190 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
‘I can’t do it here’ = statement about behaviour.
‘I can’t do it here’ = statement about environment.
When you know the level at which someone’s operating, you can help that
person to make change at that level. For example, if the person’s working at the
environmental level, the question to ask is ‘If not here, where can you do it?’ If
they’re at the identity level, the question is, ‘If not you, who can do it then?’
Teambuilding at Work and Play: A Logical Levels Exercise
We say throughout this book that NLP is experiential, which means that
to get the benefit of many of the NLP exercises you sometimes have to
move physically as well as mentally. As NLP developer Robert Dilts puts it,
‘Knowledge is just a rumour until you get it in the muscle.’
This exercise helps you to brainstorm your team. You can lay out pieces of
paper on the floor and walk through the different levels or use chairs, as in
this version. You can set this exercise to some baroque music to get the ideas
flowing and speed it up as a musical-chairs game – and you may want some-
one to capture ideas on a flipchart.
- Appoint one person to lead the exercise, ask the questions, and cap-
ture the answers.
This person is your question master.
- Place six chairs in a line; place a label on each chair to denote the
logical level.
- Sit one team member on each of the chairs.
- Have the question master ask each person in turn questions according
to the logical level of each chair.
Here are the questions to ask the team at each level:
- Environment chair: ‘Where, when, and with whom does this team
work best?’
- Behaviour chair: ‘What does this team do well?’
- Capability chair: ‘How do we do what we do when we work well?’
- Beliefs and values chair: ‘Why is this team here? What’s important
to us?’
- Identity chair: ‘Who is this team?’
- Purpose chair: ‘How does this team contribute to the bigger pic-
ture? What is our mission to others?’
