THINKING FOR A CHANGE

I didn’t know it until I began studying thinking in earnest. I began that study after completing the book on creativity (Creative Solutions, 2017). For years, I had been presenting the workshop on Creativity & Innovation—the third module in the Self-Actualization Diploma series. Since 2007 that has been one of my favorite trainings because of its focus on problem-solving. I especially liked it because of the way the four critical factors of problem-solving came together to form a united structure. Namely, outcome, problem, solution, innovation.

Prior to that I had never seen the relationship between these four phenomenon. I always thought of them as distinct and separate. Then I realized that you can’t have a “problem” without an outcome. If you don’t have an outcome— something you want that you do not currently have, then you do not have a problem. Problems arise when you select a goal as a desired outcome. A problem is the distance from now to then (present state to desired state). So a solution solves that gap, that difference. It solves the block, obstacle, or lack of resource. But then, just because you have a solution does not necessarily mean that you should innovate it. It may involve too much time and too much money. It may be unecological for your health, relationships, etc.

All of that was actually a study of thinking— how we think (or don’t think) about facing some aspect of reality to get what we want and to deal with the constraints, restraints, and challenges involved in making it happen. What I also found in presenting the Creativity and Innovation workshop dozens of times, mostly to specific divisions within organizations, is that most people do not think very clearly when it comes to problem-solving. Even people in R&D departments had significant problems to clearly sort out the real problem form the many forms of pseudo- problems (symptoms, consequences, contributing factors, riddles, etc.). And that’s why I decided to look further and deeper into critical thinking.

Many, many years previously, for a short period of time, I studied critical thinking. A local college asked me to design a short course on critical thinking (which I did). As soon as I completed that, I moved on. More recently, in revisiting the field of Critical Thinking I discovered that there had been a lot of new developments and new models, I also discovered something that surprised me— namely, no one had ever in the past 40 years applied NLP to Critical Thinking. I read dozens upon dozens of books and looked into multiple programs and not a single person so much as quoted the Meta-Model as a critical thinking tool.

So that’s what I did in Executive Thinking (2018). It was (and is) the first and only NLP book that specifically addresses the subject of critical thinking —that is, cognitive biases, fallacies, and distortions. And while in many fields people use NLP without giving it credit or quoting sources, even this has not happened in the field of Critical Thinking. Why no one else ever

thought of applying the Meta-Model to Critical Thinking or why not a single theorist or writer in Critical Thinking ever knew about or used the Meta-Model, I don’t know. All I knew was that it was time!

What the Meta-Model does in terms of critical thinking is that it provides a very practical and effective way to handle the vagueness and ambiguity of language. And given that we mostly think in language and words—the critical thinking skill of understanding how language works and how to use it with precision is a most foundational skill. That’s what the Meta-Model offers. In several ways it offers you a way to distinguish your words as your mental maps about things from the external reality (territory) that you want to navigate.

Using the Meta-Model, you learn to representationally track words to your internal mental movie (see Communication Magic, 2001). That skill depends on you distinguishing empirical (sensory-based) words from evaluative language. If you can’t make a picture in your mind of what a word refers to then you ask more questions. You ask, “Specifically where, when, what, who, which, etc.?” You index specifics that allows you to extensionalize your meanings (Korzybski). Important? Here’s what the developers said about it originally: “The Meta-Model is ... the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will do everything we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those who don’t, are people have control over the Meta- Model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do. You can be b right and witty and sharp and make the most complex metaphor in the world, but if you can’t gather information well, both internally and externally, you won’t know what to do. The Meta-Model questions are the ones that really give you the appropriate information immediately. It’s a great tool for that. ... It’s really important to understand that most people are very chaotically organized on the inside.” “By not having the Meta-Model responses systematically wired in, people get stuck. One of the things we noticed about Sal Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, and Fritz Perls is that they intuitively had many of those twelve questions in the Meta-Model wired in.” (Frogs into Princes, 1979, pp. 71, 77)

If you think sloppily, you talk in sloppy and vague ways. The cure? Take a 30-minute dose of the Meta-Model daily for 90 days. I will do a mind good.