Figured It Out

Introduction from the Editor

In this article, we continue our theme, begun last week, of the comparative ease with which the allegedly impossible can usually be achieved if we approach things with the right epistemology and with sufficient thought and determination.

We usually get confused about this pivotal point about “impossibility” because we tend to conflate actual ends with our initial choice of means.

Even the laws of physics need not pose any insuperable obstacle in technological matters or, even more so, in matters of practical affairs. Here we explain why, and how.

—The Editors

Figured It Out

In last week’s edition of Change, we looked at how surprisingly easy it can be to “achieve the impossible” as it’s quaintly called. 

We saw how change, in the new epistemology, involves an all-or-none flip from one pattern to another, where the problematic pattern is the only current possibility given the constraints in place, all else being impossible, and where our minimalist intervention, once implemented, ensures that the desired pattern will instead be the only thing possible given an alteration in that set of constraints, while at the same time ensuring that the problematic pattern is now rendered impossible in its turn.

By making use of this constraint-based notion of “conditional impossibility,” we can design an intervention that will flip any situation from the existing state-of-affairs to the desired state-of-affairs instantaneously, with nothing in between.

So Much the Worse for the Laws of Physics

Now on the new approach to change, we say that so long as we are not violating the laws of logic or of physics, anything else is possible. Yet sometimes, as in wartime, or in a highly competitive marketplace, even the laws of physics may need to be amended if that’s what it takes to innovate to win.  

The eminent Harvard mathematician and scientist Norbert Wiener, a pioneer of cybernetics, was secretly tracked down by agents from the British War Office in 1940, during the Blitz, and was asked to solve an intractable scientific problem. He was told that the War Office needed the result as soon as possible to fend off the deadly attacks on London.  Wiener assured them that that was out of the question because it had already been established that any such solution would entail, he insisted, nothing less than “changing the laws of physics!” 

The visitors’ faces turned ashen and you could have heard a pin drop. Wiener mused a moment in silence, and then asked how long he’d got.  They said they needed the solution within six weeks, preferably earlier.  Six weeks?!? What?!?  Well, after all, he thought to himself, there was a war on, lives were being lost every day for want of a solution, and so he continued to ponder deeply in silence for a few moments and then replied, “OK, I can do it; but you’ll need to give me six months.”  

Well, the laws of physics would never be the same again. Winning the Second World War required many of the cast-in-stone laws of physics to be rewritten.  And we only remember this particular story today because Wiener succeeded, and in well under the six months he asked for; as I recall, in the end, he managed it in not much over six weeks. 

Wiener didn’t let the laws of physics get in his way. Instead, determined to find a way to achieve the allegedly impossible regardless, he figured it out. So sometimes, even a known physical impossibility-according-to-the-laws-of-physics must fall under the heading, “I wouldn’t let that be the problem.” There is always another way around if you just change your assumptions.

Wartime is known to be a great spur to innovation—you zealously challenge every single assumption of yours or other people’s as if your life depended on it, because it might very well.  The vital importance of national security in peacetime, and of victory in times of war, not to mention the war chest available to tackle the apparently impossible, means that chucking out and rewriting the laws of physics gets to be almost a regular occurrence in that context. 

Just before Thanksgiving last year (2021), the main headline of the Financial Times¹ read:  “China missile fired during flight by hypersonic weapon confounds US.”  A sub-headline read, “Pentagon caught off guard.” China had just successfully tested an orbital spacecraft, launched by a rocket and capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, which can breezily evade all American “Star Wars” defences by flying over the South Pole instead of the North Pole and can fire a nuclear missile at any stateside target they please while flying undetectably and untouchably at more than five times the speed of sound, a technological advance “no country has previously demonstrated,” though the US and Russia had dreamed of developing such a weapon for years.  

What caught my eye was the third line in the article:  “Experts at Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, remain unsure how China overcame the constraints of physics…”  Clearly “remain unsure,” here, is a hilarious euphemism for “wtf?”  Before the test, any of Darpa’s physicists would have been able to assure the Pentagon top brass that such a capability was effectively impossible, indeed precluded by the laws of physics.  Afterwards, they knew it was not only possible but actual:  the Chinese had figured it out.

The Chinese missile story reminded me of my second-ever successful organizational minimalist intervention design of my career.  It was a case where the client, an engineering firm, the second largest, knew that—as all their big customers were telling them when they finally asked—if they could only manufacture a certain device to be less than 15 cm thick (instead of the industry-standard minimum of 45 cm) they would instantly get all their business and take the entire worldwide market, because such an innovative product would revolutionize architectural design. 

But our client’s top in-house experts insisted, in response to the CEO’s challenge, that that was impossible even in principle because it would be in violation of the laws of physics.  

The key part of the intervention was sending along to the industry trade fair the next month someone completely unknown to industry insiders, in the role of a ‘secret shopper’. Their task was to take aside the top sales rep at each and every stand, conspiratorially, and ask them in hushed tones, “Hey, so what’s this rumour we hear that you’re about to launch a 15cm blahdiblah?” and everyone they asked—scores and scores of them—replied in much the same way:  “ridiculous,” “impossible,” “can never happen,” “precluded by the laws of physics,” “you don’t know what you’re asking,” “you’re obviously not an engineer,” and so on.  

…Except for two of the clients’ smallest competitors—both were university spin-offs—one of whom said, “Let me have your details, because we’ll be launching it in February of next year—now what sort of quantities are you looking for and what’s your timeframe?” while the other one said, “who told you that?  hahaha! that’s such old news now! Why, we’ve had a further breakthrough and we’ve now actually got it down to just 10 cm and it will be on the market within six months!” 

Upon reporting all this back to the nay-saying engineers, they were flabbergasted, and said, “Shit! [or less polite words to that effect]… Er…Well, the only way they could have [bleep] done that is if they did x, y, z, blah blah blah…errrgh, damn them!  Now why the hell didn’t we think of that?”  …At which the CEO went as ballistic as China’s missile. “Impossible, eh? Don’t gimme this laws-of-physics bullshit, build me the damn things, max. 10 cm, and I wanna start taking orders for ours within 60 days!”
 

Impossible?  Says Who?

What is preposterously unrealistic, indeed impossible today transforms the worldwide market tomorrow, …or shifts the geopolitical balance of power (though this time not in our favour, alas), ….or who knows?—what is absurdly impossible today could cut global infant mortality in half within two years, or could simply, affordably and uncontroversially reverse climate change within at most five years.  

Now who’s to say otherwise?  No one.  Not a single living soul.

No one in the world can possibly, even in principle, know enough to say it cannot be done.  Which is the very point.  In Josh Billings’s phrase, “The trouble ain’t that folks are ignorant. It’s that they know so much…that ain’t so.”  But the wider ramifications of the nature of impossibility don’t just stop there, and in fact only get bigger.

Interchange Research had a longterm client, a leading financial services institution, beset by long-running intractable problems in the area of risk, costing it many billions of dollars annually.  Having secured Board approval to do so, the CEO had just instructed the leading global management consulting company in the field to embark on a multi-year consulting assignment with an agreed minimum retainer of $50 million dollars per annum as a “floor”—it was understood by both parties that the actual annual fees billed would run to a figure very much higher.

The project was to involve over 400 specialist consultants, and was headed by the consulting firm’s internationally eminent Senior Partner who led its Risk Management and Internal Control consulting practice for a decade. The assignment was estimated by the Partner to take five to seven years to complete, and the corporation budgeted accordingly. The total budget for the consulting project, including travel and expenses, as already approved by the Board, was well in excess of a billion dollars in today’s money.  

Interchange was told nothing of any of this.  However, having already been working with the think-tank for some years in a previous role, the CEO, new in the job, who had just commissioned the billion-dollar consulting engagement and had just got Board approval for it, figured that before actually embarking on such a costly, protracted, highly disruptive, time-consuming five- to seven-year consulting project, it seemed worth giving these guys a shot, at least, at solving the whole problem in four hours, in one hit, with a minimalist intervention, however unrealistic that might have seemed—even to the CEO who was by then a veteran of many scores of seemingly impossible MI big wins.  

Unsurprisingly, though, this time, after four hours Interchange and the CEO were nowhere near an intervention design, and so, alas and alack, the session had to be resumed after lunch.  After barely eight hours in total, but before heading off to dinner and cracking open the champagne, victory was finally declared. Together, the client and the think-tank had figured it out. The design of a minimalist intervention had been completed in detail and the problem was deemed by the CEO to have been all but solved, and implementation was underway by the following day.

Three weeks after the MI design session, the CEO cancelled the billion-dollar consulting contract on the grounds that the transformation had already been achieved, the problems solved, results validated, and there was nothing more remaining to be done.  Not 400 top guns, nor 7 years, nor a billion dollars, but just two senior analysts from Interchange Research, charging barely lunch money for a fee, and it was all done and dusted within a fortnight. 

The minimalist intervention was so cool it acquired a name within the client company.  Its name was “Fred”—which was turned into an acronym which stood for something clever, though I forget just what. But what it did certainly stand for was, “I couldn’t care less if it’s impossible—just figure out how to do it and get it done at once.”  It would be many years before any of the Interchange team had any inkling of the scope and cost of the massive consulting engagement that had been cancelled because the problem had been solved in a day. 

The Wider Ramifications of the Impossibility of Impossibility

This case illustrates, in a single example, several of those “wider ramifications” of the nature of impossibility to which I adverted earlier.  Here are a few of them:  

First, impossibility is unknowable because it can only be judged post hoc, as it concerns what are in principle unknowable potentialities—unknowable because, while the abstraction “potentialities” tricks us into thinking we’re talking about some reality, some thing, in the present, we are actually talking about something hypothetical in the future; and as the Arab saying rightly has it, “the man who purports to foretell the future is lying, even if he gets it right.”  

Second, the so-called acknowledged experts are usually of no use at all in telling us what is or is not impossible.  Not only this top consultancy who got hired and fired, but all of their main, equally illustrious competitors, would likely have agreed with their conclusion and probably were quoting even more than a billion dollars, because the firm selected had an even larger, longstanding relationship with the client corporation which they needed to safeguard, hence their easily winning when the job was put out to tender, whether their quote was the lowest or not.

But all the management consultancies—from McKinsey, Bain, Booz Allen and BCG to PWC, KPMG, Deloitte, EY and all the rest—were working (and even today still do work) from virtually identical sets of assumptions, from which their erroneous conclusions followed, just like in the “holiday leave” example detailed in “Why Creating Lasting Change Need Only Ever Take you a Few Hours—Part I,” where tens of millions of dollars were spent on a series of failed, super-high-tech management consulting solutions over a period of 7 or 8 years, whereas the minimalist intervention designed by one of our team took a couple hours to design, 20 minutes to implement and cost nothing, and resolved the whole problem instantly, effortlessly, and permanently, with no technology required whatsoever. 

Different kind of expert, different way of figuring things out, whole different kind of story of what is impossible or not.

We’re back to the old NATO training manual’s point that just because it’s humanly possible to push a pea up the side of a mountain with your nose does not mean that this is the most effective way of getting it there or that the exercise is worth undertaking in the first place in pursuit of your greater objective. 

We couldn’t be messed with peas and noses, and the mountain was too high to bother with too, as we were neither management alpinists ourselves nor had we any suitable equipment for scaling it.  Instead, we had a completely different conception of what was impossible or not—in the first instance because, in our world, in our decades-long experience with thousands of cases and no real exceptions, virtually any problem can be solved in four hours, give or take, if it can be solved at all. 

We came armed with radically different kinds of tools, radically different kinds of methods, radically different assumptions about change and, most important of all, a radically different epistemology—in short, a radically different approach to figuring things out.  

It may have sounded preposterous even to our longstanding client to think we could pull this one off, but they knew they only had to wait a day or so to find out if our kind of pea-less, nose-less, mountain-less “impossibility busting” was once again the best path forward.  They could afford to take an attitude of, “I’m from Missouri—you’ve got to show me,” because they’d be shown within just a few hours if it could be solved on the spot, if indeed the problem was solvable at all.

What’s impossible or not depends on who you ask, and that’s because impossibility is purely a function of knowledge and know-how, frame and context, and above all is a matter of one’s tacit assumptions that one erroneously takes for the rock-solid reality of the world out there—because that’s just what tacit assumptions look like:  part of the very furniture of the world.  

And if the history of science teaches us anything, it’s that the universally received opinion among the world’s scientists at any point in time, on almost any issue, is usually not just wrong but turns out in time to be 180 degrees away from the truth as science advances.  That’s what science is, reaching for an unattainable asymptote of unforeseeable realism, where every theory, every formulation, is of heuristic value only, and every victory is more-or-less short-lived. The bigger the victory and the shorter-lived it is, the faster science advances.  And as we know, science can go backwards too, and often does.

Which brings us to a third ramification illustrated by the Fred example:  epistemology is everything.  The whole difference between the Official View, let’s call it, and the Interchange view, the MI view, is, in a word, E2—we are operating from a new epistemology, E2; everyone else is operating from the old epistemology, E1.  That’s where differences in assessment of what’s impossible or not can be so utterly humongous—tantamount at least to the difference between a Roman chariot carrying an archer, and a Chinese hypersonic orbital missile-launcher carrying a nuclear warhead via the South Pole.  

Accordingly, our clients generally have no idea what kinds of problems and challenges to bring to Interchange.  How on earth can they possibly know what we, with our radical new E2 epistemology and MI technology can pull off in four hours?  They cannot. 

In this case, our particularly brilliant and successful client had already had plenty of experience with countless huge problems being solved and transformations achieved in four hours each.  Previous experience of our work was the only thing that provided a ready-made ‘plausibility structure’ giving advance credence to our counterintuitive approach and otherwise extravagant-sounding claims, thus enabling the client to regard a four-hour MI session as, at least, a perfectly realistic alternative to an expensive, inherently risky, highly disruptive, billion-dollar extravaganza staffed by 400 high-level specialist management consultants that could end up taking seven years. 

So this third ramification is that the question of impossibility, or what’s realistic or not, is also the crux of the commercial or “marketing” challenge that this radically new approach to change through Minimalist Intervention has always faced and still faces:  namely, you’ll believe it when you see it, but you won’t get to see it until you believe it’s possible that you’ll see it if you try. 

Some potential clients miss out because they make the mistake of thinking, “Well, I can see that MI can work for some enormous problems and challenges, but I know that my own challenge is just too big.” The classic billboard advertisement for Guinness for decades was, “I’ve never tried Guinness because I don’t like it.”

Interestingly, MI and its demonstrated and readily demonstrable dramatic success can provide an unimpeachable part of a plausibility structure for E2, our new epistemology, but not the other way around. You come to embrace E2 because you see it in action in MI and then you can never see the world the same way again. Your sense of what is possible or impossible is altered forever, and soon, with it, your whole epistemology.  Reality will never be the same for you again.  And all at once the world becomes a much more hopeful and far less depressing and frustrating place.

“You Say I’ve Just Asked You to Do Something Impossible—Okay, and Your Point Is…?”

As the philosopher and psychotherapist Larry Friedman points out in an important 1999 paper, “Why is Reality Such a Troubling Concept?”²,

human meanings are part of the objectively real world, [and] when the physical world has been drenched in human meaning and personal significance, it sprouts affordances that would otherwise be overlooked.³ ...Just as we know a physical structure better if we can walk around it and handle it, so human realisticness may reflect the ability to sample human meaning from several affective and cognitive perspectives. A generous sampling would reveal more potential for richness than would an impoverished one….⁴ 

Now to form a realistic assessment of anything, in the everyday sense, when we exhort people to “be realistic,” as we discussed in “Achieving the Impossible” last week, usually involves looking at the challenge from all sides, sizing it up, carefully considering it from all points of view, and making a reasonable bet on what’s doable or not, what’s worth pursuing or not.  The more points of view, and the broader the set of scenarios and alternative assumptions considered, the more reliable your assessment.  But it can never be complete. 

For you can only consider anything from all the points of view you already know about, or have thought of considering. That’s where Chinese orbitals, or Edison’s lightbulbs, or Columbus’s egg all come in, where every innovator’s perspective comes in, or indeed anything new and significant in the world.  Your own or anyone’s assessment of what’s possible or impossible, however apparently thorough and well-founded and well-attested by a legion of others—redoubtable experts all—is still at the mercy of the first person to come along and look at the thing with fresh eyes, a different perspective, different assumptions, a different knowledge-base or different know-how.  

And—hey—fasten your seat belts, doors to automatic and cross-check as soon as someone comes along with a whole different epistemology, for in that case, all at once, absolutely everything you ever thought you knew is suddenly up for grabs.  What you regard as impossible, and what you take to be possible, are constrained in the first instance by your limited knowledge but ultimately, and most severely, by your epistemology.  Here the old teeshirt slogan comes to mind:  “Be realistic, plan for a miracle.”  

Finally, consider what happens in every single MI session. First the scientific advisers don’t bring any new topic-specific knowledge to the session.  They work only with the client’s existing knowledge and know-how, knowing that even apparently impossible problems have, if we know where to look, at least 5 or 6, maybe as many as 7 or even 8 hundred thousand perfectly good solutions, and we are free to be picky and choose only those that can get to the desired free-fall “by Thursday” and therefore can use only the client’s existing knowledge and know-how.  This is the principle of utilization—we can utilize what’s already here, immanent in the problematic situation, as the raw materials out of which to construct a solution (a principle to which we’ll return in later articles).  

Second, we shift the client’s perspective on the problem just enough for it to be no longer a problem at all, but something immediately doable.  And to unpack this last notion a little bit—Third—in order to bring to bear the requisite know-how we simply take the client’s existing know-how from one context, or indeed from a few different contexts, and get them to apply it within the problem context.  

This shift, always obvious with hindsight, is close to the very essence of innovation—transferring know-how across contexts. The innovation itself, blinding flashes of the obvious, epiphanies—like change—don’t take time to occur. Rather it all happens in an instant, and while a lot of hard work by the client over many years might have come first, prior to arriving at the innovation, had the obvious been seen earlier, a lot of that hard work could have been avoided altogether. So transferring existing know-how across contexts is also one way to look at what happens in every single MI session. And when could anyone ever think it impossible to transfer know-how across contexts?  

So, have you been tasked with doing something critically important but which you happen to “know” to be impossible?  

Don’t sweat it.  

Figure it out. Then go get it done.  

Oh, I see, ahh, the problem is that achieving it would actually require violating the laws of logic or of physics?  

Again, never mind.  There’s always a way.  Figure it out.

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© Copyright 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

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1. Monday, 22nd November 2021, p. 1

2. Friedman, L. (1999) Why is Reality a Troubling Concept?  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 47:401-425, p. 422

3. ibid., p. 419

4. ibid., p. 418