Heron's Intervention Styles
Heron's six categories - Prescriptive, Informative, Confronting, Cathartic, Catalytic, Supportive - map every kind of intervention a coach or leader can make, so you can see which ones you reach for by habit and which you avoid.
Six cards lay out the interventions in two rows, authoritative on one side and facilitative on the other.
Reach for this when…
- You keep reaching for the same two or three responses, whatever the situation calls for.
- Feedback conversations always turn either soft or blunt, never anything in between.
- A coach or manager wants to check their range isn't narrower than they think.
How to run it
- Introduce the six categories: Prescriptive, Informative, Confronting, Cathartic, Catalytic, Supportive.
- Observe a real coaching, facilitation or feedback exchange and code the interventions used.
- Practise each style deliberately, including the uncomfortable ones.
- Debrief which styles are overdone and which are avoided, and why.
- Build a plan to develop the underused styles.
A worked example
Situation. Martina Delgado manages the cellar team at a family vineyard near Arequipa, Peru, and had one default style with her cellar master: Supportive, almost always.
Applied. Coding her last three conversations against Heron's six categories showed zero Confronting and zero Prescriptive interventions - she had never once said "stop doing X" or "this specific thing is wrong", despite a costly filtration error repeating for two harvests.
Result. In the next review she used a direct Confronting statement followed immediately by Supportive framing. The error stopped within one harvest, something two years of encouragement hadn't touched.
The catch
The six categories describe what you said, not whether it worked - a well-executed Confronting intervention lands very differently from a clumsy one, and Heron's model won't tell you which you just did. It also tempts people to treat "more styles used" as inherently better, when the real skill is picking the right one for the moment.
Range without judgement is just variety - the six categories are a checklist for your habits, not a formula for what to say next.
Origin: John Heron