From the Archives: Some Common Myths About Change (1990) Part III

Some Consequences of Adopting the Revised View of Change

Introduction from the editor

Here, we lay out how we intervene into systems to create instant, across-the-board change.  When we look for a minimalist way in which to intervene into a state-of-affairs, we find ways to approach the problem in ways it hasn’t been approached before.  We look at the constraints keeping the current situation in place, knowing that they won’t be found in our conception of the situation, but by looking at the situation from “its own point of view,” using as objective descriptions as possible. 

—Ellen

From the Archives: Some Common Myths About Change (1990) Part III

Some Consequences of Adopting the Revised View of Change

A great many advances have been possible within the traditional view of change, in spite of its myths being myths, and many significant feats have been and still can be achieved within the limits of its assumptions. But if we were to ask what would not be possible within the traditional view and what feats could not be achieved within the limits of its assumptions, or if we were to ask what fruitful avenues of approach we are prevented by its assumptions from pursuing, we would find whole universes of possibilities opening up for us which are not precluded by the assumptions of the alternative view we have proffered. 

If we adopt this revised view, no longer need we wait to identify the cause of a problematic situation before we can rectify it. As we turn our attention from substance and forces to form and pattern, fruitful invariances can be detected and the transfer of know-how across contexts can be readily facilitated. Longstanding problems need no longer signify the need for time-consuming solutions; rather they will be viewed as signifying only the longstanding failure of the wrong sorts of solution, and we can stop doing “more of the same” (Watzlawick et al, 1974) and start approaching the problem in ways it had not been approached before. In all this we will be looking at the constraints keeping things from being any different, and we will be seeking to lift these unseen constraints so that things and events can be released to transform themselves in the desired direction. Rather than struggling to bring change about, we will be triggering and steering the natural forces of change by judiciously pulling out the stops. 

Moreover, the revised view of change makes possible the creation of a general science of change, based on an expanded and deepened cybernetics (Stewart, 1989), establishing the general laws of change and the general principles that enable us to bring about desired changes in any area whatsoever by the most effortless possible route. This would to some extent replace but for the most part actually augment and enhance the vast body of specific change tools and techniques evolved from within the traditional view, and we would apply our new-found knowledge of change-in-general to creating the contexts in which those more traditional tools can most readily be made to work. 

10. Bringing Light and Bearing Fruit 

10.1 Our Goals are Irrelevant to the Mechanisms of Change 

The traditional tools (and new and more technologically sophisticated ones are being developed every day, and at an ever-accelerating pace) are by their nature devised with specific reference to human purposes—the manipulations we are seeking to bring about. By contrast, the approach to change emerging out of the alternative view inevitably studies its subject matter only from the point of view of that bit of the universe which we are seeking to change or to influence, without reference to our interest in it. 

This inevitability stems in part from the fact that in this revised view of the universe we begin with the need to account for the otherwise inexplicable persistence or invariance in some state of affairs by reference to the constraints operative upon it, and these will only coincidentally bear any direct relation to our purposes or to our own practical interest in the matter. 

10.2 Video Descriptions as the Touchstone 

We would therefore need to begin by getting a very clear and objective description of the desired state of affairs we are seeking to bring about, that is clearly and unambiguously different from our corresponding description of the existing state of affairs. Each such description—what I elsewhere call a “video description” for this reason (Wilk, 1986; O’Hanlon and Wilk, 1987)—must be as objective as possible and as free as possible from unwarranted assumptions, an ideal that is most readily achieved by selecting a description whose conditions of realization everyone could in practice agree on, irrespective of the presuppositions he personally happened to bring to bear: the description must be at a sufficiently low level of abstraction (from direct observables) that the evidence for its obtaining or not could be supplied on a video recording with a soundtrack.

In other words, the language of the description must be such that we would all be able to agree on whether or not it applied to a given real-world state of affairs, and so it must not include ambiguous abstractions but must be restricted to direct, uninterpreted observables (Wilk, 1986; cf. Quine, 1969 and his concept of ‘observation sentences’).

The unanimity principle we are invoking here, to wit, that any members of the wider language community who witnessed the occasion described would in all cases agree on the truth or falsity of the video description put forward (Quine, 1969), is intended to be every bit as demanding a criterion as it sounds. It is never sufficient that merely all the people who are presently parties to the discussion should agree on the truth-value of the description, because that is a recipe for disaster, the proposed change foundering on the rocks of unchallenged, erroneous presuppositions held in common.

Crawshay-Williams tells the story about Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion (where he lived, and for which he was later knighted), which is near Penrhyndeudraeth, in North Wales. He gave “a broadcast in 1950 on the Welsh Regional Programme which had considerable local interest and was highly appreciated. As a result, Mr Williams-Ellis was informed that he had become ‘world-famous round Penrhyndeudraeth,’” (Crawshay-Williams, 1957, p. 64, n. 1). The universal assent demanded of would-be video descriptions must not merely be universal locally.

10.3 Lucifera and Fructifera

At any rate, given this video description of the desired state of affairs, the next task is to proceed to identify the state of the assembly we are trying to manipulate or influence that—from its own point of view—corresponds to our description of the desired end-state. We must then identify the relevant constraints that are operative, again from the assembly’s own point o f view. 

This latter requirement is, as it happens, an essential defining characteristic of any genuinely scientific approach to things. In a scientific approach, it behoves the investigator to begin by identifying the relevant states of affairs within the realm of phenomena that are of practical interest to him—what Francis Bacon (1620), the founder of modern scientific method himself, called the fructifera (the realm in which our work must bear fruit)—and project them onto the realm of phenomena as they exist in their own right, the realm he called the lucifera (the realm into which our work must bring light).

Only once we have brought to light the relevant mechanisms—the operative constraints—in the realm of the lucifera may we project our findings back onto the realm of the fructifera. 

11. Conclusion 

The common myths of change we have surveyed implicitly put objectivity and subjectivity in all the wrong places. The observer-dependence of change is ignored. Instead, change is given a mythical existence as an objective process occurring in the world. Intervention too is mythically conceived of as being an objective matter. And yet in the traditional, myth­-laden approach, as we have seen, intervention is imbued at every point with the subjective interests of the observer and its shape is determined by the shape of his tools, in true Procrustean fashion.

Scientific objectivity requires recognizing subjectivity where it operates. But more importantly, as we ought to have known since the seventeenth century, it requires that we understand human intervention from the subjective viewpoint of that in which we intervene. The objective understanding of nature, as Bacon’s work was the first to bring out, involves understanding nature from nature’s own ‘subjective’ point of view. 

Bacon’s central maxim was surely one that we can ourselves adopt wholeheartedly as a summary of our alternative to the change-mythologies of the past: “Nature can be commanded,” he emphasized continually, “only by obeying her.” And we could do worse than to make this maxim the basis of all our intervention in the world.

REFERENCES 

Ashby, W. Ross (1956) Are Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Chapman & Hall.

Bacon, Francis (1620) Novum Organum.

Bateson, Gregory (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London: Chandler Publishing Company.

Crawshay-Williams, Rupert (1957) Methods and Criteria of Reasoning, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

The Economist, Corporate Culture for Competitive Edge: A User’s Guide—The Economist Intelligence Unit Special Report no. 1196, London: The Economist Publications, 28th February 1990.

O’Hanlon, Bill and James Wilk (1987) Shifting Contexts, New York: Guilford.

Quine, W. V. O. (1969) “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York.

Ryle, Gilbert (1949) The Concept ofMind, London: Hutchinson.

Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver (1949) The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Smart, J J C (1949) “The River of Time,” Mind LVIII

Stewart, D. J. (1981-2) Seminars on the Physical Basis of Cybernetics, Uxbridge, Middlesex: Brunel University.

Stewart, D. J. (1987) Personal communication

Stewart, D. J. (1988) Personal communication (the concept of ‘underestimating the difficulties of the technical substrate’).

Stewart, D. J. (1989) “A Ternary Domanial Structure as a Basis for Cybernetics and Its Place in Knowledge,” Kybernetes XVIII, 4, pp. 19-28.

Watzlawick, Paul, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch (1974) Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, New York: Norton.

Wilk, James (1986) Knowledge and Know-How: Management’s New Parameters, originally presented at the Second Biennial Ashridge Research Conference, “Positioning Managers for the Future,” January 1987. Privately circulated. 

Wilk, James (1987) How Change Has Changed: Organizational Culture, Justified Intervention, and the Art of the Nudge, originally presented at a conference on “Rediscovering Development: The Future in Practice,” sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Management Learning, University of Lancaster, September 1987. Privately circulated.

Wilk, James (1989) “Culture and Epistemology: Media of Corporate Stability and Strategic Change,” International Journal of Systems Research and Information Science, October 1989.

Wilk, James and Anthony Rumgay (1990) The Change Seminar, original copyright material presented in seminar form by Interchange Research 

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The author is grateful to D. J. Stewart and Anna Ellison for their contributions to the writing of this paper. 

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© Copyright 1990, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted