Executive Communication in Action · Track 4 · Dialogue Under Pressure
Under pressure, you are already several rungs up a ladder you did not notice. This is the language to come back down.
The problem
Not because you lacked good faith — but because the mind moves fast when things get tense, and by the time you spoke you had already climbed from what a camera would record to a conclusion you were treating as fact. This Track gives you the vocabulary to know which rung you are on, and the language to bring a conversation back down before it breaks.
Why now
In AI-mediated work — recorded calls, async threads, summarised meetings — a clean observation and an evaluation read very differently, to people and to the machine. The discipline of staying on the lower rungs is now visible, and it travels.
The thinker — your lens
The lens is theirs; the practice is yours. You meet the thinker in an original reading, see the idea in use, then make it your own.
At the bottom: what a camera would record. At the top: a conclusion treated as fact. Learn to see the rung you are on.
Separate observation from evaluation; name the need under the reaction; ask, don't demand.
The instrument
Together they are the discipline of keeping a hard conversation open instead of letting it close.
What you leave with
Who conducts it
Sandra M. Szwarc, M.Sc. has spent 35 years training executives to construct meaning under pressure — across finance, industry, energy and healthcare, in four languages. Strategic Narratives is where that practice meets the AI era: the machine can describe; you decide what the data means.
Fit4Global Learning Systems®
The other doors
Dialogue Under Pressure is one of five Mini-Masterclasses in Executive Communication in Action. Each is a door: roughly 90 minutes, one usable tool, sold on its own or as the full program.
Presence as deliberate signal — how you are read before you speak.
Honest, deliberate influence — build the case that lands, not just the case that is right.
Turn a chart into a decision the room can act on — and own the AI's draft.
Close on interests, not positions — and design follow-through that survives the week.
Begin
Join the next cohort, bring it to your team, or take it as a standalone. Part of the ECA full program — also available on its own.
No. It is a precision-communication course — the difference between observation and evaluation, and between asking for information and asking for permission.
The moves work even when only one person knows them. A clean observation invites a different response than an evaluation — regardless.
No. It is standalone. In the program it follows Strategic Narratives, but the concepts are independent.
The next cohort is mid-August 2026. Small by design.
Part of Executive Communication in Action — five Tracks, one capability: communication as judgment.