- How long after you started modelling David Grove did you start training others?
- What were your main difficulties in modelling David Grove?
I replied:
Starting to train David’s work
Penny Tompkins and I first saw David Grove present his work at an evening talk at Regent’s College, London in 1993. But it wasn’t until May 1995 during a residential therapy retreat that we decided to model him.
Our first aim was to be able to use his process in our therapy practice and get similar results. Later we wanted to find ways to use the principles of the process in application areas other than therapy.
We gave our first presentation on David’s work, Evolving Metaphor – A Grovian Approach, to the Association for NLP Annual Conference in November 1995.
We ran our first ‘pilot’ weekend workshop (for 12 invited guests) in July 1996 and our first open workshop in September (part 1) and November (part 2) of that same year (i.e. 18 months after starting to model him).
At that stage we were very much recapitulating David’s model of what he did since we had only just begun to formalise his work into our own model. The process of modelling, codifying, testing and refining our model took several more years, culminating in Metaphors in Mind (2000) – and continues to the present day.
I can think of four main difficulties:
1. The lack of information about how to model. Richard Bandler & John Grinder had not described how they modelled their exemplars. Their books described the product of their modelling. So, we reread their first five (pre-NLP) books with the intention to ‘reverse engineering’ their process. We asked ourselves: What must they have done that resulted in these books?
We identified several ways they might have modelled their exemplars and we adapted these to modelling David. And we added a few others:*
- Observing David working with clients.
- Listening to audio tapes of his sessions.
- Being his clients (and afterwards listening to the recording of the session).
- Unconscious uptake and deep trance identification.
- Analysing transcripts for the questions he asked.
- Fitting what he did into existing NLP models (e.g. Logical Levels and Perceptual Positions. This proved a useful stepping stone but eventually we had to abandon most of them and devise models from within the logic of David’s approach).
- Drawing on compatible methods, e.g. Gendlin’s Focusing; de Shazier’s Solution Focus Brief Therapy; Rossi’s Ideodynamic Healing Hypnosis; Bateson’s Double Bind Theory; Watzlawick’s Interactional Problem Resolution; etc.
- Once we had identified the basics of the approach, we looked outside the field for descriptions that could put David’s work into a wider context, e.g. Cognitive linguistics, Self-organising systems theory, Developmental perspectives; Constructivism.
- Lots and lots of discussion between the two of us (neither of us could have done it alone).
- Exploring David’s and our models with a supportive group of like-minded individuals: The Clean Community [link available soon].
- Testing, testing, testing our ideas: first on ourselves, second on volunteers, third with our clients, fourth in training workshops. We called this trial-and-feedback.
- Writing articles (this helped us get very clear about what we were trying to say).
3. Penny and I had both done small modelling projects on our NLP Master Practitioner programs but we had never attempted anything on this scale. We often got overwhelmed both by the magnitude of David’s approach and because he kept coming up with new stuff (some of which didn’t easily fit with his previous work). David was in the UK twice a year and it seemed he had a new idea to chase (his metaphor) every time he returned. Eventually, we went to a higher level description that encompassed the range of David’s innovations – boy, was that a stretch!
A. What David did in a client session, i.e. the observable behaviour we could record.
B. General concepts and models David derived from observing his clients to (i) guide his behaviour, and (ii) explain what happened. [Examples of such models were: T-1, T, T+1; Observer, Observed and the Relationship between.]
C. Theories as to why things happened as they did.
It took us quite awhile to realise that the relevance of the information – from a modeller’s perspective – went from A (high) to Bi to Bii to C (low). We noticed we could get mesmerised by (C) and that these explanations could distract us from learning to reproduce (A) – sometimes because they didn’t match up, other times because they just were not necessary. We thought modelling David would take us a year but it took us over four.* List in #1 above updated 9 September 2023.
