Haley promotes a view of the individual , the family context, and the therapeutic perspective, a triad

The strategic therapy that flourished in the 1980s was centered in three unique and creative groups: MRI's brief therapy center (Weakland, Watzlawick, and Fisch); Mara Selvini Palozzoli and her colleagues in Milan; and, of course, Jay Haley and his colleagues at the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, D.C. The master, Milton Erickson, was a school unto himself. What made strategic therapy so popular was that it offered a simple framework for understanding how families get stuck and a clever set of techniques to help them get unstuck.

According to the cybernetic metaphor, families become trapped in dysfunctional patterns when they cling to solutions that don't work. The trick is to get them to try something different. If the essence of neurotic behavior is stubbornly continuing to behave in self-defeating ways, the essence of strategic therapy is getting people to try something different. To accomplish this, strategic therapists introduced a number of techniques, many of them paradoxical, designed to break up homeostatic ("problem-maintaining") solutions and get families moving and on their way.