AikiCom
What a martial art teaches the body about facing conflict, made usable in an ordinary conversation.
Worked exampleConflict & communication
What it makes analysable
Someone raises their voice. Someone says the thing that was not supposed to be said. A meeting turns. In the two or three seconds that follow, something is decided, and it is rarely decided by reasoning.
AikiCom gives that moment a structure. Not a set of phrases to deploy, but a sequence: where you are standing before it starts, what you take in, whether you connect, what you do, and what you release. It applies to a negotiation, a difficult conversation with a colleague, a family argument, or a public exchange that has begun to slide.
It answers questions of the kind: why do I freeze with this person and not that one? Why did the same sentence work last week and not today? What am I doing, exactly, when a conversation goes well and I could not say why?
The model: VOCAL
Five stages, in order. Each depends on the one before it, and skipping one is usually where things go wrong.
- Verticality — the posture you hold before anything happens. Physical first, and not only physical: it is what keeps you present rather than braced.
- Observation and Orientation — two movements, not one. First taking in what is actually there, then finding which way you are facing in relation to it.
- Connection — establishing contact with the other person before doing anything with them. Nothing useful happens across a gap.
- Action — the move itself, chosen rather than triggered.
- Letting go — releasing, so that the other person recovers their freedom of movement. Without it the exchange stays a contest.
The last one arrived late. Four letters came quickly, and the model sat as “VOCA” for two months before the fifth imposed itself, by way ofukemi: in aikido, the fall that gives the attacker their freedom back. A model is not designed. It is found, and sometimes it makes you wait.
How it was modeled
The starting observation took about thirty years to accumulate, and it was not flattering to the art. Among people practising aikido, some saw their daily lives change — how they handled a boss, an argument, a provocation. Others, equally diligent, equally skilled on the mat, saw nothing change at all.
That gap is the whole question. Not “what does aikido teach?” butwhat do the first group do that the second group does not?Modeling by difference: two populations, the same training, divergent results. Whatever explains the divergence is the thing worth extracting.
The answer was not in the techniques. Techniques are codified, published, taught identically to everyone — they cannot explain a difference. It was in the attitude underneath them, which nobody teaches because nobody had needed to name it. Extracting it took years; naming it produced VOCAL, in 2016.
The transfer test came before the name did. If the structure was real, someone who had never set foot in a dojo should be able to use it. They could. That is what turned an intuition into a model, and it is the reason AikiCom appears on this site: not as a method to sell, but as the case where the method of modeling can be watched from beginning to end.
Going further
AikiCom has its own site, its own training, and its own history:aikicom.eu.
Origins
September 2008, a martial arts fair. A journalist declined the interview: aikido, he said, was not obscure enough to be interesting. On the spot, without having planned it, the answer came out as “I have an application of aikido to communication.” He came back. He asked whether there were courses. The answer was yes, starting in January, which was not true of anything that existed at that moment. The first AikiCom training ran in January 2009.
The interest in modeling came first, and the practice of it was learned in a field that had made it its founding method before turning towards its tools. AikiCom is what happens when that method is pointed at something else.
Related models
The Experience Matrix maps what a person is made of at a given moment; VOCAL describes a sequence unfolding in time. They answer different questions and should not be collapsed into one another.