Instrumental Action and Change

Practitioner’s and clients usually share a belief in instrumental action as the pathway for change, that they will need to come to a new understanding about the problem and ‘do something’ to change it. The practitioner usually accepts responsibility for helping the client come to a new understanding and finding something that the client can practically do to change their situation and the problem.  

People who seek help for a problem have usually tried a number of ‘common sense’ approaches before taking the problem outside their relational boundary. The ‘solutions’ used, by the people with or close to the problem, usually have a characteristic form that focuses on the same people engaging in essentially similar, instrumental, actions, across familiar, over-emphasised, symmetrical or complementary interactions, designed to ‘make a difference’ to that problem. This characteristic form usually undermines the difference and change integrity of these solutions and produces strategic inflexibility, predictability, convergent sequences of interaction, relational fracturing and problem-solving atrophy. 

A flexible approach to problem solving ordinarily involves the cooperative and cohesive use of people and relationships, the rich use of symmetrical and complementary interaction, the creation of divergent sequences of interaction, and the ability to use, or not use, instrumental action as required.