Why I Built the Experience Matrix: An Open Letter to NLP Trainers
An open letter to NLP trainers and coaches
To practitioners, master practitioners and trainers of NLP,
I want to respond to some of the criticism I have received about how I present the Experience Matrix and how I position it in relation to Robert Dilts’s logical levels.
The model drew a good many reactions. Here is what I take from them.
A deliberate communication choice
Let me start by owning it. I chose, knowingly, to present the Experience Matrix as the model that would “dethrone” the logical levels. The point was to draw attention to specific gaps I had identified, and to the answers my model offers.
The feedback on the model itself has been good, particularly from coaches with an active professional practice. I have also received sharper reactions, mostly from defenders of the established model. It is those I want to address here. I understand that my framing may have looked provocative, or excessive in its form.
I would still ask you to look past that first impression and examine the substance. Behind the apparent opposition there is an attempt to enrich, not to reject.
The illusion of an original perfection
As an NLP master practitioner, I met the logical levels the way everyone does, during my training. I saw gaps in the model fairly quickly, gaps that several authors had already noted, John Grinder among them.
What struck me most was something else: how completely Dilts’s logical levels became an unquestionable, and unquestioned, pillar of NLP, taught for decades as the foundational model of the field (note 1).
That elevation owes a great deal to the collective admiration Robert Dilts commands in our community, and in French-speaking NLP in particular. His reputation, which he has earned, created a halo around his theoretical work and made it effectively untouchable.
The phenomenon is all the more striking because I am not the only one to have seen the gaps. Grinder and other NLP practitioners, teachers and developers alike, have acknowledged them too, but always at the margins, never in a way that shook the model’s position within the NLP corpus. As though the stature of its creator ruled out any substantial questioning, leaving us with free interpretations and peripheral adjustments that never address the structural problems.
The false choice between preserving and innovating
Let me be clear: I am not asking anyone to abandon the logical levels. That would be as much of a mistake as refusing any evolution at all. The Experience Matrix integrates the Dilts model and goes beyond it, correcting its shortcomings while preserving what makes it valuable.
Presenting the Experience Matrix and listening to the responses, I was struck by how much room for interpretation the logical levels leave open, above all, though not only, at the identity level. Those ambiguities tend to work around the model’s intrinsic gaps rather than resolve them. That interpretive plasticity looks appealing, and it creates a real problem.
NLP is first of all a language of precision, built to decode the structure of subjective experience and to produce change by identifying “the difference that makes the difference.” In that light, the models taught in NLP trainings are scaffolding, indispensable while practitioners are learning. They structure thinking and guide practice through a critical period.
With experience, practitioners gradually free themselves from those models and develop a practice of their own, more fluid and more intuitive. Which is exactly why the initial foundations, the scaffolding we build our expertise on, need to be solid and precisely defined.
That is one of the main things the Experience Matrix sets out to do: supply the added precision the logical levels lack. By clarifying the dimensions that make up our experience, the Matrix makes for more efficient learning and a more natural transition toward practical mastery.
NLP is fifty years old and has to keep evolving. How can it evolve if we hold on to our models without opening to change, to variants, to anything new? Are we willing to practice what we preach to our clients? Do we accept applying to our own corpus the principles of evolution and adaptation we encourage in others?
The hidden cost of the status quo
I often hear an implicit argument: “If we accept this new model, it means we were wrong all these years.” The worry is understandable, and it rests on a misunderstanding.
Using the best model available at a given moment was not a mistake. Refusing a more effective tool today out of attachment to the past would be one. Every day we go on using a model whose gaps are known, while a better alternative exists, we deny our clients and our students work that could be more transformative.
Attachment in a field devoted to change
Is there not something odd in this? We are specialists in change and personal evolution, and we sometimes find ourselves firmly attached to our own mental constructions. Do we not teach that the map is not the territory? That models are useful approximations and never absolute truths?
For many of us the logical levels are not just a model or a tool. They are the backbone. Which is precisely why the idea of letting the model evolve is so hard to entertain, and so necessary.
The ethics of continuous improvement
Developing the Experience Matrix put a question to me: what do we owe, ethically, to the people we coach and train? What we already know, or what might work better, even when that means leaving our own comfort zone?
If we claim to serve human development, should our first commitment not be to the effectiveness of our methods rather than to their historical preservation?
And how would we ever judge whether a new model brings a real improvement if we refuse to explore it, to discover it, to test it?
Rejecting innovation up front costs us the potential advances, and also the very possibility of forming an informed judgment about their value.
Beyond opposition, toward integration
The resistance I meet is no surprise. Any significant innovation provokes reactions in proportion to how much it would change. The history of NLP has stiffened somewhat over the decades, and the field has gradually lost its aura of innovation and rupture. It would gain from opening to an evolution that this time rests not with the pioneers, who have aged, but with the generation of practitioners working today.
There is a fair question here about what a trainer’s real competence amounts to when they stay locked inside a curriculum defined in the last century. NLP advocates adaptability and evolution in its clients. Should it not embody those same qualities in its own teaching?
Presenting the Experience Matrix raises a question that matters for the future of NLP. We do have structures for validating trainers and training content. What is badly missing is a space for exploring and incubating innovation. A conceptual laboratory where new work could be freely explored, tested and refined. Presenting this model is itself a first concrete step toward the development lab I am calling for. Without that space, how can our discipline hope to renew itself and stay relevant to contemporary demands?
The Experience Matrix does not ask for the rejection of the logical levels. It proposes to transcend and include them within a fuller frame. It honors Dilts’s work while answering needs his original model leaves open.
I invite you to look at this proposal not as a threat to what you know, but as a chance to enrich our shared practice. It is, after all, what we encourage in our clients: the capacity to integrate new perspectives in order to evolve.
I remain open to dialogue and to constructive exchange on questions this fundamental to NLP. Anyone interested in building this space for research and innovation is warmly invited to get in touch, so we can carry the work forward together.
With regard, Christian Vanhenten Creator of the Experience Matrix
Note 1: “The model of ‘Neuro-Logical’ levels of Robert Dilts has so fully entered into the very fabric of NLP that most of us think about them when we think of ‘NLP’ or ‘logical levels’.” Michael Hall, “Greater Flexibility Using the Other ‘Logical Levels’”, NLP World, page 1.