John Grinder

John Grinder was an associate professor of linguistics at UC Santa Cruz when he began collaborating with Richard Bandler in the early 1970s. His background in Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar gave the modeling project the linguistic precision that became the meta model - a set of questions for recovering deleted, distorted, and generalized information in client language. The Milton model, NLP's hypnotic-language toolkit, was also primarily Grinder's linguistic contribution.

Grinder co-authored the foundational NLP texts with Bandler through the 1970s. After their partnership dissolved, Grinder developed New Code NLP with Carmen Bostic St. Clair, an attempt to address what he saw as ethical and methodological problems in the original NLP. New Code emphasizes unconscious-led change, multiple description, and a more rigorous modeling methodology. Grinder continues to teach internationally and is widely regarded as the field's most theoretically rigorous figure.