LATEST NEWS
2 Jun 2010
Blue Bamboo demystiyfies NLP for Supply Chain professionals
Recently, Blue Bamboo Consulting presented to the Chartered Insitute of Logistics & Transport at the Arup building in Birmingham. Ed Luttrell, Director and Principal Coach at Blue Bamboo, spoke on “Essential NLP for Supply Chain Professionals”.
Now for those of you who haven’t experienced an Arup building, it’s worth a go. Remember the Sydney Opera House? Well, Birmingham’s Arup offices may not have many operatic divas wandering around in larger-than-life dresses (although I haven’t been there during a working day of course). But it does have light, functionality, flexible spaces and fascinating dynamics that seem to shift depending on where you are and what you’re doing. It’s no surprise that Arup have won accolades and awards for their innovate designs.
As for the evening itself, it was for most people a chance to clarify their current thinking about NLP and to find out from an expert what all the fuss was about. Many had clearly heard of it; sitting in the audience I observed the many hands that went up when asked the question. But most had not been invited to learn how this growing phenomenon could actually be applied in the workplace to improve personal effectiveness and team performance.
Ed Luttrell, a certified trainer and master practitioner in NLP, explained some basic principles, structures and techniques associated with NLP. And the audience had the opportunity to play with them too: breaking out into groups a couple of times to experiment with building rapport, observing other people’s eye movements and applying some pretty challenging NLP assumptions to a number of their own work-related problems generated fun, engagement – and lots of questions! How, for example, can we resolve an issue when there seems to be completely different points of view? Two completely different sets of values, beliefs and behaviours going on? Sounds familiar? In both personal and work life, I’ve encountered plenty of moments when the other person just seems to be dug in and unresponsive to my argument.
Ed was here to challenge the group: if that’s happening, guess who’s going to have to change? Yup – ME! This, and numerous other NLP concepts were introduced, linked to personal and group effectiveness and better performance. Here, it seemed, was an expert in NLP that wanted to demystify it and make it real for his audience. Maybe there’s more to this stuff than meets the eye (or ear, or mind, or feet?.....oh dear.....I think it got to me.)
