From Pyramid to Matrix
Robert Dilts’s logical levels have long served as the Newtonian physics of coaching: a simple, hierarchical, effective frame for working on behaviors or beliefs under ordinary conditions. Set against the complexity of human identity, the model reaches its limits. The Experience Matrix proposes something closer to a general relativity of human experience, an extension that lets us take the person in their full depth, and one that sits comfortably alongside the thinking of Edgar Morin, the French sociologist and philosopher of complexity.
1. From passive backdrop to co-organizing context
In the Dilts model, environment sits at the bottom of the pyramid, treated as external scenery. The Matrix instead places Context as an encompassing, structuring frame that bears on every other space.
This meets Morin’s principle of self-eco-organization: a living being cannot be understood apart from its milieu (oikos), because the environment is “co-organizer and co-programmer” of the individual. Where Dilts sees influence descending the pyramid, the Matrix recognizes, as Morin does, that our singularity is inseparable from the mark left by external events.
2. From unified identity to multiple identifications (unitas multiplex)
One of the Matrix’s chief advantages is the move from a single, fixed “identity” at the top of a pyramid to multiple, fluid identifications. The Matrix distinguishes:
- the Singularity space: what makes the individual irreducible, their doing, their knowing, their know-how
- the space of Identifications: the many collective categories, parent, professional and the rest, the person attaches themselves to
That structure embodies Morin’s unitas multiplex: the human being is a “multiple unity” carrying the whole social fabric within while remaining singular. The subject is no longer a stable substance but a crossing point of processes in permanent interaction.
3. Bringing in the arrow of time and the narrative thread
The logical levels give a spatial, static, photographic picture of a person. The Matrix adds a perpendicular axis: the temporal dimension. Identity is no longer a “level” but an emergent, narrative property.
This echoes Morin’s notion of recursion. For him, past, present and future are not linear but circulate through one another. The Matrix therefore lets us work on the narrative thread linking past experiences to future aspirations, guided by an internal compass the Matrix calls the unconscious fundamental desire.
4. Systemic circularity rather than hierarchical cascade
The Dilts model rests on a linear cascade running from top to bottom. The Matrix proposes a systemic, circular organization in which each space influences all the others at once.
Here we find the complex causality and the recursive loop Morin insisted on: effects act back on causes, and the whole is at once more and less than the sum of its parts. Change can then start from any point of entry, emotions, behaviors, context, and propagate through the entire system.
Toward NLP 2.0
By explicitly integrating emotions, the Meta space (reflexive awareness) and circularity, the Experience Matrix does not replace the logical levels. It transcends and includes them within a frame able to handle human hyper-complexity. What it offers practitioners are the tools of an NLP 2.0, faithful to Morin’s demand that we connect knowledge in order to understand the human adventure more fully.
Quotations from Edgar Morin are translated from the French.