Assuming that I have practiced enough to be able to easily identify the INTENT and CONTENT of a transaction, recovering from a mismatch in either of them is quite easy. Suppose that I say to someone, “Have you any spare budget?” and they try to laugh off the question...
In my second example, there is a mismatch in CONTENT. I say, “I’m worried about this”, and the reply is, “It’s typical of a big company”. My transaction contained EMOTIONS, whereas the content type of the response is OPINION. As for the previous example, I can either...
The final debug technique applies to the bug zone AND the fail zones. It’s based on the Process Communication Model, already mentioned. This functional model has been tried on over a million people over about 30 years, and it’s predictions are pretty good. The model...
These two videos on Observing Communications are an adaptation for Customer-Facing Engineers of well-established and extremely impressive work by Eric Berne and others. They are listed here.
In summary, since bugs in the communication PROCESS show up as mismatches in INTENT and CONTENT, I can debug it by either adjusting my intent and content, or I can metacommunicate about what is happening. To debug PEOPLE in the ‘bug’ zone of mild stress, simple...
