Hi Jim R and Lewis Jim R - yes, of course, it would be a worth while endeavor either for the patterning you intuitively detected with the conductor or for getting in the game (modeling) or both. May I suggest that you refine what it is that this conductor has that you want. It could, for example, be his or her leadership qualitites, his or her sensitivity to the timing of the players in the orchestra, the alertness to timbre... Note that I am proposing not that you identify the patterning that this conductor represents but the context and consequences of those behaviors - this simultaneously focuses your work on a subset of the conductor's behavior and does so without inducing f2 mappings (entirely inappropriate until criterion is met) and simultaneously defines the context of imitation where you will achieve criterion (replication of the behaviors selected from the conductor) - in this case, if you re-read the possibilities I generated (hallucinating freely) in the first paragraph above and ask yourself what the context of imitation where the replication criterion could be met would be, you will note a wild set of variants depending on which of those classes of patterns you are pursuing. Let me know when you work this out and perhaps I can make some further suggestions that respond to your request. Lewis - welcome back! After a ringing endorsement of Steve's seminar and its content, you wrote, "Now, according to WITW, you would not consider this (Steve's modeling of self concept) to be a legitimate modelling project...more of a strategy elicitation with existing NLP tools. Yet Steve, in his many years of investigating how individuals organise their self-concept, has brought together an unique model which has great scope in application and the potential for profound ecological change (I have used it with some patients already). So, I am puzzled...why would this very useful model not be considered a product of modelling? Is he simply "messing around with content"? Lewis - let us agree that there are many useful ways to develop patterning and to learn. Obviously, our focus has been on modeling as Carmen and I define it in Whispering. We are NOT saying that this methodolgy is EXCLUSIVELY the royal road to patterning and learning, only that it offers a set of choices not previously exploited in any systematic explicit way. Indeed, Carmen won the National Teacher of the Year award here in the states for superb work that did not involve modeling as we define in Whispering. Further I actually suspect that many people unconsciously model - in the Whispering sense, i.e. without conscious filtering (without f2 mappings) - small portions of other people's behavior (ones that attract their unconscious attention. What modeling ala Whispering (an explicit representation of what Bandler and I did to create this field) does is take this natural process (all kids do it to learn the deepest and most important competencies in their life) and refine to a art form with the attendant consequences the patterning of excellence that NLP represents. Now presumably what Steve has done is some strange and interesting mix of unconsciously noticing patterning of people with ?healthy? ?stong? (who knows what the specific critieria that attracted Steve's attention unconsciously were - this is not been specified) self concepts and consciously marking such behaviors. Taking your representation to be accurate, he synthesized some representation of those experiences and DESIGNED a model for self concept. The key word here is DESIGNED - Steve (apparently) did not suspend f2 mappings during some unconscious assimilation phase, nor did he imitate the various people who contributed to the formation of his model to criterion - that is, by demonstrating that he could elicit the same responses from the world as each of his "models". Thus, what emerges is a complex interaction between the patterning of various people (not identified, not imitated) and Steve's own filters (the f2 mapping - prematurely from the Whispering point of view) - the model is in significant part based on observations of people p1, p2,..., pn) and largely on Steve's own filters (the prematurely applied personal f2 mappings). This is clearly a different sort of animal than the productions of Bandler and Grinder and the model explicated by Carmen and me in Whispering. I will take for granted that the arguments that detail the advantages and tremendous differences that emerge in modeling (ala Whispering) and analysis (let's call what Steve did this purely for identification). If there are any questions about this, please ask. Finally, as a concrete example, Bateson sent a number of members of the MRI group (Haley, Weakland...) to capture what Erickson was doing. As Bateson said, they all returned enchanted but without the ability to describe what Milton was doing. Haley wrote a brilliant book "Strategies of Psychotherapy"  - in my opinion, the finest (after the writings of Erickson himself) book about psychotherapy written pre-NLP. This book is entirely analytic and offers some extremely useful intellectual distinctions (meta-complimentary position...) but it is not a model. There are no explicit representations of HOW specifically to do what this genius did. There is no clean separation between the contribution of the "models" and Steve's personal maps. Thus Bateson's plea to Bandler and I to do the modeling (after he read what we had accomplished in the first volume of Structure of Magic) to Richard and I to take the challenge of modeling Erickson. All the best, John