Levels of Learning & Change

Harry explains a framework for learning and change that originated in the field of NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) — just in time for the launch of Jorge's new consultancy.

Show notes:

• unfinishe_ – Jorge Arango and Greg Petroff’s strategic AI consultancy
• Sam and Jony introduce io
• Tools for Dreamers by Robert B. Dilts, Todd Epstein, and Robert W. Dilts
• Neuro-linguistic programming
• Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins
• General semantics

Episode Transcript

Harry (00:00):
I use these all the time in all sorts of different areas,

(00:03):
and I realize they've completelychanged the way that I approach
all sorts of problem solving,from telling personal stories to
design work.
And I think the sky's the limitin terms of how they can be
applied.

Narrator (00:21):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry (00:32):
Jorge, it's so excellent to see you today.
I wanted to congratulate you.
I was super excited to see theannouncement with you getting
involved with Greg Petroff andworking in the AI space.
Can you gimme just a thumbnailof what that's about?

Jorge (00:44):
Thank you, Harry.
Yeah, I'm happy to.
So, my friend Greg Petroff and Iannounced a new strategic
consultancy that we're doing.
We have been talking with folksabout their business and
particularly the impact ofartificial intelligence on their

(01:07):
business.
Everyone is talking about AI,right?

Harry (01:10):
Sure.

Jorge (01:11):
And we started hearing a common refrain, particularly
among the people who are leadingsmall and medium sized
businesses, which is that a lotof people recognize that
artificial intelligence is a bigdeal.
This is a big change, right?
But this is also an emergenttechnology and people aren't

(01:33):
quite sure what to do with ityet.
So there's a bunch ofexperimentation.
I think a lot of businesses aredabbling with it.
And both Greg and I have beenworking in this space for a long
time, and we can help thoseorganizations get a sense of

(01:54):
direction, basically figure outhow to use AI more strategically
so that they can actually createvalue with it.

Harry (02:07):
It's super exciting and it makes a lot of sense,
especially on the heels of theJony Ive announcement, because I
think a lot of the real valuefrom AI is gonna come from
people with design andinformation architecture
backgrounds, right?
They're gonna see where to dothis work.
And I'm just excited for you andfor Greg and where this goes,
and I'd love for you to keep usposted.

Jorge (02:28):
I'm happy to do that, but I don't want to take time from
what we're here to do, which isto help folks figure out how to
gain more traction, right?

Harry (02:36):
Yeah.
It's funny, after eachrecording, I'm like,"Oh my God,
what am I gonna bring next?
How am I gonna up my game?" AndI figured something out last
time and I thought,"Oh, that'sso exciting!" And I went digging
through all my books and I foundit and I was like,"Oh man, it's
really boring in writing." But Iturned a couple of pages and

(02:57):
found something really good.
So, I'm super excited to sharewith you a model that I have
been using extensively for manyyears.
And I completely forgot that itwas in the same book as the
thing that I wanted to tell youabout.
And so if I may, lemme just readthis.
It's just a couple of longparagraphs, and then I'll tell

(03:18):
you what the book is, if that'scool.

Jorge (03:20):
Yeah, please.

Harry (03:22):
All right.
"Logical levels.
"People often talk aboutresponding to things on
'different levels.' Forinstance, someone might say that
some experience was negative onone level, but positive on
another level.
In our brain structure, languageand perceptual systems, there

(03:45):
are natural hierarchies orlevels of experience.
The effect of each level is toorganize and control the
information on the level belowit.
Changing something on an upperlevel would necessarily change
things on the lower levels.
Changing something on a lowerlevel could but would not
necessarily affect the upperlevels.

(04:07):
"Anthropologist Gregory Batesonidentified four basic levels of
learning and change, each levelmore abstract than the level
below it, but each having agreater degree of impact on the
individual.
And these levels roughlycorrespond to who am I, the
identity level, my beliefsystem, that is, values and

(04:32):
meanings, my capabilities, thatis to say, my strategies and
states, how I go aboutsomething, what I do or have
done, you could think of that asspecific behaviors or the what,

(04:52):
and then, my environment, orexternal constraints, when and
where.
"The environment level involvesthe specific external conditions
in which our behavior takesplace.
Behaviors without any inner map,plan, or strategy to guide them,
however, are like knee jerkreactions, habits, or rituals.

(05:14):
At the level of capability,we're able to select, alter, and
adapt a class of behaviors to awider set of external
situations.
At the level of beliefs andvalues, we may encourage,
inhibit, or generalize aparticular strategy, plan or way
of thinking.

(05:35):
Identity, of course,consolidates whole systems of
belief and values into a senseof self.
"While each level becomes moreabstracted from the specifics of
behavior and sensory experience,it actually has more and more
widespread effect on ourbehavior and experience.

(05:58):
Environmental factors determinethe external opportunities and
constraints a person has toreact to.
Behavior is made up of thespecific actions or reactions
taken within the environment.
Capabilities guide and givedirection to behavioral actions

(06:18):
through a mental map, plan, orstrategy.
Beliefs and values provide thereinforcement, that is the
motivations and permissions thatsupport or deny these
capabilities.
And identity factors determineoverall purpose or mission and

(06:39):
shape beliefs and values throughour sense of self.
"Each of these processesinvolves a different level of
organization and evaluation thatwill select, access, and utilize
the information on the levelbelow it.
In this way, they form ahierarchy."

Jorge (07:02):
I have a couple of books that have come to my mind as I
hear you read this.
I don't think that this is fromany of those two books, but, the
one that most pressingly came tomind is our friend Dave Gray's,
Liminal Thinking, which alsodeals with a similar hierarchy.

(07:22):
And I would love to unpack this,what book is this and who is it
from?

Harry (07:24):
it's super interesting that you would mention Dave's
book because Dave drew on thiswork.
So, this is actually a book byRobert Dilts, Todd Epstein, and
Robert's father, Robert Dilts.
So it's Robert and Robert.
The book's title is called Toolsfor Dreamers: Strategies for

(07:46):
Creativity, and the Structure ofInnovation.
And Robert Dilts Jr.
is one of the significantcontributors in the field of
neurolinguistic programming,from which Dave Gray drew a lot
of his work.
And the Dilts logical levels isthe description of the material

(08:09):
that I just went through.
And I had forgotten that Dave, Ibelieve, may have painted that
picture in his book.

Jorge (08:19):
Yeah, he has a classically beautiful Dave Gray
drawing that makes, it I don'tknow if it's this exact model,
but it makes similar ideas morevisible.
You wanna say a little bit moreabout neurolinguistic
programming?
I remember coming across thatfield, I think reading one of

(08:42):
Anthony Robbins's 1980s books.
I think it was Awakening theGiant Within or one of those.

Harry (08:48):
Yeah.

Jorge (08:49):
Cause he was influenced by that as well.
But, do you want to give us a,high level recap of what that's
about?

Harry (08:56):
Yeah.
Just as a quick aside, AnthonyRobbins probably more than
anybody else, popularized thefield of NLP, neurolinguistic
programming.
So NLP was developed in the1980s by Richard Bandler, who
was a grad student, and JohnGrinder.

(09:21):
And it was in effect the studyof the structure of subjective
experience.
Bandler and Grinder interviewedand studied a whole number of
super interesting people likethe anthropologist Gregory
Bateson, Virginia Satir, anumber of psychologists, the

(09:43):
father of hypnosis, Erickson,and a bunch of others to try to
decode how language generatedchange in people.
And it was formalized in a setof presuppositions.
And from those presuppositionsemerged a set of linguistic

(10:05):
patterns.
And those presuppositions andthose patterns can be used or
applied in almost any field.
But they are most powerfullytools for change at the personal
level.
And Anthony Robbins picked up onthis and really removing most of

(10:29):
the baggage that came along withNLP and most of the jargon that
came along with it.
He popularized it in a way thatI really personally didn't care
for and a lot of other peopledidn't care for either.
But it's hard to argue with theworld that he's built around him

(10:49):
today.
But NLP has become a tool setand a thinking model for
generating change in sales inbusiness.
I applied it in design; that'swhere the design for the first
online secure shopping cart camefrom.
It was an application of NLP,and I was interviewed for that

(11:09):
many years ago.
We can probably find the linksomewhere about how I went about
doing that.

Jorge (11:18):
To clarify what you're talking about and just to
relieve my own ignorance, whatcame to mind when I was hearing
you talk about it is a runninggag that my son and I have where
I keep quoting back to him thatstory about the little engine
that could.
And it's climbing the hill andit goes, I think I can, I think
I can, I think I can, I think Ican.
It's that kind of thing, right?

(11:38):
Like you're priming yourselfwith a language of your
self-talk, is that right?

Harry (11:43):
That's just an application of it.
It's actually significantly moresophisticated than that.
The idea, for example, somethingyou've heard of for a long time,
that the map is not theterritory is actually an NLP
presupposition.
And that was something that wascodified by Bandler and Grinder
as part of NLP and picked up inthe popular world post NLP and

(12:09):
really driven into everydayusage.
But there are, I think, aboutthirty different presuppositions
that are quite powerful.
For example, the most flexibleelement of a system controls the
system.
That's an NLP presupposition.
And you can apply that, right?

(12:29):
You can actually show up in asituation and be the most
flexible person in a givensituation, and you can influence
heavily, if not control thesituation through that level of
flexibility.
But NLP is a very interestingfield because it is semi-formal,
it has been studied a lot, ithas many different applications,

(12:52):
and many of them have beendocumented by Robert Dilts.

Jorge (12:59):
it's interesting that you bring up the map not being the
territory thing, because I wasthinking as you were describing
it that this has echoes ofGeneral Semantics, right?
I think that Korzybski is theone who said the original"map is
not the territory" thing.
And he had this notion of thestructural differential, which
is...

(13:19):
S.I.
Hayakawa later popularized it asthe ladder of abstraction, where
you have terms at differentlevels of abstraction, and when
you're communicating, you needto be clear at what level you're
working at because other peoplemight be misinterpreting the
level that you're operating at.

Harry (13:35):
Yeah.
And Korzybski's work was largelyincluded in the body of NLP
corpus, and so that's part ofhow these things came together.
But I am not the best person totalk to about the history of
NLP.
What I can tell you is how it'sbeen applied in my work in
design and software development.
And interestingly, NLP and Icame together mostly in the

(14:04):
context of a consulting group atHewlett Packard.
So I was learning, I was inworkshops learning NLP, and I
bumped into a number of leaderswho worked in an internal
strategy consulting group insideof corporate Hewlett Packard in

(14:28):
Palo Alto.
And because of my background,this was after Virtual
Vineyards, where I designed anddeployed the first online secure
shopping cart and had all thisexperience in SGML and HTML and
coding and Unix systems.
I stood out brightly to them assomebody who had a set of

(14:50):
capabilities that they wanted toincorporate into HP, so they
recruited me because their wholegroup was NLP trained.
It was NLP for business.
They used all this softtechnology to generate change
inside the Hewlett Packardsystem.
Candidly, I met some of myclosest friends even today, came

(15:11):
outta that group.
Here we are, thirty years lateror whatever, and some of my best
friends, I met in that group.
It was phenomenal.
But I wanted to share thatmodel, because I use it so
often.
I use it when I'm helping peoplefigure out how to tell their
story for getting promoted or ajob search, right?

(15:35):
Because you can actually use thelogical levels to answer
questions that people have aboutyou.
For example, environment.
Where do you live, right?
Skills and capabilities.
How do you do what you do?
Behavior level, what are yourbehavioral tendencies or biases,
right?
Your identity level, how do youthink of yourself professionally

(15:58):
and so on and so forth.
So I use these all the time inall sorts of different areas,
and I realize they've completelychanged the way that I approach
all sorts of problem solvingfrom telling personal stories to
design work and I think thesky's the limit in terms of how
they can be applied.

Jorge (16:17):
Last time we met, we said that there were themes starting
to emerge, and it feels likethis is yet another instance of
that, right?
Where one of the themes seems tobe about self-awareness, and
that includes awareness of thelanguage you're using to both
describe your context and alsoyour scope of action within that
context, right?

(16:37):
Which I think this touches on.
I wanna read back to you what Iunderstood the model to be, and
also it might serve as arefresher for folks listening
in.
Now I was curious because thereading said that there were
four levels, but I actuallywrote down five and I wanna make
sure that I got it right.
So they are identity, beliefsystems, capabilities,

(16:58):
behaviors, and environment.
Is that right?

Harry (17:01):
That's what's in the book.
And there's actually anotherone.
The book is old, right?
And I think it's evolved sincethen.
So we'll leave with the onesthat are in the book, right?
There's the identity level.
There's values and beliefs.
There's skills and capabilities.

(17:23):
There's behaviors and actionsand then there's environment.
And one has emerged since thisbook, I believe, and that's on
the very top of the list, andthat is, for lack of a better
term, connection to livingthings or spirit.
So if you were to go down thislist from the top, you would

(17:46):
think,"Okay, what is my purpose?
How do I represent myself or howdo people think about me?
What are my skills?
How do I act in the world?
What is my environment?
And so on and so forth.
I probably trained hundreds ofpeople in this model simply from

(18:07):
the point of view of being ableto tell their story in a
business context.
Because a lot of people reallystruggle to tell their story,
right?
Some people tell itchronologically.
"Well, I was born here and thenI went to school there and then
I graduated from here, and thenI got my first job there." And
they do this chronologicalstorytelling.

(18:28):
It's a yawner.
And then other people, they're alittle bit more advanced: they
do a reverse chronologicalstory, right?
They go,"Currently I'm doing X.
Prior to that, I was doing Y.
Before that, I was doing Z." Andif they're strong, they would
say,"And this is what Icontributed in each of those,"
or"Here were the challenges ineach of those." And if they're

(18:53):
really advanced, maybe they usea hero's journey structure,
right?
And they walk you through somekind of better, well-crafted
story about how they've ended upwhere they are today and you
know what they do and why theydo it.
The Dilts model.
Is particularly powerful becauseit allows you to answer the

(19:16):
question that you're asked.
So for example, what do you wantto do?
Or where do you live?
You can start at either place orwhat's most important to you?
So if somebody says,"What do youwant to do?" You can actually
start at the behavior level,because"do" is a behavioral
orientation.

(19:37):
And so you can say,"I reallywant to utilize my precision
questioning and answeringskills.
I really want to utilize my biasfor action, my sense of
proactivity.
I like listening to people verycarefully to see who they are
under the surface.
But let me tell you why that'sso important." So I'm gonna jump

(20:00):
up all the way to identitylevel.
"Currently I think of myself aslargely an executive coach and a
consultant." And now I'm goingto drop to the next level down;
i'm gonna go to, values andbeliefs.
"What's most important to me isthat people have a real

(20:20):
opportunity to grow and evolveand create the kind of world
that they want to live in." Andthen, I'm gonna jump the next
level down.
"I've developed a set ofdiagnostic skills, I've
developed a set of coachingskills.
I've learned the practice ofbeing a consultant, and I, want

(20:41):
to fuse all of these in thecontext of working in business."
And now I'm gonna jump down toenvironment.
"I live north of Santa Cruz.
It's close to Silicon Valley.
I really enjoy working from hometo a large extent.
I'm not at adverse totraveling." And, so I've just
covered a bunch of what was inDilts without saying anything

(21:06):
about where I was born andwalking you through a
chronological story of my life,which is often boring and I
haven't done a classical reversechronological sort, which
everybody expects.
And I was able to start byanswering the question that was
asked and then move around thatstructure based on what story I

(21:29):
want to tell.
It's super powerful.
If nothing more, just as thispersonal, storytelling
technique.

Jorge (21:39):
I was gonna say, it sounds like, one use for the
framework is how you tell yourown story.
And the example you've beenusing is how you tell your story
to others.

Harry (21:49):
Hmm.

Jorge (21:49):
The first question you asked me today about my new
undertaking with Greg, I toldyou what I'm doing there and I'm
thinking now that I'm hearingthis framework, that I could
tell that story much moreeffectively if I know at what
level within this model I couldfocus on.

Harry (22:12):
Yeah, exactly.

Jorge (22:13):
So that's one use for it.
Another use for it and this isthe second thing I'm hearing
from what you're saying theremight be the story that you tell
yourself.
One of the things that I'm...
I was gonna say struggling with,but it's not really struggling,
it's just going through, is theidentity change that comes from
a career where I've mostly beenperceived as a user experience

(22:35):
designer to one where I'm movingmore towards kind of strategic
consulting, right?
So those are differentidentities, and I have a persona
that I put out in the world thatis going to be shifting as a
result of this.
And this model would help meapproach that more
intentionally.
Is that the idea?

Harry (22:56):
It is, and I've wielded it in exactly those ways.
You can take something like theidentity level that you've just
talked about and you can thenstretch it out temporally where
you came from, where you are,where you're going which further
allows you to tell your story.
Look, earlier in my career I wasprimarily just a hardcore

(23:16):
information architect.
You could have called me a highutility designer because I'm not
a visual designer.
But what happened is, I evolvedinto a situation where I
realized the design work, thetechnical documentation work,
the curriculum development work,all the stuff I was doing, put
me in a stronger position toreally be leading product
organizations and really drivingthe change at the level of the

(23:39):
services and products that arebeing created.
And what happened is I startedevolving into a real change
agent at the level of workingwith leaders.
And that's the stretch betweenwhere I came from, where I am,
and where I'm going at just theidentity level.
I haven't talked about any ofthe other levels yet.

Jorge (24:00):
The way that you've been talking about it seems to imply
that these are in a hierarchy...

Harry (24:05):
Yes.

Jorge (24:06):
...from broadest or most universal to very specific.
And the way that we talked aboutit and the way that you laid it
out, you had identity at one endof that spectrum.
And I'm thinking like that mightbe like a base thing.
But then you mentioned this,sixth facet or category of

(24:27):
spirit and connection.
And that would strike me asbeing perhaps even lower level.
Am I getting it wrong?

Harry (24:33):
Maybe backwards, according to the way I think
about it, anyway.
As a hierarchy, that spirit orhigher level is the highest.
You change things there, it'sgonna change things at the
identity level.
You change things at theidentity level, it's gonna
change things at the values andbeliefs level.
You change things at the valuesand beliefs level, it's gonna
change things at the skills andcapabilities level.

(24:53):
You change things at the skillsand capabilities level, you're
gonna necessarily change thingsat the behavior level and the
environmental level and so onand so forth.
Now you could say that changingof your capabilities.
Your skills is gonna have anupward effect.
And yes, it might, and the bookspeaks to that, but really there
is a fairly strong hierarchicalorientation to the model.

Jorge (25:18):
That makes a lot of sense.
And, I think I have homework.
This is a useful framework forthinking about this change that
I'm going through.
So, thank you for sharing that,Harry.

Harry (25:30):
Absolutely.
I really appreciate it.
It's a great conversation.

Narrator (25:40):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com and if you
enjoyed the show, please leaveus a rating in Apple's podcasts
app.
Thanks.