(6.2.4.2) Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling

Clean language created by counseling psychologist David Grove, and its derivative Symbolic Modelling is a methodology aimed at drawing metaphor from opponent. Although this method is directly a method against other person, it is helpful to draw metaphor from yourself too. The three categories abstract concept, physical sensation and metaphor in this chapter inspired from those methodology.

They prepare questions without prejudice (a clean question) in order to extract the metaphor inside the opponent without distortion. The basic five questions are below.

❶ What kind of X is that X? §

❷ Is there anything else about that X? §

❸ Where is that X? §

❹ In which part is that X? §

❺ What is that X like? §

❶ and ❷ are especially important. For example, when the other person said ”voice of bird”, you can ask “what kind of bird is that bird?” (❶) If he/she answered “voice of duck”, the abstract concept “voice of bird” become more concrete.

As we just have to drill down, our vision will become narrower and narrower. So you can ask “Is there anything else about the duck?” to broaden our horizons. (❷) If he/she answered “I keep it at my parents house”, we got surrounding information about the duck. The clarity of metaphor is completely different in “voice of birds” and “voice of the duck which kept at my parents house”.

❸ and ❹ are asking almost the same thing. They focused on the position of the metaphor. It seems to me that those question include the prejudice that X is not an abstract existence but a specific existence occupying a certain place. This prejudice prompts a change from an abstract concept to a physical metaphor.

For example “creativity” is obviously an abstract concept. Let’s dare ask. Where is your creativity? Please think a little. Some people say they are heads, others will be fingertips. Because it is a personal metaphor, it is natural that it varies from person to person.

I showed some examples in (6.2.3.1) draw a picture. A designer think that the creativity is in the brain at first and then spread out of the brain. Another designer think that the creativity exists among the team members.

Suppose you are asked, “Where is the creativity?” If you think, “It’s in my head,” it suggests that the other team members can’t see the creativity directly. If you think, “It’s among team members,” it suggests that the creativity ​may not match the thoughts in each individual members.

❺ is a question to ask the metaphor directly.

In my case, creativity is like a processing device and it is in the back half of the head. Inhale information like water from the eyebrows, sift the garbage by the filter, then process it with the back half of the head and take it out of the mouth and hands. In that process, especially the good water of choice drops just like the top of the belly, and it gathers there and makes a beautiful lake. A beautiful flower of one circle grows and blooms over time in the lake. I think that it is very important to deliver this beautiful flower to many people.

That means there is a second creativity on the belly. It seems to me that there are two types of creativity. One is mechanical creativity to filter large amounts of information. And another is botanical creativity to grow slowly over time. By developing the metaphor, my feeling about ​​the creativity was translated into languages.

Metaphor is born and clarified with this basic 5 questions. This clarified metaphor was called “Symbol” in Symbolic Modeling. By clarifying the change of symbols on the time axis and the relationship between symbols, we can create a model using symbols.

The question to clarify the change of the symbol on the time axis is as follows.

- What will happen then?
- What will happen next?
- What happens just before that?
- Where does it come from?

For example, when you think “information is like water and it is inhaling from between the eyebrows,” you can ask yourself “what will happen then?” or “Where does the water come from?” Those questions help to evolve metaphors.

The question to clarify the relation of the symbol is as follows.

- What is the relationship between X and Y?
- Are X and Y the same? Is this wrong?
- What is between X and Y?
- (When X is an event) What happens to Y when X happens?

In (6.2.4.1) NM method and analogy, there were two symbols “kite” and “wind”. To develop the symbolic model, you can ask “What is the relation between the kite and the wind?” or “What is between you and the kite?”

I introduced some representative question sentences here, but the question is not limited to this. For example, if you said “X is moving”, the question “What direction are X moving?” is effective for concretization. If you say “X is far”, the question “How far is it?” is effective.

The answer to my creativity earlier was a considerably developed model with five symbols of processing equipment, water, filter, lake, flower. We can not have such a developed model from the beginning, but gradually develop by repeating the question and clarifying the position, features and relationship of the symbols.

Those symbols are personal metaphors, so it will not be transmitted to people as it is. If I explained suddenly at the beginning of this chapter, “The flower that blooms in your lake ~”, you do not understand it well.

At the beginning of this chapter I wrote as follows. “Ideas do not work effectively in their original form as they are born, just as newborn children can not work, so in order to adapt to various conditions to solve real problems, We need to repeat the fix. ”

Personal metaphor also does not work effectively as it was born. So it is necessary to repeat the revision to the form which is conveyed to others. The image of the growth of plant, the image that we do not know when it blooms and the image that it takes time to bloom; those images are converted to the explanation that three phases of ”Plowing, seedling, growing” and the seedling can not be controlled.

Footnotes

• *25: The overlapping l in Modelling has been adopted as in the original work.
• *26: James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, “Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling”. Crown House Pub Ltd, Reprint edition, 2000.
• *27 (For Japanese readers) In English, those questions are “And where is X?” and “And whereabouts is X?” In some cases, you can’t tell exactly where it is, but you can tell whereabouts it is. (For English readers) In Japanese, where = “DOKO” and whereabouts = “DONO-ATARI”. I observed many Japanese wonder why there are two similar questions.
• *28: In Japanese, there is an idiomatic expression “to fall into the belly” = “to be convinced”.
• *29 Other than questions of relationship, “What kind of the kite is that?” and “Where does the wind come from?” are also useful.
• *30 When people say “it’s moving,” they often use gestures such as hand movements to describe it. Since gestures are quite close to metaphors in transforming abstract concepts into concrete movements, we focus on these gestures in Symbolic Modelling training. I won’t go into in detail in this book. One important point is to maintain the first-person perspective. If the he/she points to a virtual object on his/her head, you should not point to the object on your own head, but to the object on his/her head.
• *31 At the time of writing in 2018, head-mounted displays for entering virtual reality (VR) spaces have become inexpensive, and it is now practical for multiple people to enter a virtual space to communicate. It may eventually become possible for multiple people to discuss the metaphorical space while sharing it, and create new symbols in the space on the spot to develop the model.