GOING DEEPER: Capturing Experience

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Asking Questions

Questions set the direction of a person's thinking. The compelling nature of questions makes it important to have some understanding of the presuppositions operating in them. In addition, it is important to know what kind of information you want to get by asking your question. This allows you to recognize if your exemplar's response is in fact an answer to your question.

"Why is the sky blue?" When one of the us asked this of his daughter, she reflected on the question for a moment and realized that she did not know. She proceeded to propose a possible explanation. When it was rejected, she set sail on another internal voyage of exploration, and soon returned with yet another explanation. But this too sank upon the rocks of science, and she was forced to seek even further for a workable reason. When at last she had exhausted her ideas, she asked to be told the real reason the sky is blue. But her father refused to tell her. Several years later she confessed to him that she still wanted to know the answer to the question, Why is the sky blue?

The Magic Carpet of Questions

Several years later? Questions can do that; they can seize our attention, letting go only when they are answered. And it is not only the big questions that grab us, questions about the whys and wherefores of our pasts, presents and futures. Even mundane questions - How long does it take to drive across the United States? Who starred in the movie "Gilda"? Why is the sky blue? - can demand our attention and compel us to search for answers. But do we have to search? It is as though questions are special keys that, when turned, inevitably start the motors of search and discovery.

How Do Questions Get Our Motors Going?How do questions get our motors going? Now, of course, we just asked you a question. Did you just read across it? Or did you take it in and consider it? What happened in your experience? Where did your thoughts go? How did your body react? As we ask each of these additional questions, are you aware of your thoughts shifting to find an answer? Even if you were not aware of doing that, do you feel that brief moment of stillness, of plunging inside, of wondering?

We are meaning-making beings, creatures who use meaning to mold the raw materials of perception into the bricks of experience with which we build our worlds. Indeed, the two brick-making tools of meaning are those of Making Distinctions (which we discussed in the previous Going Deeper essay) and Asking Questions. While distinctions provide form, it is questions that provide the impetus to form. Being asked a question has an undeniably compelling quality to it. The motive power of questions becomes immediately evident when you are asked a question that you do not want to answer. You will nonetheless answer it "on the inside." Even more telling than this, however, is the difficulty you will have in refusing to answer it on the outside. You feel impelled to answer, and it is an act of conscious self-mastery to remain silent.

It is as if our bodies and our nervous systems are set to respond to questions. And indeed they are. At its most fundamental level, the body is constantly posing and answering the most fundamental of questions: What is this? The semi-permeability of cell membranes, the key-and-lock recognition device of antibodies, the pressure bulbs in skin, the dendritic receptors that respond to specific neuro-transmitters, and so on are all, in effect, asking the question, What is this?, and are waiting for the particular molecule, or pressure, or protein, or neuro-transmitter that is the answer they are looking for. We are neurologically set up to respond to, orient toward that which is new, unknown, different, or unaccounted for in our feelings, environment, senses, philosophies.

Questions are asked when there is something that must be accounted for, be made sensible, be given meaning. That is the only time they arise. The nature of a question is to turn us to the necessity of making meaning. The interruption of our normal flow of meaning making immediately generates questions. The purpose of questions, we can say, is to alert us to the fact that meaning needs to be made of something. This is so much the case that when we are asked a question (rather than generating it ourselves) we respond to it as though it had been raised within us. That is, the fact that a question is being asked presupposes that there must be a need for meaning-making. In general, we do not first consider whether or not the question is worth answering. Instead, we respond as though we had generated it ourselves; we seek an answer.

How Do Questions Set Our Filters?

So far we have been talking about how being asked a question incites us to make meaning. But being asked a question is more than an experiential nudge that gets us moving; it is a nudge that gets us moving in a particular direction. The content of a question sets our experiential filters, opening up certain lines of thought, and leaving others unnoticed and out of consciousness and unexplored. As an example, try the following, small experiment:

Slowly rub your hand upon a place on your clothing, asking yourself as you do, "I wonder just how intensely I can experience this?"

If you do this, you will undoubtedly discover that your experience of touching the cloth becomes richer, perhaps in many ways. (And there is no need to stop with clothing! We encourage you to ask yourself this question in relation to all manner of experiences.) The cloth has not changed; but the quality of your attention to it did change. And this change was mediated by the form and content of the question itself.

In the previous Going Deeper section we explored the role of distinctions in organizing our experiential filters along certain lines. The distinctions we make determine to a great extent what we notice - that is, what has significance or meaning. Questions set filters through which we perceive and make sense of a situation by suggesting what is relevant. For instance, asking, "Why is the sky blue?" suggests to us that the relevant distinctions at that moment are "sky," "blue" and "causes of color." If instead we ask the question, "Why is the sky cloudy?" a somewhat different set of distinctions becomes relevant. It is the same sky, but now we are considering it with respect to the distinctions of "sky," "clouds" and "causes of cloudiness." The question, "Is the sky bluer than yesterday?" filters our thoughts through the distinctions of "sky," "blue," "yesterday" and "comparisons of more than." And pointing up at a passing jet and asking, "Where do you think that jet is going?" takes our thoughts into an entirely different realm of considerations. We still see the blue sky as we watch the jet pass overhead, but we are no longer intent upon the task of making meaning regarding that blueness; instead, now we are intent upon making meaning regarding possible destinations for that jet.

QUESTIONS AND MODELING

The effects of asking questions are not trivial. Asking a question is NOT an innocuous, neutral act. It is a way of compelling someone's experience along certain lines. There is no avoiding or canceling the compelling nature of asking a question. What we can do, however, is be mindful of this influence and, so, be mindful of how we ask our questions.

One of the authors witnessed a particularly telling and poignant example of the distinction-setting nature of questions at a lecture about a particular approach to relationship therapy. To demonstrate the approach, the therapist brought to the stage a woman who had a problem with her husband. She explained that he often had to work late at the office and, though he was very good about calling to let her know, she still felt annoyed about it. The session proceeded approximately as follows:

Therapist: Where does he call you from?

Client: His office.

Therapist: How do you know that?

Client: Well, he says he's still at his office.

Therapist: Could he have been calling from somewhere else?

Client: (in obvious growing distress) It's possible, I guess.

The session quickly spiraled into this client "realizing" that her husband's behavior may well mean that he was having an affair. Without judging whether the therapist's questions sprang from prescience or personal agenda, it is still the case that he led his client down a particular path of thinking with the nature of his questions. Questions set the distinctions through which we filter our subsequent meaning-making. (From the audience - on the outside of the interaction - we can wonder why the client didn't merely reject the questions as irrelevant or even insulting? Of course, she could have. But it is not so easy to do that when one is inside the experience of being asked the questions.)

When modeling, bear in mind that your exemplar will try to answer the question you actually ask (not the question you intended to ask). So it is important that you ask your question in a way likely to take your exemplar down the experiential path you need her to explore. For example, suppose we are modeling an architect and want to know what her thoughts are while designing a home. We could ask, "What are you feeling when you are designing a home?" This question, of course, is asking her to identify her feelings. But we want to know what she is thinking, so it is more useful and appropriate to ask, "What are you thinking when you are designing a home?" This seems a fairly obvious example, but is in fact by no means exceptional in practice. We frequently find that, in the midst of pursuing understanding, people are so intent and focused on the answers that they neglect the form and subtleties of the questions they are relying on to produce those answers. Slips of intention that are obvious to us as they lie here on the page, can easily be overlooked in the heat of information gathering.

In fact, going deeper, we find that the exemplar will respond to the subtlest aspects of the questions put to them. Suppose we ask the architect the following two questions:

"What are you thinking when designing a home?"

"What are you thinking about when designing a home?"

Are these two questions asking our exemplar for the same aspect of her experience, or different aspects? On the face of it, both questions seem to be asking the exemplar to go down the same experiential road, that is, identifying what she is thinking when designing a home. But take a moment to ask those two questions of yourself. You will discover that they tend to take you down different paths, affecting you somewhat differently. The first question orients you more to being in the act of designing a home, and pulls your thoughts from that perspective, while the second question puts you more in the observer role. (Substituting your own content into the questions will help make these subtle differences immediately evident to you. For example, if you are adept at cooking you would ask yourself, "What is important to me when cooking?" and "What is important to me about cooking?") In other words, the first question is asking her for an ongoing report of what is happening in her thinking, while the "about" in the second question suggests analyzing what she is thinking when designing a home.

How significant is the difference between these two - or any two - questions? That can only be answered in use with an actual and particular exemplar. Depending upon the exemplar's response to them, these questions could generate similar answers or wildly different answers. What we want to make clear, however, is that words do matter.

Though, No Guarantees

The fact that words matter, that they compel experience, does not mean that they will compel the experience of everyone in the same way, or in a way that is necessarily predictable. We foreshadowed this demur when we noted above that the significant difference between two questions will only be revealed in the use of those questions with a particular exemplar. Meaning is not in the words themselves, but is ascribed to those words by the person using (or responding to) them. No matter how careful we are in wording our questions, it is always the case that the exemplar will respond according to her own lights. And that response is not necessarily an answer to the question we asked. She will answer the question as she understands it. It is essential to ask the question you want to ask, using the wording that conveys your intention, so as to help orient the exemplar to the precise information you are after. But there are no guarantees.

In the previous essay, we explored the necessary role of distinctions in describing your exemplar's ability. In general, you are asking questions in relation to those distinctions. That is, you are wanting your exemplar to describe her experience in terms of those distinctions. If, for instance, one of your modeling distinctions is regarding "tempo," you might ask our architect exemplar, "How quickly are you moving through the design possibilities you are imagining?" She answers, "Well, I'm imagining moving through each space to find out how it feels." This is a reasonable (and revealing) answer, but it is not an answer to the question we asked. Her response is not about tempo, but (perhaps because she seized upon the word "moving" in the question) about her process for testing her design possibilities.

Since you cannot depend upon the question to elicit just the information you want, it is necessary for you as the Ôasker' to know what you are asking for, to have some understanding of the kind of distinction you want to make in the exemplar's experience. It is this understanding that allows you to assess the exemplar's response to know whether you have an answer to the question you asked or not.

At this point you might be wondering: If the exemplar will respond to my questions according to their understanding of them, why bother to be precise about how I ask them? In fact, there are three reasons why the uncontrollability of the exemplar's answers makes it all the more important to be precise. The first we have already talked about above, which is that the wording of your questions will always have an effect on the thinking of your exemplar. And because of shared linguistic, cultural and societal histories, that effect will usually be just what you (or anyone) would expect.

The second reason is that when you know what kind of information your question is intended to retrieve, it will be immediately clear whether or not the exemplar's response truly answers that intention. That is, crafting your question to go after a certain kind of information not only helps set your exemplar's filters, it sets your filters as well. Then, when the response comes back, you are already tuned to recognize the kind of information you are seeking. For instance, when we ask the architect, "How quickly are you moving through the design possibilities you are imagining?" we are setting ourselves to notice descriptions of tempo patterns. Her answer, "Well, I'm imagining moving through each space to find out how it feels," is interesting and is filled with potentially important information that we may well want to capture. But it is also important to not let this unexpected fount of good stuff wash away the fact that it nevertheless did not include the information we wanted. Which leads us to the third reason that being deliberate about your questions is important.

And that is, if your precise question does not elicit the information you need, you at least know what your first question was and what it elicited and, so, will better understand how to re-tune your next question to help orient your exemplar's thinking. This "tuning" of the question takes us now to the notion of "framing."

Framing Questions

It is not the exemplar's job to know what you, the modeler, need to know about the structure of her experience; she just has it (and very likely never explored its structure before). It is, however, your job as the modeler to help your exemplar gain access to those aspects of her experience that you believe may be significant in making it possible to manifest her ability. And you do this primarily through asking questions. The magic carpet of your questions is a set of frames for your exemplar to think "through" - conceptual filters that set direction. Before rolling out such a carpet, it is worth considering where it is likely to fly.

This means considering where you want your exemplar's thinking to go, and what she may need to know or hear in order to go there easily. How can you know what she needs? Some of those answers will be found in your own experience; you are a human being, just like your exemplar, and so most of the experiential ground on which you both stand is common ground. Consider what would help you better understand and respond to the question you want to ask, and those same considerations are likely to help your exemplar as well.

But of course there will also be differences in understanding between you and your exemplar. So in addition to considering what would help you (as a another human being) understand and respond to the question, it is also important to consider what this exemplar - this person - may need.

Jargon

In particular, be wary of using jargon in your questions. When operating from our own areas of expertise we can easily slip into using its jargon, forgetting that the exemplars have not been initiated into the arcane world of our modeling distinctions. Since they are not privy to your world, consider how you can ask for your distinctions in language that almost anyone can understand. It is the difference between saying, "During elicitation, pace the exemplar's model of the world while calibrating their responses," and, "When asking questions, use language and examples that your exemplar naturally understands, and at the same time continually notice changes in your exemplar's comfort and understanding so you can appropriately adjust how you ask your questions." The first sentence is (accurately) understood only by those already initiated into the modeling world uses of "pacing," "map of the world," "calibrating" and "responses." In contrast, almost anyone can get these same ideas from the second sentence.

The need to make sense to your exemplar does not mean that you can never use jargon. The advantage of jargon is that it condenses concepts into a word or two that would otherwise take paragraphs to describe. And this can be a big advantage in terms of making communication more efficient. It means that you and another person can communicate both with a shared understanding and efficiently. When you are gathering information from an exemplar (perhaps for hours) it can very helpful for both of you to share the language - the jargon - of the distinctions you are using in your modeling. When you want to introduce jargon, however, introduce it. That is, make sure that you first explain it and, ideally, give examples, so that it also becomes meaningful to your exemplar. Indeed, every word functions in this way, Ôstanding for' whole complexes of associations that can only be unraveled with a lot of description (which is what dictionaries do). Jargon, then, is really only language that has not yet been made meaningful to you.

SHIFTING THE FRAME OF THE QUESTION

Obviously, you cannot know up front everything that you need to take into consideration in formulating questions for your exemplar. Your exemplar is not a box of informational marbles that you are emptying, one marble at a time; your exemplar is a person you are getting to know. Modeling is a process of discovery, rather than confirmation. And, so, as you gather information you are learning more and more about how to understand and interact with this person, your exemplar.

You can therefore count on your questions occasionally going awry. When this happens, many people often respond by asking the exact same question again! Not surprisingly, the result is either the same answer from the exemplar (perhaps expressed in different words), or the same answer plus a growing sense of annoyance on the part of the exemplar. After all, she understands the language and she already answered your question, so why are you asking it again?

Perhaps the best way to think of a question that goes awry is that it worked perfectly to take the exemplar where you did not intend her to go. This misunderstanding is feedback to you that you need to frame your question differently. (It is NOT feedback to change your intention and abandon going after the information you want.) Accordingly, the next question to ask yourself is: How do I need to ask my question in order to get the information I want? Answering that can be made easier by further questions such as, Do I need to make my question simpler, or more concrete? Do I need to give examples? Do I need to backtrack so we are both in the same frame of reference? Are there terms (perhaps jargon) I am using that need to be explained? Is she operating within a frame that is not useful for getting to the information? Is there a frame for thinking that would be helpful? Does she need suggestions for how to search for or think about the kind of information I am interested in? Do I need to more specifically bring her attention to a particular aspect of her experience?

These questions are offered only as examples of what to consider, not as a complete set. They are useful, but you will give yourself more freedom and spontaneity in the re-formulation of your questions by recognizing that, in general, your exemplar needs either clarification, an example, a distinction, or a suggestion.

Framing by Clarification

As we have already discussed, the use of jargon can create confusion or misunderstanding in the exemplar. And of course, jargon is by no means the sole source of misunderstanding. Any of the ways you have of expressing an idea (your choice of words, sentences, sequencing of ideas, and even voice tonality and facial expressions) may lead your exemplar down paths of association that you did not intend, and perhaps all the way to misunderstanding. When you discover that this has happened, one approach is to clarify, explaining as simply and directly as possible the terms or concepts you are using.

As an example, say that we are interested in the architect's internal sensory system experiences, that is, what she is seeing, hearing and feeling in her head and body. So we ask her, "What are you imagining when you are in the process of coming up with possible designs?" We know what we mean, but she can only respond to the question with what it means to her. So she answers, "I'm imagining the interests and desires of my clients, of course." Obviously we need to clarify our use of the term "imagining." Speaking in terms that she is likely to already be familiar with, we could respond with:

"I think I misled you by using the word Ôimagining.' What I want to know is, when you are in the process of coming up with possible designs, what are you picturing in your head, what are you hearing or saying to yourself, and what body sensations are you aware of?"

This explanation will probably give our exemplar the perceptual and conceptual frames she needs to go directly to the kind of information we are after. If your clarification is still not enough, the exemplar will let you know either by again answering from another area of her experience, or by asking you for additional explanations. In either case, you can oblige, this time coming at your explanation from a different angle. You might instead decide that a better way to create a shared understanding is through offering examples of the kind of experience you are after.

Framing by Example

Suppose you ask someone who does not speak English to retrieve a "ball" from the next room. Since that person is not sure what "ball" means, she is liable to come back with anything (or nothing). The way words naturally acquire meaning is by being connected to particular classes of experience. So we show her a small, soft, red sphere and tell her it is a "ball." This example establishes for her what "ball" means: it denotes the class of spherical, small, red, soft things. With that in mind, she returns to the room, but again returns empty-handed because there were no spherical, small, red, soft things in there. Then we show her examples of other spheres that are brown or white, hard or soft, and of various sizes. Through these examples, her understanding of what "ball" means becomes more precise: a ball is any spherical object. Now she can go into the next room and retrieve it.

Often the quickest and surest way to establish a shared understanding with your exemplar is by providing examples of the kind of information you are seeking. After all, the examples you use will be those that are meaningful for you and, if they work for your exemplar as well, both of you will then be using a very similar set of associations. In working with the architect, for example, once it was clear that she misunderstood our use of "representing," we could help her by offering:"What I mean by Ôrepresenting' is what is going on inside. For instance, when I go to select a present for a friend, I make pictures in my head of times when I have seen him particularly pleased, and notice what it was that pleased him. I'm also asking myself things like, ÔWould he like that kind of thing again?' ÔWhat could I find that would be similar?' and things like that. I even have feelings of pleasure when I imagine him opening it up. So, for you, when you are in the process of coming up with possible designs for your clients, what are you representing?"If this example connects to our exemplar's own experiences, she will have a far more accurate idea of where she needs to turn her attention in order to answer our question. Of course, as with simple clarification, there is no guarantee that this will be enough. She may still need additional examples.

Framing by Distinction

As we said, your exemplar is not a box of informational marbles. Gathering information is an interaction during which you and your exemplar are learning how to understand and communicate with each other. As the modeler, it is obvious that you are working to understand your exemplar. Your exemplar will, however, be working just as hard to understand you. She will need to make sense of the language you use and the information requests you make. And the more educated your exemplar is about what distinctions to make in experience, the easier it is for her to be your partner in discovery. This does not mean you have to teach her modeling. In the process of gathering information you will be implicitly educating your exemplar about what to attend to, and how to make sense of, her experience.

There may also be times when you can help your exemplar by being explicit about some of the distinctions you are using in your modeling. This is particularly useful when you find that your exemplar seems to be "locked onto" a certain area of her experience, and changing the form of your question and offering explanations does not seem to help. When this happens, you need to make an explicit distinction for your exemplar between what they are offering you and what you want them to access in their experience.

For instance, suppose that we now know that as the architect comes up with possible designs for a home, she evaluates each possibility with respect to how well it will "fit the temperament" of her client. Wanting to know what motivates her to make that evaluation, we ask her, "Why is it important that it fit their temperament?" She responds with, "Well, when I imagine I'm in the space, I imagine I'm there as the client. And I feel what it's like to be there. Then, if it fits for me it will usually fit for the client, too." This is interesting and undoubtedly useful information about how she decides the room fits. But it is not an answer to the question we asked. Her awareness is "locked onto" what she is doing as she designs, rather than the "reasons" for doing it the way she does, which is what we are interested in exploring at the moment. To clarify the distinction for her, we can explain:"We know that you want the space you design to Ôfit the temperament' of your client. This is your criterion when designing. And what you were just describing is how you know when a particular design fits or doesn't fit. You imagine the room and when you can feel in it what you know your client wants to feel, then you have a possible design. That is how you know it Ôfits' during the design process. It may also be that if you can satisfy your criterion for fitting, that it will somehow serve or help to satisfy some other criterion that is, in a sense, outside of the actual process of designing the home itself. I call this the Ômotivating criterion'; it is why it is important to you that the home you design fits your client's temperament. So for you, why is it important that you design homes that fit the temperament of your client?"Now we have drawn a boundary around what our exemplar has been putting her attention on, identifying it, making it distinct, so that it is easier for her to recognize it as something distinct from other aspects of her experience. Now she knows what to set aside and what to attend to in her experience.

Framing by Suggestion

It is often effective to offer your exemplar suggestions about what her experience might be with respect to the particular distinctions you are asking about. In putting forward your ideas about what is going on in your exemplar's experience, you are doing two potentially helpful things. The first is that it may help your exemplar even better understand the particular nature of the information you want her to be attending to.

The second, more significant effect of making a suggestion is that it gives your exemplar something to respond to. By giving your exemplar a description that is not her experience she can, by contrast, more easily identify what is her experience. For example, our architect exemplar now understands what we mean by "representations," but she is having trouble identifying just what hers are when she is in the midst of developing design possibilities. We can offer:

"Let me make a suggestion, but you decide if it is close to what you do or not. Earlier you were talking about Ômoving through space,' so perhaps what you are doing is constructing an image of a possible room, then seeing yourself moving inside it and getting a feeling about how easy it is to move through it?"

As we describe this, our exemplar will try to imagine it, and will probably notice right away those aspects of the description that do not fit with her actual experience. So she responds to our suggestion with:

"It's true, I do make a picture of the space, of the room. But I don't see myself in it. I'm actually in the room, seeing it as if I was there. And I move through it and really get a sense of whether it feels open, or warm, or efficient, or whatever the client wants the room to be."Offering suggestions is often an effective way of giving your exemplar an opportunity to identify just what is and is not their experience.

Ready to be Wrong

Indeed, offering suggestions can, in a sense, be too effective. So let's wave a small red flag of warning. When modeling, we are as much as possible opening ourselves to who our exemplar is, rather than trying to install our ideas of who they are into them. Two dynamics that operate during elicitation make dangerously fertile ground for the planting of suggestions. The first is that the exemplar will probably be able to imagine to some extent doing whatever it is we are suggesting, and may then conflate the imagining of the experience with their actual experience. The second factor is that most exemplars want very much to be accommodating and helpful. Together, these two dynamics create a potential for suggestions to prejudice the exemplar's experience. Yet we do want to be able to offer suggestions for the purposes of clarification; it can be very helpful for the exemplar. How can we use this tool without hitting our thumb?

In the above example with the architect, we prefaced our suggestion with, "Let me make a suggestion, but you decide if it is close to what you do or not." This helps to clearly set a frame for the exemplar that what is coming is to be taken only as a suggestion, that there is no expectation on our part that what we are suggesting is necessarily correct. We typically preface our suggestions to the exemplar with some such cautionary words in order, as much as possible, to help them maintain a separation between what is being suggested and their actual experience.

But more important than any cautionary words is what must be behind them. And that is that you are always ready to be wrong. By this we mean that any concerns you might have about being right, not wanting to make mistakes, not wanting to look foolish, appearing all-knowing, and so on are all subordinated - if not completely swept aside - by the one thing that really does matter, which is being able to understand the world of this exemplar, this person. Indeed, when you make a suggestion about what your exemplar's experience is, you are offering it with the intention of being wrong, wrong so that your exemplar can more easily get to what is "right" in her experience. (An additional check on inadvertently influencing the exemplar is "calibration," which we talk about in Going Deeper: Stepping In.)

Answering Un-Asked Questions

The exemplar is always telling you something. She may not have answered the question you asked, but she is certainly telling you something. That is, whatever your exemplar offers you will come from her world, and will be a manifestation of how she is operating within the context of the ability she is describing. And so almost every response is relevant. When we asked the architect why it is important that her designs "fit," she answered, "Well, when I imagine I'm in the space, I imagine I'm there as the client. And I feel what it's like to be there. Then, if it fits for me it will usually fit for the client, too." This is not an answer to the question we asked. But it is an answer to one we did not ask, namely, "How do you know when a space will fit for a client?" (And this is a question we would probably ask at some point in the elicitation.)

A useful way to think about this is that the exemplar is always offering you her experience. If her response is not an answer to your question, ask yourself, "What has she just told me about the structure of her experience?" Whatever it is, you can be sure it is characteristic of this person operating within the context of her ability. And it may prove to be useful to you in understanding and, ultimately, replicating her ability.

Though always relevant, this un-asked for information may or may not be useful. For instance, our architect exemplar might reveal, "You know, I'm always tapping my teeth with a pencil or whatever while I'm thinking of possible designs." That behavior is certainly relevant in the sense of it being characteristic of her manifesting her design ability. However, it may not be necessary for us to also tap our teeth in order to design buildings. Sorting out what is essential and non-essential is explored in Going Deeper - 16: Elegance and Going Deeper -17: Generic Models.

* * *

Suppose you have gathered information regarding one example of your exemplar manifesting her ability. You then explore a second example. But this time you get a description couched in different terms (words and phrases). What are you to make of this? Do these differing descriptions actually represent two separate abilities? Of course that is possible. But if you have been careful to draw your exemplar's examples from the same kind of situations, it is probably the case that these two descriptions are different expressions of the same underlying set of patterns. We call this "redundancy," by which we mean that the same pattern or element of experience is being expressed in a variety of ways.

Of course, we use words as a medium for capturing the otherwise hidden experiences of our exemplar. But keep in mind that we are after the structure of those experiences, not the words used to describe them. Words are fluid and often have fuzzy boundaries in terms of meaning. What is more, there is usually more than one word that can be used to denote an experience. In addition, we can express the same thing in many different ways. Beyond this, it is more the rule than the exception that language provides the freedom to represent something in a variety of ways. (As these previous three sentences illustrate.)

Nevertheless, differences in the words one uses to express oneself do convey subtle differences of experience. The question for us as modelers is, Are those differences significant in terms of the structure of experience of the exemplar? To answer this question, we must not necessarily rely on the exemplar's words, but look instead to the underlying patterns those words are intended to describe. And this is the subject of the next Going Deeper essay.

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