STRATEGIC THINKING WHEN INTERVENING

What do you say after you say, “What do you want?” And then, what do you do after you work out be a well-formed outcome for your client? What then? How will you intervene at that point and what intervention will you use? And, come to think of it, is there an Intervention Pattern that we can use to guide our thinking?

The essential intervention pattern involves a special kind of thinking—namely, strategic thinking. This is the kind of thinking that you engage in when you know two things: where the person currently is and where the person wants to be. This Now—>Then thinking is what enables you to think strategically. This is the Present State (PS)—Desired State (DS) gap. Now you can ask yourself, “What thinking, believing, deciding, planning, acting, relating, changing, etc. will move my client from now (P.S.) to then (D.S.)?”