"Let's avoid treating an attack of appendicitis by reading a book on all the diseases of the digestive system"... 

There are basically two forms of stress:

The first form of stress comes from an identifiable event in the history of the company and which can be a beneficial event just like a catastrophic and therefore negative change (loss of market, gain of additional markets, restructuring desired or not, reorganization imposed or suffered, relocation of the company or redeployment of employees, commercial successes that will have to be confirmed, growth of the company with an increase in the number of employees, etc.). These situations correspond to a trauma , the passage of a shock wave (a shock more or less extended in time) that will have to be absorbed. The difficulty in this case is the return to another situation of balance, to an adaptation in a new situation of “normality”. This difficulty is linked to the fact that individuals and even the organization keep in memory the memories of the trauma or the change and that they are unable to overcome it to restart their activity "as before" (the "as before" being makes it an illusion and does not exist, because nothing is ever the same - the past is always lost and inaccessible) or fails to adapt to the new situation and to mourn the "good old times ". For a disaster everything happens as in the clinical field with a post-traumatic stress disorder - the image that corresponds most to it is that of a sudden event like during Hurricane Katarina or the attacks of September 11 or during shipwreck when a boat sinks after hitting a reef. In this case, the intervention strategies will consist in bringing the person or the organization to decant the traumatic event and to " archive the past in the past " in order to release the energies and allow them to invest and to be available again in the present and to prepare and build the future. In the case of stress due to a positive event, intervention strategies will seek to facilitate the mourning of a bygone past and to direct personal and structural resources towards adaptation to changes in order to create a new "reality". functional.

The second form of stress corresponds to daily activities that are tense, sometimes difficult and require energy, attention and emotional control and which are maintained over time. The rupture occurs this time by the accumulation of micro fractures and not because of a specific event. A metaphor for this type of stress can be represented by the image of the succession of waves for months and months which continually "lick" the hull of a boat and which, by dint of perseverance, pierce the hull and make it flow… it's the drop of water that makes the vase overflow… and one cannot say that the vase overflows because of the last drop but rather because of the accumulation of all these drops. In this specific case, it is imperative to see with individuals and organizations, how they manage the daily sources of stress: the relationship, the communication, and the activities internally, with the outside, and society in general. From there, we can define the weak points to be improved and offer a whole series of heuristic techniques and adapted to the needs of the person, the team or even the organization. These techniques are to be experienced and not to be learned in a theoretical way and concern the areas of problem-solving - problem-solving strategies - techniques for constructing and achieving objectives - an objective must be defined in a certain way. way to be achievable and the stages of its realization must also be built in a strategic way-, the management of communication - with customers, colleagues, collaborators, superiors, suppliers, and oneself- and the management human relations - ability to say "no", to manage a team, to manage deadlines and priorities, etc.-. This area corresponds to the era of day-to-day management techniques and effectiveness and efficiency.

But there is another configuration which corresponds to the (explosive!) mix between the 2 forms of stress previously described and where an accident, a change, a positive or catastrophic event is added to daily stress. There is superimposition of the stress of managing change on the stress of managing daily life, just as when the effects of a storm are superimposed on the predictable rise in water due to the tide. The addition of the two phenomena submerges dykes which would have withstood the storm and a fortiori the tide but unfortunately not the combination of the two factors. In this configuration, a variety of interventions will have to be offered according to previously defined priorities and will have to be monitored and corrected on a case-by-case basis and continuously in order to stick as closely as possible to the evolution of the situation until obtaining a first equilibrium. This first balance can be readjusted again and so on until the desired configuration is obtained.

From my experience in France, Italy and the USA, I must say that these problems of stress management in companies are left to the responsibility of the human resources departments which "subcontract" them to external training organizations, or to psychologists who will intervene at theoretical and normative levels.
The problem associated with this strategy lies in the fact that a theoretical solution of training and psychology is applied to a human, event-related, relational (team, organization, society), communicational, and pragmatic difficulty. This amounts to treating an attack of appendicitis by reading a book on all diseases of the digestive system... A reassuring solution has indeed been found, but it does not correspond to the logical level at which the problem appeared.

CM