Please give me a referential index
Listening to friends, family and colleagues I am amazed at how, as people, we manage to communicate at times.
I am talking about statements, where certain information is missing; when someone says something, or asks a question and you end up have to clarify one or more points of what they’ve just said so you can understand what they are specifically talking about before you can respond.
Referring to my copy of The User’s Manual For The Brain (because it’s been bugging me for sometime now) I am reminded about Lack Of Referential Index or Unspecified Nouns and Verbs - the proper term for those of you who like to know these things.
It occurs (and I am assuming big-style here) when someone knows what they are talking about and what they want to say, but miss out a salient piece of information from a statement… EG.
- They are not here - who specifically isn’t where?
- I can’t find it - can’t find what?
I use the meta model of language in my work when I am writing content for websites. I take the viewpoint that a search engine (which I am trying to attract to my web page) has to question every potentially vague statement there is in my content. This approach leaves me with so much more specific content that is understandable as part of an entire piece of writing, or as a snippet in context.
It’s actually quite fun to question it. You will even sometimes get the classic response, “oh you know what I mean”.
Lack of referential index is also something I see quite a bit in our old friend - e-mail. The need for speed - the rush, rush, rush - allows for oversights and lack of questioning as we type and press “send“. How much time that must waste in a business environment!
Tags: Language, NLP at Work
Is the full Meta Model a bit OTT for business application? For some people it takes some time to get past the content and listen for linguistic structure.
Most missing content can be recovered by challenging unspecified verbs and nouns, and provoking clarification through paraphrase - or just repeating the last thing they said back with a question tonality.
This is the basis for the Verbal Package (a derivative of the Meta Model) coded by John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St.Clair as a result of needing an effective listening pattern that businesses can learn FAST.
It’s a bit less precise than the Meta Model so it takes a couple more questions to get to what’s really going on, but you arrive at the same place. When I teach it I add in challenging generalisations (especially modal operators).
Comment by Daryll — May 2, 2008 @ 9:36 am
“Most missing content can be recovered by challenging unspecified verbs and nouns, and provoking clarification through paraphrase - or just repeating the last thing they said back with a question tonality.”
This tends to be the case… I’ve never heard of the verbal package - may need to do some digging.
Comment by craigkillick — May 2, 2008 @ 9:38 am