First and Second Order Change

NLP was intellectually built on automata theory (Turing 1946). With NLP, people learned to re-programme themselves for success.  The basis of NLP was to take an old programme and create a new output.  The premise is, if you can be clear about your problem and outcome you can pretty much change anything. The Swish Pattern, classic anchoring and new behaviour generator to name a few, embody this thinking. However such linear processing does not take into account the multiple levels that occur in human processing or the ecology present in the overall system. Often the Classic Code brought about first order change, that is change within the current frame at the same logical level and type.

A fundamental flaw in Classic Code NLP is the unconscious is not explicitly involved in the selection of the new choices.  With Classic Code NLP, clients are encouraged to use their conscious mind to select their resources.  The challenge with this is the conscious is limited in it’s processing capabilities and relies on using the past as a template for future choices. The conscious mind is not as creative as the unconscious nor does it have access to your offline resources (things you can do that you don’t know you can do yet) nor does the conscious mind have access to the raw data of all the things you can quickly assemble to learn new things.  The conscious is the organiser and tracker of experience, the unconscious includes all your experience and is akin to a creative genius. Like a lot of creative geniuses the unconscious is not effective at being an organiser. So which part of the mind do you think it most effective for selecting and creating new choices – the organiser or the creative genius?
In the video of the month, The Constraints of the Swish Pattern, I talk of a Swish Pattern demonstration I did at an NLP Practitioner class. In my demo referred to in the video, the client was a severe knuckle cracker and constantly cracked her knuckles throughout the day.  This obviously was not good for the health of her fingers and the people in her life (and those on the course) found her behaviour highly irritating.  The swish includes eliciting the trigger of an unwanted behaviour and selecting a new ‘programme’ to operate at the trigger. When the person finds themselves in the context of the unwanted behaviour at the trigger point the new behaviour will occur. To the reader familiar with the TOTE model the swish changes the operations phase of the strategy.  This often but not exclusively produces first order change.

She swished the knuckle cracking to the outcome of finger flexing. This was a healthier option than knuckle cracking and also silent. The resource remained in the same frame as the problem, rather than unconsciously knuckle cracking, the client unconsciously flexed her fingers.  Through my observation of her in the afternoon on the course, the change seemed to be taking hold nicely, there was no knuckle cracking. All good, or so it seemed.

The following morning the lady arrived looking rather pale, I enquired to how she was and how was the knuckle cracking. She said she felt no inclination to crack her knuckles at all; in fact it didn’t seem right. The problem was she had been up all night cracking as many other bones as she could in her body. She could crack ankles, wrists, knees and shoulders. She needed to crack these bones to satisfy the ‘intention’ of what the knuckle cracking had previously satisfied. Saying it another way, in the absence of knuckle cracking she needed another way of getting the benefits knuckle cracking gave her. This case is an example of how limited the change can be when you are working with consciously selected resources and how the ecology in the system lies within the unconscious mind.  The question is how do you create a situation that engages the unconscious and change way beyond the scope of the original problem i.e. second order change.  The answer is the New Code of NLP.
John Grinder created the 6 step reframe at a seminar he was conducting for mental health workers in Canada.  John refers to the 6 step Reframe as the Breakthrough Pattern in NLP (Bostic and Grinder 2002). The Six Step Reframe went to territories no NLP pattern had done previously. The six step actively engaged the unconscious mind through eliciting an involuntary signal for yes and no, elicits an intention for the behaviour to be changed, and the unconscious selects the resources. The conscious does not even know the new choices that satisfy the positive intention. This is about as far removed from the Swish as you can get.

A short while ago a client visited me and told he felt very panicky in social situations and highly awkward in business.  He has nerves when presenting and facing peers.  He wanted to work on the business context as he had several large projects ahead. In the change work I did with him, we created a space that represented his present state, and when he stepped into the space, he had a full VAK sensory experience of his problem (his words).  He was fully plugged in, I could see from his calibration all the non verbal cues associated with his state.  He then broke state, and I did a New Code NLP process with called the NASA game. A New Code NLP Game manipulates processes to stimulate dual hemisphere processing, parallel processing in all three Representational Systems (VAK) and challenges a person to incrementally increase their competence at certain tasks with the game, the result is a High Performance State, a state which is not connected with any past activity, it has been created in the present, is highly creative and carries the array of choices only the unconscious can offer. With this state activated in my client, he walked into the space where he had located his ‘problem state’ and watching the processing as a coach was very pleasing. He now had new choices, he was not aware of the specifics of these choices, neither was I.

A few weeks later the client called me to let me know the results in his life. He no longer felt awkward in business settings; he felt calm and confident giving presentations. In fact he had challenged himself to deliver a presentation to senior business people, which would have really been issue previously, but not now. An interesting side effect was his increased confidence with woman, soon after he was naturally talking to ladies in all settings from public transport to social settings. He was calm and at ease. This is how well the New Code generalises, and this is second order change, the creative part of the mind is providing creative solutions. The conscious mind does not even know what the new choices are at the point of intervention, the conscious mind gets involved shortly after the change, in tracking what is now new experience.

I have been in the NLP field for 17 years. In the early days I would see 6-8 clients a day, for three days a week. Sometimes this amounted to 12 hours of NLP change work with different clients in one day. I have tested the Classic Code NLP (and now New Code) across so many contexts with so many different behaviours that I have a huge repertoire of experience.  I have fantastic case studies of success stories with the Swish, Anchoring, New Behaviour Generator, Submodality Map Across etc. The question I ask, is a question posed by John Grinder, with the Classic Code; “when successful are we transforming unhappy robots to happy robots?” That is the challenge with first order change.

What I enjoy most about my work, is that my clients do not have a conscious representation of what is fully possible in their lives. What is truly possible is way beyond what we can think about with our conscious minds.  Some don’t even have a conscious representation of what their outcome is. The Classic Code brought new choices to people by helping them be clear about their outcomes and then using techniques to actualise the outcome. The New Code does something very different, it enables you to go way beyond your outcomes into territories previously unavailable to you and enjoy change across the system i.e. second order change.