From the Archives: Realizing Possibilities Part I
An interview from 2010 with Dave Franzetta and James Wilk on the theory behind minimalist intervention and its development
Introduction from the Editor
A decade before James and I decided to create Change to bring our observations and theories about rapid change to a wider audience, Dave Franzetta, who became president of Interchange Associates after years as a client, created the definitive guide to understanding what minimalist intervention is, how it came to be, and the relevant theory behind it. It’s what I think most people who have been interested in minimalist intervention over the years have read to understand what it is, and Dave has agreed to let us share it on Change.
The result of three days of conversation over coffee, the interview covers a lot of ground and will be published in three parts.
In this part, Dave and James discuss James’s academic journey through fields in philosophy and science to answer the question, “Is it possible to pinpoint in advance the smallest intervention into any system that will trigger a flip from the existing state of the system to any other possible state of the system?”
Dave also starts to draw out James’s epistemology (theory of knowledge, truth, and the nature of reality) that made the development of minimalist intervention possible, and that has been informed by observations of targeted, rapid changes.
As always, please feel free to let us know if any concepts stand out for you in the comments – we try to write about the things that people are interested in and have questions about.
–Ellen
Introduction
by Dave Franzetta, President, Interchange Associates, Inc.
You know how it is when you’ve finally achieved some objective after a long time trying—often, you look back and realize that it was just one small thing you eventually did, or stopped doing, or did differently, that enabled it to happen. If only you’d realized earlier, you would have done only that one small thing in the first place and the rest would have followed naturally, saving yourself a lot of wasted effort. Now just imagine the possibilities if you could rapidly pinpoint that one small thing right at the beginning of your effort.
And that’s just what James Wilk’s scientific work has made possible.
But, who, exactly, is James Wilk? Wilk runs an international think-tank, Interchange Research, an independent scientific research enterprise devoted to the study of the phenomena of ‘directiveness’ in nature and in human affairs. The rigorous study of these phenomena— including control, intervention, evolution, adaptation, purpose, complexity, and design—has given rise to powerful new scientific concepts and methods of analysis whose practical applications have come to be referred to under the heading of “minimalist intervention.” A philosopher and scientist, he is on the faculty at the University of Oxford where he has researched and taught for many years.
As for me, after ten years as a client of Interchange Associates, which licenses the commercial application of the Interchange Know-How, I joined Interchange as a partner in that enterprise more than five years ago1. Fifteen years of exposure to the practical application of Wilk’s work, participating first hand in the creation of several hundreds of successful minimalist interventions, has delighted and inspired me, and has changed my way of thinking about the world, and what is truly possible.
Wilk has always stressed that to benefit from these analytical methodologies it is neither necessary nor particularly helpful to know anything at all of the highly technical scientific and philosophical ideas behind them. My experience as a client confirms that view. However, in order to get a better understanding of these powerful and provocative ideas, Wilk and I held a number of conversations over a two-month period earlier this year. What follows is based on the give-and-take of those conversations.
Einstein once said that science aims to make things as simple as possible but not more so. My conversations with Wilk attempted to draw out, in the simplest possible terms, some of these challenging ideas, which Wilk has almost certainly taken further, in theory and in practice, than anyone else to date. My principal concern, however, was to make clear the way in which the ideas themselves give rise to the revolutionary, often startling practical applications he and his scientific and philosophical colleagues have developed.
The Quest
DF: I’m going to start with what should be a simple question. . . James, What exactly is it you do?
JW: Well, the simple answer is, “as little as possible.” That’s what my work is all about: enabling people to do as little as possible to secure their desired end-result.
DF: Well, that may be true, but that’s not the answer I’m interested in. You’ve hardly been practicing what you just preached: Look, you’re an established Oxford philosopher and scientist—I’ve known you for over fifteen years, so I know that you’re also an experienced, practicing clinician, and a longtime business adviser to corporate CEOs. From your Oxford undergraduate days on, you’ve been on a research journey along parallel tracks running through academic philosophy, cybernetics, neuroscience and complexity theory; with a few long stops in the social, cognitive, behavioral and systems sciences; and a detour or two through theoretical biology, semantics, semiotics, and a host of other fields—I have no idea what some of these disciplines involve—collecting impressive academic and professional credentials along the way. And in addition to all this academic work, you’ve been doing clinical things, working on practical applications in industry—and you continue to work in many of those areas of scientific research in one way and another. I can understand why the Oxford University website describes your career as having been less of a career than a meander, but I also happen to know that you were on the trail of something really big that makes sense of all your apparent wanderings. What were you looking for?
JW: Well, you’re right. My meander was more of what is known in Eastern traditions as a “path”— you follow your nose; you go wherever the path leads you, cutting your way through the jungle when you have to, more path-finding than path-following. I was hunting something down. Those fields you rattled-off were the fields in which I had to train and work in order to pursue my chosen quarry—the study of change or transformation in nature and in human affairs. Or to change the image, they were all little more than the venues in which I had to play. Despite appearances of being a polymath, I’m really only a one-trick pony. My field just didn’t have a name before I gave it one.
DF: Which is?
JW: It’s “metamorphology”—actually an old word, but it hasn’t caught on yet. I tend just to talk in terms of “minimalist intervention.” In any case, my one and only field of research all these years has simply been the transformation—in any sphere—from one pattern to another.
That topic is both very broad and quite narrow at the same time. It’s narrow in its focus, broad in its sweeping implications and range of potential applications. In fact it’s as broad as it gets, and it turned out it was also broad in the range of philosophical and scientific problems that needed to be tackled, and solved, as I went along. If no one else was going to address these subsidiary questions (and in some cases it turns out no one else was interested) then I had to do it myself: “a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.”
More to the point, loads of these answers were already lurking there in the literature, in odd places—the fruit of the labors of a lot of brilliant people working in only apparently unrelated areas of science and philosophy, mostly since World War II, but a few going as far back as the 17th Century. I’m currently writing up a potted history of the field over the past 80 years, singling out some of the pioneers whose coattails I’ve been riding on. Anyway, that gave me most of the pieces of the jigsaw, and the rest, the missing pieces, I had to figure out through my own research. That was the really tough bit. So, like the definition of an engineer as “someone who learns whatever he needs to learn to get the job done,” I had to go and answer the specific questions I needed answered first, along the way, putting together the pieces of a very complex jigsaw puzzle, if I was ever going to answer the biggest question of them all.
That question, and as far as I’m concerned it is the biggie, was this: Is it possible—in theory, or more importantly, in practice (and if so, more to the point, how)— to pinpoint in advance, the smallest intervention into any system that will trigger a flip from the existing state of the system to any other possible state of the system?
DF: That sounds like a pretty arcane question.
JW: Arcane? There’s no question in the world more practical! Think about it. If you could answer that question in the affirmative, and work out the “how” part, then it would be possible to pinpoint the smallest intervention, in any situation, to transform the existing state-of-affairs into the desired state-of-affairs. Come on, you can’t get less arcane or more practical than that!
DF: All right, so you go and spend decades in dedicated scientific research, and you have to admit the research itself was in some pretty arcane fields of science, from the layman’s point of view, anyway—semiotics and cybernetics are hardly household names! So after all that, did you find the answer you were looking for?
JW: Eventually. But you’ve got to remember—you said “fields of science.” Apart from the empirical side, I needed, concurrently, to rigorously excavate the philosophical foundations of change, through fundamental investigations in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science, and related fields—because all of this work together soon acquired a single-minded, explicit aim. That aim was to explore the conceptual and empirical implications of a radical new approach to understanding the very nature and dynamics of change.
The results, as you know, were set out in my theoretical treatise, Principia Metamorphologica (based in turn on my doctoral thesis), which I withdrew from Oxford University Press just before it was to be sent out for peer review, because I spotted an error in it. There was an unintended ambiguity in my use of a fundamental, deliberately undefined term, and one that sounds innocent enough: the word was “item.”
As I worked to put that troublesome ambiguity to rights, I started digging deeper at that spot, and there opened up before me a rich new vein of theoretical development I’d never suspected was there. The treatise quadrupled in size as a consequence, and has delayed publication by over a decade so far, but I at last had what I’d been looking for from the beginning.
And the upshot is that this way of understanding change turned out to require what was tantamount to a radically revised view of the very fabric of reality—not to put too fine a point on it.
DF: Let’s cut to the chase then. What have you been doing along with your Interchange think-tank colleagues to explore the practical implications of this new view?
JW: Along the way, while the research has been proceeding, we’ve been developing powerful, practical applications for resolving major issues in the world of affairs through precisely pinpointed minimalist interventions—that is, actions precision-engineered for the purpose, which is the practical upshot of all this theory. But it’s hard to make sense of the practical consequences without understanding at least a little of where my colleagues and I have had to depart from the conventional, “commonsense” view of reality.
The Conventional View of Reality
DF: So what is it that’s so different about your conception of reality?
JW: OK. Let me try and keep this brief. On the conventional view of reality, there is on the one hand, the way things are—how the world is. And on the other hand, there’s the picture in our heads of how things are: our perceptions and misperceptions, conceptions and misconceptions of the world.
According to such a view, we progressively construct an ever more complete, ever more accurate picture—in our heads so to speak—of the unified, determinate, given world—typically thought of as being outside our heads—building up ever better models of how things are, and how it all fits together into some kind of a system.
DF: That’s probably how most people, at least those who bother to even think about it, think about reality.
JW: Agreed. Now, on one variant of this view, as our knowledge of the world progresses, our perceptions, conceptions and models of reality come to correspond ever more closely to how things really are.
But on a second, dissenting variant, we can only construct an ever more coherent model of reality, which we can—at best—assume may more closely approximate to its actual workings, but is just more internally consistent and leads to better predictions.
And on a third, closely related, contemporary variant of the conventional view of reality—an influential variant sometimes called “constructivism”—all that we take for reality is held to be, after all, just a kind of virtual reality in the first place, as it were a simulation in our heads. Just a function of how our brains have been wired. So this third, “constructivist” variant (really little more than a noisier, more rhetorically strident rendition of the second, “coherentist” variant) holds that since we cannot ever sensibly talk about, let alone fathom, how things really are in themselves, because we can never get beyond the world inside our skulls—think of that movie The Matrix where brains are stimulated to evoke a surrogate, virtual world—we can at best just hope for an ever more cohesive, more adequate overall construction or model of reality. The constructivists hold that the best we can ever do is construct a surrogate world that works more satisfyingly for us—a more practicable virtual world—for they think that, strictly speaking, that’s all there is.
And so where the first two “realist” variants put reality out there and quite separate from our pictures and models in our heads, this third, constructivist version of the conventional view puts it all in our heads.
They hold that reality itself is ultimately only here in our heads in the first place; that is, we have a picture or model that is not, strictly speaking, a model of anything we can ever say anything about. They reckon that what we take for reality itself is just a kind of working model we’ve constructed—but that it’s all we have, and we can simply try and reconstruct it as we will, with better or worse consequences, working it into an ever more cohesive and practicable system.
An Alternative View of Reality
DF: I’ll stop you now by saying that’s all very interesting, but it sounds a lot like debating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Also, you called all three of these views “variants of the conventional view” of reality, which implies you are contrasting the conventional view with the view you’ve come to hold.
JW: Absolutely right, on both counts. First, yes it does sound like debating about angels dancing on pinheads. Totally. In fact, despite the vast philosophical literature comprising centuries of debate between these three views and despite the supposedly great differences between them, still from my perspective, quite frankly, the differences are too trivial to be worth bothering about. For all three agree on the essential points, which is where my colleagues and I have found them all to go wrong.
You see, my own view of reality breaks radically from all three variants of the conventional view insofar as, for one thing, our own view puts reality as well as our perceptions and conceptions of it all out there, outside our heads. It’s all out there! The way you take things to be is something out there in the world, not in your head at all! Why on earth did anyone ever think it was? It is the territory-as-mapped-by-you, but a part of the real-world territory itself for all that. Your mapping is necessarily incomplete, only highlighting selected aspects of things while ignoring others, and may be wrong in some details, but it’s out there all the same, and—importantly—objectively verifiable.
DF: So our own, subjective view of things is objectively verifiable, but incomplete; the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. It’s out there, a piece of the real world, not in our heads, but only a piece of what’s out there? Is that right? And if so, so what?
JW: You put it very well. The truth and nothing but the truth, but importantly, not the whole truth. Exactly. But let’s look at the “so what?” Because it’s a whacking great big “so what.”
Consider anything we’re disposed to refer to as “the situation” or “our situation.” Our situation is never a given, but is how we currently situate ourselves, in relation to the factors we deem relevant to achieving our ends, and the resources we believe to be at our disposal. Nor is it simply our own private construction. Not at all. It’s real enough, and in itself it’s entirely independent of how we choose to think about things. Our subjective reality, our perception of reality, our conception of it, is not in our heads at all but is objectively out there with the rest of the objective world. It’s a real live piece of it, which is why it seems so real to us at the time. You can touch it and feel it and observe it; you can count it and measure it.
All the same, your perception and conception of the world, objectively verifiable and real—part of our shared, public, non-negotiable reality—is still no more than a more-or-less arbitrarily selected subset of the rich, infinite possibilities out there in objective reality. Since the subjective realm is a selection from, a subset of, the objective world, it can be—and for the most part usually is—quite objective for all that, though, mind you, that objectivity won’t buy you much! All that objectivity and two bucks and a quarter will buy you a ride on the New York subway. For—and here’s a big piece of the “so what”—even our most accurate, objectively valid conceptions and perceptions of how things are may nonetheless be quite irrelevant and misleading, even dangerously wrong.
DF Whew—that’s a lot to take in. Can you just briefly recap your proposed alternative to the conventional view of reality?
JW: Sure. First, my view of reality rejects the conventional subjective/objective dichotomy and puts our subjective perceptions and conceptions of things out there in the world, open to view and objective verification for what it’s worth (which turns out to be: not much). This account regards our take on the world as being a limited—and often unduly limiting—subset of how things actually are, where both the possibilities and the constraints are infinitely richer than in our limited conceptions of them.
Now that recaps what I’ve said so far, but it’s only one aspect of our alternative conception of reality.
More importantly, at the same time—on our view—reality has, and can have, no unitary coherence. There is nowhere our various accurate descriptions of the world all come home to roost. Reality can never be validly—or even reliably—represented in a nice, tidy, stable, unified picture, whether now or “one day.” To put it bluntly: There is no “the way things are.” There just is no “how the world is,” whether given or constructed. There cannot be, even in theory. If you like, there is no one “reality.” There ain’t no such animal.
Instead there are an infinity of mutually irrelevant and only coincidentally connected ways things are, shifting constantly in response to the questions we happen to ask about how things are. Change the question and you change “how it is”—sometimes radically.
DF: Does that mean that we can never comprehend reality, and that any laws or generalizations which would purport to describe “reality” in a comprehensive manner can’t be believed, because reality literally changes as we change our point of view, a sort of Heisenberg Principle as related to reality?
JW: No, not exactly. On our revised view, we see reality as no more than the sum total of what can be regarded, on objective criteria, to be “real,” objectively valid. And so, for us, reality is at best a random miscellany, comprised merely of the objectively right answers to whatever questions we have happened so far to ask. Reality is a creature of inquiry, a by-product of the questions we ask and answer. And the answers, like the questions, can take an infinity of different and utterly unrelated forms, and need have nothing to do with one another—and, for the most part, do not.
An explanation is whatever succeeds in explaining something to someone, removing some puzzlement about “why this, as opposed to that.” And just about anything can serve as an explanation—contrary to the age-old prejudice amongst philosophers that all explanations must ultimately take the same form, and must all join up into one great explanatory framework. Utter fantasy, grounded in nothing!
But to come back to your question: No, we can indeed—absolutely, positively—come to know how things “really” are in the world outside our heads, the reality behind appearances, but only in respect of any one, given specific question at a time. However—and this is key—we mustn’t expect it all to fit together into a coherent whole, ever, (never, ever, ever!) because—guess what—in reality, it doesn’t. It doesn’t and it can’t, as a point of logic. Not in any possible world.
DF I think I get it. It will never be possible to weave those right answers to our questions into a coherent whole. So “reality” is just the sum total, as you say, of what is “real,” which is just what is the case with respect to the questions we’ve asked so far?
JW: Yes, precisely, it’s just an abstraction from the answers to our questions, and they don’t join up, not even “at the back”! There’s no unified realm where all the answers fit neatly together into some kind of a system man progressively reveals. There’s no “City of Truth” as the medievals thought of it. You might say too that we sort of get the reality we deserve, according to the questions we’ve chosen to ask, or more to the point, have failed to ask, because if we haven’t asked the questions, we won’t have those answers and reality will be correspondingly impoverished compared to what it would have been, had we asked those questions. But what’s worse, and here’s where the shoe really pinches, most of the time we ask the wrong questions.
For example, I was trying to get from Union Station in Washington, DC to a meeting in Alexandria, Virginia and I asked about the times of the Amtrak trains and got the right answer, absolutely the correct answer; so I nearly cancelled the whole trip since there were only a couple of trains a day at very inconvenient times and I’d be marooned in the middle of Virginia somewhere, I figured. What the hell did I know? I know London. I know New York. I know Oxford. But I’d asked the wrong question.
Fortunately, I was eventually spurred to ask the right question when someone naively questioned me, “well why d’you wanna take a train anyway, of all things?” “Well wha’da’ya mean?” If I’d asked how to get to Alexandria by public transport I would have been told at once that there’s a fast Metro running there every few minutes, back and forth. Alexandria’s only a few subway stops away.
Reality is the sum total of what’s real—all the right answers to the questions we’ve so far thought to ask, and those questions are a creature of our particular purposes in asking. Like our purposes, our questions—and in turn, reality—are inexhaustible; and what appears to be real (“No way to get a train to Alexandria at the times I need to go”) may only be a deceptive distraction. Plenty of Metros, guy. Get real.
DF: So you do away entirely with the notion of a fixed, coherent, unitary world with which we have to deal, and you replace it with what?
JW: We replace it with the notion of reality as infinitely multi-dimensional and entirely question-relative, a creature of our various inquiries, never forming any kind of a cohesive system, even for an instant.
DW: Thank you—that’s the summary, the recap, I was looking for. Now I’d like to move on.
JW: Me too, but not so fast, I’m afraid. It gets worse again. Way worse. For on our new view of reality, the world is also, therefore, “a symposium of points of view,” to borrow Eddington’s apt phrase. For there will at any instant be a quite different, equally objective reality corresponding to each of an infinity of different points of view, in respect of each and every distinct question that can be asked.
DW: Does that mean “anything goes,” depending on your point of view?
JW: No, not at all! In fact, our account leaves no room at all for any form of relativism—this is taken care of by the strict question-relativity of all assertions and by our own set of more severely demanding criteria for the truth of any assertion. You see, in the first place . . .
The “Museum Theory,” Techniques and Expertise
DF: Hold on a second. If I am following all of this correctly, then on your view of reality, my own perceptions of “how things are”—call it my own “Little Reality”—are, in fact, a very real, objective, publicly verifiable part of the “Big Reality,” because I’ve selected them from the menu offered by Big Reality. So, does everything in what I’m calling my “Little Reality” just depend upon how I look at things? Are there no rules or laws that govern how things are or how things work?
JW: That’s an interesting question, but one that sounds to me (forgive me) as if it is still mired in the conventional view of reality; and it can only be asked from within that view. I recall you referred earlier too, in one of your questions, to laws and generalizations, and I think you asked whether all this means we can never say anything at any level of generality, and I never quite got around to answering you. It’s not that there are no laws describing “reality,” no invariant patterns (of course there are); and it’s not that we cannot generalize validly (clearly we often do), but rather that the desire to categorize and label every aspect of our reality and try and make it all fit together into some kind of a unified whole—a system posited as constituting the underlying structure of what we’re dealing with—is the very impulse that leads to problems in the first place.
DF: Can you try that again? I’m not sure exactly what you’re getting at.
JW: I don’t think I put that very well, but let me un-garble that for you. Hopefully not just re-garble it. You see, the conventional view not only posits a systemic reality (given or constructed)—a determinate, unitary, law-governed, hierarchical cosmos of wheels within wheels—“nature,” “the world”—but the conventional view posits a world in which there are supposedly to be found various fixed classes of phenomena, hierarchically related: biological phenomena, and the phenomena “of” (“belonging to”) geophysics or quantum mechanics or psychology or economics or accounting, and so on and on. As if all of reality, including human life and all our human engagements, and everything with which scientists or civil servants or managers have to deal, came ready divided-up into fields, corresponding to the well-worn classifications used in dividing up (say) university departments, the labels on corporate organization-trees and standard industry classifications, and so on—like the signs on supermarket aisles or department store floor guides or what have you. According to this conventional “museum theory” of reality, everything bears or could bear a label stating what sort of thing it is, what class of phenomena it belongs to, what department it therefore belongs in, and so which specialty and set of expert tools is required to deal adequately with it.
DF: But hang on, I don’t call a plumber if a fuse blows and my lights go out. I call the right expert for the job, the one who knows the answers to the sorts of questions I want to answer. Why is the use of labels and categories so inherently limiting? Don’t they help us deal more effectively with the perceptual bombardment by which we are assaulted every minute of our waking lives? This approach generally works, doesn’t it? It gave us the Yellow Pages, for a start.
JW: Sure it works, but only up to a point. What if your fuse only blew because an RCD [residual current detector] was thrown when water from a leaking pipe started dripping on an electrical connection? Or what if it wasn’t dripping from a leaking pipe but from a roof tile that was dislodged, letting rainwater in? You’d need a roofer, not a plumber, let alone an electrician.
But let’s back up a step: Any given aspect of anything, on the conventional view, is supposed to be addressed with the appropriate class of specialist knowledge couched in generic techniques and principles, each based on an understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships found to obtain in that particular domain. This only means that each class of problems has already been implicitly defined as the class of problems amenable to a given class of known generic technical solutions: “This is a financial problem, a marketing communications problem, an engineering problem, a culture-change issue, a strategic issue, an operational re-engineering problem”—and so we name our complaints after our favorite remedies. This change to be brought about is essentially a change of type “X,” that is, the type that is achieved by using the available “X”-tools.
DF: What’s that old saying about experts? “If your only tool is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail.”
JW: Sure, but it’s even worse than that, because, as I like to point out, the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more this error is only compounded!
DF: Wonderful. But a scary thought too!
JW: It’s as scary as it gets. Nowhere does this “museum theory” of reality operate more insidiously and destructively than in practical affairs where we glibly bandy about our favored mid-level abstractions—as if we were talking about something real. Yet, if I’m right, it turns out that, fortunately or unfortunately, the whole “museum theory” of reality is no more than a fairy tale, and in fact a dangerously limiting one.
DF: What fairy tale are you thinking of? The Emperor’s New Clothes?
JW: That’s the one! And it’s scary precisely because who would second-guess the experts? The Emperor’s New Clothes indeed! Experts only know what they know, and no more.
A lovely story comes down to us from Pliny the Elder about the painter Apelles, fourth century B.C.E., in which a certain “expert,” a passing cobbler, pointed out correctly that Apelles had made an error in his depiction of a shoe-latchet in one of his paintings. Well, Apelles gracefully accepted the criticism and swiftly rectified the fault with a few deft brushstrokes, whereupon the cobbler went on to criticize the way Apelles had painted the wearer’s legs! The indignant Apelles rebuked him with the immortal words, “Cobbler, do not judge above the sandal!”
The cobbler’s expertise made him competent to judge of the anatomy of sandals, but not the anatomy of anything higher. Yet the expert is irresistibly tempted to extend his presumption of expertise to judge matters superficially adjacent to those in which he can rightly claim to be an expert, even where, as in the case of the legs above the sandals, there’s no legitimate connection beyond, at best, bare propinquity of subject-matter, if you’ll pardon the pun. The expert knows the right answer to the question, but what if it’s the wrong question?
DF: But again, throw away conventional reality if you must, but what about all the scientific progress of the last few hundred years? Do we throw that away too?
JW: Rest assured, it’s left quite untouched. Bear in mind, the conventional, superannuated view of reality we reject—this notion of a unified, systemic reality, hierarchically arrayed in classes of phenomena forming the domain of separate disciplines—was not arrived at through a process of scientific discovery! It was simply dreamt up, in pretty much pre-scientific days, by those good old boys in powdered wigs, tricorn hats, knee breeches and frock coats, and by their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, before we knew even the most insignificant fraction of what we know today.
Yet it remains the official Reality, the one in which almost all of us live and move and have our being—or at least imagine we do. Nor, if the historians of science are to be believed—and their research on this point is by now pretty incontrovertible in my view—the conventional conception of reality contributed “not one jot or tittle” (as they used to say in those days) to any scientific advances. It was quite neutral, just some charming wallpaper. Science would have been, and is, quite safe without the fairytale illustrated on that wallpaper.
In any case, irrespective of whether we view this reality as given for us to discover, or constructed by us according to how we’re wired, this fairytale, bureaucratically-organized reality—a determinate, systemically interconnected, hierarchically-ordered, rule-governed, toolbox-friendly, deterministic universe of matter and energy, object-and-forces, cause-and-effect—is something my colleagues and I have come to jettison altogether in favor of the very different reality we have been laying bare in our philosophical and scientific work. But science can carry on happily, indeed more happily, without the outdated Baroque picture hanging on the wall above the conference table.
From cause-and-effect to flux-and-constraint
DF: Are you saying that science can still trace the laws of cause and effect, one question at a time, without having to buy into the Baroque picture of a unified, hierarchically-ordered City of Truth, as they called it?
JW: Well, not to be too pedantic but it was actually medieval thinkers who called it that, though the powdered-wig brigade, bless their cotton breeches, took up that old and comforting view, or brew, old wine in new bottles, to console themselves after the senseless anarchy of the Thirty Years’ War. Yet for all that, the universe now appears to be more anarchic than orderly, on our conception, although richly veined with pattern all the same.
Next: Working “directly with pieces of the real world” to create change by releasing constraints
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.
© Copyright 2009, 2022 David Franzetta and James Wilk
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Dave has been a partner for 17 years and has been exposed to Interchange Research’s work for 27 years as of 2022.
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