THE 7 GENIUSES OF NLP The Maven, Connector, and Salesman and the Patron Saints How NLP Really was Created

I want to tell a story. I can’t say that it is absolutely correct; it could be way off. But it is the best thinking and understanding about the origin of NLP that I know at this date. For more about this see the 17 articles on the History of NLP that I wrote (www.neurosemantics.com / Writings). You can also compare The Wild Days of NLP (1971-1981) by Terry McClendon (1989) and Grinder’s book which I provoked, The Origins of NLP (2013) and the review that book (Neurons, 2013, #23, May 13, 2013).

Malcolm Gladwell writes in Tipping Points (2000) that in a social movement of change, “some people matter more than others.” That’s because “when people are in a group, responsibility for acting is diffused.” There are three agents of change in a social movement who bring about a new phenomenon in the world. The three key roles are: the maven, the connector, and the salesman. He says it takes all three roles to effectively initiate a new movement. Using this as a template, then we can ask: Who played these roles in the origin of NLP? Who was the maven, the connector, and the salesman? Here is my answer to these questions.

Connectors: The connectors are people with a special gift for bringing the world together. What makes a person a connector is knowing lots of people (Gladwell, 2000, p. 38). They have a knack for making friends and acquaintances. Connectors like people, like being around people, like seeing people develop and grow. Today we call this social intelligence. Mavens: The word maven comes from Yhiddish and means one who accumulates knowledge. Mavens know something that others don’t. As an information broker, they may be avid readers, or researchers, or persons who have access to special knowledge. A maven who has “knowledge and social skills” can start word-of-mouth epidemics (Gladwell, p. 67). Salesmen: These are people with the skills of persuasion. They may be persuasive because of their energy, enthusiasm, charm, likeability, speaking skills, etc. They get rapport and trust and then are able to lead people.

The Mavens. The persons who had specialized knowledge or skill were Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Grinder in Transformational Grammar (TG) simply because that was his area of expertise. He did his doctorate in TG, worked with the founder Noam Chomsky, and worked with the other founder of Cognitive Psychology movement, George Miller in his lab. And two years prior to the formal founding of NLP (1975) with the publishing of The Structure of Magic, John and Suzette Haden published a preliminary version of the Meta-Model in the book, Guide to Transformational Grammar: History, Theory, Practice. And Richard’s specialized “knowledge” was his mimicking/ copying skills so that he could somehow pick up on the patterning in Perls, then Satir, and then laer Erickson without

knowing how he did so. By the way, Richard was never a “mathematician” or a “computer programmer.” Those were classes he took at Kresge College when he was 20 years old. Both of his degrees were in psychology.

The Connector. This describes the person who can get people together, who can create collaborations or coalitions and hold a group together. The person who had the inter-personal skills for pulling people together to work together was Frank Pucelik. Frank and his wife Judith DeLozier moved to Santa Cruz after he got out of the army and time in Vietnam and studied psychology and Gestalt at the very time when the new College, Kresge, was beginning in 1971. Somehow he and Richard got together, became good friends and Frank sat things up with the college so that they could do the “Gestalt Class” for college credit. Later when Richard got John involved, Frank and John began good friends (so much so that when Judith left Frank for John, John raised Frank’s son, Eric). Frank also got together the first group of some 17 people and organized them as the experimental laboratory for the discoveries that later became NLP.

The Salesman. The “salesman” (salesperson) is the person who can get information out so that the specialized knowledge of the mavens can have a wider influence. Those who did that for the origin of NLP were four: first, Robert Dilts, then Steve and Connaire Andreas, and then Anthony Robins. Robert Dilts did it through his studies while still a student and studying for his master degree— which was published in Roots of NLP, Applications of NLP, and then Bandler and Grinder commissioned him to write the authoritative work, Neuro-Linguistic Programming: The Study of the Structure of Experience (1980). This made NLP far more widely available and made it read-able and truly accessible.

Steve and Connaire Andreas did the same by writing and publishing the four seminar books: Frogs into Princes, Trance-Formations, Reframing, and Using Your Brain for a Change. These were the books that put NLP into the world of psychotherapy. When Trance-formations sold 380,000 copies, it made NLP a house-hold name in the field of therapy. Steve also brought into NLP the credibility he had built for years as a key leader in Gestalt Therapy as John Stevens. He established a place for NLP in the Ericksonian Conferences. Anthony Robins then took it further by essentially putting the NLP Practitioner training into the book, Unlimited Power (1985)— selling multiple millions of copies. Then with a genius in marketing, he made NLP known to literally millions and even today still influences more people to come into NLP than anyone else.

When we ask the question, “Who really created NLP?” there is not a simple or single answer. It really took a community to create it. Richard as one maven offered the amazing possibility of learning by modeling. John created a code for how that worked. Frank developed a community of people to test and refine the models (Meta-Model, Representational Model, Strategy Model). Then Robert, Steve and Connaire, and Anthony got the word out. Each of these seven had their own genius which collaboratively brought the movement together as a field.

NLP could not have been created without them. NLP as we know it today has developed from the combination of these seven geniuses. And because there was a community, two original “groups” which tested and refined the beginning models— there are scores and scores of highly significant people who also made it happen. Together they were able to innovate the models that we now call NLP (PNL).

And the patron saints? None other than Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. They were the ones who established the premises and principles of the new humanistic psychology that have now become the “NLP Presuppositions.” They established the idea of the healthy side of human nature, what I have designed as “the bright side,” in contrast to the sick and dark side. And unknown to most, Kresge College as a new experimental college that began in 1971 was dedicated to the ideas of Rogers and except for the funding of the college, it would have been called the Carl Rogers College. They were the ones who conceptually led the human potential movement from the 1940s through the 1960s and among those who became the second generation leaders of the human potential movement were Bateson, Perls, and Satir.