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Carmen Bostic St Clair and John Grinder
Review by Dave Allaway

Target audience: The NLP "community", though I suggest, a little cynically, Grinder's friends.

Summary of content: Three sections, ten chapters.
Section 1 - A Freshening Wind - looks at epistemology, terminology, and some useful historical antecedents to NLP, both generally, and personally from Grinder's point of view.

Section 2 - The Eye of the Storm - early NLP modelling, the novelty and uniqueness of NLP, and an introduction to "New Code".

Section 3 - A Steady Sea Breeze - key modelling issues, a description of the differences between NLPmodelling, NLPapplication, and NLPtraining. This is followed by some recommendations to the NLP "community".

There is a poor example of a bibliography that seems to be a personal collection rather than a useful aid to deeper understanding.

There is no index.

Recommended features: Tricky one this. I don't really recommend this unless you take pleasure, as I sometimes do, from wading through prickly thorns and squelching mud in order to harvest a few tasty berries.

What kind of berries are in this book? There are some real taste sensations regarding what the authors call "First Access" which is a useful term to describe our interface with aspects of the world that are generally deemed to be external to us. That is, our VAKOG. Despite their claims regarding epistemology and ontology, and their early reference to autopoietic organisation, they fall into the Cartesian trap and distinguish between First Access and the "real" world. Surely Bateson (1972), and Maturana & Varela (1987) [who developed the autopoietic view] would take great issue with St. Clair and Grinder over this.

Another tasty fruit, hidden amongst some dreadful, arrogant and bitter text, concerns pattern recognition and modelling within NLP, as distinct from other approaches. There is some good stuff in here.

Yet another juicy fruit is the historical material that does a pretty good job of positioning NLP as an outgrowth of the cybernetic movement of the 1950's. The value of this is two-fold. Firstly, it helps us to understand some of the early terminology of NLP (e.g., 4-tuple), and, secondly, it helps my understanding of how systems thinking has shaped NLP. Other historical fruitlets of value include the development of the Meta-Model, of course, including some useful detail on the work of Noam Chomsky.

My final selected fruity offering is the wealth of insights throughout this book regarding the distinctions between First Access and language. I'd have liked the authors to be more explicit in their labelling of these insights as "Neuro-linguistic" since that is really what it is about. However, I did benefit from getting a different and more experienced view, from Grinder, about how language goes about its transformation of VAKOG.

Personal impressions: The type-face is dreadful for a start. All in bold, so the book is dark, and it is like looking at a 381 page headline.

This is a book that delighted me, frustrated me, and angered me too. The delights, I outlined, within my fruit bowl, above. My frustration came from, perhaps, expecting too much of Grinder. There are a few dreadful inconsistencies in this book. Firstly, as outlined above, the ontological and epistemological claims versus the autopoietic claims. Secondly, and this is a biggy, the authors' attempts to describe the difference between "Classic Code" NLP, and "New Code" NLP. Classic Code is, according to the authors, content free, is exemplified by the Meta-Model, and did not take account of ecological issues. New Code is different because it does include ecological considerations, and, erm, yes, well. Erm, …, erm, yes. Well, here is what the authors say about it: 'a complete verbal representation of the finer points necessary to the deployment of the skills of the new code format are well beyond the scope of this book …'. What a cop out. So I can't say that I know much about New Code, except that it is better than Classic code. And in a book that is 381 pages, I am suspicious about this to say the least. By way of illustration, the authors take issue with Robert Dilts' "Neurological levels." Ok, so the process is, in my opinion too, misnamed - there is no evidence to suggest that humans have neurological levels of any sort, let alone like those in Dilts' process. However, Grinder suggests that it is not an NLP process at all because it is a content-based process (p.292). My problem with the authors' issue is that their claims regarding the distinction between content and process are not as clear as they make out since Dilts' process can be used content-free or with content. Certainly, the Meta-Model and reframing, two of the earliest NLP models, utilise content in order to access the process, but in my opinion, that's neuro-linguistics for you: the language is our access to the process; from the content we deduce the process.

So, overall, I'd not pay money for this book since it didn't give me what I wanted, which may have been unfair of me, but there it is. Some good stuff if you're willing to wade through it.

Dave Allaway
November 2004