A Review of an interview by Robert DILTS

By John GRINDER, co-creator of Neuro-Linguistic Programming

I am in possession of the translation of an interview recently published by the french school PNL REPERE in which Robert DILTS makes a number of points which have stimulated my interest and to which I wish to respond. Over the years, I have noted, sometimes with amusement, sometimes with annoyance and most frequently a mixture of both, the re-writing of the history of NLP. Typically, this is done by people who were not present at the origins and initial discoveries of the principle patterns of NLP and have no idea about the events that they pretend to comment on. Such behavior may be due to ignorance or with fraudulent intent: it is often difficult to determine which. However when someone as well-known and who is as well-positioned to know something about what actually occurred as Mr. DILTS is attempts to re-write NLP history, the amusement I might otherwise experience quickly dissipates. I have no question about Mr. DILTS' intelligence - thus ignorance is ruled out. Some of his statements in this interview do raise questions about other aspects of his behavior and the intentions behind them.

I. Mr. DILTS states in this interview,

"At the beginning I was very involved in the practical developments related to strategies and I also discovered the eyes movement technique."

What Mr. DILTS is referring to by the phrase is open to a limited range of interpretations: the most probable being the now quite well-known eye movements - essentially the six principal movements of a person's eyes which unconsciously reveal the representational system (visual, auditory or kinesthetic) in which they are at that particular instant accessing and using as a basis for a type of computation usually described loosely as thinking. This particular pattern is quite unusual in a number of respects: I mention two:

1. calibration is the art (highly-developed among well-trained NLP practitioners) of detecting some consistent set of non-verbal (and unconscious) cues in a specific person and noting that when these cues are present, the person is in a particular state from which a particular class of behaviors will tend to issue. It is an axiom of NLP that while dictionaries of verbal behavior (different natural languages) are certainly legitimate and useful, a dictionary of non-verbal behavior is, in general, an oxymoron. Indeed, the emphasis placed in NLP trainings on calibration is a tacit acknowledgement that any practitioner wishing to appreciate the complex unconscious signals offered by unconscious processes of a client will be required to calibrate freshly each such client as there is little legitimate transfer from the calibration of one client to another. This practice is designed to prevent inappropriate interpretations (so-called mind reading) by NLP practitioner and the ethical violations (imposition of content on the client) that typically occur when calibration is either absent or inadequate. All this makes the eye movements discovered and coded in NLP by myself and Richard BANDLER in the mid-70's so unusual: they are (as far as observations so far made indicate) universal in our species. This is quite surprising and useful. While the particular representational systems preferences or skill levels any particular individual will achieve is influenced by the implicit modeling within the family of origin and other early learning contexts, the eye movements themselves are independent not only of the personal history with all its various and distinctive learning contexts of individuals but also of culture and language. This is an extremely robust pattern.

2. The vast majority of patterns coded in NLP come from the core activity in NLP; the modeling of geniuses. The eye movements referred to in the interview with Mr. DILTS are one of the few exceptions: Certainly the modeling by BANDLER and I of Dr. Milton H. ERICKSON and of Virginia SATIR alerted us to the importance of calibration and sensitized us to leveraging representational systems. Further, our creation (again BANDLER and myself) of the first model in NLP (the meta model published in 1975 in The Structure of Magic) cleared the way to recognize the systematic use of predicates as indicators of representational system preferences (again, Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic). But these were the precursors to our discovery (not modeling in the NLP sense of the term) and coding of eye movements. Thus, the pattern of eye movements stand out as one of the unique contributions by BANDLER and myself which is NOT a consequence of application of the modeling technology of NLP and one that I am quite proud of. I therefore respectfully request Mr. DILTS either correct the error in the interview or in the event that the quotation in the interview is an accurate representation of what he said, that he withdraw this wholly inaccurate statement so as not to mislead the readers of this magazine as the to actual historical facts in the discovery and coding of the eye movements in NLP.

II. Mr. Dilts states in this interview that,

"I developed the use of the TOTE model, which wasn't used in NLP before"

The TOTE model was created by Eugene GALANTER, Karl PRIBRAM and George MILLER (also the author of the superb article that is so frequently referenced, and properly so in my opinion, in NLP, The Magic Number Seven plus or minus Two) in their excellent book Plans and the Structure of Behavior where they provided a much needed alternative schema to the strictly Stimulus-Response (S-R) theory promoted by B.F.Skinner. CHOMSKY exposed the deep formal inadequacy of S - R theory but it was the fine work of the three men mentioned above that offered the first coherent and useful alternative - always a pre-requisite for a paradigm shift.

In the academic year 1969/70, while in the process of completing my PhD in linguistics at the University of California, San Diego, I was invited as a guest researcher to work in George MILLER's lab at Rockefeller University, New York. It was there that my initial appreciation of the TOTE model (I was already familiar with it from reading the book referenced above) deepened through discussions and applications with George MILLER and other visiting professors (Paul POSTAL, Tom BEVERS… as well as other guest researchers. This was an extremely useful and exciting time in my intellectual development. Just as Automata Theory forms the basis for much of my thinking (then and now) the TOTE model was implicitly and explicitly a part of my thinking and public work from the origins of NLP.

III. Mr. DILTS, in response to a question from his interviewer as to what he is particularly proud of (in the context of his work in NLP) makes the following statements (among others):

"…I developed the area of identity and sponsoring and helped connect NLP to deeper aspects of life such as spiritual aspects."

"I also created SCORE as well as SORE with Todd Epstein."

This is absolutely correct - Mr. DILTS is the author (or co-author in some cases) of these content models. Along with the content impositions proposed in his Neuro-logical Levels (a full critique is offered in Whispering), he has managed to confuse the public by presenting content patterns and models " patterns and models that violate one of the ethical standards of NLP - the commitment to respect the form (or process, if you prefer) content distinction. This distinction is, again in my perceptions, one of the differentiators that has allowed NLP to spread like wildfire from its origins in the behavior (modeling, principally) of two strange creatures (BANDLER and GRINDER) who wandered about the Santa Cruz mountains in various altered states pursuing a dimly glimpsed but radical possibility that has more than exceeded their original intentions in its diffusion in the world. Mr, Dilts, in spite of the direct tutelage offered by each of the co-creators of NLP has managed to miss the point with astonishing consistency. It is precisely because there is no requirement to subscribe to particular beliefs and values that NLP moves so easily across cultural and linguistic barriers and is easily and respectfully incorporated into these distinct systems.
What he is taking credit for is a degradation of the very technology in which he makes his living.

Later in the interview, he characterizes NLP as forming three distinct generations and characterizing it as suffering in its initial phase from being entirely too Californian. I find this peculiar - at last check, I am unaware of what language Mr. DILTS has achieved competency in other than English (American). While I myself have long journeys ahead of me to mastery, I have working competency in some eight languages and with an enormous appetite for more. I find his comments both self-serving and disingenuous. NLP has succeeded in being inclusive precisely because it eschews content issues such as beliefs, values and other forms of content imposition. A modeling, for example, of the processes by which our species in its apparently compulsive search for the illusion of stability and security generates and then embraces its own creations - the beliefs, values and "deeper aspects of life" … - would be a brilliant and useful piece of modeling work - but to arbitrarily present a PARTICULAR SET - any specific set of values, beliefs and even hierarchies of these amazing creatures - as if they had some validity and/or stability across individuals let alone distinct cultures is a travesty and an imposition of content. The mentioned characteristics leave such work far, far below the minimum ethical and precision standards that have allowed NLP to flourish. Yes, a modeling of the PROCESSES by which we as humans create such constructions would be a legitimate and likely useful task but to fall to the level of imposing one's own beliefs, values… is quite astonishing.
To avoid any misunderstandings on this topic, I absolutely respect Mr. DILTS' right and that of each reader of this response to Mr. DILTS' interview to create and embrace any set of beliefs or values he or she choose, while reserving the right to challenge them (largely for the consequences they entail) but this is a far cry from imposing one's own beliefs and values. What is at issue here along with the distinction made in modeling, presented briefly below in point IV, is the very definition of NLP - will these distinctions be ignored and this technology, this ancient and powerful form of learning (modeling), now newly recovered and explicated, and the content-free, purely syntactic strategy at the core of NLP from its inception pass on the wind or will the future hold a new wave of content-free modelings of geniuses from every corner of the planet to inspire and inform us and to raise the level of the game (as proposed in Whispering, page - Life.

IV. Mr. Dilts states in another portion of the interview:

"Success Factors Modeling " is in a way pure NLP because it is modeling that is not too cluttered by existing techniques"

The core activity of NLP is modeling with its unique requirement that the modeler during the unconscious assimilation phase suspend all attempts to understand or analyze the behavior of the genius that he or she is modeling to avoid contaminating the resultant work product - the explicated model of the genius' patterning. Anyone purporting to model in NLP who fails to respect this requirement is simply either ignorant or fails to respect one of the fundamental distinctions that differentiates NLP modeling from other perfectly legitimate forms of modeling. Population biologists' model population fluctuations; physicists' model patterns of quantum mechanics such as entanglement; engineer model dams, buildings, bridges… and all this is a perfectly appropriate use of the term modeling. NLP modeling is differentiated from all such activities by the distinction offered above. My co-author Carmen BOSTIC ST. CLAIR and I in a recent book Whispering in the Wind; see www.nlpwhisperinginthewind.com) have publicly called upon Mr. DILTS (who specializes in something best referred to perhaps as Analytic Modeling) to respect this fundamental distinction - he has thus far failed to respond. By the way, the actual history of the discovery of representational systems and in particular eye movements is also available in this book for those of you interested in what actually occurred.I object most strenuously to this representation - Mr. Dilts is quite aware that his left-brained oriented analytic form of modeling (which in this latest re-labelled version actually implies application of aggregation methods underlying statistical methods) is a gross misrepresentation of the fundamental distinction in modeling which created the discipline in which Mr. DILTS makes his living. Yet in spite of this enormous gap between what he does (Analytic Modeling) and NLP modeling as defined behaviourally originally by BANDLER and myself and subsequently by BOSTIC and myself in a perfectly explicit form in Whispering, he continues to speak as if the distinction does not exist. I find this unacceptable and as co-creator of NLP ask (again as BOSTIC and I did in Whispering) that he respect this most fundamental distinction between modeling as it is defined in the discipline of NLP and what he does, which, for convenience I will refer to as Analytic Modeling. To blur the distinction is to lose, in my perceptions, the most radical innovation that NLP has to offer to the world. Mr. DILTS, proceed with your Analytic Modeling in which I wish you the best of success but do not act as if this core distinction does exist - the precise distinction that differentiates NLP from all other forms of learning known to me. This is far too expensive a price to pay for professional advancement. I close with the following observation. In George ORWELL's fictional novel entitled 1984, he offers any number of insights about social movements and the processes that determine whether they in their consequences promote the evolution or de-evolution of personal liberation. NLP in its application form (respecting the form or process/content distinction mentioned above in my critique) and in its core activity (modeling as suggested above and more extensively in Whispering) represents with these distinctions a pathway to promoting both excellence at the social level and liberation at the individual level. As ORWELL proposed (the term control is problematic but the point is well made):

He who controls the past controls the future!

With these consequences in mind, I have taken the time to challenge and correct certain historical inaccuracies offered by Mr. DILTS in his interview and to offer some commentary about what I perceive to be the consequences likely to arise in the presently uncertain future of NLP if certain distinctions are not respected - I sincerely hope that Mr. DILTS considers all this and makes a congruent decision about how his enormous talent could be put at the service of this now 30 year old dream generated originally by BANDLER and myself.

If what I propose seems to you, the reader, to be unreasonable, then I remind of what George Bernard SHAW once cleverly observed:

Reasonable men adapt themselves to the world

Unreasonable men attempt to adapt the world to themselves

This is why all progress depends on unreasonable men!

With a correction for the exclusive use of the masculine pronoun, I find myself in complete agreement with Mr. SHAW.


John GRINDER
Co-creator of Neuro-Linguistic Programming