Y’know

How do you know you know something?  How do you know you’re learning?

I spent a couple of days last week on the first two teaching days of an academic course.  The topic in question is a fluffy subject for magpie minds - the tutor even used the word “eclectic”.

We spent the tutorial days chatting.   The tutor had a dozen or so slides and if he hadn’t had those then it would have felt like we were just hanging out, sharing tales from our various pasts and blethering.  It was a pleasant way to spend two days, but it didn’t feel structured or disciplined and so I didn’t feel like I was being taught stuff and therefore I didn’t feel that I learning.

I had the same experience years ago when I spent enough to buy a newish small car on NLP training, but couldn’t tell if I’d got anything out of it.  I challenged the tutor then saying “this is interesting and it’s cool, but what exactly are you teaching me and what am I learning?”   He said that different people know they know things in different ways and observed that I need to be able to relay something in a structured way in order to know that I know it.  He also said that they’d taken a decision to teach in a way that suited the majority of people who could learn without the need to evaluate their learning.  Or something.  To this day I don’t know if he was bullshitting on the fly or if I really am that anomalous.

In the old days of surgery the method was watch one, do one, teach one.  Teaching something fulfills my need to be able to relay it in a structured way.  I guess the nearest I’m getting to that in my studies is the discipline of writing an essay on the subject which is transparent enough to explain its own subject-matter to an intelligent lay-person.

I decided to trust the tutor last week.  He’s been teaching his subject at various universities for years, with a lifetime of training before then.  There were only four of us, all with a couple of decades of working life behind us and all well on the way through our studies.    The experience with the NLP training is a reasonably successful precedent.   And most recently I’ve discovered that when I am teaching, I watch people to see if they understand the concepts rather than banging on and on until they and I am bored.  I don’t care whether or not they have an “ah hah” moment of epiphany when they realise they get it, so long as they get it.  I do spell it out when I’m asked to, but that’s because leaving people floundering is cruel.

So I decided that last weekend I’d go with the flow rather than floundering, but I’ll only find out what I learned when it comes to writing the assignment.  It’s flattering to be trusted to pick the bones out of our chattering, but it’s also rather scary if the truth be told.

Bouncing back

Have you ever tried dropping a word or phrase into a conversation and seeing how long it takes for the other person to use it? It usually takes between 30 seconds and two minutes for it to bounce back to you.  If this was a real life example then the word I’d expect to come back would be “bounce” in the same conversation but not necessarily in the same context.

In the last week I have read the phrase “back in the day” three times on different blogs (Le Pen Quotidien, Suz at Large and Paddy K), each entry posted on the 28th or 29th of December.  I noticed it the first time I read it because it jarred slightly.    So, never at all and then three times in a week.  At first I thought that someone, somewhere has dropped that phrase into the collective conversation at the end of December and what I was seeing were the ripples, however the phrase “back in the day” is a song and a movie, so it’s obviously a phrase that’s out there, even if I’ve not heard it before.  Checking blogsearch.google.com it was actually used less in December than in November or October.   So much for my theory, then.

Even so, let me recommend the game of dropping words into conversations.  It works best in three- or multi-handed conversations (pubs, meetings, that sort of thing) and works best with simple and appropriate words that aren’t entirely obvious given the context.

Well, it passes the time.

Soft is hard

One of the things that annoys me about the industry I work in is how much it undervalues what it persists in calling “soft” skills. Tech skills are the hard skills which command respect. Don’t get me wrong. I love geeks, in fact I find geekiness really sexy. I like it when a guy’s skillset is really hard. But before we tumble too far down the road of pornuendo, I want to wave a flag for soft skills.

(Incidentally, it’s not just my industry: surgeons are godlike if they do good scalpel but their bedside manner is considered irrelevant because you can’t quantify it, despite the rather obvious thought that the placebo effect is a neat way to improve a post-op complication rate and that there is a direct relationship between faith in the practitioner and the power of the placebo).

Now I have pretty good soft skills. Give me a bunch of folks and half a day and I can get just about any form of coherent analysis out of them you’d care to mention - be that a plan, a process, a set of requirements, a list of deliverables, a taxonomy. You name it, all we need are post-it notes, marker pens and caffeine and carbs, and we’ll end the day tired, happy and in agreement. I’m not bad at training sessions, though it’s not really my thang. I can plan a series of activities to take a group of people through the acceptance cycle when we are imposing change on them. I know a reasonable amount about NLP and how to use it appropriately in business situations. I spent more of my life than I care to remember selling, which is the ultimate test of soft-skills in action.

The problem is that soft skills are hard. They are hard for a lot of reasons. They are hard partly because soft processes are only logical in hindsight. You can look back at a soft process - the process used to manage a series of changes to the way that people work, for example - and think it was all pretty obvious. But try to design it… ah that’s another thing.

There are very few “how-to” guides to soft skills. I think I’ve found two on requirements analysis in all of the IT bookshops I have ever been to. There’s a lot of literature about training skills and some about introducing change to people, but a lot of it is either off-puttingly pretentious (”Soft Systems Methodology” - I mean, wtf?) nauseatingly cute (”The one-minute cheese-monger”) or theoretical but not practical (”The Tipping Point”).

The other challenge is that soft skills are implicit skills; they are hidden, obscure, almost invisible. This doesn’t make them easy but it does mean they are undervalued. The people with the best soft skills don’t make it look easy. Oh no. When you are with people with really good soft skills, you don’t notice that anything is happening at all. On the other hand when change is introduced badly, it is obvious for all to see. The best and most recent example I can think of from this blog is the MTAS debacle where change was imposed on the victims with no attempt to get them to actually want the change. MTAS could have been a success; the system it replaced was broke enough to be worth fixing. MTAS needed better technical implementation for sure, but those affected could have been brought at least to a state of neutral acceptance of the concepts behind it, and maybe even trust and support, if had been handled right.

Soft skills are subjective skills, when using soft skills you need be aware of context and to exercise judgement. You need imagination. You have to be willing to walk in someone else’s shoes. They involve taking risks and making yourself vulnerable. When you are exercising soft skills, you have to be willing not to know. This subjectivity makes them difficult to turn into a system or a methodology.

With soft skills there’s no right or wrong answer, there is better and worse, more useful and less useful, but no right and wrong.

That’s not easy.

In fact, it’s hard.

Aphra’s top tip…

Aphra’s top tip…

… if you want to retain any degree of respect and professional credibility among your colleagues, don’t tell them that you store you dirty clothes on the floor. They will look at you, but say nothing.

Mental Maps

I need to have a mental map of everything I have to do, in order to be able to get on and do things. Without one, I flounder around and lose track.

If I am going to get on with - say - cleaning the kitchen, I need to know that - yes - I have to clean the living room, but that can wait until tomorrow so long as I remove the dead mouse, and that although I’m going to paint the kitchen, it won’t be before the next free Saturday with dry weather.

All the things I have to do are neatly arranged in relation to each other and to calender dates and other events on my mental map, like squadrons of Spitfires at Bomber Command.

Sometimes it’s a mind-map, sometimes it’s a project plan, sometimes its a flow-chart, sometimes it’s just a really well internalised list, but if I don’t have that map in one form or another things get forgotten and this has been happening more and more recently. What with having time off, studying, training courses and the like, my mental map has become very disturbed.

We discovered today that we had forgotten about a whole load of things-to-do from last month: the professional equivalent of finding green stuff in coffee mugs which had been put away in the cupboard and left for four weeks.

Through an accident of scheduling I have two completely clear days tomorrow and Thursday and so I have all the time and mental space I need to rebuild my map. Woo Hoo!

However, when I told my boss about this he looked concerned and issued a warning: “don’t forget that things can change”. He’s normally very trusting but he’s resisted my attempts to introduce mental order before. He seems afraid that structure will introduce inflexibility. I find this really interesting, because it is so different from how I think.

I’m going to put a pin in my map tomorrow to remind me to ask him how he keeps track of what he has to do.

Unasked questions

Very occasionally something interesting turns up on the list of search terms people have used to find my blog. A couple of days ago someone searched for “question NLP never asks”. It’s almost a zen koan, and it’s certainly an interesting search term for a thinking NLPer. All NLPers should be thinkers, though sadly this is not so.

There are of course two sorts of questions one never asks. Actually, make that three.

The first sort are the ones which there is no point in asking because if, by happy chance you are told the truth, you won’t believe it: Does my bum look big in this? Have you stopped seeing her? Do you really love me?

The second sort are the questions which will rock the boat. The US Military has made not asking questions its official policy on homosexuals in the military: “Don’t ask, don’t tell” indeed. In these cases, it is better not to know the truth. These are the questions that Tessa Jowell presumably didn’t ask her husband.

The third sort though are the interesting ones. These are the ones we don’t ask because we don’t think in those terms. These are the questions that inhabit our blind-spots, whatever they might be.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a koan to play with, and without getting too thought-for-the-day about it, I am now asking myself “what questions don’t I ask?”

It’s easier to see the back of your own head without a mirror.

… but then again, too few to mention …

When you get a text message at a quarter to midnight saying “Are you still awake?”, what are you going to do? That’s right. I rang back.

My friend has a complicated life. I’m used to being the soap opera around here, and it is rather odd to find myself the stable one while my friend ricochets from situation to situation like the ball in a pinball machine.

He has some choices to make and, for once in my life, I didn’t have advice to give.

I am great at giving advice.

No, really I am.

Sometimes it’s advice, sometimes it’s an opinion, sometimes it’s a suggestion, and one of the things that makes me a good person to ask for help is that I am always really clear on which it is. I’ll even give people advice that I really don’t want them to take, if what is good for them is painful for me. For some reason that’s the one set of advice I have a 10/10 take-up on. Oh well.

So I told him about a couple of ways that I make sure I end up with as few regrets as possible. Coward that I am, I don’t like the idea of regrets.

The first is to kick start some hindsight. Imagine yourself five, ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future, or at the far end of your career, or the far end of your life, and look back on the situation you are in. What would you wish you had done? What would you regret the least? A powerful question that. (Ha!) Use it wisely.

It’s an odd thing to do the first time you do it, but it is so powerful and so useful that it can end up becoming habitual. It helps you get some perspective on the thing and sort out the short-term gain or pain from the lasting consequences of your decision.

The second is to take time to notice that the decision you are making is the right one, given the circumstances you are in right now. This is something that good abortion and adoption counsellors do. They take the time to make sure that, whatever happens in the future, the woman knows now that the decision she has made (to terminate the pregnancy, to give the baby away or to go through with the whole thing) is the right one given the situation she is in and the information she has available.

This one makes it easier for you to forgive yourself for your own mistakes because you know you did the best you could at the time.

The third thing is to be aware when a decision really is not your call, and you are just a factor in someone else’s decision-making. Deluded fools that they are, they think the world revolves around them. Don’t they realise? You see, you can have all sorts of reactions to the consequences of another person’s decisions but unless you caused them to take that decision, regret cannot be one of them.

So there you are. Aphra’s guide to regret-free decision-making. Mind you, you may still make completely lousy choices. You may still lie awake staring at the ceiling and aching with pain. But at least you’ll have got there really really carefully.

Grandmama, Grandmama, here’s this lovely egg. Listen up while I teach you how to suck it.

Word Clouds

Hey - how cool is this? These are the words I use here. If you like, it’s a snapshot of my mind. I got it from a site that makes t-shirts. I skipped on the t-shirt, but I really like my word cloud. I’d love it on a mug.

Someone has written a plugin for using with WordPress, but I think it only works if you use WordPress as a stand-alone content editor instead of doing your blogging here on site.

I thought this was cool so I have suggested it in the features forums. I have started a conversation suggesting the Word Cloud plugin and added the suggestion to a separate conversation about tag clouds. Be wary of spamming though, but the two conversations are about different features, though they look very similar. Apparently the thing to so is use the Feedback button at the top right of your Dashboard to put the suggestion to the WordPress Peeps.

Questions - 8 - More NLP Meta Modelling

This considers how to use the NLP Meta Model to give structure and direction to your questions. If you have not come across the Meta Model before, you can find out about it in Questions - 7.

Got that?

Good.

Before we consider the Meta Model in more detail, here is a simple scope warning:

The Meta Model is not the best tool for investigation and analysis. It is easy to get seduced by it because it is so comprehensive and so well documented. Many NLPers seem to assume that it is applicable to all circumstances and that is the only way to work out what questions to use. Bandler and Grinder developed it when observing therapists at work, and they used it to explore people’s own models of the world. But Hookins tried to use it in the analysis and design of computing systems and he found that the Meta Model is not interactive enough to use in a questionnaire and that it is too personal to work in a group setting.

The Meta Model, however, is great for those situations where someone is stuck in a mental loop and simply will not consider any viewpoint other than their own. It’s useful for discussing things with teenagers if you can get them to stop sulking long enough to answer any questions at all. It is of course important to be able to use it gently and conversationally, and not to let it turn you into an inquisitor.

Ok, on to considering it in practice.

Many statements fall into several Meta Model categories, and it is up to the questioner to decide what direction they want to take the conversation, and to choose a question accordingly. For example:

“It is up to you to choose what question to ask”

Revealing the lost peformative:

Who says it is up to me?

Revealing some of the presuppositions:

Do I have the right and the opportunity to ask a question?
Do I have the skill to choose what question to ask?
Is now an appropriate time to ask a question?
Will my question be answered?

Revealing the universal quantifier:

Is it always up to me to choose?

Exploring the nominalization:

So I’m the one with a choice to make, am I?
So the questioning isn’t automatic, then?

Exploring the unspecified verb:

How, specifically, do I choose the question?

Uncovering the referential index:

Whom do I ask?

As you can see, you can go charging off in a vast number of different directions, some of them inward, some of them outward. The Meta-Model helps you to understand what’s missing from a description of the world, but it is up to you to understand what those directions are, and where they might lead you.

It is fun to take a simple statement - any simple statement - and do what I have just done, to look for the Meta Model deletions in it, and to challenge it accordingly. This sort of practice makes it much easier to recognise the questions you can choose in the real-time of real life.

The Meta Model is taught over days or even weeks of NLP training, and I feel rather mean giving you the whole thing in such a huge and indigestible lump.

If you want to explore the Meta Model in more detail, I’d recommend printing out Larsen’s table or the one I put together in Questions - 7 and watch the News with it on your lap. You will soon get a reputation for devastatingly clever insight and cynicism. Play with it like that for a while, and then find yourself a book about NLP which doesn’t aggravate you. (If you thought “ooh look a presupposition about NLP books” then very well done.)

Playing with the Meta Model is such a good starting point for considering the power of questions that I think I am going to leave you with it.

Have fun.

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.

---

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.