Questions - 7 - The NLP Meta Model - what’s that?

A friend of mine asked me “what brought the Questions on?” - Good question!

Recently, I had to help a colleague consider how to find something out, so I was thinking in a fairly structured way about questions and writing about them helped me do this. I’ve been thinking about questions for a good long while. As I said in the first of these posts, asking questions has been my job one way or another for most of the last 20 years.

I’m almost done. Just this post and one other, and then back to my normal random posts about whatever sparkly thing catches my mind’s eye.

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We have looked at how to use questions for investigation and analysis; we have looked at how to use questions to control a conversation and steer it; we have looked at how to use questions to intensify emotions. Finally, I want to look at one way to use questions to reveal the stuff we hide from ourselves.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed the NLP Meta Model of language and presented it to the world in The Structure of Magic. A meta-model is a model of a model, so this is a description of the language people use to describe their world.

There are a large number of detailed and frankly arduous descriptions of the NLP Meta-Model out there. I had been going to write it up myself but I’ve decided to follow the structure given by Loren Larson, though I have created my own examples. The key word here is example. The questions in the right hand column are each just one way of many that could be used to open up and find the hidden content beyond, behind and beneath the statements in the left hand column.

PATTERN	RESPONSE
DISTORTIONS
MIND READING (claiming to know someone else’s thoughts without specifying how you know)
Dogs come when they’re called. Cats take a message and get back to you later. (Mary Bly)	How do you know the cat is taking a message?
LOST PERFORMATIVE (Value judgements where evidence for the judgement is omitted)
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.	How do you know they have staff? Who says so?
CAUSE & EFFECT (Statement implies that A causes B, or vice versa)
Don’t use cats - they’ll screw up your data. (Anonymous science professor to student)	How will they screw up the data? (Seek evidence) Do they always screw it up, every time? (Seek counter example) But what happens if you want data on cats? (Seek counter example)
COMPLEX EQUIVALENCE (Statement implies that A is equivalent to B)
Long ago, there lived a creature with a voice like a vacuum cleaner. We know little about it, but we do know that it ate cats. (Anon)	Could there be some other reason that cats run away from vacuum cleaners? (Seek counter example) Are the only things that cats run away from creatures that used to eat them long ago? (Seek counter example)
PRESUPPOSITIONS (The statement assumes that something is true or will be true)
The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. Presuppositions: Owls and cats get on together Pea green is a beautiful colour Owls and cats are capable of going to sea	There are a huge number of ways of attacking presupposiitions: Do owls and cats actually get on together? Is pea green an appropriate colour for a sea-going vessel? I thought cats didn’t like water - do they? etc

GENERALIZATIONS
UNIVERSAL QUANTIFIERS (words like: always, all, every, everyone, never, no one)
Never play cat and mouse games if you’re a mouse. (Don Addis) Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. (T. S. Elliott)	Never? What would happen if you did? No one at all? Every single human law that ever there was?
MODAL OPERATORS (of possibility: can, will of impossibility: can’t, won’t of necessity: must, have to, it is necessary)
Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats. (Rebecca West)	What stopped him? What would have happened if he had?

DELETIONS
NOMINALIZATIONS (verbs that have been made into nouns; the rule is, if it’s a noun and you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s a nominalization
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. (T. S. Elliott)	Whom does he deceive? How is he sauve?
UNSPECIFIED VERBS (verbs where some detail of the action is not specified)
And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled, Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled, Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair - Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there! (T. S. Elliott).	What’s been looted from the larder? Whose jewel-case? Milk missing from where? How do you stifle a Peke? etc
LACK OF REFERENTIAL INDEX (an action is specified, but WHO is doing the action is left unspecified. Put another way, it’s any non-referring noun phrase)
Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called “the Hidden Paw”. (T.S. Elliot)	Who calls him “the Hidden Paw”?
COMPARATIVE DELETIONS (A comparison is made, but what it is being compared to is unspecified;included words like: better, worse, more, less, best, worst)
By associating with the cat, one only risks becoming richer. (Collette) One reason we admire cats is for their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing, or pretend they do. (Barbara Webster)	Richer than whom? Richer than what? On top of what?

It is not easy to come to grips with the Meta Model; as you have seen, there is a lot of it to take in. There is also a real risk that you can end up being intimidating and smart-alecky or humourless if you permit your responses to become too Pavlovian. (Too Pavlovian, how, specifically?).

In the meantime, it is fun to take a statement at random from just about any source such as television, a newspaper or a blog, and run it through the Meta Model to see how many of the categories it fits.

There is a lot to discuss with the Meta Model, so…

… more another day.