Rigor and Creativity: the strategic model in action in the various operational contexts

"The gods certainly did not reveal everything to mortals from the beginning, but, by researching, men gradually found the best.".
(Xenophanes)

It seems counterintuitive to think that a theoretical-applicative model can be an intervention tool in such different contexts: how can it be used in the clinical, business, sports or school world?
Is it not evident, even to the less experienced eye, that a patient is different from an athlete, a manager or a work group?

Although the answer seems obvious, it hides something extraordinary: they are systems as different from each other as they are unanimous in their request in the face of the need for an intervention: "Change me without changing me".

This is the precise request that lies behind every intervention of change that we find ourselves carrying out, whether we are in the company, in a psychiatric clinic, in an organizational context of any kind, or whether our client, client, patient is a single person or a group.

Why do people or a system resist change despite craving the request for a decisive intervention or for improvement / enhancement? In each context, unique in its being and with distinctive characteristics of its sector, we find the resistance to change for the principle of homeostasis.

As the French physiologist teaches us Claude Bernarde homeostasis is the natural tendency to achieve relative stability that unites all living organisms, for which this dynamic regime must be maintained over time, even when external conditions vary, through precise self-regulating mechanisms. Any strategy, even if technically successful and meticulously studied in detail, becomes unattainable and is rejected by colliding with a system that tends to maintain its own balance, whether it is functional or not, due to the principle of homeostasis.

The Model of George Nardone, declined in its forms to fit into the particular operational context, is able to circumvent this structured mechanism to make the desired change not only an achievable goal, but a natural and inevitable consequence.

The personality of the Model is expressed in the characteristics of the rigorous evolved Problem Solving and the wise Strategic Communication that are mixed together, to reach the agreed objective and / or overcome the defined problem, in the cleverly structured and planned steps that veil the technology of the intervention. with the magic of change.

The Strategic Specialist makes use of non-ordinary logic, rhetorical architects and the art of the stratagem to realize the validity of the intervention.
Non-ordinary logic, based on the suggestion of ancient and at the same time very modern stratagems, shakes our rational convictions and offers unexpectedly simple solutions to problems of a disparate nature (Nardone, 2009).

Competence of the Strategic is to go through the phases of advanced problem solving with rigor and flexibility:

• defines the problem and / or agrees the objective to be achieved by focusing on “how the problem works” rather than on “why it exists”, keeping the attention towards a present in which to find solutions rather than towards a past in which to identify culprits;
• analyzes and evaluates the attempts made to change the situation, both the "attempted solutions" that somehow did not work, compromising the condition or not making it evolve, and the "positive exceptions" that have worked in the past and it is necessary to verify if they can be adapted to the present rather than replicated;
• making use of the specific technical specifications of the model ("Technique of How to Worsen and / or Fail", "Technique of the Future Scenario / Beyond the Problem", "Climber Technique"), structures the steps to be taken starting from the agreed goal and descending to backward to concretely define the smallest step to be implemented, experienced not as an imposed one, but as a joint and inevitable discovery.

The communication he uses is the one that, rather than explaining, is capable of making people feel, the one capable of reaching and infecting the heart even before being understood by the intellect. In this communicative field, the dialectic leaves room for dialogic and the logical-relational explanations bend, especially in the first phase, in front of the strategic dialogue; the descriptive-logical language supports the analogical one.

Strategic communication as a vehicle for change lies in knowing how to add to the interlocutor's vision and not in taking away, to direct the perspective in the desired direction, starting from its reality. Verbal, non-verbal and paraverbal language become a perfect synthesis not only to make people understand rationally, but above all to make the interlocutor feel suggestive and lead the interlocutor to have eyes to see that corner of reality that he could not see from his perspective.

In every strategic intervention, to get to structure a new homeostasis or to make the existing one evolve, it is necessary to put together Descartes and Pascal, “learning” and “change”.

Depending on the context, we can decide whether to insert a learning or change program: if a system is blocked, I will insert a change that will require repeated learning over time to become acquisition; if, on the other hand, we are not in a blocked situation, as often happens in a company, where the system, albeit slowly, is progressing, I will insert a learning path that, if well planned, will inevitably lead to change.

The ultimate goal of any intervention, whether it starts from one or the other, remains the "acquisition" of a way of perceiving and reacting to reality that is functional and effective. The foundation of the strategic logic is to develop intervention models based on the objective to be achieved, adapting the solution to the characteristics of the problem rather than preparing them on the basis of theories relating to the nature of that given phenomenon (Nardone, 2009).

The Model can be declined in different areas: Psychotherapy, Coaching, Business Consulting, Performance Enhancement, Training, following the art of the stratagem of “constantly changing while remaining the same”.

The possible worlds of intervention are only apparently different: their dynamics make them all fields of action for the resolution of problems, management of relationships and communication and the achievement of objectives. Each area does not limit the other, but adds to the Model, in a vision of continuous and continuous change: an essential element to make research not only research, but research-intervention.

Whether you approach the Model as a trainer or learner, therapist or patient, consultant or client / client, coach or coachee, the highest goal according to ancient wisdom is to "win without fighting": the person becomes so able to use the model that itself becomes the model, changing its way of relating to itself, others and the world.

So much has been done, a piece of history written thirty years after the birth of Strategic Therapy Center of Arezzo, but the path is endless and, taking up the words of Bertrand Russel: “Science can set limits to knowledge, but it should not set limits to the imagination”.

 

Dr. Maria Nucera (Official Psychologist-Psychotherapist of the Strategic Therapy Center)

REFERENCES

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