The Fundamental Strategy ↑

Frank and I have considered how to manage these issues. We have set-

tled on a specifc strategy. We have determined to pursue the mini-

mization of these particular classes of distortion by calling upon a

large number of people who were physically present and participated

in or observed some of the events that are herein described. A few are

names that are widely recognized in the present day feld of NLP; most

are people who are unknown and largely inactive with respect to the

patterning of the NLP of today – people who have no particular clear

known agenda. Mark carefully what they report.

You will fnd in this book the voices of people who moved resolutely,

wandered, and/or often stumbled (most of all the co-authors of this

book) through these events, each of whom carried with them specifc

personal agendas and perceptual flters which ensured that their per-

ceptions and thus subsequently their reconstructed memories of these

events would be quite distinct, especially with the passage of time (now

some 40 years). Many of these diferences arise through the ubiqui-

tous and selective perceptual fltering that necessarily results from the

strong limitations of the bandwidth of consciousness (7 + or – chunks

of information).

I would venture that few of the distortions that occur in such recon-

structions are deliberate. Tis lack of explicit awareness of the fltering

and its consequences, and the unconsciously motivated personal agen-

das of the people responsible for these deviations from what actually

happened (now largely unknowable), makes such distortions all the

more problematic, both with respect to the task of discovering what

the distortion is/was and what it is/was a distortion of – that is, devia-

tions from what actually happened.

But surely one of the most obvious and powerful conclusions from the

development and deployment of patterning over the last four decades

in NLP, and easily verifed in the reader’s own experience, is the aston-

ishing diversity in the descriptions that emerge from any single event

when described from the distinct perceptual positions of the people

who directly participated in or witnessed the event in question.