LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER

Here’s a possibility I’d like for you to imagine. I know it is a wild idea; I know that it has very little history in the field of NLP (a significant problem in NLP), but I want to be so bold as to suggest it now for us. Imagine: Neuro-Semantic trainers learning from each other! But first, a story. A story that Arie de Geus frequently told.

In the early 1900s, milkmen in England would deliver bottles of milk to the door of each country home. At the time the bottles had no cap, and two different species of British garden songbirds— the titmouse and the red robin— learned to siphon the sweet, rich cream from the top. Pretty clever!

Then between the two world wars, dairy distributors began placing aluminum seals on the bottles. Cut off from the rich, abundant food source, the individual birds—both robins and titmice—occasionally figured out how to pierce the seals. By the 1950s the entire titmouse population in the United Kingdom— almost a million birds— had learned how to pierce the seals. Wow! Talk about creativity and talk about learning spreading among the birds.