Five Things "Environment" Cannot Hold
When the Experience Matrix comes up in conversation, the model I developed as an alternative to the Logical Levels (or an extension of them, depending on your affinities), the talk usually turns to identity. That is understandable. Moving from a fixed “I am” to a dynamic “I identify with”, recognizing multiple identifications that activate according to the situation, treating Singularity as the space of what makes each of us irreducibly ourselves: all of that looks quite different from a single “identity level” at the top of a pyramid.
But the Matrix makes a second move that tends to go unnoticed, and it matters at least as much. It replaces environment with Context.
If the Matrix is new to you: picture a circle set inside a surrounding space. The circle divides into two hemispheres. Below sits your Singularity, what you do, what you know, what you know how to do. Above sit your multiple Identifications: parent, coach, manager, creative. Emotions wrap around the whole. At the center is a Meta space of reflexive observation. A temporal axis runs through all of it. And the space around the circle is Context. Not at the bottom of a pyramid. Around it. Everywhere.
This is not a cosmetic rearrangement. It is a substantive correction. Look at what cognitive science, systems thinking and sociology have produced over the last fifty years, and you find that the change of word carries five properties the term “environment” cannot hold.
1. Context surrounds; it is not subordinate
Dilts puts environment at the bottom of his pyramid, the least influential level, the one that merely supplies the scenery. Bateson, whom Dilts claims as a source, said the opposite: “The unit of survival is not the organism, it is the organism plus its environment.” Separating the two is an epistemological error.
Koestler’s theory of holons makes the same point differently. We are autonomous wholes that are simultaneously parts of larger systems. The environment is not beneath us. It is the system we are part of. Context in the Matrix reflects that by surrounding all the other spaces rather than sitting below them.
2. Context shapes; it is not passive
Christopher Alexander, the architect whose work prompted the change of term in the Matrix, defines context as “the sum of all the factors that have an effect on form”. Not an inert backdrop, but an active component of whatever emerges.
Behavioral economics agrees. Thaler and Sunstein showed that choice architecture, the way options get presented, systematically influences our decisions. How dishes are arranged in a cafeteria changes what people eat. How an open-plan office is organized changes what people produce.
In coaching this is decisive. When a client says “I can’t be creative”, the answer may not lie in their beliefs or their capabilities. It may lie in a professional context that does not make creativity available as a legitimate identification.
3. Context runs both ways
Maturana and Varela demonstrated something counterintuitive: the environment does not transmit information to the organism, it perturbs it. What the organism does with the perturbation is determined by its own internal structure. Kicking a stone and kicking a dog do not produce the same result, not because the kick differs but because the internal structure does.
The reverse holds too. A person transforms their context as much as the context transforms them. Giddens calls this structuration: social structures are both the medium and the outcome of our actions.
Dilts’s “environment level” runs one way. It sits there, it influences, and that is that. Context in the Matrix is a two-way structural coupling.
4. Context generates identifications; it is not scenery
This is probably the property that matters most to practitioners. Context does not merely surround a person. It generates the categories they can identify with.
A tech startup values “fast decision-maker”, “disruptor”, “high performer”. A humanitarian NGO values “mediator”, “facilitator”, “good listener”. Change the context and you change the available identifications. Not by magic, but because the social system produces communications, expectations and norms that make certain identifications possible and others marginal.
Bourdieu called this habitus: embodied dispositions produced by prolonged exposure to specific conditions of existence. The social context deposits itself, literally, in the body and the mind, as ways of perceiving, thinking, acting and feeling.
Bateson added a negative dimension. What a context does not make available shapes a person as much as what it offers. Absent identifications, closed possibilities, skills never called upon: that invisible dimension has no place at all in Dilts’s model.
5. Context is subjectively configured; it is not objectively given
The biologist Jakob von Uexküll distinguished Umgebung, the objective environment, the same for everyone, from Umwelt, the lived world particular to each organism. A tick in a garden perceives three signals. A dog perceives thousands. A human perceives something else again. The “objective” garden is the same; the lived worlds are incomparable.
Dilts’s environment is an Umgebung, an objective setting. Context in the Matrix is an Umwelt, a world structured by the person, filtered through their identifications, their emotions, their map of the world. Two colleagues in the same office live in different Contexts.
For coaching this is fundamental. Mapping a client’s Context does not mean describing their situation objectively. It means exploring how they live that situation: which identifications it makes salient, which emotions it triggers, which possibilities it opens or closes.
What changes in practice
Moving from “environment” to “Context” shifts three things.
The diagnosis widens. A problem presented as internal, whether lack of confidence, procrastination or impostor syndrome, can turn out to be a dysfunctional coupling between person and context. The context may not value the identifications the person needs, or may impose identifications incompatible with their Singularity.
The interventions diversify. You no longer work only on the person, changing beliefs, developing capabilities. You can work on the coupling: shift how the context is perceived, create favorable micro-contexts, identify which identifications the context makes available and which it withholds.
Responsibility redistributes. The client is not defective in a neutral environment. They are structurally coupled to a context that perturbs them in a particular way, and that they perturb in return. Neither a passive victim of the context nor the absolute author of their fate. Both at once. That is more accurate, and more useful.
The Experience Matrix is often described as a model that changes the question of identity in NLP. It does. But stopping there means missing half the journey, because of what it does to context. Taking context out of the bottom of the pyramid and making it the structuring frame of the whole of experience puts the Matrix in line, sometimes without knowing it at first, with six decades of converging work in cybernetics, the biology of cognition, phenomenology, sociology and complexity theory.
One word changed. Five new properties. And a practice that cannot stay the same.