The Director's Cut: Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Although it has been around for many years, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), the so-called science of human excellence, is only now taking off in the business and IT worlds. But it is taking off big time.

One reason for the growth in interest is that having tried all of the process driven initiatives of the past, many IT leaders, their teams and companies are realising that future success all comes down to people – to awakening their true and total potential. Organisations that do this release a power that is quite awesome.

However, just as in IT many people hide behind confusing terminology and strange language, so do exponents of NLP. So what is it, once we strip away the hype and jargon, and how can it help us in our working and personal lives?

NLP is defined as the study of the structure of personal experience. According to one of its creators, Richard Bandler, it was specifically created in order to allow us to be our very best by creating new ways of understanding how verbal and non-verbal communication affect the human brain. Translated into English, it provides us with tools to be the very best that we can be.

To me, there are three areas of NLP that we can put into immediate effect in IT, and business:

1. Modelling

Modelling is quite simply this: Find a person, a team, a project or an organisation that has reached where you want to be, find out what they did to get there and do what they did. It’s a clever word for copying, and if you think that’s cheating, I agree – so cheat with pride!

By their very nature, 'benchmarking' and 'best practice' provide us with the best thinking of a number of people, used by many. In other words, we will be as good as everyone else doing the same thing, which these days is not good enough, and not good enough by far. Modelling opens us up to pioneers who have already achieved, and how they did it, and it enables us as people, teams and organisations to break away from the rest.

2. Beliefs

Our beliefs govern our lives - when we believe something to be true, we see and experience the world in that way. We must therefore choose our beliefs with care and be aware that no event, nothing that ever happens to us, has any meaning, other than the meaning we choose to give it. We can use this to alter our unhelpful beliefs, and give more empowering meanings, by simply asking better questions.

The strongest single question to do this, is “How does this event help me/us to achieve our aim?” This is especially helpful with projects. One ongoing theme of failed projects is how much time they spent focusing on problems, dangers and risks. I know some project teams who spend half a day every week focusing on what might go wrong and much of their project budget on contingencies in the event of failure. Unfortunately, our minds do not think in negatives (try this, right now - do not think of a green giraffe with Tony Blair sitting on top), and so, what we focus on, we naturally move towards.

It is therefore hugely powerful to ask ourselves a positive question – do this consistently, watch success become automatic, and see your world literally change around you.

3. As if

NLP, and many other leading approaches to human potential, have examined why people so often fail to achieve their goals. The main reason is because we have traditionally been taught to think about them in the future tense: “We will have totally trusting relationships in my team.”

The downfall of this is that it is always going to happen, rather than happening now. “As if” is very powerful, and it basically says that the quickest way to make something happen is to act as if it already has, and reality will automatically catch up. In this case: “We have totally trusting relationships in my team” will, if truly taken on board and believed in at a deep level, make it happen. Why? Because when we believe something to be true, we see the world in that way and it becomes our reality in all that we say and do.

David Taylor is the author of best-selling business book The Naked Leader (www.nakedleader.com), president of IT directors association Certus and a regular contributor to silicon.com.

Do you agree with his thinking? Email editorial@silicon.com to let us know.