Jonathan Altfeld – Knowledge Engineering
Salepage : Jonathan Altfeld – Knowledge Engineering
Modeling other people’s belief and decision systems with greater depth, breadth, and accuracy than you would think possible today, and assisting you in intuitively identifying methods to optimize those systems. Dear Advanced NLP Student and Modeling Fanatic, This is Jonathan Altfeld. I was a professional in the field of Artificial Intelligence before founding the Mastery InSight Institute and immersing myself in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Professionally, I conducted expertise modeling nearly entirely for Fortune 500 organizations. I was hired to interview business experts, learn what they knew, how they knew it, and how they made the judgments they did, and then create software tools to replicate those experts’ decision-making processes. Some of you are probably thinking… “What? You mean the discipline of NLP isn’t the exclusive source of modeling expertise? Blasphemy!” Some of the abilities taught by NLP are closely paralleled in the discipline of Knowledge Engineering. There are clear variations, but at the heart of NLP technology and expertise is a collection of tools for modeling human knowledge and subjectivity. Those who work in professional Knowledge Engineering will recognize that description. They are, in many respects, parallel fields. Knowledge Engineering is the process of developing software systems that act and ‘think’ like human experts. In such a project, key software development team members would be responsible with obtaining information from experts and then encoding that knowledge in a way that allows computers to consistently and quickly duplicate the expert’s actions! There are more “similarities” than “differences” between these two modeling methodologies. But don’t worry, both exist. The Knowledge Engineer (KE) interviews and studies experts in order to learn directly from them. There are several strategies that may be utilized to do this, all of which are loosely categorized under the umbrella term “Knowledge Acquisition.” Once a significant initial knowledge-base of modeled information has been accumulated, the KE identifies methods of storing/structuring/representing the expert’s knowledge and then begins to construct an expert system software application. NLP practitioners and master practitioners may identify the preceding technique as being related to what is known as Modeling in NLP. This is used to conceptually duplicate behavior in a specific subject of knowledge and goes beyond strategy elicitation. We occasionally hear individuals refer to’modeling’ as’reproducing a tennis swing’ or’matching/mirroring’ someone else’s actions. Don’t let them oversimplify things because it isn’t. If they’re recommending such things, they clearly don’t understand what modeling is. Allow people to claim that if you (for example) learn to detect when someone is in a specific Sensory Mode (such as “Visual”), you’re modeling. That would be a disservice to both you and the modeling process; that example is simply “strategy elicitation” on a very tiny scale. One (flawed but useful) rule of thumb is that if you need at least several full-time AND efficient weeks or months to develop an area of competence, you could be modeling. If it takes you months to learn knowledge, integrate it into your unconscious mind, organize and improve it, and then use it to replicate expert behavior, you may be modeling. Think again if you thought learning how to develop rapport with “colored mental bubbles” was modeling. It isn’t. That is, at best, strategy elicitation. I once saw a trainer enter a “expert circle,” saying that he envisioned all the talents he desired (but hadn’t yet elicited) into that circle, and he could experience what it was like to be the expert. As if he claimed he was modeling for a surgeon and I would let him within 3 miles of my friends or family who needed medical attention.
Please give me a break!!! Modeling has a “poor rap” as a result of distortions and examples like these. The issue then becomes, would REAL modeling abilities be beneficial to you? So, let’s take a look at some real-world instances of models at action.
Have you heard of the “Mega-Math” or “Mega-Memory” courses that are frequently marketed on television as collections of genius tactics in specific skill areas (math and memory skills)? Kevin Trudeau made a fortune from the selling of these (and other similar) courses.
The majority of “Real Estate” home-study courses featured on infomercials are examples of persons who imitated their own (or someone else’s) ability to acquire real estate with no money down. Someone assisted them in packaging that model in a way that makes it simple to understand.
The website http://www.sportsmind.com.au is an example of an NLP-trained individual who modeled sports performance enhancement and now teaches facilitators of his system in those skills.
The “Persuasion Tactics Power Summit” course (and home-study package) was based on a Persuasion Tactics “model” I learned from Chris Tomasulo, a naturally persuasive man.
Discover for yourself how the CDs in the course sound.