Harry 0:00

I use these all the time in all sorts of different areas, and I realize they've completely changed the way that I approach all sorts of problem solving, from telling personal stories to design work. And I think the sky's the limit in terms of how they can be applied.

Narrator 0:21

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:32

Jorge, it's so excellent to see you today. I wanted to congratulate you. I was super excited to see the announcement with you getting involved with Greg Petroff and working in the AI space. Can you gimme just a thumbnail of what that's about?

Jorge 0:44

Thank you, Harry. Yeah, I'm happy to. So, my friend Greg Petroff and I announced a new strategic consultancy that we're doing. We have been talking with folks about their business and particularly the impact of artificial intelligence on their business. Everyone is talking about AI, right?

Harry 1:10

Sure.

Jorge 1:11

And we started hearing a common refrain, particularly among the people who are leading small and medium sized businesses, which is that a lot of people recognize that artificial intelligence is a big deal. This is a big change, right? But this is also an emergent technology and people aren't quite sure what to do with it yet. So there's a bunch of experimentation. I think a lot of businesses are dabbling with it. And both Greg and I have been working in this space for a long time, and we can help those organizations get a sense of direction, basically figure out how to use AI more strategically so that they can actually create value with it.

Harry 2:07

It's super exciting and it makes a lot of sense, especially on the heels of the Jony Ive announcement, because I think a lot of the real value from AI is gonna come from people with design and information architecture backgrounds, right? They're gonna see where to do this work. And I'm just excited for you and for Greg and where this goes, and I'd love for you to keep us posted.

Jorge 2:28

I'm happy to do that, but I don't want to take time from what we're here to do, which is to help folks figure out how to gain more traction, right?

Harry 2:36

Yeah. It's funny, after each recording, I'm like, "Oh my God, what am I gonna bring next? How am I gonna up my game?" And I figured something out last time and I thought, "Oh, that's so exciting!" And I went digging through all my books and I found it and I was like, "Oh man, it's really boring in writing." But I turned a couple of pages and found something really good. So, I'm super excited to share with you a model that I have been using extensively for many years. And I completely forgot that it was in the same book as the thing that I wanted to tell you about. And so if I may, lemme just read this. It's just a couple of long paragraphs, and then I'll tell you what the book is, if that's cool.

Jorge 3:20

Yeah, please.

Harry 3:22

All right. "Logical levels. "People often talk about responding to things on 'different levels.' For instance, someone might say that some experience was negative on one level, but positive on another level. In our brain structure, language and perceptual systems, there are natural hierarchies or levels of experience. The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level below it. Changing something on an upper level would necessarily change things on the lower levels. Changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper levels. "Anthropologist Gregory Bateson identified four basic levels of learning and change, each level more abstract than the level below it, but each having a greater degree of impact on the individual. And these levels roughly correspond to who am I, the identity level, my belief system, that is, values and meanings, my capabilities, that is to say, my strategies and states, how I go about something, what I do or have done, you could think of that as specific behaviors or the what, and then, my environment, or external constraints, when and where. "The environment level involves the specific external conditions in which our behavior takes place. Behaviors without any inner map, plan, or strategy to guide them, however, are like knee jerk reactions, habits, or rituals. At the level of capability, we're able to select, alter, and adapt a class of behaviors to a wider set of external situations. At the level of beliefs and values, we may encourage, inhibit, or generalize a particular strategy, plan or way of thinking. Identity, of course, consolidates whole systems of belief and values into a sense of self. "While each level becomes more abstracted from the specifics of behavior and sensory experience, it actually has more and more widespread effect on our behavior and experience. Environmental factors determine the external opportunities and constraints a person has to react to. Behavior is made up of the specific actions or reactions taken within the environment. Capabilities guide and give direction to behavioral actions through a mental map, plan, or strategy. Beliefs and values provide the reinforcement, that is the motivations and permissions that support or deny these capabilities. And identity factors determine overall purpose or mission and shape beliefs and values through our sense of self. "Each of these processes involves a different level of organization and evaluation that will select, access, and utilize the information on the level below it. In this way, they form a hierarchy."

Jorge 7:02

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 from any of those two books, but, the one that most pressingly came to mind is our friend Dave Gray's, Liminal Thinking, which also deals with a similar hierarchy. And I would love to unpack this, what book is this and who is it from?

Harry 7:24

it's super interesting that you would mention Dave's book because Dave drew on this work. So, this is actually a book by Robert Dilts, Todd Epstein, and Robert's father, Robert Dilts. So it's Robert and Robert. The book's title is called Tools for Dreamers: Strategies for Creativity, and the Structure of Innovation. And Robert Dilts Jr. is one of the significant contributors in the field of neurolinguistic programming, from which Dave Gray drew a lot of his work. And the Dilts logical levels is the description of the material that I just went through. And I had forgotten that Dave, I believe, may have painted that picture in his book.

Jorge 8:19

Yeah, he has a classically beautiful Dave Gray drawing that makes, it I don't know if it's this exact model, but it makes similar ideas more visible. You wanna say a little bit more about neurolinguistic programming? I remember coming across that field, I think reading one of Anthony Robbins's 1980s books. I think it was Awakening the Giant Within or one of those.

Harry 8:48

Yeah.

Jorge 8:49

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 8:56

Yeah. Just as a quick aside, Anthony Robbins probably more than anybody else, popularized the field of NLP, neurolinguistic programming. So NLP was developed in the 1980s by Richard Bandler, who was a grad student, and John Grinder. And it was in effect the study of the structure of subjective experience. Bandler and Grinder interviewed and studied a whole number of super interesting people like the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir, a number of psychologists, the father of hypnosis, Erickson, and a bunch of others to try to decode how language generated change in people. And it was formalized in a set of presuppositions. And from those presuppositions emerged a set of linguistic patterns. And those presuppositions and those patterns can be used or applied in almost any field. But they are most powerfully tools for change at the personal level. And Anthony Robbins picked up on this and really removing most of the baggage that came along with NLP and most of the jargon that came along with it. He popularized it in a way that I really personally didn't care for and a lot of other people didn't care for either. But it's hard to argue with the world that he's built around him today. But NLP has become a tool set and a thinking model for generating change in sales in business. I applied it in design; that's where the design for the first online secure shopping cart came from. It was an application of NLP, and I was interviewed for that many years ago. We can probably find the link somewhere about how I went about doing that.

Jorge 11:18

To clarify what you're talking about and just to relieve my own ignorance, what came to mind when I was hearing you talk about it is a running gag that my son and I have where I keep quoting back to him that story about the little engine that could. And it's climbing the hill and it goes, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. It's that kind of thing, right? Like you're priming yourself with a language of your self-talk, is that right?

Harry 11:43

That's just an application of it. It's actually significantly more sophisticated than that. The idea, for example, something you've heard of for a long time, that the map is not the territory is actually an NLP presupposition. And that was something that was codified by Bandler and Grinder as part of NLP and picked up in the popular world post NLP and really driven into everyday usage. But there are, I think, about thirty different presuppositions that are quite powerful. For example, the most flexible element of a system controls the system. That's an NLP presupposition. And you can apply that, right? You can actually show up in a situation and be the most flexible person in a given situation, and you can influence heavily, if not control the situation through that level of flexibility. But NLP is a very interesting field because it is semi-formal, it has been studied a lot, it has many different applications, and many of them have been documented by Robert Dilts.

Jorge 12:59

it's interesting that you bring up the map not being the territory thing, because I was thinking as you were describing it that this has echoes of General Semantics, right? I think that Korzybski is the one who said the original "map is not the territory" thing. And he had this notion of the structural differential, which is... S.I. Hayakawa later popularized it as the ladder of abstraction, where you have terms at different levels of abstraction, and when you're communicating, you need to be clear at what level you're working at because other people might be misinterpreting the level that you're operating at.

Harry 13:35

Yeah. And Korzybski's work was largely included in the body of NLP corpus, and so that's part of how these things came together. But I am not the best person to talk to about the history of NLP. What I can tell you is how it's been applied in my work in design and software development. And interestingly, NLP and I came together mostly in the context of a consulting group at Hewlett Packard. So I was learning, I was in workshops learning NLP, and I bumped into a number of leaders who worked in an internal strategy consulting group inside of corporate Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto. And because of my background, this was after Virtual Vineyards, where I designed and deployed the first online secure shopping cart and had all this experience in SGML and HTML and coding and Unix systems. I stood out brightly to them as somebody who had a set of capabilities that they wanted to incorporate into HP, so they recruited me because their whole group was NLP trained. It was NLP for business. They used all this soft technology to generate change inside the Hewlett Packard system. Candidly, I met some of my closest friends even today, came outta that group. Here we are, thirty years later or whatever, and some of my best friends, I met in that group. It was phenomenal. But I wanted to share that model, because I use it so often. I use it when I'm helping people figure out how to tell their story for getting promoted or a job search, right? Because you can actually use the logical levels to answer questions that people have about you. For example, environment. Where do you live, right? Skills and capabilities. How do you do what you do? Behavior level, what are your behavioral tendencies or biases, right? Your identity level, how do you think of yourself professionally and so on and so forth. So I use these all the time in all sorts of different areas, and I realize they've completely changed the way that I approach all sorts of problem solving from telling personal stories to design work and I think the sky'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 like this is yet another instance of that, right? Where one of the themes seems to be about self-awareness, and that includes awareness of the language you're using to both describe your context and also your scope of action within that context, right? Which I think this touches on. I wanna read back to you what I understood the model to be, and also it might serve as a refresher for folks listening in. Now I was curious because the reading said that there were four levels, but I actually wrote down five and I wanna make sure that I got it right. So they are identity, belief systems, capabilities, behaviors, and environment. Is that right?

Harry 17:01

That's what's in the book. And there's actually another one. The book is old, right? And I think it's evolved since then. So we'll leave with the ones that are in the book, right? There's the identity level. There's values and beliefs. There's skills and capabilities. There's behaviors and actions and then there's environment. And one has emerged since this book, I believe, and that's on the very top of the list, and that is, for lack of a better term, connection to living things or spirit. So if you were to go down this list from the top, you would think, "Okay, what is my purpose? How do I represent myself or how do 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 of people in this model simply from the point of view of being able to tell their story in a business context. Because a lot of people really struggle to tell their story, right? Some people tell it chronologically. "Well, I was born here and then I went to school there and then I graduated from here, and then I got my first job there." And they do this chronological storytelling. It's a yawner. And then other people, they're a little bit more advanced: they do a reverse chronological story, right? They go, "Currently I'm doing X. Prior to that, I was doing Y. Before that, I was doing Z." And if they're strong, they would say, "And this is what I contributed in each of those," or "Here were the challenges in each of those." And if they're really advanced, maybe they use a hero's journey structure, right? And they walk you through some kind of better, well-crafted story about how they've ended up where they are today and you know what they do and why they do it. The Dilts model. Is particularly powerful because it allows you to answer the question that you're asked. So for example, what do you want to do? Or where do you live? You can start at either place or what's most important to you? So if somebody says, "What do you want to do?" You can actually start at the behavior level, because "do" is a behavioral orientation. And so you can say, "I really want to utilize my precision questioning and answering skills. I really want to utilize my bias for action, my sense of proactivity. I like listening to people very carefully to see who they are under the surface. But let me tell you why that's so important." So I'm gonna jump up all the way to identity level. "Currently I think of myself as largely an executive coach and a consultant." And now I'm going to drop to the next level down; i'm gonna go to, values and beliefs. "What's most important to me is that people have a real opportunity to grow and evolve and create the kind of world that they want to live in." And then, I'm gonna jump the next level down. "I've developed a set of diagnostic skills, I've developed a set of coaching skills. I've learned the practice of being a consultant, and I, want to fuse all of these in the context of working in business." And now I'm gonna jump down to environment. "I live north of Santa Cruz. It's close to Silicon Valley. I really enjoy working from home to a large extent. I'm not at adverse to traveling." And, so I've just covered a bunch of what was in Dilts without saying anything about where I was born and walking you through a chronological story of my life, which is often boring and I haven't done a classical reverse chronological sort, which everybody expects. And I was able to start by answering the question that was asked and then move around that structure based on what story I want to tell. It's super powerful. If nothing more, just as this personal, storytelling technique.

Jorge 21:39

I was gonna say, it sounds like, one use for the framework is how you tell your own story. And the example you've been using 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 told you what I'm doing there and I'm thinking now that I'm hearing this framework, that I could tell that story much more effectively if I know at what level within this model I could focus on.

Harry 22:12

Yeah, exactly.

Jorge 22:13

So that's one use for it. Another use for it and this is the second thing I'm hearing from what you're saying there might 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 the identity change that comes from a career where I've mostly been perceived as a user experience designer to one where I'm moving more towards kind of strategic consulting, right? So those are different identities, and I have a persona that I put out in the world that is going to be shifting as a result of this. And this model would help me approach 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 the identity level that you've just talked about and you can then stretch 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 was primarily just a hardcore information architect. You could have called me a high utility designer because I'm not a visual designer. But what happened is, I evolved into a situation where I realized the design work, the technical documentation work, the curriculum development work, all the stuff I was doing, put me in a stronger position to really be leading product organizations and really driving the change at the level of the services and products that are being created. And what happened is I started evolving into a real change agent at the level of working with leaders. And that's the stretch between where I came from, where I am, and where I'm going at just the identity level. I haven't talked about any of the 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 about it and the way that you laid it out, you had identity at one end of that spectrum. And I'm thinking like that might be like a base thing. But then you mentioned this, sixth facet or category of spirit and connection. And that would strike me as being 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 or higher level is the highest. You change things there, it's gonna change things at the identity level. You change things at the identity level, it's gonna change things at the values and beliefs level. You change things at the values and beliefs level, it's gonna change things at the skills and capabilities level. You change things at the skills and capabilities level, you're gonna necessarily change things at the behavior level and the environmental level and so on and so forth. Now you could say that changing of your capabilities. Your skills is gonna have an upward effect. And yes, it might, and the book speaks to that, but really there is a fairly strong hierarchical orientation to the model.

Jorge 25:18

That makes a lot of sense. And, I think I have homework. This is a useful framework for thinking 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 at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.