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The field of NLP is not really a “field” at all, but much more like a jungle, with here and there a little clearing where someone is tilling and defending a small plot and raising a crop. It is now a bit over 25 years since the beginnings of NLP, and that is about where physics was in the early 1800's, with a few investigators scattered here and there, occasionally communicating with each other and sharing ideas and the results of experiments. It took roughly another 100 years for physics to reach some kind of maturity, in which there was sufficient agreement among those working in the field on what constitutes appropriate methodology for testing and validating ideas. That agreement on assumptions and criteria for testing observations allowed it to become a cooperative effort, independent of any particular authority or personality. The Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman describes physics (in the early 1960s) as follows:
“We have a way of checking whether an idea is correct or not that has nothing to do with where it came from. We simply test it against observation. So in science we are not interested in where an idea comes from.”
“There is no authority who decides what is a good idea. We have lost the need to go to an authority to find out whether an idea is true or not. We can read an authority and let him suggest something; we can try it out and find out if is true or not. If it is not true, so much the worse—so the 'authorities' lose some their 'authority.'”
“The relations among scientists were at first very argumentative, as they are among most people. This was true in the early days of physics, for example. But in physics today, the relations are extremely good. A scientific argument is likely to involve a great deal of laughter and uncertainty on both sides, with both sides thinking up experiments and offering to bet on the outcome. In physics there are so many accumulated observations that it is almost impossible to think of a new idea which is different from all the ideas that have been thought of before, and yet that agrees with all the observations that have already been made. And so if you get anything new from anyone, anywhere, you welcome it, and you do not argue about why the other person says it is so.”
“Most people find it surprising that in science there is no interest in the background of the author of an idea, or in his motive in expounding it. You listen, and if it sounds like a thing worth trying, a thing that could be tried, is different, and is not obviously contrary to something observed before, it gets exciting and worthwhile. You do not have to worry about how long he has studied, or why he wants you to listen to him. In that sense it makes no difference where the ideas come from. Their real origin is unknown; we call it the imagination of the human brain, the creative imagination.”
“Many sciences have not developed this far, and the situation is the way it was in the early days of physics, when there was a lot of arguing because there were not so many observations. I bring this up because it is interesting that human relationships, if there is an independent way of judging truth, can become unargumentative.” (6, pp. 21-22)
If NLP is to mature into a field, we need to communicate more between those isolated little plots in the jungle, and take a closer look at what is being raised in each of them. Not to search for truth with a capital T—physicists gave that up long ago—but to find out what works dependably, and think about how it works, so that we can continually improve what we do. We also need to follow the lead of physics and separate this search from the personalities involved in the search—shifting our attention from “Who's right,” to “What's right.”
Grinder and Bostic's book, Whispering in the Wind, invited readers to engage in a “professional high quality public dialogue among the practitioners of NLP,” and it was in that spirit that I recently wrote an extensive review (3) commending and sometimes amplifying parts of the book, while questioning and criticizing other sections, and offering alternative understandings. Sadly, neither the authors nor anyone else has stepped forth to continue this kind of dialogue that is essential if our jungle is to become a cooperative effort to refine and develop a field out of what we do.
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