HOW BANDLER HAS JUMPED ON OUR BANDWAGON

In the field of NLP, it was Martin Roberts, who in 2000, identified the list of questions that began the first list of questions for a Well-Formed Problem. He wrote that in his book, Change Management Excellence. Prior to that nearly all of the problems to be solved in NLP were therapeutic problems. Sue Knight was one of the first NLP trainers to shift the focus from therapy to business. In 1995 she published, NLP at Work and applied a number of the NLP patterns to business applications. But even with that, there was next to nothing directly about ‘problems’ or problem-solving.

My first attempt at problem-solving as such was in Sourcebook of Magic, Vol. I (1997) when I listed 16 patterns for different strategies. In my 2002 book, Games Business Experts Play, I addressed a few business problems such as resolving conflict. In Unleashing Leadership (2009) there was a little bit about problem-solving but not a lot. It really wasn’t until Creative Solutions (2016) that I directly and explicitly addressed problem-solving. So also again in Executive Thinking (2018) that focused on critical thinking.

I recently discovered that Richard Bandler has jumped on the problem-solving bandwagon. He did so in his book The New Structure of Magic: Patterns for Problem Solving (2022). So I reviewed it in terms of the structure of problems and problem-solving processes and found out the book is primarily an attempt to update the Meta-Model. How is that connected to problems? It’s in the idea of using the Meta-Model to solve problems. Now I do like how he framed things. He framed the Meta-Model in terms of thinking just as I have been doing for almost 20 years. He did that by referring to what Fritz and Virginia were ‘really’ doing.

“They actually got people to engage in new thinking. If you change the way you think, it changes the way you feel and therefore changes what you’re capable of doing. ... They were not repairing a human being, they were problem solving.” (iv).

Now one thing we’ve learned about Bandler’s speaking and writing, you have to take whatever is said or written with a big dose of salt and not take his exaggerations and mis-statements literally. Here’s an example of an exaggeration: “people like me who grew up in the 1950s, when telephones weighed 50lbs.” (p. v). Oh my God! 50 pounds! No wonder children couldn’t make phone calls back in the 1950s! Or consider this one: “When we have a model that won’t do something, we have a problem.” (p. vii). So a model ‘won’t do something!’ It’s the problem? Is it stubborn? It the model on strike? Holding a grudge? Actually, we are the ones who use models to do things, models are just mental maps. They don’t do anything!

Next, he calls the Meta-Model “a problem-solving machine” (p. xii). Then he declared “we really built a machine that’s a model of how you solve problems” (xiii). Hmmm. That’s a very strange use of the word ‘machine.’ How is a list of linguistic distinctions and questions a ‘machine?’

Now if you get the book and you already have the book The Structure of Magic (1975), then expect that 150 pages or more are directly quoted from the first book. He just cut-and-pasted what was in the first book and put it here. So why is it called The New Structure of Magic? Mostly because of the framing and some examples of solving problems. The new framing is that the Meta-Model is a tool “for solving problems in business and science.” But then again, when I examined the problems addressed in the book, 90 percent of them are therapy problems and not business or science problems. He only introduced two or three of those and they are the common ‘Bandler stories’ that have been presented in videos and books for the past 40 years. Nothing new in them at all.

Nor does he even attempt to define a ‘problem,’ or identify a problem’s structure. When he does refer to a problem-solving process, it is a process he took from Design Thinking. Here is that process as a ‘model,’ yet as a process, it is insufficient for problem-solving.

Empathize: observe the person.

Define the problem: the person’s needs, context, environment.

Ideate: challenge assumptions, create ideas.

Prototype: Potential solutions.

Test: collect feedback

Launch: the product or create the solution. (page 168).

Here’s the problem—there’s nothing here about going inside to the person’s mental map and identifying how that map inadequately describes the problem and therefore is the problem. Here he is very close, but also so very far away. Close because with the Meta-Model, every ‘problem’ is a problem because the thinking that maps things is somehow inadequate. Something is deleted, over-generalized, and/or distorted.

The book is close but limited because all of the problems are represented problems and are solved by changing the qualities of the pictures, sounds, or sensations. In the Neuro-Semantic model, this is Level-One of problems (‘direct problems’) and yes, this is the genius of the NLP model—changing the cinematic features of our mental movies (sub-modalities) can create significant change. But there is not even a hint of Level-Two (layered problems) or Level-Three (assumptive problems). For those, you have to know that thinking comes in levels, therefore problems come in levels and that requires a meta-level model like Meta-States to be able to track and address those problems.

Here again we see how NLP brought us so far, but cannot complete the journey. For that we need the Meta-States Model and Neuro-Semantics.