Andy included The Structure of Magic on his list of books for us to read and review because he understood it to be about neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a near-fabled communication technique apparently used by everyone from Agatha Christie to high-flying salesmen that supposedly helps one compel an audience’s attention and ordain the focus of their thoughts — sounds handy, hey?
Unfortunately, The Structure of Magic is specifically about NLP in the context of the work of a psychotherapist and, whilst it’s interesting, it is pretty fixedly a book about psychotherapy. Now, I’m not claiming that Team Rubber’s a place entirely free from emotional and metaphysical issues or that we aren’t concerned with making people’s lives happy, rich and fulfilled but I think it’s fair to say that therapy is quite a long way from our stock in trade.
The not-especially-transferrable lessons in The Structure of Magic are all about carefully listening to a client’s answers in a therapy session and using equally carefully chosen prompt questions in response to get them to express (and I’m putting this very simply) what they really mean.
The technique is based on the theory of transformational grammar which, very basically, goes something like this:
- we each have a tangible experience of the world. This is unique to all of us and cannot be directly shared with anybody else.
- We translate this experience into a logical, storable *something* in our minds. This translation is subject to our interpretive model of the world (so two people might understand the exact same experience in very different ways — I guess it’s similar to the ‘glass half full’ idea). This results in a logical understanding that is your best rendition of the tangible experience — this is referred to as the ‘Deep Structure’.
- We translate this well-formed Deep Structure into an actual sentence that we express to try and communicate the experience to another person. This is called the ‘Surface Structure’. The thing is, just as something gets lost in translation from the actual experience to our understanding of it, so something gets lost in translation from that understanding of an experience to our communication of it (a phenomenon of which I’m keenly aware as I type this).
The thinking goes that the flaws in these expressed sentences mirror flaws in clients’ models — classed as generalisations, deletions and distortions, if you must know — and so by helping the client to ‘repair’ these sentences, to make them ‘well-formed in therapy’, they can also start repairing (‘enriching’) their model of the world.
The thing is, I found the book’s premise and therapeutic applications convincing enough and it was obviously put together by people who had theorised, researched, tested and refined the idea (which makes it hard to argue with) but I found the style and language rather hamfisted, inelegant, confusing even. The book seems unsure as to whether it’s a description of a philosophical theory, a sort of textbook overview of/introduction to a psychotherapeutic concept or a practical handbook of applied technique. It felt to me almost like it had been written in a hurry, as if the authors (sincere apologies to all my English tutors for bringing the dreaded authorial intention into this) knew they were on to something and knew all the answers in their own minds but had to get it all down on paper before someone else beat them to it. I guess I mean there’s an emphasis on content and progression over precision, continuity and completeness.
Anyway, I don’t think the point of having us review business books was to critique their literary merit and Andy’s question for me/this book was ‘is NLP rubbish?’.
My answer is that it’s not rubbish in the sense of hokum or myth: it’s a cogent argument backed up by research and applied experience (although the ‘sales’ version might be snake oil as I’m not quite sure how the aforementioned salesmen turn this into a proactive rather than reactive technique, or whether doing so involves a massive compromise of the idea’s essential integrity). Nor is it rubbish in the sense of being poor or low-grade; I don’t think it’s Einsteinian-level breakthrough thinking but it is tested and true and by all accounts adds value to the world of therapy. It might, however, be rubbish in the sense of being waste — it’s far from useless to everybody but I’d suggest that it is a very long way down the list of ‘things useful to Team Rubber in the here and now’ and probably there are better things that could be done with our time.
In conclusion and in short, ‘get back to work!’.
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