From the Archives: Realizing Possibilities Part III

The method of minimalist intervention design

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Jul 29, 2022

Introduction from the Editor

In Part III of Realizing Possibilities, Dave and James discuss the method of minimalist intervention design. James outlines the iterative processes of “defining” the outcome—using questions to guide the client away from the problem and the assumptions that come with it, and towards a specific definition of a desired outcome—and “designing” the outcome—identifying catalytic communications aimed at changing the context for the players involved.

–Ellen

Defining the Desired Outcome

DF: The way you've been describing using questions to shift reality sounds almost like magic. And I remember from my time as a client, it sometimes felt like magic. Can you be more specific about the process of asking those questions to pinpoint the minimalist intervention that will flip that reality?

JW: Well, basically, first we have to begin by providing the client—the problem-owner—with expert analytical guidance in defining a desired outcome really worth achieving, in place of the outcome that has initially been framed in terms of unintentionally obfuscating abstractions.

The initial framing of the problem or challenge presented by the client is, in our experience, virtually never relevant to the design of an optimal resolution for achieving the outcome desired. We almost don’t care about the problem—it can be a distraction. We’re interested in constructing a solution, and an optimally effective solution will never (and I have proved this from first principles), will never ever be relevant to the problem it solves.

If the client’s map were of any use—and that’s all the presenting problem is, a map of some situation-we-know-not-what-it-is—and the problem-as-presented were really worth thinking about, the client would have solved it by now. So we choose to ignore it, and not waste time over it. Instead of asking about the problem, we must therefore begin by dispersing a conceptual smokescreen consisting not only of the proffered abstractions embedded in the problem-definition, but also consisting of tacit assumptions and implicit metaphors, maps and models of what’s going on, and we begin by clearing all this away, thereby getting down to something real and concrete on which to work, stripped of unnecessary accompaniments, systematically filtering the complexity as we go.

DF: Could you explain the specific process you use for helping the client to define a desired outcome in a bit more detail than that?

JW: Happily. It’s an iterative process that, as you well know from your client days, may take up to a couple of hours, in which we deploy our analytical methods to assist the client to do the following:

first, to unpack abstractions into their concrete, real-world equivalents, to be described in unambiguous, empirical terms that do not go beyond what could in principle be verified by a video recording with a soundtrack (what we call “video descriptions”);

second, to reveal and relegate all operative tacit assumptions, bearing in mind that if an assumption is tacit it does not appear to be (certainly to the person operating from that assumption, and to those who happen to have silently bought into it), doesn’t seem to be an assumption at all, but seems, rather, merely to be part of the undeniable, factual furniture of the world. They take it for objective reality itself. Having revealed and relegated these tacit assumptions, we assist the client in eliminating all the now-explicit assumptions clearly seen to be false, and to flag the remaining ones as open to question and testing;

third, to reveal and relegate “mental models” of what is going on, what he or she is dealing with, how it works, and what is required to achieve the desired results, along the way again discarding those that can be seen to be mistaken or irrelevant; and finally

fourth, to filter the complexity of the situation, defining in precise terms, with clear, verifiable criteria, the outcome actually required, eliminating all the unnecessary “nice-to-haves” and “thought-we-needed-to-haves” and so on.

Filtering complexity instead of mapping it—our own approach to managing complexity—is itself an extremely complex subject, and we have developed a sophisticated, scientific methodology for rapidly filtering the complexity of idiosyncratic, real-world situations without the need for maps or models.

Which is important for all the reasons we discussed a few minutes ago—model ships and all that.

DF: So does your approach to filtering complexity emerge naturally from your revised view of reality, as your explanations so far would seem to suggest it would, and if so, how?

JW: Absolutely it does! And the best way to explain this is by considering how we go about creating the “filters” when we are working with an actual client. The client seeks to find a way to get from the existing state-of-affairs to the desired state-of-affairs as swiftly and cost-effectively as possible, with a minimum of risk and without undesired side effects. However, since there is no such thing as “the way things are,” there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as “the existing state-of-affairs,” except by contrast with the rigorous, concrete video-description of the desired state-of-affairs.

To get a better feel for this idea, imagine that you go for your annual medical check-up and a complete battery of tests, and you ask the doctor at the end of it all to give you a full report on your present physical condition. She is not going to give you an exhaustive descriptive account of every aspect of your anatomy and physiology, is she? Nor is that what you were asking for. She will simply tell you what needs to be put right: “your blood pressure is slightly high, you’re about 7 pounds overweight, and you do need glasses, despite the laser surgery.”

And so it is with “the existing state-of-affairs.” We use the concrete description of the criteria for the desired state-of-affairs as our filter to pinpoint the relevant corresponding aspects of the existing state-of-affairs, how things are now by contrast, and only with respect to this one very specific question. This is a far-from-trivial undertaking, fraught with hazards—I’ll make no bones about it! It is critical that the desired state-of-affairs should be a desired present, not a desired future—it’s got to be how events would be “free-falling” right now, today, as we speak, if no intervention were required—and the existing state would be, well, not something static, but an account of the corresponding, highly patterned, current, dynamic free fall—again shorn of tacit assumptions, implicit models and metaphors and blurry abstractions.

Getting from the Defined Outcome to a Designed Outcome

DF: All well and good, but it seems that you still haven’t done much, by this point in the analysis, other than to define more carefully what things would be like if the “problem” were resolved. How do you go about resolving that problem situation and actually delivering the desired outcome?

JW: As you rightly point out, all that we have as the fruit of our labors so far—albeit no small thing, and, mind you, rarely optimally achieved naturally without such methods—is a rigorous, scientific description of the precise shift required: a defined outcome. But so far, that’s all.

However, as you correctly imply, the really challenging part is then to take this defined outcome and convert it into a precision-engineered, designed outcome: one that is ready for immediate implementation in the form of one or a few small, catalytic actions—typically a few precision-designed but otherwise seemingly ordinary, natural communications (a conversation in an elevator, a couple of emails or phone calls, a question put to one or two key executives, or what have you) that’s sufficient to transform the whole situation overnight and shift things sustainably from the existing free fall to the desired free fall, and lock it all in place.

In the first phase of the work I described a moment ago—those four iterative steps to define an outcome—the client constructs an objective with expert help from us. By contrast, in this second phase of the work, to design that outcome down to the last detail, my colleagues and I now take over: and we design the minimalist intervention itself with help from the client.

So the roles reverse in a way. Before, the client defined the outcome with expert help from us; now, we design that outcome with help from the client, using their expert navigational knowledge of their territory. So from this point onwards it’s our hand on the drafting-pen, not theirs. Sure we rely on the client’s intimate navigational knowledge of the territory, as I said—the organization, business, industry, people, politics, and so on along with all the most minute, “irrelevant” idiosyncrasies of the place and the players, as well as the client’s own preferred management style and ways of doing things. We have to. For it is the client who will be implementing that intervention and taking full responsibility for it, and it is the client who must convince us that the intervention designed should deliver the goods without risk of mishap; and the client must be 100% confident in implementing the minimalist intervention designed.

DF: It seems like the design of a minimalist intervention to deliver the desired outcome could be a very elaborate process. How do you go about it?

JW: Well, in this second phase of the work—designing the precision-engineered catalytic communications—the filtering process gets even more technical, actually vastly more technical, though only from the analyst’s, not from the client’s point of view. The rich fabric of reality, which I referred to earlier as consisting of an infinity of perceptions and communications of all the players involved, an infinity of possibilities and constraints, again most of them local and idiosyncratic—the whole damn shooting-match is now subjected to rigorous, scientific analysis, which is the form the filtering now takes in this “phase two,” let’s call it. Though I’m artificially separating-out these two phases, which in practice are more intertwined than otherwise.

So this rich fabric—which is, I repeat, precisely what the executive (I mean every executive, everywhere, all the time) is always, always, always really dealing with, beneath all the comforting abstractions—this kind of fractal interference pattern, resulting from the interaction of innumerable perceptual and communication loops, constraints, purposes, agendas, framings, highly patterned flows of information and flows of imparities, and so on, above all consists of a kind of dance of the semiotic context-markers: those aspects of communication that at every point signal to the players what context they are in. Change them or obliterate them and you instantly transform the context.

Like Ali Baba’s wife, when she learned a mark had been placed on Ali Baba’s tent to single him out for assassination, she ran round putting an identical mark on all the other tents. Bingo. It is here, in identifying these context-markers, actual and potential, that we bring to bear a sophisticated, rigorous technical armory—originally derived from cybernetics, complexity theory, semiotics, semantics, the behavioral sciences and a host of other scientific disciplines—using the whole shebang to analyze this rich, kaleidoscopic, multidimensional tapestry, tracing all the salient threads to identify the key ones to pull in order to shift the whole pattern to the desired one.

DF: That sounds fascinating. Can you “lift the hood”, so to speak, and explain how that part of the process works?

JW: I’ll try. This involves a bunch of further steps, again in an iterative fashion:

first, we pinpoint the intervention point (or points) where the right catalytic intervention would flip the whole situation from the existing to the desired state, in one fell swoop, not gradually;

next, we create an initial, broad-brush intervention design, sketching, in principle, the outlines of the minimalist intervention required to catalyze the desired change and lock it in place;

then, we turn that abstract, notional design into a highly detailed, idiosyncratic, high-precision intervention design, taking into account all of the relevant—but at first seemingly irrelevant—idiosyncrasies of the organization, the people, the politics, and so on; and

finally, in collaboration with the client, we co-design a turnkey minimalist intervention, ready for immediate implementation, and delivering within days or weeks an outcome that would otherwise have taken months or years or would have been impossible to achieve at all.

DF: I’m certain that a “turnkey minimalist intervention” is what any of your clients is really hoping for. It’s what I was always looking for from my work with Interchange.

JW: That is a critical point. When I say that we design outcomes, I don’t mean that we simply produce the equivalent of the architect’s elevation drawings—corresponding to what I earlier called helping the client define the desired outcome—one that will meet the client’s specification. Nor do I mean merely the architect’s blueprints—the pinpointed intervention points and broad-brush intervention design; nor even the detailed construction drawings the builders will work from—the fine-grained, idiosyncratic intervention design.

Rather, I include as well all the fine-tuned changes that in house-building can only be worked out on-site in the course of the builders’ work, when, for example, they have to be told by the client that that study door cannot open inwards the way it’s being hung, because a potted plant must go in that corner against the wall (nowhere else will it have the right amount of light for that delicate species without blocking the natural light the client needs over her desk, nor can the door be hung from the other side either to open inwards, for such-and-such a reason, etc.), and so it turns out that the builder determines the door cannot currently open outwards either because of certain other constraints he knows about, which therefore means moving a structural bit of the wall, necessitating moving a girder over here, until before you know it, significant changes have had to be made throughout the entire structure of the building! This is the all-important “co-design” step, the very last stage in the process, where yet another set of intervention design skills and methodological manoeuvres comes into play in the analysis.

An Iterative Analytical Methodology

DF: From the way you describe this process, one might think that the process could take weeks, even months to complete. Yet, when I was your client, it never took more than one—or, at most, two—three-to-four hour sessions of my time to produce any of the hundreds of minimalist interventions we worked together on. How do you get it all done so quickly?

JW: It wasn’t always so fast. Years ago, when we were first developing the methodology, it used to take months of analysis in some cases; but now, as you said, it frequently takes no more than a matter of three or four hours of the client’s time, and we very often complete the entire process, both the first and second phase, in a single, analytical consultation. Moreover, it’s typically only one person we ever need to meet with.

Now, as I think I said earlier, the steps to define a desired outcome are iterative, as are the second set of steps to design that outcome down to the last detail. In fact, the two sets of procedures overlap and the intervention-design steps get meshed back into further iterations of outcome-definition, because that definition gets continually refined and perhaps even radically redefined as the analysis proceeds.

Nonetheless, within a remarkably short time the client’s preferred problem-definition has shifted almost unrecognizably away from the originally proffered problem definition, where it started.

Which is yet a further reason why, for us, in common with numerous contemporary systems approaches, the particular presenting issues are totally irrelevant, topic-wise, and are just as irrelevant as the identity of the particular business or industry. We almost don’t care. In our work, every situation is treated as utterly unique, and the keys to an optimal solution invariably turn out to be entirely idiosyncratic. I’ve never designed the same intervention, the same solution, twice. Even if the problems as presented sound superficially identical, the solutions never will be. Nor are effective solutions ever topically relevant to the problems they solve, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

DF: But that still doesn’t explain how you can do so much in what seems to be so little time.

JW: Remember: our work is about filtering complexity, not modelling it! You can divide the universe in two, at worst, with each question—is it in this half of the universe of possibilities (e.g. “bigger than a breadbox”) or the other half (“smaller than a breadbox”)?—and it’s a poorly selected question that only enabled you to rule out half the possibilities.

So just do the math: If Problem A is 100,000 times more complex than Problem B, what’s that? Maybe 2 to the 16th or 17th power? So it should at most take only another 17 questions to filter the complexity of Problem A, compared to problem B, and at, say, 3 minutes average per question and answer, that’s only what, an extra hour? Less! With decent questions, maybe only 15 minutes longer.

DF: That seems hard to believe, considering that your clients tend to be C-level executives. They didn’t get where they are because they didn’t have much to say. Or maybe I’m just projecting my own behavior onto all of your clients.

JW: Bear in mind, all we are doing with our questions is filtering. The client is not instructing us about her business. So, we can move really fast because we squander no time learning about the client’s business or organization or issue at the client’s expense. Since the client knows all that already, our learning about it will not add to the total amount of knowledge in the room!

Besides, we already expertly know our way around all the detailed matters with which the intervention-design will be concerned: the rich communicational fabric of patterned contexts and context-markers, flows of information and imparities, constraints, behavioral patterns, and so on, which the Interchange think-tank has been devoted to researching for many years, building on hundreds of thousands of man-years of work by other researchers in the scientific disciplines on which we’ve drawn in constructing our theory and methodologies.

DF: How then, would you characterize the nature of your practical work with clients?

JW: The Interchange methodologies themselves serve as a bridge between our alternative take on reality, along with a large body of scientific theory, on the one hand, and on the other hand, whatever specific concrete situation the client brings for resolution on any given day. The methodology is thus not a “technique,” or management process or problem-solving protocol at all, or anything like it. Nothing so simple and lineal as all that. It’s a framework for tapping into our scientific knowledge to filter the complexity of the client’s situation by asking questions and responding to the answers with further questions— resembling a kind of scientific detective work.

The methodology merely guides us in knowing what we’re looking for at each juncture, and, above all, knowing what questions to ask to elicit the next in the emerging series of clues. And we only use a fraction of it on any given case. Like a psychoanalyst who has spent decades absorbing a huge body of technical theoretical material, not all of it applies to any given case let alone any given analytic session, and she only evinces her vast knowledge by sitting quietly behind the couch and saying “a-huh” and “tell me more about that.” Or a corporate lawyer for that matter. Same applies.

DF: What is all of this supposed to feel like from the point-of-view of one of your clients?

JW: However technical the analytical process may be from the professional’s point of view (for it is the same, after all, with the psychoanalyst’s or attorney’s work), from the client’s point of view it is simply a matter of responding candidly to the questions asked. Like an interview!

DF: It certainly never felt like a job interview to me. More like an interview with my physician or accountant or attorney.

JW: Obviously. From the client’s point of view, it is a matter of walking in the door with an ambitious, mission-critical business challenge deemed impossible to achieve within the desired timeframe or impossible to pull off with the available resources; or else walking in the door with a daunting, intractable issue that has defied all previous attempts at resolution (and defeating armies of well-meaning and knowledgeable consultants along the way)—and then walking out, four hours or so later, with a compelling, unique, readily-implemented idiosyncratic resolution, custom-designed from scratch down to the last detail, and delivering immediate and bankable results—a precision-engineered, designed outcome, good to go.

DF: James, thank you very much. Do you have any final words to leave me with?

JW: The 18th Century philosopher and scientist Lichtenberg said that if an angel were ever to tell us how the world really worked, it would sound to us at first like, “2 + 2 = 13.” I hope I’ve been able to make these ideas a bit more accessible for you.

DF: You certainly have. Once again, thank you!

About the Author: David Franzetta

Dave Franzetta, President of Interchange Associates, Inc., is based in Orange County, California. He has been working with Interchange since 1994, co-designing scores of successful minimalist interventions addressing a wide range of business issues, and immersing himself full time not only in the practice of minimalist intervention but in the science behind the analytical technology of Interchange Research.

Holding degrees in science from Michigan State University and management from Farleigh Dickinson University, and with a professional background ranging from science and naval intelligence to accounting and finance, Franzetta joined Interchange Associates Inc. following a distinguished, wide-ranging 30-year career with Prudential Financial, spanning corporate finance, insurance and reinsurance, franchise management, risk management and investment management, with a reputation for effective leadership in business transformation, including the dramatic turnaround and leadership of what became one of Prudential’s best performing operating companies.

Franzetta served as Comptroller of Prudential Investment Corporation and later as Chief Accounting Officer of Prudential Insurance, and also as Chief Financial Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, President and Vice Chairman of several of Prudential Financial’s operating subsidiaries.

A guest post by

David Franzetta

A seeker of wisdom, wherever it happens to be, and it’s Everywhere

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