Rick Brenner, Chaco Canyon Consulting
When we talk, listen, send or read emails, read or write memos, or when we leave or listen to voice mail messages, we’re communicating person-to-person. And whenever we communicate person-to-person, we take risks.
We risk being misunderstood, offending others, feeling hurt, and being confused. There are so many ways for things to go wrong that we could never learn how to fix all the problems after the damage is done – there’s just too much to know. And when things do go wrong, the personal and organizational costs can be unbearable. Careers can founder; new products can be too little too late; companies can fail.
A more effective approach avoids problems altogether, or at least minimizes their occurrence. If everyone in the group understands how interpersonal communications can fail, they can frame their communications to avoid problems.
Participants learn a model of interpersonal communications that can help them stay out of the ditches. Virginia Satir, a pioneering family therapist who applied systems thinking to the study of human relationships, originated the model. It provides a new understanding of how communications can go wrong and how to keep them right.
Understanding, though, is not enough. We must have access to what we know in the moment, when we’re deeply involved intellectually and emotionally. In those moments of intense involvement, we’re most likely to slip, and least likely to remember what we’ve learned. That’s why we use an interactive learning model in this Session. We emphasize communication under stress, where the most expensive failures occur. We’ll learn to appreciate that it’s far easier to avoid damage than to repair it once it’s done.
Of all the stressful situations we encounter at work, one of the most difficult is saying no to power. We’ll show how to apply the models and techniques we learn to that very tricky class of situations.
2010 Invited Speaker, Rick Brenner, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video
