Curiosity

What a journey it was for our March Café!

Authoring a chapter for the Association of Project Managers on Communication and using NLP to enhance project communication was the starting point…  Part of this discussion piece centred on the awareness that our NLP training gives us of the importance of our language and the NLP Communication Model.  How we filter, how we can, on average, process 7 ± 2 “bits” of information at any one time, how we Delete, Distort and Generalise (DDG) and then respond to that information…  It is relevant to communication in projects… and in most situations where we are aware of what is going on around us and we want/need to respond…  And we remembered that “The meaning of the communication is the response you get” as a presupposition.  It means we can change our language to suit the context we want to give and better understand the response we receive.   How lucky are we?!

We then talked about words that have been somewhat “hijacked” for meaning… “manipulation” which has sometimes been ascribed negatively to NLP when it can be argued that manipulation happens by many people… politicians and children were put forward as excellent manipulators!  The word “radical” has been somewhat subverted to describe people who have been “radicalised” to have extreme views.  Whereas radical thinking has been lauded as the reason so much progress has been made in the world and yet the word now has a negative undertone?  The same for “fanatic”.  Sports fans and music fans… and when the word is extended from “fan” to “fanatic”, it begins to have a different meaning for many… zealots, extremists, etc…  More food for thought…

Another AI, Social Media and Critical Thinking discussion ensued (we’ve had them in previous cafes).  The meeting participants believe that NLP encourages and increases curiosity and invites us to question what we see in front of us.  Social media gives bite-sized chunks of easily digested information… too easy to digest?  The resource factors of time, money and attention span suggests that information given in the media (social or otherwise) is taken at face-value… curiosity is stifled (consciously or unconsciously?) and beliefs are moulded by the information sources we are accessing, be they social media or AI answers to our internet searches.

Do we question these references?  AI has given us several references (in recent research prompts we have given it) that have been either completely fabricated, when the “links” have been followed, or the link is unrelated to the information required.  We’re not yet at the point when AI answers can be fully trusted…

We went on to discuss science fiction novels that are (or have already!) becoming reality such as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Phillip K Dick) and “Brave New World” (Aldous Huxley) where the concept of autonomous, learning machines (robots) and controlled human intelligence are the “norm” and the wild thinkers are free to think for themselves…  “The Matrix” was another example where it was posited that the basis for the film may have been “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge" (George Berkeley) a philosophical work published in 1710 (if not known by the film-makers, it certainly has themes that are consistent with the story). So, yes, we’re all curious!

Though-inspiring discussions… again… and you can be part of it in the next ANLP Community Café, exclusively for ANLP Members with the details available on your Members dashboard when you log into the ANLP website.