4.34 Requisite Variety

In cybernetics there is a principle known as the law of requisite variety. This law states that in any connected interactive system, the element that has the widest range of variability in behavior will be, ultimately, the controlling element.[23] No matter what field you are in, you will probably have come to the realization that the top people in that field are those who have the most variety in their behavior, those who have choices of behavior that their colleagues don't have. Any time you limit yourself with regard to some choice of behavior, you are working against yourself and letting others get the competitive edge. The objective of NLP is to provide the human species with more behavioral choices. We believe that the more choices and possibilities the members of our species become aware of and make available to themselves, the more we will advance as a whole.

The greater your ability to respond to any situation in a variety of ways, the more effective you will be at utilization and at getting the outcomes you want.

4.4 Ideas and Examples: Areas of Application for Strategy Utilization

In the following subsections we will show how the material discussed thus far in this book may be applied to different fields to expand the possibilities for their growth and development. Obviously the examples we have selected represent particular options for utilization that could be expanded upon or reorganized in a variety of ways. By applying your own strategy for creativity when you go back through this book to review and outline procedures useful in your field, you will obtain a unique pattern specifically oriented for your own purposes of strategy utilization.

4.41 Education

The field of education is an obvious place to start, as the establishment of synesthesia patterns, strategies and anchors is precisely what the process of learning is about, not only in the classroom but in interactions among teachers themselves, between teachers and parents, teachers, administrators and school board members, district school officials and personnel in each state office of education, and so on, up to and including interactions with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare at the federal level. Learning is a lifelong process, and although we will concentrate on classroom learning in this subsection, you can easily apply your imagination to the enormously positive potential inherent in using NLP in exchanging and enhancing teaching strategies, troubleshooting personnel problems, settling salary negotiations, harmonizing with parents and parent organizations and so forth.

For teachers, one important application of strategy utilization is to pace students' learning strategies in the classroom. By identifying the steps through which a student naturally incorporates new information and behavior, and by presenting the material to be taught in that form, teachers can greatly facilitate the learning process. Through adapting information to the representational systems with which a student is most adept, a teacher utilizes the student's natural skills and resources most effectively, whether at the kindergarten or college level.

For example, an electrical engineer in one of our workshops, who primarily used internal kinesthetics in his strategies, described how learning to read electrical schematics was at first very difficult and boring for him. He had a hard time making sense out of the mass of lines and symbols he saw in his textbook. He couldn't "connect" with them and found circuits extremely difficult to interpret until one day he began to imagine what it would feel like to be an electron floating through the circuit he saw diagrammed in front of him. He would imagine his various reactions and changes in behavior as he came in contact with the various components in the circuit, symbolized by visual characters on the schematic. The diagrams immediately began to make more sense to him and even became fun to figure out and to design. Each schematic presented him with a new odyssey. It was so enjoyable, in fact, that he remained with electronics and went on to become an engineer — all because he found a way to utilize his strategy effectively in the learning process.

In our experience, "good" teachers use the process of pacing intuitively. Teaching is much more difficult if you have to constantly fight your students' models of the world to "reach" them.

A remarkably astute understanding of strategies was shown by a teacher in one of our workshops who had taught special education classes for several years. In her algebra class for slow and handicapped students, a large and muscular black student was having a very rough time working any of the problems on the board or on paper. (Remember that the athletic muscular — or mesomorphic — body type is indicative of a person with primarily tactile kinesthetic (K^e) strategies.) Another member of the class was blind — so all of the material presented in the class was also available in braille and raised surface diagrams. As a project, the teacher had the "slow" black student learn to read braille (K§). Not so surprisingly the student's ability to pick up algebra using the braille and raised surface material was many times more rapid than when he attempted to do it visually. The braille paced his natural abilities and strategies with his tactile system (we have often suggested the use of braille and raised surfaces for sighted but kinesthetically oriented persons when we have consulted for special education groups).

Generally, kinesthetically oriented students have a difficult time in the classroom. Feelings, especially those from external sources, don't lend themselves well to what we call "academic" subject areas. One of the classic stereotypes in education is that of the athlete who has a difficult time in the visual and auditory world of

lectures, blackboards and books; and likewise the thin, tense "A" student who has difficulty in the kinesthetic world of athletics. Written tests and the classroom environment are visually and auditorily oriented. In our experience many young people who have been labeled "slow," "handicapped" or "disabled" in this context are far from "stupid" — they simply have different strategies for learning that are not utilized by present techniques of education.

In most cases K^e individuals end up in manual or mechanical occupations like construction, farming or gardening, athletics, assembly line work, auto repair and other jobs where they can utilize their kinesthetic skills.

The teacher mentioned in the preceding example also pointed out that many of her students (most of whom were black) had elaborate "tapping" systems for doing arithmetical operations like addition and multiplication, in which they would perform and keep track of their calculations by tapping their fingers on their thighs or desks (A^e_t→K^e), a process resembling the use of the abacus. When the students were forced to do problems without tapping in this way they were unable to get the correct answers.

It has been our experience that one distinguishing characteristic of black culture is an orientation toward auditory external (A^e) and kinesthetic external strategies and attributes. This would account for many of the difficulties experienced by Blacks in educational institutions established and controlled by white western cultures.

People with efficient auditory strategies often have difficulty writing. In fact many of you readers may notice that your writing style and strategy are very different from the way you talk. Both involve externalizing internal experience in a digital form, but speaking and listening are different from writing and looking. One method that we often suggest to people who get blocked easily while writing is to dictate their work first, or to tape record discussions with friends. This can help overcome any inertia that they have toward writing in that they can always begin the process of writing by transcribing the recorded material. In essence they would be employing a strategy that goes from A^e to V^e. The inverse of this strategy for people who have difficulty speaking is, of course, to write or take notes on their material before they present it orally.