UNPEALING THE ONION OF ABSTRACTIONS

When I first arrived in Egypt, I was talking with some of the Neuro-Semantic Trainers and we got talking about the articles which I posted here on “Neurons” about former CEO of VISA, Dee Hock and the way he went about inventing what he wanted— “a brand new kind of organization.” One of them asked me several very pointed questions: What do you think was the core skill that enabled him to do what he did? What set him apart in being able to think through all the web of abstractions and get to the heart of things which others were not able to do?

I had not thought of that question before, and so I didn’t have an immediate answer. Yet because all of us were “thinking aloud together” and engaged in collective learning, as I talked out my thoughts, I discovered the answer.

“What Dee Hock did was an essential and basic NLP procedure— he de-nominalized the abstractions that defined the banking industry until he got to the heart of the matter, and finding that enabled him to understand ‘the real business’ that he was in and from that create new processes. What did he actually do in the process of de-nominalizing? He pulled the abstraction apart, got to the underlying processes (or verbs) and he described this as “peeling the onion.”

When I was then asked what that meant in his case and how he did that, I went took out the book and read some passages. And doing that made me realize two things: first the power of de- nominalizing and second the advantage of calling it “peeling the onion.” Now if you have read the Meta-Model of Language (The Structure of Magic, 1976, 1977) or my book (Communication Magic, 2001), you know that when we de-nominalize an abstract term we are finding the hidden verb inside of a word that sounds like a “thing.” This means we move a term from sounding static, unmoving, fixed, frozen, etc. back to a dynamic process of actions and activities.

“Relationship” becomes relating and now we can ask question to index who, when, where, how, in what way, etc. “Leadership” becomes leading and we can now find the specifics of who is leading who to what and in what way. “Self-esteem” becomes esteeming one’s “self” with value and worth based on some value-system or criteria. What de-nominalizing does linguistically is to return to our perception the energy, dynamics, and aliveness to the world that had become frozen. And doing that puts return change and choice into the picture. It empowers us to be able to do something rather than just suffer the predetermination of a frozen, staid world.

If that’s the power of de-nominalizing, then giving it a name that’s more dynamic and descriptive. And that’s what the metaphor “peeling the onion” does. Thinking about words and ideas that are “thick,” “abstract,” and “complicated” as the layers of an onion suggests that we

can get to the “core” of the idea and make it more simple and direct as we do the “UNPEALING.”

Hock did that first with “money.” He asked himself, “What is money? Money is not coin, currency, or credit card. That was form, not function. Money is anything customarily used as a measure of equivalent value and medium of exchange. But what had that anything become?” (p. 121)

“Money” began to be represented as coins, then centuries later by paper as “currency” then as checks. But what is the essence of “money?” “I continued to peel our onion of understanding looking for the essence of money.” Slowly it dawned on him that money had come to be represented as alphanumeric symbols (numbers, letters) recorded and transported on valueless metal and paper. But still— a gap in understanding.

Why? Because “symbols themselves have no value.” Further, anyone could write down letters and numbers! Then an awareness: “Money had become guaranteed alphanumeric data expressed in the currency symbol of one country or another. Thus, a bank was no ore than an institution for the custody; loan, and exchange of guaranteed alphanumeric data.” (p. 122)

Now while that was technically correct, Hock was still not satisfied with it. He still needed to know: What was the essence of what happened when we use a telephone to authorize a credit card transaction? Data was being transferred. Yet nothing has passing through the telephone. All that was happening — actually— was “a disturbance of electronic particles— waves of energy.”

“Peeling this onion of understanding was enough to make us cry. The essence of money seemed to be everywhere, yet nowhere. We had to understand.”

With alphanumeric data moving around the world in the form of energy waves via telephone, computers exchanging information, what is money? What is a bank? Wouldn’t that make any institution which could move and guarantee alphanumeric data as people would expect— a bank? The next peeling of the onion asked, What is the nature of the banking business? The answer to that came as three functions:

1) Identify buyers to sellers and sellers to buyers so that an exchange could be made.

2) Guarantee and warrant to buyer and seller they system of exchange.

3) Originate and transfer value data as messages in the form of alphanumeric data. The conclusion? “We were really in the business of the exchange of monetary value.” (p. 125). So “credit card” is a misnomer based on banking jargon.

“The card was no more than a device bearing symbols for the exchange of monetary value. The fact that it took the form of a piece of plastic was no more than an accident of time and circumstance.” In the end, the peeling the onion of the conceptual terms that had long defined that industry enabled him and others to completely rethink their business and that led to designing new structures and inventing many of the pieces of “an entirely new organization.” NLP introduced this in the Meta-Model of Language as the de-nominalizing process and it is an incredibly powerful process as it opens up new perspectives and facilitates creativity.