1.6 Modeling Elegance

In the modeling and reproduction of strategies for eliciting outcomes, we are also extending another evolutionary trend in the development of behavioral models with NLP. This is the trend toward increasingly elegant models. The term "elegance" here refers to the number of rules and distinctions a particular model requires to be able to account for all of the outcomes for which it has been designed. The most elegant model would be the one which employs the fewest number of distinctions and which is still able to secure a domain of outcomes equal to or greater than that of more complex models. For people and organizations, this means a significant saving of time and energy in the development and implementation of behavioral outcomes necessary to achieve their goals.

1. The transition of models toward increased elegance occurs in two ways:The elements identified as having casual importance become more basic to the particular interactions involved in achieving outcomes. In NLP, for instance, we begin by showing how the five classes of sensory experience (seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting) are the basis for the strategies people have for generating and guiding behavior, rather than more complex and abstract concepts such as "ego," "mind," "human nature," mechanisms," "morals," "reason," etc., employed by other behavioral models.

2. The orientation of the model turns much more toward form than content. By "form" we mean the principles or rules of interaction between structural elements that generate the possible states or interactions of the system. The basic equations or physical "laws" developed by Newton, for instance, are simple and elegant statements of the relationships between physical elements (at a certain level of experience) that can be used to describe, predict and prescribe the changing events that make up the content of a large portion of our physical universe. These same formal rules hold for the motions and interactions of many different objects: springs, billiard balls, pendulums, cars, projectiles and so on.

The reduction of the syntax of a model to that set of rules necessary and sufficient to describe interactions among its structural elements increases rather than diminishes the power and effectiveness of the model. For example, chemists don't need to test all possible chemical combinations to discover which outcomes will be successful. A knowledge of the basic properties of atomic elements and molecular structures allows them to predict, in many cases, which chemical interactions will work and which will not. The elegance of the model of modern chemistry enhances efficiency and streamlines the operational strategies for predicting and generating outcomes.

Modeling elegance serves a similar function in NLP, cutting through the complexities of human behavior to reveal the underlying rules that govern behavioral interactions. NLP is concerned with the generative principles of behavior rather than the content, which in its infinite variety may become infinitely complicated and confusing. Because it concentrates on form, NLP is freed from attachment to a particular behavioral content. In this perspective the evolution of behavior offers us an alternative to "specialization," which is often just familiarity with content.

By knowing the basic elements and generative rules of a particular model of behavior, whether that of science, technology, business, law, therapy, medicine, politics or education, it isn't necessary to spend years studying the particulars of behavior within each model in order to master it. Indeed, progress in the efficiency and potential of education has always occurred as more elegant models have developed.

1.7 Representational Systems: The Building Blocks of Behavior

The basic elements from which the patterns of human behavior are formed are the perceptual systems through which the members of the species operate on their environment: vision (sight), audition (hearing), kinesthesis (body sensations) and olfaction/gustation (smell/taste). The neurolinguistic programming model presupposes that all of the distinctions we as human beings are able to make concerning our environment (internal and external) and our behavior can be usefully represented in terms of these systems. These perceptual classes constitute the structural parameters of human knowledge.

We postulate that all of our ongoing experience can usefully be coded as consisting of some combination of these sensory classes. In our previous work (see Patterns II) we have chosen to represent and abbreviate the expression of our ongoing sensory experience as a 4–tuple. The 4–tuple is shown visually as:

< A^e,i, V^e,i, K^e,i, O^e,i >

Here, the capital letters are abbreviations for the major sensory classes or representational systems that we use to make our models of the world:

A = Auditory/Hearing

V = Visual/Sight

K = Kinesthetic/Body Sensations

O = Olfactory/Gustatory—Smell/Taste

The superscripts "e" and "i" indicate whether the representations are coming from sources external, "e", to us, as when we are looking at, listening to, feeling, smelling or tasting something that is outside of us, or whether they are internally generated, "i", as when we are remembering or imagining some image, sound, feeling, smell or taste. We can also show the 4–tuple iconically as:

The following excerpt from Patterns II will further assist the reader in understanding the 4–tuple:

"Assuming that you are a reader who at this point in time is sitting comfortably in a quiet place and that you are reading alone, the 4–tuple can be used to represent your present experience of the world as follows:

The specific 4–tuple which represents the reader's experience where i is the referential index of the reader and the blankspace Ø indicates no experience in that mode.

"In words, the reader's present experience of the world is represented by a description of the visual input from the words, his present kinesthetic sensations and the olfactory sensation available. Since, by our assumption, the reader is in a place where he is presently receiving no auditory input from the external world, the value of the variable A_t (the auditory tonal portion of his experience) is Ø. The values of the V, K and O variables are specified by a description of the input from the world that is impinging on the reader at this point in time. Notice that in specifying the 4–tuple for the reader's present experience, we restricted ourselves to representing experience originating in the world external to the reader. The 4–tuple can also be used to represent the reader's total experience — that is, his present ongoing experience independently of whether it originates in the world external to the reader or not. We have found it useful in our work to identify the origin of the portion of the experience described in the 4–tuple — that is to distinguish between which portion of the experience represented by the 4–tuple originates in the world external to the person whose experience is represented by the 4–tuple and which portion is generated by the person's own internal processes. One easy way of representing this distinction is by simply attaching a superscript to each component of the 4–tuple — either an i (internally generated) or an e (externally generated). Thus assuming that the reader is reading with internal dialogue at this point in time and using the superscripts which distinguish the internally generated from externally originated components of the 4–tuple, the reader's 4–tuple would look like: