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Robert Dilts, one of the co-founders of NLP, has recently posted an informative article on the topic of modeling.  Dilts says in his article, “Anyone who claims to know or care about NLP is aware that the process of modeling is the life blood of the field. The origin of NLP and its continued evolution come from the ability of NLP practitioners to model the verbal, cognitive and behavioral patterns (the “neuro-linguistic programs”) of exceptional people. It is frequently pointed out that the basis of NLP is modeling and not the “trail of techniques” that have been left in its wake.”

Within the realms of NLP there are two ‘schools’ of modeling – two distinctions – as prefered by the likes of John Grinder. Like Dilts, I tend to use the analytical modeling framework; although I have a passion for what I refer to as ‘implicit modeling’ and actually use a combination of both in my work. Yet there is also what Dilts refers to as ‘pure NLP modeling’ – this is the implicit or non-impositional form of modeling.

The difference resides principally in the degree of imposition of the perceptual and analytic categories of the modeler during the modeling process. – in the case of NLP modeling, the imposition is minimal; in the case of Analytic modeling, the imposition is maximal.

Read Dilts A Proposed Distinction for Neuro-Linguistic Programming article here.

Listen to our podcast to hear about our approach to modeling:

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Found out more about Changeworks Communication on our revamped website.

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In the final part of my interview with David Gordon, he talks about the application of this phenomenal technique in organisations. What are the characteristics of good modelers? Modeling is both art and science (in my mind).  This requires a level of skill and training (in particular a high level of expertise in NLP and questioning/listening (coaching helps too).  So it is quite an investment in learning that many are not willing to take. Creating the case for modeling in the corporate arena is not straightforward, however once they get involved they see the vast benefits and rewards that this technique offers for organisational learning.

The February issue of Scientific American’s Mind magazine has an interesting news article about identity and behaviour. New research suggests that cloaking oneself in a new identity – even for only a few minutes – can disrupt long-established patterns of behaviour. To conduct the study, psychologists entered the online gaming world and developed new ‘avatar’ identities for volunteer ‘players’ and then got them to do maths tests. From a mix of male and female participants those given a female identity and who competed against two males performed worse and gave up quicker than did those assigned male identities and whose opponents were female.  However the subjects’ real genders did not affect their scores!

Whilst the news item does not elaborate the specifics of how the avatar roles were created or transferred to the volunteer subjects, we know that identity is made up of a number of important factors.  It is who we are, who we see ourselves to be; that is our abilities, beliefs we have about ourselves (ie females are rubbish at maths??!!), our values (a certain form of belief that is non contextual) and our thoughts, as well as our attitudes, emotions and the behaviours and strategies we have adopted for that identity (ie playing dumb to be a female ??!!). 

These are of course, exactly the components we study, deconstruct and reconstruct in experiential modeling (or you could call it experience reprocess engineering!). So this research supports what we find (and have found for the last 25 years) in modeling ability and the structure of experience using NLP.  (Why does it always take the psychologists so much time to catch up with NLP?  my opinion only .. and perhaps a little ‘blind’ at that!!). And what we have found is that the effect of identity and ability is not tied to a lifetime of experiences, and can therefore be deconstructed and taught to others.

In my second interview with David Gordon he talks about how modeling can be used by organisations to improve performance and help organisations become excellent. Drawing on examples of work done modeling technical skills for a patent office, modeling effective team work for a large oil company on an oil platform in the North Sea, and also a modeling study on a CEO to improve leadership communication.  Listen to the 5 min interview below.

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I recently attended David Gordon’s advanced modeling course at the Northern School of NLP.  David Gordon is one of the founders of neuro linguistic programming and has spent more than 30 years developing the field of modeling.  In this 12 min interview (part 1 of 3) David explains what modeling is, what behaviours can be modeled and why modeling is important. 

You can find out more about David’s work and his new book ‘Expanding your World’ on http://expandyourworld.net/

I have written about modelling in previous posts. But this is such an important tool in helping organisations to collaborate, communicate and demonstrate powerful leadership that I want to explain more about this powerful technique.

The performance excellence locked up in an organisation’s workforce is one of the biggest single factors that determines the competitiveness of a business. Here is where competitive advantage originates. Those businesses that recognise where they have exceptional performance and try to understand and create more of it, will be the winners of the future. Behavioural modelling can help businesses achieve higher levels of sustainable performance and learning.

Behavioural modelling is an example of ‘double loop’ learning, in that it involves helping the business to perform a skill better, so that the structure of this process can be taught to other individuals. And at the same time the business is taught the process of how to model it (i.e. learning how to learn). This ‘double loop’ learning methodology is both highly cost effective, drawing on the resources internal to the company at hand, and also guarantees long term systemic change.

The goal of behaviour modelling is to identify the essential elements of thought and action required to produce the desired excellent behaviour. It provides a description of what is necessary to produce a similar result. This process can be used to understand a particular example of excellence better by unpicking the processes which underlie it, and from there to be able to teach others how to do it. Conversely, it may be used to refine performance in others by specifying the steps followed by those expert or excellent performers. In this respect, the modelling process has much in parallel with that of business process reengineering.

The foundation of the modelling process is Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not least because NLP developed out of the modelling of human behaviours and thinking processes. NLP modelling involves finding out about how the brain (‘Neuro’) is operating, by analysing patterns of language (‘linguistic’), behaviour and non-verbal communication. The results of this process are then put into step-by-step strategies or programmes (‘Programming’) that may be used to transfer that skill to other people. One of the biggest challenges in modelling exceptional performance comes from the fact that these ‘experts’ often are not consciously aware of what they are doing. They are therefore unable to provide a direct description of the processes that make up that excellence. In fact, many experts purposefully avoid thinking about what they are doing, and how they are doing it, for fear that it will actually interfere with their intuitions!

Therefore the four step process as outlined below, particularly the implicit and explicit phases, is essential. Implicit modelling allows a direct intuitive representation to be formulated about that engineer’s subjective experience and the explicit modelling elicits the explicit structure of the excellent performer’s experience so that it can be transferred to others.

The methodology of the project follows four distinct phases:

• Initial Needs Analysis – discussion to ascertain the elements of excellence and required use of the results.
• Implicit modelling – use of 2nd positioning to pick up intuitions. Effectively shadow the person on the job.
• Explicit modelling – conduct a formal 45 min interview with each person to be modelled using a discussion guide for the interview to gather data, and to record the interview on camcorder/mp3 recorder for later analysis.
• Model Building Phase – To build a model to be used in an effective training or transfer of skills programme and also for recruitment selection and induction.

One of the challenges for the modeller is dealing with the vast array of information that is presented to him or her during the process of modelling … more about that in a later post.