A list of research papers, books and thesis that make use of the ideas of David Grove.

A 10 minute video clip of a Symbolic Modelling session is used to illustrate: the use of the Clean Language of David Grove; working with client-generated metaphor; and facilitating the client to self-model.

In the beginning was an ethos, a characteristic spirit of a community. Judith DeLozier says: "The discipline known as NLP began before it had a name with an interdisciplinary community of people. We were motivated by a shared curiosity about how we know, about how we learn, how we communicate, and how we change."

A review of the ideas from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb who asserts that "our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable — and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. In spite of our progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable, while both human nature and social 'science' seem to conspire to hide this idea from us."

"In all living creatures, from snails to people, knowledge of space is central to behavior. We live in it, move through it, explore it, defend it.  Space is unlike other senses [because it] is not analyzed by a specialized sensory organ. The brain must combine inputs from several different sensory modalities and then generate a complete internal representation that does not depend exclusively on any one input. How, then, is space represented?" In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, Eric R. Kandel, Norton, 2007

A joined-up model of how methodologies derived from the work of David Grove invoke the psychoactivity of spatial relations in therapeutic, as well as in other settings. Once a space becomes psychoactive a person is effectively 'living in their metaphor'. Then, when something changes in that perceptual space (often spontaneously), more of their mind-body is involved. This usually produces a more embodied and systemic change.

Steve Andreas has generously allowed us to reproduce the pages of his new book, Six Blind Elephants, where he analyses Clean Language and Symbolic Modelling. Following the extract we have copied our response to Steve's original manuscript as it contains some valuable distinctions about clean questions and a clean methodology.

Our aim is "To get you to think networks. It is about how networks emerge, what they look like, and how they evolve. ... Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them."

Extended quotations about Experiential Constructivism from Fritjof Capra, John Grinder & Richard Bandler, and George Lakoff & Mark Johnson. Plus recommended reading.