The generative model is a model for transformation in which dialogue, creativity, and learning are the bases on which new possibilities and alternative futures are generated and implemented in the face of the hardships and challenges that the persons express as the reason for their consultation. The generative approach formulates an operator-consultant relationship characterized by joint action, innovation, and an adept and coordinated use of individuals’ resources and knowledge in different contexts.

The process of dialogue on which this model is based attempts to create conditions to support persons in their efforts to re-imagine their lives, circumstances and relationships, and to create and implement new options that enable them to handle creatively the process of evolution and the dilemmas it presents, as well as hardships, conflicts, challenges, and crises.

The generative model provides professionals in different fields and other individuals—as well as the organizations and communities in which they work—with the tools they need to recognize their resources, values, and possibilities in the face of the challenges and hardships that occasioned the consultation. The aim of the model is to recognize opportunities to design and implement viable options.

This model makes individuals into participants, involving them in the active design of possibilities. It offers tools and resources for professional practice so that those who have solicited the consultation can develop skills and competences useful in both professional and personal facets of their daily life.

The model helps professionals and participants to move beyond a vision focused on hardship and deficit to one that heeds possibilities—whether actual, novel, or emerging—and works within the framework of productive dialogue based on resources, learning, and creativity. This model has been used with excellent results by professionals who work with families and/or in the fields of therapy, conflict management, community and organizational development, education, healthcare, and others (see articles that illustrate the application of the model and its results). In the sphere of psychotherapy, the generative model is geared to the recovery and transformation of the self and relationships. In conflict and crisis management, it aims at creating more promising dialogues. In organizational and community development, it is geared to inclusive, creative, and productive participation. In all areas, it encourages responsible commitment on the part of participants.