Frameworks
Twelve constructs for understanding how people operate. Not a taxonomy — a set of lenses. Each one isolates a different layer of the system that produces behaviour.
- DECISION MAKING
Decision Patterns
How people filter information, weigh options, and commit to a course of action — often without noticing the pattern they repeat.
Read the framework →“Most people believe they decide rationally. In practice, they decide structurally — the same sequence, the same filters, the same emotional checkpoints — regardless of the content.”
- MOTIVATION
Values
The hierarchy of importance that governs behaviour. What matters most isn’t always what people say matters most.
Read the framework →“A person’s stated values and their operational values often diverge. The operational ones — the ones that actually govern choices under pressure — are only visible through behaviour.”
- IDENTITY
Beliefs
The assumptions people treat as facts. Beliefs define what feels possible, reasonable, or worth attempting.
Read the framework →“Beliefs don’t announce themselves. They present as reality. The sentence ’I can’t do that’ sounds like a fact about the world, but it’s a belief about the self.”
- COMMUNICATION
Language Patterns
The specific words and structures people use reveal — and reinforce — their internal models of reality.
Read the framework →“’I have to’ and ’I choose to’ describe the same action from entirely different internal positions. The language someone uses tells you where they stand relative to their own experience.”
- COGNITIVE FILTERS
Meta Programs
The unconscious filters that determine what you pay attention to and how you process it. Meta Programs are the operating system beneath your thinking.
Read the framework →“Two people in the same meeting hear different meetings. One filters for what’s wrong; the other filters for what’s possible. Neither is choosing to do this — their meta programs are running automatically.”
- PERSPECTIVE
Perceptual Positions
The ability to experience a situation from three distinct viewpoints: your own, the other person’s, and that of a detached observer. Developed by John Grinder as a core NLP technique.
Read the framework →“Most interpersonal problems persist because people are stuck in first position — their own perspective. The moment you can genuinely occupy second or third position, the problem changes shape.”
- TEMPORAL PATTERNS
Timeline Therapy
How people organise time internally determines how they relate to past experiences, present action, and future planning. Developed by Tad James from NLP submodality work.
Read the framework →“Some people store the past behind them and the future ahead — time flows through them. Others see their entire timeline spread out in front of them. These aren’t metaphors. They’re operational structures with measurable effects on behaviour.”
- INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONS
Submodalities
The fine-grained qualities of internal experience — brightness, distance, size, tone, temperature — that determine the emotional impact of any thought. Developed extensively by Richard Bandler.
Read the framework →“The content of a memory matters less than how it’s encoded. A bright, close, moving image produces a different response than a dim, distant, still one — even if they depict the same event.”
- BEHAVIOURAL SEQUENCES
Strategy Elicitation
The process of extracting the exact internal sequence — the specific steps of seeing, hearing, feeling, and self-talk — that produces any behaviour. The foundation of NLP modelling.
Read the framework →“Excellence has structure. When someone is consistently good at something, they’re running a specific sequence of internal operations. That sequence can be made explicit, taught, and transferred.”
- SENSORY PROCESSING
Representational Systems
The sensory channels through which people process and organise experience — visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, and digital. The first distinction Bandler and Grinder identified in NLP.
Read the framework →“When someone says ’I see what you mean,’ ’That sounds right,’ or ’I feel like that’s correct,’ they’re not using metaphors. They’re telling you which sensory system they’re processing through — and if you match it, your communication becomes remarkably more effective.”
- ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION
TPDK Framework
Technology, People, Decisions, Knowledge — four interdependent pillars that determine an organisation’s capacity for transformation. Original IP bridging NLP with systems thinking.
Read the framework →“Most organisations try to transform through technology alone. But technology without the right people, decision structures, and knowledge architecture produces expensive failure. Transformation is a four-variable equation.”
- STATE MANAGEMENT
Anchoring
The process of associating a specific stimulus with a specific state, so that the state can be accessed on demand. One of the most practical and immediately applicable NLP techniques.
Read the framework →“You already have anchors — a song that brings back a feeling, a smell that triggers a memory. The difference is that most anchors are accidental. Anchoring is the deliberate creation of stimulus-response pairs for states you want to access.”
A set of lenses. Each one isolates a different layer.