Peter Young. Whatever Happened to the L in NLP? Peter began the session with a “health warning!”. He believes that what we do is not neccessarily what NLP says we do. Or to be clear what some NLPers say we do! Some say (universal quantifier) NLP can absorb anything useful and make it NLP. That’s fine but how often do we, the people who are NLP, have a sort out and pick out the gems from the rubbish we need to discard? Peter suggests never!! He is on a mission to simplify NLP, to boldly throw out the crap and replace it with simple rules and an easier way! Using stories. Getting off the soap box... What follows is my interpretation of the evening, from my perspective in my model of the world!!! If I’ve missed anything, oops!! Peter lives near Exeter and told us a little about his upside down house, where he sits in his rocking chair, musing as he gazes out over the Exe estuary. The shared courtyard is surrounded by ten houses and contains the fountain he and his neighbours bought to mark the millenium. Then he paused and asked us to draw a picture about what he had told us. Involvement already! This is what we like. What had we done with the words he had spoken? Had we translated them into our own vision of houses, rivers, fountains etc.? Of course we had! To accurately portray the scene we would have needed much more detail. The purpose, to illustrate how we understand language. We all had a sense of his house and environment, did we need it to be completely accurate to understand his introduction of himself? 1st target. The NLP Meta-model questions are mostly designed to chunk down to find more detail about the content of language. Is this actually useful? When is it useful? Does it get us anywhere? What would we answer to the question, “So what?” Peter contends that Meta-model questions are about ‘context’ providing more description of a static state, or ‘stuck’ state. To ‘unstick’ ourselves, or others, we need questions that focus on ‘consequences’, ‘outcomes’, and give a sense of movement through time towards “what happens next?” A standard NLP model of PS (present state) + R (resources) = DS (desired state) has both PS and DS as static, static old or stuck, and static new or fixed. The resources are a strategy or “story that works”. To illustrate a “story that works”, Peter then proceeded to make himself a cup of coffee. I asked him if he had brought enough for all of us! (If you haven’t seen ‘Blazing Saddles’, you won’t understand the import of that question!) But he had only enough to provide an example of a “story that works”. He started with an intention or desire for a cup of coffee and went through the steps needed for a successful outcome giving us plenty of VAKOG input as he went along. Why choose something as mundane as making coffee? Because often “stories that work” are just that simple. Time to distract us with another game, before the riot over lack of coffee for the masses! We eagerly gathered round the cloth covered table to play ‘Kim’s game. (Jungle Book). Peter whisked off the cloth to reveal about 20 objects for us to memorise in about 30 seconds. I remember in the Jungle Book that Kim was shown precious stones in his 30 seconds and when asked later provided precise details of colour, cut, carat and flaws of each stone. To do this he needed an internal store of information to make these judgements and to recognise so quickly and accurately the items under the cloth. How did we fare with Peter’s mixed miscellany? No one got all 20! I don’t think anyone was using the 1 bun, 2 shoe, technique, but I may be wrong. I attempted to link the items by making them actors in a story and remembered 12 items. The flaw in all of this was that Peter has been collecting ‘odd’ items for some time for this game and some of them were unknowns to us the players. How did we cope with that? By using what we did know. So for example there was a yellow armchair, which is actually a mobile phone holder. Either answer was correct if we had been asked what was under the cloth. Only one would have been correct if we had been asked for a detailed description of the precise purpose of each item. We wanted to continue playing with the fun game of ‘what else could you do with this item? The whole point of what Peter was trying to say was that all of the answers are ‘correct', or rather, ways of ‘holding the world.' The talk was really about multiple ways of perceiving the world, and that all answers were valid closures. 2nd target. The purpose here was once more to illustrate a misconception in NLP about the ‘Map is not the Territory’. “Reality” depends on our perspective, our current knowledge, our beliefs and values and possibly our sense of identity. Peter used the paradox of the Cretan liar. A traveller in Greece meets a Cretan. The Cretan says, “watch out, all Cretans are liars!” Does this include himself as a Cretan? In which case maybe not all Cretans are liars? This is called a self referential paradox. Time for a break with the helpful admonition “I know you think you understand what you thought Peter said. But I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what he meant!’ Now came the tricky bit! When you don’t know something it can be difficult to understand. When you do know something it can be so simple you can’t understand how everyone else finds it so difficult to grasp. Still with me? To make sense of the world we compare everything with what we already know. As babies we know very little, as adults we know quite a lot more, or think we do. We have plenty of internal references to match to external stimulae, and so make the best sense of things to match our existing ‘map of the world’. Returning to Kim’s game, this means that sometimes how we perceive things may not be how they really are. Given something we don’t recognise we go for the nearest match we have. “Its a grey brain like thing”. “Its a yellow chair shape”. “No match found .. please re-enter a new string!” and those of us who knew, “its the tap from a wine box!” (Different model of the world seen through rosy glow perhaps!) Peter was eager to move on and discuss Lawson’s theory of closure, from a book by Hilary Lawson, which he has been attempting to read for some time. (Heavy going philosophical stuff, some exerpts below). Going back to the “once you know something its easy” principle Peter is struggling with presenting this theory of closure in a clear, concise and NLP friendly way! 3rd target. In NLP we often talk about our ‘filters’ focussing our attention on the bits of input that we recognise and can cope with. These ‘filters’ are neccessary or we would drown in input with the vast amount of information per second that hits our senses. These ‘filters’ therefore act to reduce the wealth of information and ‘funnel’ it down to a level we can manage. Peter contends that we don’t ‘filter’. What we do is to spot the information that is the ‘same as’ something we already know and ‘close’ our mind around it. Before we did this the world before us was ‘open’. We hold information that is different in such a way that it becomes the same as something we already know or understand. For instance lying in bed looking at floral pattern curtains and noticing the ‘faces’ we see in the pattern. Why do we do this? Because it turns the unknown into something meaningful that we can do something about. We turn it into a “story that works” for us. Phew! This was a session with some bits that were easy (we already knew them) and quite a lot that was not easy (we didn’t know them or couldn’t easily fit them into what we did know, or refused them entry because they contradicted what we thought we already knew). After reading this report you may be wondering what was the purpose? For NLP to be truly dynamic we, its practitioners and fans, must be prepared to challenge the very essence of NLP. If something is not working what do we do? Refuse to listen and continue blithely on towards the cliff edge? No! NLPers do something different. Thank you Peter for reminding us that sometimes doing things differently is not as comfy as we might like. More about Peter can be found on his web-site. If you’ve read this far you are due some light relief so follow the link to read some light hearted pokes at Meta -modeland Milton Model language! and for another view of the evening. Allegorical report. I think I understood it! :-) ... and more on closure, from Tara Randall. Closure : A Story of Everything By: Lawson, Hilary Paperback Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0415136504 Written thus:- "The second characteristic of closure that has been identified is that all closures fail, in the sense that closures are not capable of being equivalent to, or replicating, openness. We become aware of the failure of closure to reflect the character of openness in two ways. On the one hand closures fail because the material in question need not be this material, it could be something else and the alternative material may threaten and supersede the current closure. On the other hand closure fails because the texture generated by material offers new closure which in turn potentially undermines current closure. So long as a closure is not undermined by alternative or additional closures it need not be abandoned. However all closures are at risk of failure and will be seen to fail if the closure is pursued. Once again, this outcome follows directly from the structure of openness and closure, namely that closure is not openness, nor does it describe an element of openness. As a result closure cannot be equivalent to openness." This is a key point. In fact, the whole book is full of key points. "In the case of linguistic closure the assumption of completeness is at once apparent. On hearing or seeing a written word or sentence we assume that it means one thing. We know of course that words and sentences can be taken to mean different things, but we usually assume that the intention on the part of the speaker or writer is to provide a single meaning. In the event that alternative closures are available we can in the manner of the duck/rabbit swap from one to another, but even so we are likely to seek to abandon one closure in favour of a single meaning on this occasion. The assumption of closure becomes more evident when we are the author. When we say or write a word or sentence we have a unitary meaning in mind. Of course we may come to see that our formulation could be interpreted otherwise and this can on occasion be intentional, if rare, but at the moment of inception we provide one linguistic closure. There are instances in language, poetry being an example, when the potential to realise a single closure is deliberately avoided. This phenomenon will be examined in detail later, but even in such cases it is still possible only to provide a single closure at any particular moment. A poem is like a complex version of the duck/rabbit in which a plethora of alternatives are available, but as with the duck/rabbit only one of them can be understood at any one time." Peter’s comment on this book; However tricky to read, it is still brilliant piece of thinking, and it really pays off when you make the effort to see how it all works. Return to NLP-South main site