SAVI® in a Nutshell

SAVI®, pronounced “savvy,” is a system for analyzing the verbal interactions between people. The SAVI® framework allows us to make informed judgments about the effects we can expect certain kinds of communications to have. It also provides practical guidelines for intervening in unproductive conversations.

SAVI® provides a way of thinking about and describing communication that enables you to understand and explain what’s happening in any given conversation, predict what is likely to happen next, and try to change the course of those events, if you wish.

The SAVI® system is based on the idea that all human behavior — including verbal behavior — can be described in terms of problem solving. Each type of behavior either approaches or avoids the problem to be solved in a given situation. (In this context, human problems include any conditions that create stress for human beings.)

Whenever people are communicating, the basic problem that needs to be solved is HOW to communicate. Only when this problem is solved can information be effectively transferred from one person to another. When this problem is not fully resolved, the result is misunderstanding — and misunderstanding creates stress.

When people are experiencing stress about the HOWs of communication, their behavior is related more to this problem than to the content of their communication. Therefore, the problem of how to communicate must be solved to a satisfactory extent before the problem of WHAT to communicate can be addressed.

The SAVI® system focuses on this central issue of how information is communicated. It categorizes the different ways people behave when they communicate, and it describes these behaviors in terms of their effect on information transfer. Any content can be conveyed using any type of behavior — the same information can be expressed in the form of a question, a proposal, a joke, a put-down, and so forth. But what the listener hears, and how effectively the information will be used, depends very much on how this content is communicated. Sometimes the message received by a listener is quite different from the message that the speaker meant to send. Using SAVI®, we can understand exactly why this happens and take steps to get the conversation back on track.