In preparing this address, naturally the first thing I did was look again at the conference title: "Modeling Excellence in an Increasingly Complex World." And I thought back to when I was a kid, and recalled that it seemed pretty darned complex then, too. We were diving under chairs to protect ourselves from atomic bombs, and crowds of white adults were screaming at a little black girl trying to go to school, and we were fighting the communists everywhere, and flying people to the moon. All in all, seemed pretty busy to me then, too, As a senior in high school, I was a contestant in the Bank of America Science competition. I was one of five students from various schools. They gave us a topic - "What is the most important scientific advance in this century?" - and then we had 15 minutes to discuss it among ourselves before appearing before the judges to debate and respond to questions. In the first 10 seconds of that 15 minutes of preparation, my fellow nascent scientists agreed among themselves that atomic energy was obviously the most important discovery. Everybody knew that. I said nothing. I was too busy watching my brain connecting up my epiphany neurons. When we appeared before the judges, my fellow "debaters" launched into violent agreement with one another regarding the various uses and abuses and futures of atomic energy. Once they had exhausted themselves, I cleared my throat and begged to differ. Actually, I announced, the most important scientific discovery was genetics for, ultimately, It is genetics that will determine who is deciding how that atomic energy is used. And that, as they say, was that.

Well, 35 years later those synapses are still connected. But now they have some company, the connections are richer. I had the right idea way back then, but now I realize that I had the wrong content. Because there is a "who" that will determine how genetics is used as well. And it is that "who" that I want to talk with you about today.

Now, I'm not going to describe a methodology for doing modeling. There are many such methodologies. My colleague, Graham Dawes, and I have ours, codified in the Experiential Array, and there are many others, both within the field of NLP and outside of ft. They all have different things to offer us, and they all have something to offer us. And none of them is the right methodology, and in time, each in its turn will be plowed under to fertilize the growth of now methodologies, methodologies that we can not yet imagine. No matter how wonderful any of these methodologies may be, none of them works on its own. It takes people to bring them to life.

What I am going to suggest to you today is that modeling has a tremendous contribution to make to society, and even to our future as a species. That this contribution goes much deeper than the application of modeling to promote personal excellence. With modeling we can come to grips with the essences of human experience. And by applying modeling to understanding the structure of experience at that level, it can provide both conceptual and practical tools for addressing some of the larger problems within and between societies. And beyond even that, I want to float the idea that if modeling as a conceptual and a practical tool were to spread, that it would bring about a fundamental change in being human. "Who" always matters.

I'm sure that every public address in the last six months has included some reference to the events of September 11th, and this one will be no exception. But I hope to depart from the stance that is usually taken in one, fundamental way. Almost all of them note that on September 11th the world changed. Well, I do not agree. After the attack, mystified Americans were asking a very good question: "Why do they hate us?" Four months later, I am watching a car commercial that ends with an SUV tearing across the landscape while a voice intones, "Remember, America is still the greatest country in the world." That is not a different world. That is more of the same old world. Yes, we are waiting in longer lines, strangers are x-raying our shoes, and businessmen are making plans for national Identity cards In the United States. But the world views that now conceive of such things were there conceiving of such things long before September 11th. The world has not changed. Instead, the world - as it has been for a long time - is becoming more apparent. I don't need to run through a list of seemingly Intractable and recurring ills. We all know that list.