A crash. A commotion. Her head shoots straight into the air, muscles snapping taut, poised to launch skyward.
My prefrontal cortex begins to lose its grip as I realize I am little more than a rag doll atop a thousand pounds of emotion and muscle.
She skitters sideways, wriggling and twisting, directionless, gaining energy.
What to do?
Every instinct tells me to seize control. Tighten the reins. Hold on. Stop her before this gets worse.
Instead, I laugh.
I relax, release her head—and every attempt at restraint—and urge her forward.
We gain speed like a runaway locomotive. For a moment, I question my sanity.
But a few strides later, something shifts. We are still moving fast but she seems to settle. I am once again in control. She’s calm. We can get on with the day’s work.
The interesting thing about this encounter is that I accomplished what I wanted by doing almost exactly the opposite of what I wanted to do.
My instinct was to stop her. My objective was to calm her. Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Had I given in to my fear, things could have gotten Western real fast. My tension would have confirmed her suspicion that something was terribly wrong. Her fear would have increased my own, and we might have found ourselves in a contest of escalating force with potentially disastrous consequences.
Instead, I gave her somewhere to put all that energy. I stopped fighting the behavior and redirected it.
I didn’t surrender control. I changed the means by which I exercised it.
This is what interests me about strategic communication.
Whether we’re dealing with a frightened horse, a difficult colleague, or an entire organization, we often approach communication with a preferred message and an instinctive way of delivering it. We want someone to understand, agree, cooperate, or change. And when they resist, our natural inclination is often to repeat ourselves more forcefully.
But communication isn’t strategic merely because we have an objective.
It becomes strategic when we are willing to subordinate our preferred behavior to what is most likely to produce the desired response.
That distinction is relatively easy to observe between two individuals. As the number of people, interests, relationships, and competing motivations increases, the problem becomes considerably more complicated.
Yet the fundamental question remains the same.
Am I responding to what the other party needs in order to move toward my objective?
Or am I simply doing what makes me feel more in control?