anne and her 2 daughters in interrupting cycles within that system. So, taking a larger view and looking at both family systems as if it is only one, which it is, my colleague was able to use communication more effectively.

But lets go back to the business system we were talking about.

The first step is always identifying what the problem is, in as concrete a fashion as possible.
The second step will be to identify what a change in that situation is in a concrete, small and desirable way. Set an achievable goal, if you want to call it something. This outcome seems simple but already here we are reducing complexity to be able to arrive at something that can be changed: a first step if you will.
The third step is making a detailed list of what have been the solutions to change the situation.

Let me make another detour about the important difference between solutions – which are those things that actually work to promote a change in a painful situation – and attempted solutions, which is a term that was invented by the folks at MRI in 1966, which designates all actions that have been tried with the specific intent of promoting change and have not worked to achieve the desired goal. Therefore, to talk about failed attempted solutions, the way several of our European colleagues do, is actually a redundancy: if a solution had worked, there would be no ‘attempted solution’ which, by definition, has not worked!
Some times we will find things that have actually worked in the past but for some reason have either stopped working now, were not applied in a consistent way or were dropped because the smallness of the goal was reached and deemed too small, without going back to the drawing board of ‘what comes next’. These solutions are solutions, they are not attempted solutions and should be looked at once again. It could also be that those solutions were such in a particular context in which the problem occurred in the past and now the current problem happens in a different context.  An example of this could be a student in a school who had problems with their 5th grade teacher. A ‘problem-solver’ was called in at the time, the problem analyzed and resolved but when this same student arrives in 6th grade, in a new school, with several new teachers, the context has changed. The student is likely to go back to implement solutions that had worked with their 5th grade teacher but because the context has changed they will turn into attempted solutions and a ‘problem-solver’ will have to be brought in again. It is likely, however, that what will be needed will be shorter because the student already has a success story under their belt: their attempted solution needs a little ‘tweaking’ to become a solution again.  There are at least 2 ways to achieve this result.

  • Work with the student
  • Train the environment – the school or teacher in this situation – for long term awareness of the cycle of problem/attempted solution.
  • Work on the interaction in the context in which it is happening. Always!

Most systems have been ironically trained to disregard focusing on something small that can be changed. At least in California, there also seems to be an allergy to talk about problems as such. There are a lot of euphemisms instead:’ issues’ and ‘challenges’ have had ‘innovative’ approaches that have failed to produce the results needed. This could be a dangerous trend of not looking at what is staring us in the face: lets look at the problem as such and attempt to change it, rather than pushing it under the rug and implementing smaller changes in the fringes which don’t address the real problem. Protocols are put into place to streamline responses, which take away the possibility of the individual to respond to a given situation. What ensues is that the person in front of a computer screen is guided through a series of questions rather than listening to what the person on the phone is asking for, for example. A very large Health Maintenance Organization in California, moved their ‘advise nurse’ option from the individual hospitals to a centrally located phone bank in another city. Originally the patients could call the advice nurse with a quick question and the nurse, who usually knew the patient, could answer the question briefly and effectively. Instead now, the patient calls in, has to go through a very long process of being on hold while the call is redirected to a ‘triage nurse’, who, because she has not idea whom she is talking with, has to follow the protocol in front of her and ask a number of questions which are infuriating to the patient – who just wants an answer – and therefore runs the risk of a bad interaction with the person at the end of the phone line, who HAS to ask the questions even though she knows the answers. An example is a patient calling to  renew an asthma medication. One of the questions the triage person is forced to ask when she hears the word ‘asthma’ is: ‘Is your breathing interfering with having a conversation’… I rest my case!

We could actually equate this conversation with a conversation with a psychotic clients in a delirium: they resist change in an extreme way. The bigger the system the more likely that it will be structured and rigid and the more there will be resistance to change, even though things are not going well. So it will be necessary to turn this around when someone at the top of the HMO decides that it is more cost efficient to actually have the nurse that knows the patient respond to the phone. It would make for shorter conversations and much higher patient satisfaction.

This is a situation in which ‘strategic communication’ comes in.

  • Define the problem
  • Agree on objectives
  • Look at attempted solutions. Again, we actually want to see if there have been some solutions but then we have to see IF these solutions are still viable in a different context. Hence the example of the 5th grade student who is now in a different situation.

Defining a problem and seeing it as “obvious” can be very dangerous.  The student is the problem: is there anything else to say?

There is usually A LOT more to say! Dick Fisch would always say that taking your time to define a problem will ALWAYS save you time in the long run in finding the solution. Along the lines of Napoleon giving the order to dress him slowly because he was in a hurry.  Does this student have trouble with ONE of his four teachers? Does he have trouble in the yard with his friends? Does he have problems adapting to the school administration? Have they managed to make friends? In what context does this student have a problem with this teacher? When she gives them free time? When they are in the middle of a reading assignment?  The more time we devote to finding out the specifics of when, how and what does the problem arise, the more information we will have to be able to implement a positive change. Another important variable in this ‘construction of the problem’ is the teacher. How open are they to managing this situation? How biased are they towards minority students? The situation will be very different in a school where the majority of the students are high socio-economic class, with educated parents who are supportive and responsive to the schools demands. If this is a minority students in that system, the reaction by the system to the misbehavior will be probably a lot less tolerant and it is likely to escalate much quicker. The student will be quickly labeled and less energy will be devoted to trying to fix it ‘because what do you expect’ kind of mentality.
If, on the other hand, it is an affluent, young, maybe white teacher, in a minority school the problem could run the risk of escalating in a different way. The young, inexperienced teacher is likely to tolerate this poor behavior on the part of the student for much too long, because of her perception.

1) this ‘poor’ child has less advantages than I do
2) I cannot discipline the student because I do not belong to their race so I have no credibility
3) I am told by the system – the school culture – that I have to struggle with this student while still paying attention to the other 30 students in the class because … There are lots of reasons that this teacher can ‘explain’ to herself why her behavior towards this students should be ‘tolerant’ which in turn this problem student will take advantage of and continue to not change his/her behavior.

Inequity as an explanation and as a lens through which to ‘see’ this conflict in the school, makes it more likely that hard questions will not be asked and the definition of the problem, which is so crucial to it’s solution, will remain vague and therefore much harder to fix.

My younger son is currently in Copenhagen so I thought of a danish analogy in: « The Emperor’s New Clothes”, a short tale by Hans Christian Andersen about two weavers who promise and emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that he doesn’t see any suit of clothes until a child cries out, « But he isn’t wearing anything at all! »

What do we actually do? Paul Watzlawick once said: ‘we are like mechanics and we unlock mechanisms that are not working well. We actually don’t find anything in there that was not already in there.  We also don’t invent organizations: we are called in to unblock them, but we don’t create them. All we do is help people or organizations to function again in the way they used to when there was not a problem or we help them find a way to function better. The goal of an intervention is to convey to the person to find out how they can change, solve a problem rather than give them the solution. In this way, we go around what other models call resistances to change and we ensure that the person feels like they came up with the change, with the solution. The problem-solving approach of the MRI is to ‘lead from behind’.
This is where strategic communication comes in. How do we ask questions? What questions do we ask? How do we paraphrase what the client has just said so that they feel heard, understood, in a short period of time?  MANEUVRABILITY. Leading the person to see the problem in a different way, which in turn allows them to act differently and find a solution.
Just as much as we define a problem with attention to detail, we will keep an eye open to being able to define change, even before it starts to happen, with the same attention to detail. In principle, we can talk about a few different stages of change

Start small: gradually starting from the smallest possible change. If we help the client set up these small initial changes, the process will have a snowball effect and change will be achieved in a shorter period of time than if these initial steps had not been put in place. This is particularly important to set up when we know, as change agents that there will be a high resistance to change.

a) how could you make things worse? – applying  a small push in the opposite direction of the one in which we would like to see change. It enables the ‘sufferer’ to start to see alternatives.
b) Magical solution: if you woke up tomorrow and the problem had vanished, how what would you be doing differently? How would other people be acting differently towards you? Steve De Shazer. These things, brought in by the client, can be prescribed for them to try, in small doses. It is less likely that a client will argue with something that they, themselves have suggested. Act ‘as if’, hypnotic suggestion used by Watzlawick. Butterfly reaction: something very small will create a big change.
c) In the cases where we have made suggestions, the clients agree to carry out the homework but then they come back and they have forgotten or they didn’t have time or they really thought about it after they arrived home and they knew it wasn’t going to work, we will utilize what we call the ‘disadvantages of change’. As you have figured out, we are not really interested in the ‘why’ of the problem, in the origin of the problem BUT we will make believe in this situation that we are very interested in figuring out why the problem is now happening. The main reason for the change agent to adopt this posture is so that the client, who has not been working, will now decide that they had better move because their consultant has, all of a sudden, become a person with A LOT of time and much less interest than the client themselves, in promoting change. “I would not want you to run into a change, without thoroughly looking at possible disadvantages of achieving the change that you have signed up for! After all, we wouldn’t want you to rush in a new direction and have it be the wrong direction.” This is a useful strategy when you feel like you are sitting at the edge of your chair, you are talking much more than the person you have in front, usually the other person is sitting back, with arms crossed or slowly moving their heads from side to side. If/when you become aware of this situation, you want to catch yourself as soon as possible and make a U-turn. As a rule of thumb as a consultant, you never want to APPEAR to be working harder than your client. This is, of course, just a matter of appearance because you are really working very hard, taking many variables into account, watching for nodding – agreement with what you are saying/suggesting, thinking about how you are going to incorporate what the client is telling you into your next suggestion. All of this has to happen in your head, while you have a pleasant smile on your lips. As a consultant, you have to travel the fine line between working hard, not seeming to and engaging your client in working along side yourself. If not, like in a row boat, if it is only you rowing, you will just turn in circles, which is exhausting to you and not helpful to your client.

This process that I just alluded to, watching your client for a ‘yes’ response all of the time, comes from Milton Erickson’s hypnosis method, of course. It is the biggest influence from Erickson on the MRI model of problem-resolution.

The Power of Words
The main influence on our model in terms of use of language comes through Milton Erickson and his work of hypnosis without trance. I will talk about a few ways in which these ideas can be implemented to different interactions.
Let us be clear from the beginning that, strategic communication by definition, aims at promoting influence on the behavior of the person we are communication with. For communication to be strategic, it is important to create a setting in which the context is one of trust and reliability. We have found that this is achieved effectively by using words that the clients themselves are using. Of course, part of this context is created immediately when someone asks for help: you are the expert. It is then your responsibility to use this context in an ethical way. It will become your ‘responsibility’ to move a person from a point A, where they are uncomfortable because if not they would not have asked for help, to a point B, which has to FIT with the person they are AND present the situation/or be seen in a different way.
I am currently working with a client who has recently separated from his wife of about 15 years. He has always been the one making decisions in the relationship and he feels deeply responsible for the fate of his partner and their 2 children. He is an educated man for whom being logical comes as second nature. And his wife, of course, speaks the language of feelings: ‘don’t leave me now’, ‘I suffer from depression so I have not been myself and that is why I treated you so badly’. His attempted solutions have all been along the lines of ‘taking care of her and her feelings’ by explaining why the separation is better – they were arguing so much that he was afraid there would be an escalation which led to physical violence–, how she needs to take care of the kids, how it is good for her.
Because he is mostly rational and is in business, I was able to quickly, and with less ‘sales job’ than usual to tell him that ‘taking care of her’ is coming across as condescending because he is telling her, probably AGAIN, what is good for her. He continues to, even from the separation, be in control of her life and tell her what she should do. Instead I suggested that he should take some blame for the current state of affairs and write a message in which he communicates that he believes she is strong and able to get herself ‘out of the hole’ by herself and FOR herself. I also suggested that they make a commitment, if he thought that would be helpful, to not initiate a serious relationship with anybody else for either of them. I took his words of ‘depression’, ‘take care of’, concern and moved them to ‘return control to your partner’, strength and allowing you both to continue on your own journeys.
By the way, I am not a matchmaker so, whether they end up married or not is secondary to allowing people to have choices. I will tell you in 6 months whether they ended up together or not 😉

An important factor in establishing a context of trust and reliability is making eye contact in a way that is, on one hand not invasive – all the time – nor non-existent. I find myself looking down or around and establishing intense contact when I am ready to say something that I want the client to listen to. It gives you credibility and establishes trust.

Putting things of the table, is a general term that I use a lot. When you listen to what your clients are asking of you, when you REALLY listen, without imposing your constructions of reality onto what they are saying, or ‘knowing’ ahead of time what they ‘should’ be talking about, you will hear what they are asking for. Coming back to my client in the relationship, one of the last things I ‘slipped’ in when we last talked was: ‘What about a commitment that neither of you will get into a serious relationship with anyone else in the next 6 months?’ Long silence and then: ‘Well! I think that would not be a good thing to bring up because it will make her more upset at this time. It is the last thing she needs!” I smiled on the inside because, with such a response I know that I have hit something that is going to be something different from him attempted solutions. I did not insist on the first round but I planted a seed that I will certainly come back to.

Another important piece of this puzzle is to agree whenever possible with your customer: look for something positive to say. Even an abuser – I know this will raise some eyebrows—gets to the point of abuse after they have tried other things, as hard as that is to think about. I usually hesitate to bring this one to a large group because in my experience you will all go out and positively reframe everything that your customer has to say now! PLEASE don’t do that: it comes across as false, dishonest and is condescending. Jeff Zeig talks about ‘making conversation unusual: we see things that are extra-ordinary. When you shine the focus of the attention on the exception, you can no longer go back and look at it in the same way.

Your actions and words create realities or images. I was recently at a fancy university in Santiago, Chile and the head of the Psychology Dept. sent me a million mails to set up an appointment while I was there. She got the University press to come do an article about my visit – I was invited, and paid! by another institution so it was a surprise that it was, all of a sudden, so ‘official’. She then brought burnt coffee in plastic cups, with forks for sugar. I am NOT very difficult and have a very bad memory for names but from now on, whenever my friend wants to remind me of this lady’s name she says: ‘the one who made you talk to the journalist with a picture of you and her and then brought coffee in plastic cups!” I immediately know whom she is talking about.

Use language as precisely as possible.  In this way you are communicating to create an effect in the other person. It is important for the consultant to be seen as putting as much effort into reaching the client as possible: they are important. Take your time in doing so. It is useful for me to not speak any language well any more because it allows me the time to pause, think and then say what I want to say. It creates an effect in which the client is waiting patiently for something really important that is being thought about just for them. They are much more likely to pay attention. It can become a little bit like theater, where a play is put together for one spectator: think about it as gift wrapping a good idea that you think your customer will buy.

You should also be aware of ‘deflection’ answers. You ask/say something and the customers utters words but does have not responded to your question. Almost any example that I give you now will be obvious but you need to pay close attention, when you are asking something, that the answer is coherent with your statement. “What were you feeling when your daughter told you she was pregnant? The dynamics were very complicated”. These are words that are said in response to a question: they are not an answer to the question.
Setting up a question so that we can predict the answer gives the consultant credibility. This is where being older than 25 entering this business is helpful. It is not fair but there have to be some advantages to having grey hair.

SUMMARY
If I were to summarize what Strategic Communication is about I would say that it is

  • the goal of strategic communication is to achieve actions that are efficient and concrete in promoting change in an undesired situation called the problem
  • It is a different way of communication because it entails a conscience in the way words are used to reach a goal. Strategic communication is a way to influence people and their actions towards reaching new agreements to promote benefits for the client. It is up to the ethics of the consultant as to how those changes are achieved. It should be an ‘ecological’ application with a healthy outcome.

I am going to give you an example in which I believe Strategic Communication is somewhat abused. I heard of a mining company in the north of Chile which wanted to hire a consultant to ‘sell’ the local people in a town to accept their arrival in that town without too many complaints because their complaints would delay the company’s ability to do their job as quickly as possible. The people were complaining because extracting gold from the nearby mountain was going to use all the water in the town and return it to the town, after it had been used to wash the chemicals in the mine, with high levels of contamination. This is an example of ‘industrial development’ which was going to benefit some foreign mining company to the detriment of the people of the town. I had a serious argument with the person telling me this story because, from my point of view, that is a ‘sales’ job that is masked under strategic communication to make the company CEO be happier. It is, of course, my opinion.

  • Strategic communication is a concept that is utilized is a variety of professions: coaching, consulting, mediation, sales, marketing, psychology, social work, negotiation, just to mention a few. It is the consultant in all these professions who will be a leader in communication.
  • How to do it? Know how to listen without pre-conceptions, protocols and ‘right things to do’. Be empathic but leave strong feelings outside of the office, or, at least, be aware that you have those feelings. Watch your client: the absence of emotion could be just as important as the presence of strong emotions.
  • Get your client’s attention and maintain it until the end of the interaction or until you have ‘closed the sale’ to the satisfaction of the goal set at the beginning of your interaction.
  • Stay away from the pre-made phrase ‘I know how you feel’. Unless you have gone through EXACTLY the same experience, with exactly the same actors, etc, you cannot know. You can imagine, you can understand, but you cannot ‘know’. How relaxed are you after you tell someone you are really worried about something serious and they tell you ‘don’t worry about it?’

The brief therapy model uses Strategic Communication from the first exchange with a client. It is a model of implementing change that gives you a useful guideline. You cannot go onto the next step if you have not thoroughly examined and implemented the previous one.  A dirty little secret is that the problem-solving strategic communication can become a little addicting and a way of life: If I see every situation as a puzzle to be solved, I am modeling a way of looking at the world that promotes change in a positive direction. I hope I have managed to infect you a little bit with this virus in the last hour.

Merci beaucoup.

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© Karin SCHLANGER/Paradoxes
Pour citer cet article : Karin SCHLANGER, Strategic Communication: one tool, multiple applications  2015. www.paradoxes.asso.fr/2015/10/strategic-communication-one-tool-multiple-applications

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