What is SALTT and why is it called that?
It 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.
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.
Tom: 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.” The slogan I’ve adopted is a skit on chemistry:
SALTT ⇋ Salience Alignment Methodology + Training Technology
Hence, SALTT Solns.
Why methodology; not method?
It is a point of 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.