What is SALTT and why is it called that?
SALTT is about managing your personal focus, about organising your priorities, about learing to recognise what is value generating and what is distracting, and then concentrating your energies on those things that are important to you.
SALTT stands stands for Salience ALignment Training Technology.
Salience is an iteresting word; it comes from the Latin salire – to leap. It is the root of words such as somersault, assault, resilient, abseil and so on. Salience also has the meaning of to leap out, as in things which are noticable, prominent, or important. It is the latter, the meaning of importances and the values derived that I apply it.
Alignment is about having things in a line, having everything pointing in the same direction and supporting, rather than undemining, each other. In NLP, Robert Dilts designed a process called Neuro-Logical Level Alignment which explores how behaviours can match and support “higher” level aspects of the self, such as Identity, Belief, or Values. It is satisfying and useful to be doing the very things that hold importance for you.
Hence, Salience Alignment is about getting to do marshall your skills, abilities, learnings, behaviours, and so on, in accordance with what you find personally significant. And that often involves discovering what is actually significant to you in the first place – which may not have been immediatly obvious.
The idea is anything but new, even if my invented term is. The principles are abundent in ancient scripture, mystical traditions, modern psychology, as well as much of the popular self-help literature. I’ve mused for many moons over the terms salience and alignment to the point where the term stuck in my head and seemed to encapsulate what I was looking for: “salience alignment” became saliently aligned as it were.
Training, in this sense, is about the formation of habits, beneficial ones that is. It is about training oneself to recognise what is important and what is not; then honing and applying the very skills that support those importancies. It is in opposition to being distracted and dragged along by the social milieu. It is about learning to focus, cultivating mindfulness, the awareness of what is truly significant.
Technology is a term that can be applied to pen and paper, but modern digital technology in the information age is becoming ever so much more versitile. The capacity for communication and multimedia experiences are enablers to making the training of habits of salience alignment.
SALTT Solns.
So, I had this conversation with a friend:
- Me: Salience Alignment Technology, or Training, or Teaching or Therapy.
- T: Why not spell it with two Ts? a lot of Silicon Valley companies do that.
- Me: Oh yeh…
Along with that, I have a facination for the chemistry of salt itself. Our chemistry teacher drilled it into us that
acid + base -> salt + water
Whereby salt (tends to be) soluble in water and that why the sea is salty. A solute in a solvant forms a solution: abbreviated to “Soln.” Solution is also taken as being an answer to a problem. The slogan I’ve adopted is a skit on chemistry:
SALTT ⇋ Salience Alignment Methodology + Training Technology
Hence, SALTT Solns.
However it has been pointed out:
- A: Also don’t get the name when there’s an M not an L. Why not SAM-T²
- Me: Yeh, good point – the original acronym seems to have slipped. the AL was meant to come from ALignment
I’ll leave this one to the branding experts when I can afford them.
Years ago, some French friends of mine gave me some Gros Sel de Guerande (course sea salt) – actually they got it from Sainsbury’s, but the minerals gave it a much richer flavour than normal table salt. When I went to France with them, I insisted on visiting the salt marshes where it is harvested. I’d been working on the application for a few months, and was thinking about how to implement salience alignment. It was after visiting the town of Saille that the idea crystalised, so to speak, that this might be of benefit to others.
Why methodology; not method?
It is a point of the purest pedentry. Methodology is the “-ology” of method. Its used to indicate the philosophy of science – the why. It is why science has hypotheses, experiments, measurements, falsification and all of that. In computing, methodology has come, a bit confusingly, to mean method. From taking an idea to distributing some software. I am using methodology here, not so much as the particular methods of salience alignment, but rather as the method of finding the methods. In this sense, the training is not about just following some prescribed recipe, but rather about having the insight into being able to experiment and discover new recipies for yourself. In other words, the methodology is about cultivating a thirst for knowledge of the the whole personal excellence thing.