Written and Produced
by Andy Bradbury
(author of "Develop Your NLP Skills", etc.)
Reviews: Part 28
Written and Produced
by Andy Bradbury
(author of "Develop Your NLP Skills", etc.)
Reviews: Part 28
The Title
Name(s) of the Author(s)
Publisher and ISBN Number [this will be for the paperback version except where the number ends with (Hb)]
Whispering in the Wind
Carmen Bostic St. Clair and John Grinder
J&C Enterprises ISBN 0-9717223-0-7
I really wanted to like this book, and to be fair, it does have it's moments. Quite a few of them, in fact.
First and foremost there is the very interesting model of "neurological transforms":
Sensory Input » f 1 » FA » f 2 » Linguistic Representation
Which highlights the way in which data received via our senses is actually moderated in the act of receiving it (at f 1) - even before we have the initial "experience" (at FA - First Access) - as well as during the process of converting that sensory information into a linguistic representation.
There's the fleeting, yet crucial (IMO) observation on one of the most widely discussed, and misunderstood topics in NLP - rapport:
"Rapport, we propose, is established precisely at the point that the agent of change has captured the unconscious attention of the person with whom he wants to achieve rapport. One particular form that rapport can take, then, is trust. The common misperception, mistaking trust for rapport, seems to be the logical level error of identifying a member of a set with the set itself."
(p.345. The term "logical level" is being used here in it's Batesonian sense.)
And the authors do an excellent job of dissecting Dilts' notorious "logical levels" model, even questioning whether it belongs within the list of NLP techniques. More than that, however, they also look at possible reasons why it has become so popular, despite its obvious flaws, and also pose Dilts some very precise questions which would allow him to demonstrate that the model is a genuine part of NLP rather than just another bit of his personal, somewhat quirky world view. (Sadly, though the book has been out for about three years, Dilts does not seem to have responded to these remarks. If anyone knows different, please let me know and I'll be happy to amend this review accordingly.)
But most important of all, perhaps, is the attempt to restore the "unconscious mind" to its rightful position in NLP.
What few people realise is that three of the most influential people involved in the formulation of NLP, people who are on record as has given it the "thumbs up" - Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson - all ended up withdrawing their approval, and all for the same reason. In their opinion, NLP lost sight of the importance of communicating with, and utilising the power of, the unconscious mind. Not that the unconscious mind has been forced out entirely, rather that it has all too often been pushed to the back of the auditorium when it should be on stage giving the presentation, so to speak. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a field of study which has as a basic concept the idea that the unconscious mind is in many respect much smarter than the conscious mind.
In Whispering in the Wind the authors make a real effort to bring the unconscious mind back to it's rightful place, using the 6-Step Reframe technique as an example. Unfortunately, however, the effort is largely undermined by the obtuseness of the writing and the poor presentation.
The first thing that hits you (well, the first thing that hit me) when you pick up this book is the amateurishness of the production values. Which might be less noticeable if (a) the book wasn't so expensive, and (b) if this weren't mirrored in much of the contents.
The front cover itself is a turnoff, being in shades of grey with white lettering. To me, it looked like something out of a rather sinister nightmare, but hey, who cares? You can't get it in shops or from online sellers such as Amazon anyway, so you're probably buying it "sight unseen".
Anyway, you then open it up, and you find something truly remarkable - the entire book is printed in a bold, sans serif font except in three places:
When asked about this choice of fonts, on the whisperinginthewind.com website, Grinder first questioned what evidence there was that regular serif fonts were easier to read from the page than bold sans serif. Could he really have overlooked the fact that the main text of about 99% plus of all books printed using the Western alphabet - including his own self-published books Turtles All the Way Down and Precision - use a regular serif font for the main text. Or maybe he thought it was just a co-incidence. He subsequently acknowledged that:
"... it was through thorough and pure ignorance [sic] that we selected the font... more on personal preference than any other criteria that we did for Whispering."
(post to http://www.whisperinginthewind.com/discussion/index.htm. Thread heading "Fonts". Dated 03/10/2002)
It seems strange that an expert communicator and modeler would overlook such an basic fact. But this element of "personal preference" may also explain the atrocious writing.
In the first place the book reads like it was written to be as inpenetrable as possible, as demonstrated in this relatively mild example:
"Note that even when these [previously stated] conditions are strictly met, only the denotive meaning (the actual referent of the word in question) would match up in speaker and listener - the conotative or deeper associations which are secondary and often experienced in western cultures as the feeling tone associated with the communication would be individually unique to speaker and listener, guaranteeing an ongoing difference between the two."
(p.188)
To a professional linguist, like John Grinder, that passage may be crystal clear, but not, I suspect, to the average NLPer who might buy the book.
What that passage actually means - I think - is something like:
"Note: Even when these three conditions are strictly adhered to, the speaker and listener will only share an understanding of the "surface" level meaning of the words. The deeper, more precise meaning of the words, and their emotional impact, for listener and speaker alike, will still depend on each person's unique interpretration. So there would never be an exact match between what the speaker means and what the listener understands."
If this is what they meant, why not say so, without all the jargon. If it wasn't what they meant, then the book is even harder to understand than I thought!
On top of all the other shortcomings, there is no index, and the editing is seriously sloppy. Without doing a precise count, my impression is that there is, on average, one error - ungrammatical sentences, wrong spelling, inconsistencies, typos, badly drawn diagrams, etc. - every two or three pages. Each one is pretty trivial on its own, but after a while I began to find them very irritating, especially as a decent editor would probably have eliminated the vast majority of them. For example, at one point in the book, whilst discussing the subject of coding information, the authors make the following claim:
"In any coding exercise, it rapidly becomes clear that there is an arbitrarily large number of different representations of a complex behaviour that could potentially serve as a description. A classic example of this is the set of three representations immediately below - a binary number, a decimal number and a phrase in English:
101101011010010000
186,000
the velocity of light
In fact, these three representations are equivalent - they are simply three distinct codes for the same information. Note that the example makes explicit that the information is independent of the code selected for its expression."
(p.272)
"Is it 'eck as like, Sunbeam!" as they say up North.
As someone who has had quite a lot of experience working on the design of relational databases, it seems to me that if this information is to be accessed by a human being then the three "representations" are nothing like "equivalent". (If it isn't to be accessed, then it arguably doesn't have any meaning at all.)
Unless I'm familiar with binary numbers, why would I understand that the top line represents the decimal number below it. And for either of the two numbers, unless I already know the approximate value of the speed of light, how would I realize that the two numbers related to the speed of light rather than any other topic? And if I only read the last line, what would it tell me about the numerical value of the speed of light?
The fact is that the three different kinds of coding quite radically affect what information can be gleaned from each line.
I am aware that some people who have read this review feel that I have overemphasised the problems and given the book an unfair/unrealistic rating (see second rating, below). To which I would answer with a little story:
A year or two after I wrote the review I attended a seminar lead by John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St. Clair (which I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way). One day at lunch in a nearby restaurant there were seven or eight people from the seminar (including myself) seated around a table. As far as I could make out, everyone at the table had started to read Whispering in the Wind at some time or other. Yet I was the only person who had read it all the way through without giving up.
Overall, then, I'm looking at a balance between a some interesting ideas on the one hand, and obscure writing, alround poor presentation and a very hefty price on the other. Had the book been priced under £10.00 (UK) I would have given it a qualified recommendation. If the authors had managed to give what appeared to be a clear exposition of their ideas on the importance of the unconscious mind, etc. - clear to lay readers, that is - I would have been less cautious, and would have thought that a price around £14-£15 would be justifiable. In practise, however, to buy the book in the UK the total cost, including post and packing, is $52.95, or approximately £28.00 (at present, and rather more when the dollar wasn't so weak). At that price I have now chosen to give the book two recommendations:
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Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Dummies
Romilla Ready and Kate Burton
John Wiley & Sons Ltd ISBN 0-7645-7028-5
What can I say. If you buy a book with "for Dummies" in the title then that's probably exactly what you'll get.
To be blunt, if you collected together all of the existing introductions to NLP, (both good and "less good"), chopped them all up, sentence by sentence, threw all the pieces into the air, and then made up a new book by simply picking the bits that looked like they might go together - filling in the gaps with pure guesswork - then I imagine the result might look something like this. It would certainly help to explain why the authors so frequently deal with topics or individual points two, three, or even more times, giving different and in some cases even conflicting information each time.
Having said that, I must confess that life was quite exciting up until page 72. You see I'd skimmed through the book before starting to read it, and I'd noticed several mentions of George Miller and his legendary 7 ± 2 pieces of information, as well as several mentions that we receive 2,000,000 bits of sensory information per second. A number of authors have walked up to the mouth this particular trap and have then turned away at the last moment. Seeing some of the many errors in the "Dummies" book, I sensed that this time the trap was finally going to claim a victim. And sure enough, on page 72, it does!
The errors I refer to are varied in type, but depressingly frequent. These are just a few examples:
"Oh! And did you know ... the hippocampus is made up of banks and banks of pyramid-like structures that get filled up during the day and emptied out at night? This means that you are able to make connections more quickly when you first wake up, so do your hardest thinking before the pyramids fill up."
(p.57)
Intriguing as this may sound, it is unfortunately wrong in almost every respect.
Firstly the whole sidebar is a collection of meta model violations - that is, missing information:
It's true that neurons accumulate minute electrical charges, and pass the signal on when a sufficiently large excitory charge has built up, but this happens millions of times a day - not just once.
But enough of the teasing. What about the definitive cock-up on page 72? Perhaps it will be easiest if I start by quoting the claim about Miller's famous 7 ± 2:
"Professor George Miller conducted research into how many bits of data people can hold in their short-term memory at any given time. He came to the conclusion that a person can hold 7 ± 2 pieces of information; nine bits if they are feeling good or have an interest in the subject and only as few as five if they're feeling a bit low or are not particularly interested in what it is they're trying to remember. If you are not into multi-tasking you may have trouble coping with more than one!"
(p.72)
"NLP has adopted the idea of chunking from the world of IT; ..."
(p.244)
Okay, you'll understand why I've included that second quote in just a minute. For the moment let's just be clear that everything in the first quotation after "information;" is pure fiction. There is nothing in Miller's article about whether the subject is tired or interested, etc. What he attributes the variability to is (a) the kind of information - words, binary numbers, digital numbers - (b) how we encode the information, and (c) how much we already know about the subject. In fact, Miller writes:
"... the number of bits of information is constant for absolute judgement [for example, 'Is musical tone A different from musical tone B?'] and the number of chunks of information is constant for immediate [i.e. short-term] memory. The span of immediate memory seems to be almost independent of the number of bits per chunk, at least over the range that has been examined to date."
(The material in square brackets has been added for clarification.)
So, the truth of the matter is that the notion of "chunking", as it is used in NLP, comes from (a) Miller, and (b) Korzybski's "ladder of abstraction". Just why these authors imagine it comes from IT is a mystery we may never solve.
The more immediate concern is the way that the authors harp on and on about 2,000,000 bits of input per second and 7 ± 2 pieces of information in short-term memory, and end up walking straight into the trap of supposing that the two figures apply to the same unit of measurement. Miller himself was quite clear that "bits" and "chunks", as used here, are not the same thing, because one chunk contains numerous bits. A single reading of Miller's article readily illustrates this basic fact.
Put this together with all the other mistakes and this book is revealed as a very poorly researched mish mash. It is too superficial to be of interest to anyone but a novice, and a novice wouldn't know enough to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff.
It is my impression that the true value of this book is summed up by the contents of Chapter 22 - "Ten Movies that Include NLP Processes".
At the start of this briefest of chapters (3½ pages) we are told that in each of the ten films listed the authors "were able to identify aspects of NLP," and that in each case they "have identified some of the NLP features in each film..." All of which is, to be blunt, pure hogwash.
In the first film - As Good As It Gets - they claim that a neighbour's dog teaches Jack Nicolson about rapport building, but after that, the whole thing goes rapidly downhill. In the next film - Bend It Like Beckham - the entire description is as follows:
"A delightful film about girl power, friendship, and fulfilling dreams and aspirations in spite of obstacles."
Or again, for Field of Dreams:
"This is a movie classic about the fulfilment that comes from manifesting one's dreams."
Based on these descriptions it seems that having dreams is something these authors imagine is an exclusive feature of NLP - which is going to come as a bit of a shock to all those people who are having and fulfilling dreams without ever knowing that NLP exists!
Am I being overly cynical? Apparently not, since one of the items in the list of features the authors think we should consider when watching a film is:
"What message is there in this movie about dreams, goals and outcomes."
Presumably because non-NLP films don't have anything in them about dreams, goals and outcomes. To which one can only say: Did you ever see a film that didn't have something in it about dreams, goals and outcomes in one form or another?
I originally ended this review by saying:
To be frank (or sid, or bert), I can only think of one other (allegedly) NLP-related book that comes this close to being pure junk.
Fortunately there are several perfectly good introductions to NLP already on the market, and even if there weren't I would still have no hesitation at all in recommending that readers avoid this book at all costs.
Since then a still small, but growing, number of junk books on NLP have been appearing. That does not, however, alter the fact that Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Dummies is, by my reckoning, pretty much pure junk.
Recommendation: Avoid like the plague.
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Andy Bradbury can be contacted at: bradburyac@hotmail.com