Identity & experienceTool
The Experience Matrix
A map of what a person is made of at a given moment, and of where a difficulty actually sits.
What the best do, and why it can be taught
Skill Modeling is the study of how a human competence is actually built, and of how it can be handed on to someone else.
Models
All modelsConflict & communicationWorked example
AikiCom
What a martial art teaches the body about facing conflict, made usable in an ordinary conversation.
Cognition & knowledgeExploration
PKMind
What happens inside someone who manages what they know, and why the tool is almost never the problem.
Development & worldviewsExploration
Spiral Dynamics Atlas
What happens inside a person at each stage of development, and what makes the move to the next one possible.
Direction & meaningExploration
Orientation Without a Destination
How to steer through a life whose destination you cannot know.
From the articles
Drag to browse
A model that cannot be handed to another person is not a model. It is a portrait.
Ask someone who is genuinely good at something how they do it, and you will get an answer. It will be fluent, confident, and largely wrong.
Pure knowledge is becoming an abundant resource. And what is abundant loses its value.
Ask someone who they are and they answer with a list. Every item is true, none of them is the answer.
The logical levels are the Newtonian physics of coaching: reliable under ordinary conditions, strained by real human complexity.
NLP doesn’t work. You work. NLP just explains perfectly how you work.
You know an actor a little better at the hundredth character he has played.
Latest articles
All articlesAn Identity We Never Owned
Alexander Douglas, a philosopher at St Andrews, reaches through Spinoza, Zhuangzi and Girard the observation the Experience Matrix is built on: we do not find our identity within ourselves, we borrow it. Then he stops where the work of coaching begins.
What Will Make the Difference in the Age of AI
Pure knowledge is becoming an abundant resource. And what is abundant loses its value. There is, however, a gap that AI does not close: the gap between knowing and doing.
The Experience Matrix: A New Cartography of Human Experience
Ask someone who they are and they answer with a list. Every item is true, none of them is the answer. That small vertigo is not a flaw in the question. It is the territory the Experience Matrix sets out to map.
The Inverted World: What If the Matrix Had Come First?
A trainer from a parallel world where the Experience Matrix has been NLP's canonical model for forty years writes to say why the newly proposed logical levels won't do. The objections usually aimed at the Matrix, turned around and sent the other way.
Context Does More Than We Think
In 2020, two researchers, Roope Kaaronen and Nikita Strelkovskii, published a study in the scientific journal One Earth. They wanted to understand one specific thing: how a behaviour spreads through a group of…
What experts cannot tell you
Ask a skilled person how they do it, and the answer is usually wrong. Not because they hide it, but because competence disappears from view as it matures.
Stay in touch
New models, articles and work in progress, a few times a year. No more than that.