The method of Klainerman vector fields plays an essential role in the study of global existence of solutions of nonlinear hyperbolic PDEs, with small, smooth, decaying Cauchy data. Nevertheless, it turns out that some equations of physics, like the one dimensional water waves equation with finite depth, do not possess any Klainerman vector field. The goal of this paper is to design, on a model equation, a substitute to the Klainerman vector fields method, that allows one to get global existence results, even in the critical case for which linear scattering does not hold at infinity. The main idea is to use semiclassical pseudodifferential operators instead of vector fields, combined with microlocal normal forms, to reduce the nonlinearity to expressions for which a Leibniz rule holds for these operators.