(a) Number each participant and schedule them to present their ideas for a specified time (e.g. five minutes). Each is to take the output of the one that has come before them and to process it through his or her strategy. Each must let the others talk without interruption.

The trick, of course, will be to find the the sequence that best fits the natural resources of the participants. You may, for example, want to design your sequence such that A starts with his creativity strategy. Then you schedule B to critique A's suggestions. Then you schedule D to modify the faults that B found and make A's proposals useful again. Then you schedule E to figure out ways to implement the modified proposals. And finally you schedule C to feel everything out and decide if the proposals and implementation procedures are appropriate.

You are assigning them to do what they have done before anyway. Their problem has been, however, that their sequencing was somewhat random and, because of conflicts, nothing was ever really allowed to develop. They did not have a framework structured to take full advantage of their abilities. By scheduling them you reframe the situation so that B is no longer "insulting" A by finding fault, but carrying out a necessary function. Each person's strategy is framed as a resource (which indeed it is) and each is respected for his or her skill. Person A generates ideas specifically so that B may test them and find where they need to be modified and made even better. The time becomes maximally utilized and each time block is used for one function at a time. One major difficulty with many group decision making processes is that the people jump from considering and defining present state to desired state to problem state to resources, and often the content gets jumbled. One important function of scheduling is that when you are considering a desired state you stick with desired state until it has been specified in detail. These details may later be modified on the basis of other information — but the process of initially defining it is not interrupted.

(b) The programmer must also control for adverse nonverbal or interpersonal interactions, whether they are intentional on the part of the participants or not. Sometimes one member of the group will use a certain tonality, for instance, that triggers negative feelings in another, even though the person using the tonality is merely excited and does not mean to intimidate. If the programmer observes such a response s/he can take steps to neutralize that tonal anchor and repeat what she or he has just said over again.

By making such an intervention, the programmer can assist the executives into each contributing their strategy as a part of a larger decision making strategy, so that the overall decision they make together is better then any could have made alone.

VI. INSTALLATION

As we approach the final section of this book, we are approaching the end of what may be viewed as the second act in a three-act play. Some appropriate portion of your life experience prior to reading this book is act one, in which the main characters are introduced, the plot is established, and the tempo and pitch of the action have risen to create exactly the right degree of anticipation for act two. "Live" theater, for over 2,500 years, has provided one of the most powerful and exciting forms of entertainment available to the human species. The sensory encounter with living people— surrounding us in the audience as well as on stage — allows us to experience a range and variety of synesthesia patterns that we've learned to appreciate and value in the context of that altered state of consciousness commonly called "vicarious" experience.

In the second act of our play — this book — the characters and their interactions are revealed to a depth and extent not available to us on the level of act one, generating new levels of meaning to the dialogue, gestures and facial expressions of the characters and setting the stage for the launching of the most powerful act in the drama . . . act three. Under the impact of the insights, dialogues and outcomes of act two, the action in the third act takes a quantum jump to a new dimension of experience, leading the protagonist to the denouement of your choice — a meta-choice if you wish.

For weeks prior to the first public performance of a stage play, the actors and actresses of the cast rehearse their lines before the watchful eyes and ears of the director, who may insist on certain body movements, gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, rate and volume of dialogue delivery and so forth to generate maximum effect in the eventual presentation before a "paying" audience. The function of a director, in part, is to recognize, elicit and utilize the talent resources of each member of the cast to maximize his or her performance. A discriminating theater-goer decides to attend a play as much on the basis of who the director is as well as the cast and author.

During rehearsal members of the cast anchor their on-stage entrances, exits, movements and dialogue lines to particular cues —words or actions immediately preceding their own "parts"— until each scene and act flow as smoothly as the ongoing life experience it represents and emphasizes. The purpose of all preliminary work is to embed, to disguise, to render magically invisible in the flow of the performance another and more fundamental set of cues: a sequence of culturally rooted visual and auditory stimuli that evoke appropriate combinations of audience 4-tuples. By controlling the sequence, tempo, timing, variation and magnitude of audience internal kinesthetics during a stage play, the actors and actresses play their audience much as a musician plays an instrument. If it is done well, both the audience and the cast thoroughly enjoy their shared experience.

Whether art imitates life or life imitates art, effective installation is like the preparatory work that is integral to a successful performance. The NLP practitioner, like the director of the play, insures that all cues are appropriately anchored and that each member of the cast has rehearsed until his performance is exactly tuned to achieve the desired outcome — only in this case you will write the script for your own third act.

6. Well-formedness conditions for the installation.

There are two basic ways to install a strategy sequence that you have designed: (1) through anchoring and inserting the steps of the strategy and (2) through having the client rehearse (a form of self anchoring) the strategy sequence. Although these two methods will be treated separately as we initially present them, they are best utilized in conjunction with one another — firing off the anchors you have established as you "walk" the person through the strategy-The goal of installation is to make the strategy you have designed function as naturally and automatically as the existing strategy you are replacing. Each step in the strategy must automatically trigger the next. There are two major well-formedness conditions for installation that you will be testing for to insure that you have done effective work:

1. The entire strategy sequence must be available to the client as an intact unit — so that each step is automatically tied to the next.

2. The strategy sequence must be tied to the appropriate context —so that it is wired (anchored) to some stimulus (context marker) within the context that will initiate the strategy when that stimulus is introduced. This is to insure that the strategy will initiate itself at the appropriate time.

To install a strategy effectively you will have to interrupt or break the existing strategy at the appropriate place so that the new one may be inserted. Generally this is just a matter of timing, so that you begin the new strategy at the place in the existing sequence where the old strategy would have gone into operation. Sometimes, however, you will have to purposefully interrupt the existing strategy (if the synesthesia patterns are too ingrained or the strategy operates too quickly) before the new one can be effectively installed.