Pols Consulting

I am currently helping a client with developer recruitment and stumbled across Johanna Rothman’s superb Hiring Technical People blog. Now added into my blog reader!

I attended a fabulous session at XTC on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) given by Rixt Wiersma. Obviously we could only touch on a small area of NLP in the time available, but it inspired me to want to re-read my NLP books – and that’s always a good thing!

We discussed Robert Dilts’ model of thinking about personal change, learning and communication. Learning, change and communication can take place on different levels. Basically we do not change in bits and pieces, but organically, from one level to the next. To be effective you have to communicate on the same level as the other person. The levels are:

1. Environment: What we react to, our surroundings, and other people we meet. EG: This is a great desk for pairing.
2. Behaviour: The specific actions we carry out, regardless of our capability. EG: I started automating the GUI testing today.
3. Capability: The general skills and strategies that we use in our life. EG: We don’t have access to the real customer to answer our questions.
4. Beliefs and Values: The various ideas we think are true, and use as a basis of our daily action. EG: If we use Agile software development techniques we can deliver more business value and have lots of fun too!
5. Identity: The basic sense of self, your core values and mission in life. EG: I’m a great java developer.
6. Beyond (think text books call this Spiritual): This is the deepest level, where we consider and act out the great metaphysical questions. Why are we here? What is the purpose of XP? EG: We need to be more competitive as we are loosing market share to our competitors.

The take-home point for me is that in order to have effective communication with someone you need to form a rapport and respect his or her internal models (ie the best rapport comes when you communicate on the same level). Obvious really, but you have to be told these things sometimes!

One very scary quote (think it was Richard Bandler):

To find out the beliefs and values of a software developer look at their code