Modeling Excellence Series #16

Earlier this year I wrote 15 articles in the “Modeling Excellence” series and ended that with the one back on May 27. Recently in a training someone asked, “When is modeling ineffective? What would be an example of an ineffectively modeling of some excellence?” At the moment of the question I did not have a poignant example, but now I do.

A number of years ago after Southwest Airlines demonstrated their excellence in creating a low-budget airline that stayed profitable and kept growing during the same time that every other airline in the US was suffering declines and losses, if not going through bankruptcy. So both United Airlines and Delta attempted to model what Southwest was doing and enter into the market as competitors. So both launched subsidiaries to compete with the Southwest’s business model. United invented “TED” which I often flew between Grand Junction and Denver. Yet while they were certainly able to copy the system, they were not able to actually model the excellence that distinguished Southwest.

That is, they were able to copy the planes, the processes, quick turn-arounds at airports, etc. but they were not able to model and replicate Southwest’s values or spirit. Southwest is known for their entrepreneurship, fun, and love and the airline trades under the ticker symbol LUV. They were the airline which first introduced humor in something as serious as the safety instructions given just before a flight takes off. They added little comments like, “If you haven’t been in a car since 1970,
here’s how a seat belt works.” So while United and Delta airlines could model the externals-what Southwest does, they could not model the spirit by which Southwest employees do what they do. Given their cultures, they could not model the culture.

This explains, I think, much of NLP modeling which has failed to be effective. People have examined and modeled the structure of some experience and have fully identified all of the external steps, actions, and responses required to be able to do whatever some high performer or expert is able to do. But they missed something. They did not get the internal stuff- the spirit of the expert. They did not capture the expert’s attitudes, values, principles, understandings, beliefs, decisions, identity, permissions, and frames of mind.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that while Neuro-Linguistic Program is superb at detailing the behaviors of an experience and some of the first-level frames of mind- beliefs, it is not equipped to flush out the multiple layers of self-reflexive frames. And why? Simple. The classic NLP strategy model does not include a model for modeling the systemic self-reflexivity of human consciousness. NLP is excellent for detailing the linear strategy of the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic steps in “thinking and “feeling.”

This explains why NLP needs the Meta-States Self-Reflexivity Model. That’s because above and beyond the strategy model, and each piece of the strategy model, are additional layers of reflexive thoughts-and-feelings and for each one of those are additional hidden layers. And it is the Meta-States model that is designed to identify these layers that hide within, above, and behind these “thoughts” whether they are beliefs, decisions, identities, permissions, prohibitions, understandings, etc.

Now, systemically when these layers combine they gestalt to create additional phenomena that are more than and different from the sum of the parts. Within human consciousness, they gestalt into attitudes-higher level frames of mind that hold together a synergy of multiple beliefs. And because of this, using the Meta-States model we can model the structure of an attitude to identify the spirit of the expert.

Here then is the difference that makes the difference within so many experiences. That is, above and beyond what the top achiever does is his or her attitude or spirit that actually drives the experience. It is the person’s spirit that endows the experience with the certain quality that takes it to a new level and gives it the quality that we are actually seeking to model.

The point is that our modeling will be ultimately ineffective if we do not get both the what and the why. The what is the performance, even when it is the micro-performance of the actions that make up the activity. The why is made up of lots of things:

•  The intention behind it, which is made up of the values or significance and which answers the why question. “Why are you doing that? What’s your intention?”
• The principles and understandings governing one’s assumptive frames about how it works and how to carry it off.
• The aspirations of one’s vision about the meaningfulness of the activity.

The point is that to unpack the expert’s attitude or spirit requires the ability to enter into his or her matrix of multiple meanings or meta-states that galvinize the person’s robust state. This explains why we really cannot, or should not, use NLP as mere technology- as merely a set of techniques. To be a technician alone will only model out the external activities as United and Delta did with Southwest and entirely miss the inner “culture” of the company. To model the culture, the inner spirit and attitude of the people who add the quality to the activity, we have to use a model that can handle the non-linear, systemic self-reflexivity of the human
subjective experience- the Meta-States Model.

For books on Meta-States, see www.neurosemantics.com and click Products.

For the APG Trainings that Introduces Meta-States, click Trainings and then APG.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

When it comes to the heart of Neuro-Semantics and NLP— studying subjective human experiences and modeling those experiences, a first question that often arises is why.  Why model an experience?  And the answer is really simple.  It is to understand how it works. That’s because when you understanding the how of now (Jan. 28, #6) you are often handed powerful leverage points of change or replication.  That is, knowing how an experience works—if that experience is not helpful, useful, beneficial, ecological, etc.—you can change it.  And mostly you can change it by noting how it works, when, where, with whom, etc. and sometimes the tiniest alteration of a key variable will facilitate a systemic change.

In NLP, we often describe this using a dangerous word to describe this kind of change, “magical.”  That’s because the change that happens seems incredible, fantastic, and seemingly “magical.”  A good example is facilitating a change in a person’s “internal critic.”  Simple ask a group of people:

“Who here has an internal critic?”  “Who here has an internal voice that criticizes you, attacks you, insults, you, says ugly things to you and that makes you feel bad?”

What I find incredible is not that there are people like that, and who will raise their hands, “Yes, I have an internal critic like that!”  What I find mind-blowing is that anyone ever treats themselves that way!  My thought is, “Why would you talk that way to yourself?”  But the fact is, a large percentage of people everywhere in the world identifies with this experience and feel helpless to change it.  Of course, the helplessness rises from using a very ineffective method of trying to change it.  What do most people do?  They tell themselves to stop!

Ah yes, the “command negation.”  And by issuing a command to themselves, “Now I’m going to stop telling myself that I’m an idiot!”  “Don’t ever say again that ‘I’ll never get it!  I must be stupid!’” Of course, this does not work.  Of course it makes things worse.  Whatever you command yourself to not do, you have to represent and think about.

Using the NLP Communication Model, instead of using an ineffective change method like that, we first seek to understand the how of now. We ask exploration questions about the experience so that we can model the experience itself.  So we ask the modeling question: “How do you do that?”  And at first, most people don’t even know how to answer that question.  “What do you mean, ‘how’ do I do that?  I just tell myself that I’m going to make a fool of myself because I’m not prepared.  That’s all.”

Now what modeling enables you to do is to listen for structure or process. In that statement, I hear the person tell me the content words, “I’m going to make a fool of myself because I’m not prepared.”  Okay, so that’s what you say to yourself.  How do you say it?  What tone of voice?  Repeat the words using the tone that you use in your mind so I can hear the tone.  Okay, now where is that voice— in your head?  Behind you?  In front of you?  To one side or another?  Panoramic?  What is the volume?  After getting the answers to such process questions, then I begin to play around with the experience and alter the quality of the various variables and invite the person to notice the effect.  Common ways of doing this in NLP are:

• Lower the voice and notice how low you make the volume before it doesn’t feel bad.
• Change the tone so it sounds like Elvis Presley singing, “You’re a hound dog.”
• Make the tone very sexy and try very hard to feel bad.
• Put the voice into your little finger and hear it coming from there.

Typically such alterations create systemic change.  The experience of being berated by your internal critic completely changes.  Changing one of the qualities of how you do something, changes the whole experience. It becomes different and sometimes so different that it becomes something else.  It might become humor, ridiculousness, playfulness, non-sense, etc.  That changes things in a much more elegant and easy way.

What about replication?  What if you have an experience that’s a great experience and you want to experience it for yourself?  This is the case with modeling experts— modeling someone who can do something that’s extraordinary, wonderful, and empowering.  In this case, we do the same thing.  We embrace the experience, frame it so as to punctuate it and set it aside in our minds and the mind of the expert and then begin to discover how do you do that?

Now most of the time the expert cannot answer the question.  And there’s a good reason, he or she does not know how.  The skill is so habitual and so ingrained into personality and behavior that it is no longer in conscious awareness.  This, in fact, is a description of a competent skill.  The skill occurs in the right context without the person needing to “work himself up for it” or for “her to orient herself to the context.”  It just happens.  It happens outside-of-conscious-awareness.

That’s where a modeler comes in.  The modeler asks how questions and gives menu lists of possibilities and evokes the expert to do the skill or imagine doing the skill and calibrates to what the person does that re-establishes the expertise.  It is in this way that we can detail the steps of the strategy that have become streamlined.  And when you know that, you can replicate it.  You can use the step-by-step process to try it on and see how it works within you or use it with others.

Why model?  To change strategies that you’re not an expert at (or someone else is) and also to replicate new strategies that someone is an expert at.  If you want to know what NLP is about, it is this.  Yes, NLP is also a Communication Model — that’s what the originators created by modeling three communicators (Perls, Satir, Erickson) and that Communication Model is also a tool for modeling. But, more about that next time.

Modeling Excellence Series #3

In last week’s post, I highlighted the power of focusing on the how of detailing out what is happening in the now. For me, this was the most exciting thing when I first discovered NLP Modeling.  By asking questions and by closely observing people, a person could identify how any given person is currently, at this moment, creating his or her sense of reality.  And if we can do that, then we can figure out how that reality came into existence, operates, and can be altered.  Incredible!

Now in NLP Modeling, Wyatt Woodsmall (1990) was the person who first differentiated two dimensions or levels of modeling.  He labeled them Modeling I and Modeling II. I think that this distinction provides a valuable way to think about the range of the modeling that we can do.

Modeling I refers to pattern detection and transference. This kind of modeling detects a pattern of behavior that shows up in certain skills, abilities, and expertise.  By explicating the patterns of behavior in the skill or skills—the what that an expert actually does to achieve a result, this modeling focuses on reproducing the products of the expert.  This kind of modeling focuses on learning the sets of distinctions, procedures, and processes which enable a person to reach a desired outcome.

Modeling II refers to modeling the first modeling (Modeling I).  As such, it focuses on the how of an expert—how does the expert actually create and perform the expertise.  It doesn’t focus on the what is produced (that’s the first modeling), it focuses on the background competencies.  Now we focus on the processes which are necessary to generate the patterns that form the content of Modeling I.  In this modeling, we especially pay attention to the beliefs and values that outframe the expert.  Here we attend to the meta-programs, the contexts and frames, the meta-states, etc., all of the higher frames.

I like this distinction because, as Woodsmall points out, the field of NLP itself resulted from Modeling I, but not Modeling II.  Let me explain.  NLP emerged from the joint venture of John Grinder and Richard Bandler as they studied the language patterns of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir.  First Richard used his gift of mimicking Perls’ and Satir’s speech, tonal, and language patterns.  Though untrained in psychology and psychotherapy, by simply reproducing the “magical” effects of these communication experts, he found that he could get many of the same results as the experts.  Incredible!  How was this possible?

In searching for that answer, John used Transformational Grammar and his unique skills in that field to pull apart the “surface” structures for the purpose of identifying the “deep” structures.  Both of them wanted to discover how this worked. Frank Pucelik also was a part of all of that, and he created the context and the original group in which all of the discoveries took place.

From the theory of Transformational Grammar, the assumptions of the Cognitive Psychology (Noam Chomsky, George Miller, George Kelly, Alfred Korzybski, Gregory Bateson), and the coping of Perls and Satir, they specified what “the therapeutic wizards” actually did which had the transformative effect upon clients.  That was the original NLP modeling.

This adventure in modeling then gave birth to The Structure of Magic (1975/ 1976) which gave us the first NLP Model.  This was originally called The Meta-Model of Language in Therapy.   Today we just call it, The Meta-Model. This is a model about the language behavior of Perls and Satir, that is, how they used words in doing change work with clients.  And that then became the central technology of NLP for modeling.

The amazing thing is that with that first model, they were able to model a great deal of the governing structure of a person’s experience.  That enabled them to peek into a person’s model of the world just by listening to the features that linguistically mark out how the person has created his or her map.  While this is not all that’s needed for modeling, it certainly gives us a set of linguistic tools for figuring out how a piece of subjective experience works. It answers the how questions:

• How does a person depress himself?
• How does a person take “criticism” effective and use it for learning?
• How does another person look out at an audience and freak out?

The Meta-Model gave the original co-developers of NLP numerous tools for both understanding and replicating the person’s original modeling.  Soon thereafter, as they modeled Erickson, they began adding all kinds of non-verbal and non-linguistic distinctions to their model, enriching the modeling process even further.   As NLP started with Modeling I and not Modeling II, the early NLP thinkers and trainers did not have access to the higher level of modeling until some time later.  Nor did they seem aware of it for some time.  Eventually this realization arose as people began asking some basic modeling questions:

• What strategy did Perls use in working with clients?
• What strategy enabled Satir to do her “magic” with families?
• What strategy describes Erickson’s calibration skills and use of hypnotic language patterns?
• How did any one of those wizards make decisions about what to use when?

Even to this day, we do not know.  We know what they produced, but not how they produced such.  We have the results from their magic, but not the formula that identifies the states and meta-states, the beliefs and higher frames of mind that enabled them to operate as “wizards” in the first place.   Woodsmall (1990) writes:

“In short, if NLP is the by-product of modeling Erickson, Perls, and Satir, then why are we never taught how they did anything?   All we are taught is what they did.  This means that we can imitate the powerful patterns that they used, but we don’t know how they generated and performed them to start with.  From this it is evident that the part of NLP that is the by-product of modeling is a by-product of Modeling I, but not of Modeling II.” (p. 3)

As the product of Modeling I, all that we originally received in NLP was the result of modeling.  We received the patterns and procedures which the modelers found in Perls, Satir, and Erickson, i.e., reframing, swishing, anchoring, collapsing anchors, etc.  We received the NLP patterns. Bandler and Grinder gave us a legacy of dramatic processes that enable people to change.

Only later was it that Bandler, Grinder, DeLozier, Bandler-Cameron, Dilts, and Gordon begin to wonder about the modeling itself that they started to explore the modeling processes, assumptions, patterns, etc. about modeling.  From that came the commission from Richard and John for Robert Dilts to write the second modeling book, NLP: Volume I.  That volume made Modeling II available.

They also left their theory about change, mind, neurology, language, etc.  Of course, they did not call it “a theory.”  In fact, they pulled off a big “Sleight of Mouth” pattern as they told us that they had no theory, just a description of what worked.  “It’s a model, not a theory.”  With that mind-line, they distracted our attention and offered “the NLP Presuppositions,” telling us that they were not true, could not be proven, but seemed like really nice “lies” that would take us to more resourceful places.  So we just memorized them, only half aware (if that), that within the NLP Presuppositions they had hidden away the theory of neuro-linguistic programming.