Into the Unknown

New Year, New Direction

Jan 19, 2024

Introduction

Happy New Year!

We wanted to start off 2024 with an updated, more concise version of one of our most popular posts, though one from so long ago that many or most of our newer subscribers across the thirty or so countries where Change is currently read may not have come across it until now.

For it provides some principles that readers of Change may be able to put into practice straightaway in their own change efforts.

The rapid, across-the-board transformations through very small interventions that we have been referring to throughout our past 70 posts is only possible when the change is co-designed with Interchange Research advisers in a Minimalist Intervention (MI) session.

However, there is one aspect of our MI work, a prerequisite to its getting off the ground in the first place, which has far wider applicability: creating a space in which we can leave the known behind, enabling thoughts to emerge that have never been thought before.

Understanding a little bit about the actual experience of embarking on an MI session should give you some clues to how you can create such a space yourselves.

Rapid, across-the-board, large-scale change is only possible if we can first escape our habitual ways of thinking, redirect our endeavours and venture into the unknown. To create new patterns, we need to explore what lies outside the current ones.

In Minimalist Intervention, we generate new thinking in specific ways that are unique to each case, and enable the client to proceed in a new direction. It’s a process of steering thinking out of the known and into the unknown, and from there into the creation of something new, a new direction for our endeavours.

Outside the context of Minimalist Intervention, we can also propel our own thinking into the unknown in a more generic way, by combining provocation with openness.

Going beyond patterned thinking almost always leads to something fruitful.

Go beyond your current ways of thinking and you can expect the unexpected.

Why not kick off your New Year in a totally new direction? Why hang around the known when you are free to rethink and explore the unknown? You never know what you’ll find.

–The Editors

Into the Unknown: New Year,
New Direction

One key to Minimalist Intervention is considering every problem as unique and one-off, and to consider every solution as equally a one-off. Indeed, over nearly four decades in the C-suite creating thousands of major transformations, we’ve never applied the same solution twice.

And part of the experience of Minimalist Intervention is that almost every time the solution, or the tiny catalytic shift required to quickly create the supposedly impossible transformation desired, seems obvious once it has been found. In fact, that’s how we can be sure we’ve found the best one.

The solution can even seem so obvious that clients and practitioners alike can suffer from amnesia—completely forgetting what the problem was to begin with, or that there was a stressful, costly, intractable problem in the first place, a phenomenon we’ve observed consistently in our research for the past 48 years.

To address the amnesia, at the start of a session we document the problem’s initial formulation along with the best possible options for solving it, as well as the likelihood of solving it. Comparing where we eventually end up four hours or so later helps the amnesia to lift.

The best solution is rarely obvious—perhaps never.

While an epiphany is a blinding flash of the obvious, if it were obvious beforehand it wouldn’t have been an epiphany. And if it were not obvious afterwards, had it not suddenly become self-evident, it would not have been considered an epiphany in the first place.

While genuinely new thinking throws light on what had been there all along, it was something no one had ever noticed.

It’s not as if the client had overlooked something obvious. The discovery had been obvious to no one beforehand, but afterwards was obvious to all.

All our work since 1985 has been with seasoned, successful top managers, highly skilled at weighing possibilities, evaluating risks and so on, and who had already deployed the very best advisers and consultancy firms to no avail.

The clients and their advisers weren’t missing anything they shouldn’t have missed. And yet, as the novelist Bernard Malamud said, “If you’re on the wrong track, every station you come to will be the wrong station.”

Part of the problem is that it is impossible for anyone to know in advance which aspects of a situation are being looked at in the wrong way. Even the simplest situation has countless such aspects—more than the number of stars in the galaxy, and therefore countless possible solutions. In MI the client is launched at warp speed into that galaxy of unarticulated possibilities—the unknown.

That’s what’s so great about the unknown: the solution we haven’t got is far less likely to be found amongst the known—our comparatively tiny existing stock of solutions. We all tend to behave like the proverbial drunk who looks for his lost house keys under the streetlamp, not because that’s where he dropped them but because that’s where the light is.

Only a client who owns the problem, is determined to solve it, and who has been intimately involved in the situation being described for some time will even be aware of that galaxy of relevant aspects in sufficient detail, and revealed through close interrogation.

Nor can they convey this information, even to themselves—for it would take more than a lifetime to do so. Left to their own devices, they cannot conceivably know in advance what might or might not be salient to catalyzing the change they seek.

This detailed tacit knowledge of the territory can therefore never be compassed by any outside adviser. Our MI questioning process is aimed at filtering this tacit knowledge for which we must rely on the client as a resource, someone who knows the territory intimately.

We filter out the seeming infinity of possibilities by looking, for example, for where the solution is not to be found. As in a game of Twenty Questions (where we ask, “Is it bigger than a breadbox?”), with each question we are dividing the universe in two and filtering.

The problem owner, the client, is the one person disqualified from solving their own problem. If they could have solved it they would have solved it by now.

So don’t look to them for the answer, of all people! Why would you ask for directions from someone who admits they’re lost? The client—and probably their whole organization and all their advisers, sometimes their whole industry—have been on the wrong track all along.

Yet the client’s knowledge is still invaluable to the process of finding a solution because only they know, tacitly, all the ins and outs, and only they will be in a position to judge whether the “obvious” solution that emerges in a session, the epiphany, will work or not. Only the client has access to this galaxy of numberless descriptive possibilities, not us; we simply know how to navigate that galaxy swiftly and surely to home in on the target.

The client’s tacit assumptions make up the biggest part of the known from which we need to extract the client. They are stuck in a reality where “there’s no there there”—where the solution they seek is definitely not to be found.

And their assumptions are creating a dense fog making it impossible for us or anyone even to see any of the galaxy of possibilities. And so an MI session can look like giving the client the third degree. Everything is ruthlessly examined and questioned, assumptions are rooted out, exposed to the light of day, and, if unwarranted, consigned to oblivion.

While we rely on the client’s deep, detailed tacit knowledge of the problem space including what is really going on, what will work, and what won’t, the client relies on us to provoke her into new thinking, to challenge her tacit assumptions, and to be confident guides into the unmapped and unthought, knowing that we have the methodology to find our way back to a better solution.

Minimalist Intervention is about dancing with dissatisfaction—the existing state of affairs—to turn it into true satisfaction—the whole of the desired state of affairs achieved in one hit. It’s not about providing an adequate programmatic solution to reach somewhere that’s “at least an improvement.”

We never know what we will end up creating or what form the solution will take, because we don’t yet know what the reality is that we need to shape, and the form the solution will take is not up to us or the client, rather it’s up to the dynamics of that reality.

By leading the client from the handful of known possibilities to the galaxy of unknown, alternative possibilities and then filtering for the smallest, easiest, cheapest, quickest, most risk-free and most effective one, we turn the impossible into the obvious.

When we’re working on doing the impossible in an MI session, it’s at one level a game of provoking the client to think of something completely new, something he hasn’t thought of before, and to stay in that space for the whole time so that we can deploy our methods to analyze the situation afresh.

We are listening only for new knowledge being brought into the room. We try to keep the rhythm of an MI session that of an interrogation, steering the client’s utterances, and stopping him in his tracks whenever, in answering our questions, he’s saying something he’s said or thought before.

There’s no time for him to share old thoughts, because we know we have only a few hours to make something new happen overnight that the client thinks impossible. We are seeking an entirely new frame, idiosyncratic to the situation, in which the problem is no longer a problem, or where there is nothing stopping this “impossible” change from taking place straightaway.

We unpack vague abstractions into the concrete, idiosyncratic details to which they refer. For as we interrupt, we guide. We create new pathways to draw out new thoughts.

We also need to create enough openness to ensure a space where things don’t have to be straightforward, rational, and understandable—figured out, largely taken care of, and under control—because if they were, we wouldn’t need to be involved.
.

A Space Where Nothing is Figured Out: Oxford Revisited

This process of creating new information in the room, provoking new thought, is in the first place facilitated by the form of an MI session, which we adopted from the outset of our decades of scientific work developing the proprietary scientific MI methodology of Interchange Research, even in its earliest version, “MI 1.0.”

The form of a session evolved in part from the time-honoured practice of provoking intellectual growth through the one-on-one tutorial system of undergraduate education at the University of Oxford.

As Ellen Arkfeld put it, someone who, like me, had been through the process as an undergraduate, the unique Oxford tutorial system at its best forces you

to think a question all the way through, and when you do that you leave the place where you were satisfied with your answer because it was the first thing you thought of and it seems to fit. You’re forced into the space where nothing you think is right.
You watch yourself change your own mind. You realize how often in your life you go confidently with your first take on things just because it’s there.
You become less attached to that first thought. You realize that just because a thought comes first doesn’t mean it’s the truest. You learn that generating knowledge is literally a creative process—not collecting or finding something, call it Truth, which exists only waiting for us to discover it, but generating any number of new things that we can objectively verify as true.
Then you take all of this personal struggle, not an un-frustrating process, the best your mind could come up with that week, and expose it to someone whose sole purpose is to tell you everything wrong with it.

The hour-long philosophy tutorials I’ve conducted at Oxford over the past two decades almost invariably took place once a week in a cozy, ancient room panelled in dark oak, and hung with small portraits of centuries of scholars. In the Autumn afternoon, sunlight streams in through stone mullioned windows, looking out over the churchyard to the fine Norman church.

The student and I take up our places at one corner of a huge antique, dark oak table some five foot wide and 20 foot long, which dominates the room and is surrounded by heavy, dark oak chairs, the other ten remaining empty.

The student reads out his handwritten essay, which I have never had sight of before, his “lecture” punctuated by my frequent interruptions. It’s a game in which the student is there to defend himself, and I am there to attack at every opportunity.

In this game he is all seriousness, of course, because so much is at stake for him, while I am only playing. It is how the philosophical training is conducted. I am to disport myself like a freeform martial arts master or a fencing master training his pupil.

No matter how ingeniously the student manages to put his finger on the crux of the issue, adopting an ingenious position, handling it with nuance and arguing for it compellingly—still, I am there to be critical, challenging, sceptical, even pedantic, ever on the attack.

I will raise objections or make countermoves to which I can see he has left himself open and force him to tighten that knot. And I have the right at any point to interrupt with a demand for a concrete example. So he has to be ready, knowing he’d never get away with an unmoored abstraction or cliché.

One of the biggest learnings comes from the fact that if the student is defeated over a particular point, and knows he was defeated, by the rules of the game he has to relent, surrender, concede the point to me, adopt it as his own, and quickly amend his thinking and argument accordingly.

What he learns from his intellectual fencing lessons more broadly is when to stop and withdraw at a seemingly insuperable obstacle, ease off and retrace his steps, or when to press on regardless, pursuing his course with steely determination, oblivious of the response and just devise some way to surmount it.

All essential stuff for anyone who thinks for a living, wouldn’t you agree?

For example, what CEO, manager, entrepreneur, policy maker or financier does not need such skills?

And even when secretly agreeing with him, like a fencing master I will challenge him anyway, testing his resolve, arguing the other side, and my student either has to give way and retreat or press forward, parrying my attack and sometimes delivering a counterattack of his own.

If he gives up too easily, I will coax him back into the tussle, suggesting a counter he might easily offer to my own counterargument, one that was already there, implicit in his argument so far.

If a student is boring me, I make sure he soon knows about it, for there’s no point in wasting this precious time. I’m looking for bold moves, adventure, originality. Don’t waste my time telling me anything I already know. Thrill me with a new discovery! Don’t just dawdle in the familiar.

And don’t rush in like a fool over the same old ground already well-trodden by the angels. Nor is there any room for throat-clearing, waffling, or trotting out commonplaces. I’d say to some students, “You’ve already been reading for four minutes now; please wake me up when your essay starts.”

I listen intently not only for content but for tone of voice. And I am always watching the student’s face attentively for signs, on the lookout for the places where he looks or sounds unsure of what he is saying, the shadow of doubt crossing his brow. “Are you sure?” “Really?” Even if I don’t have a clue what it is that he is evidently unsure about!

But at the same time I am trying to listen sensitively and sympathetically, hanging on his every word, trying to stay openminded, non-judgmental. After all, I am also insatiably curious, eager to spot even the germ of any new and original discoveries he might have stumbled upon.

Some particularly gifted students, after a year of Oxford tutorials with me, would become increasingly skilled as a philosopher, to the point where he would by the end of a tutorial on a given topic, not only come up with a solution he had never thought of before, but one neither I nor perhaps anyone else had ever thought of before either—entirely new thinking, ideas new to us both, new in the world—that’s what we’d uncover through the interaction. And that’s what I am after. That’s the Oxford tutorial ideal.

Like an MI session, an Oxford tutorial is a kind of dance, and if all goes well, out of the whirlwind of the dance something new in the world emerges. I can’t dance without a dance partner and I’m asking the student to dance or fence with me. En garde!

So one of my rules is that you can’t take notes during the tutorial, because you can’t dance and write about the dance at the same time. Feldenkrais used to have the same rule for his classes, and tell his students, “You can’t take notes, but when the class is over, take what you’ve learned and go teach it to someone else.”

When all goes well, the student learns that there is never just one right answer. What matters is arriving together at a place where he no longer had the philosophical puzzlement with which he’d set out, a position he is prepared to defend and knows how to defend. But it also has to be a place where I am unable to find obvious objections which he hasn’t already covered off.

Through this process, over the course of the year, the best students acquire mastery. By the end of the year he should be impossible to persuade but easy to convince. He ought to be able to do philosophy and to tackle almost any philosophical problem like a pro. He will have learned above all how to spot bullshit in any arena of life and challenge it—his own as well as others’.
.

The Form of the New

It is in the Oxford philosophy tutorial process that an extraordinary alchemy takes place. No one knows for sure quite how the magic happens— it is not a rational process—and yet, if all goes well, the magic happens every time.

This same ritual, or something very like it, has been re-enacted like this for over 800 years, day in, day out during term time. The method of teaching itself has passed this way from teacher to student over centuries, even in the very room where my student and I would work together at Oxford amongst the darkening oak panelling and weathering stone mullions.

Yet for fostering creative and critical thinking, for allowing new ideas to come into the world, this 800-year-old method remains cutting-edge in the field of higher education, and is known for producing more than its fair share of leading scientists, philosophers, statesmen, inventors, scholars, parliamentarians, writers, financiers, entrepreneurs, captains of industry and heads of state.

This extraordinary style of one-on-one learning under the guidance of an expert in the subject represents a radically different kind of education from what most university graduates have ever experienced.

The weekly essays Oxford undergraduates produce are not formally assessed or graded, and Oxford undergraduates sit only two sets of exams, essay exams—once at the end of their second or third trimester (“Prelims” or “Mods”), and one (“Finals”) just before receiving their degree, and the class of degree they are awarded will depend on the results they achieve on these exams, mainly their results in Finals.

When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, my philosophy tutor, the late Justin Gosling, told me off for attending lectures—“You haven’t got time for that! You need to work.” I have always given much the same advice to my own students, though unlike me, most of my students have still preferred sitting in lectures to spending yet more hours of their already long working week wrestling with a problem on their own in their handwritten philosophical notebook.

Those who have been through the Oxford tutorial system, particularly in this classic, undiluted form which I have been describing and which my students at Oxford get to experience, will recognize what I have been talking about.

Only around 3,300 undergraduates each year will leave Oxford with a degree gained principally if not exclusively through learning in the way that I have described. Yet this remarkable institution constitutes a unique set-up for creating and innovating together, and one potential model for co-creation of any kind, with far wider applications.

Nor is it any wonder, then, that the Oxford tutorial should have influenced the form, at least, of the encounters in which the magic of MI takes place.

For I began developing the first rudiments of our proprietary MI methodology for catalyzing rapid change within my first few months after leaving Oxford. And at that time, the only two models of a professional relationship which I had experienced firsthand in any depth were the Oxford tutorial, on the one hand, and my experience of the training analysis on which I had just embarked as I prepared to train as a psychoanalyst. All three very different methods share in common that they involve taking a leap into the unknown to emerge with buried treasure.

The source of the MI practitioner’s questions and interruptions in an MI session is worlds away from the source of the Oxford tutor’s (or a psychotherapist’s) questions and interruptions, and are uniquely generated by Interchange Research’s Minimalist Intervention technology. For this closely guarded proprietary capability, or indeed anything even remotely like it, only exists within Interchange Research—no one else does this because no one else can.

Nonetheless, the classic Oxford tutorial is not a mere analogy, for a lot of the client’s experience in a session is very close, insofar as you are being asked questions to which you do not have an answer, where no one knows and you can’t find out, but where an answer can be devised, improvised, which will stand up to every challenge.

And everything the client in an MI session says, like everything the Oxford student says in a tutorial, is only said in order to be challenged by the Interchange adviser.

There are other vital differences between an MI session and an Oxford tutorial besides the source of the questions. As the student is writing and thinking throughout the week between tutorials, they may find themselves thinking, “I know there is an answer that makes sense of the question—‘Is time real?’ ‘How is weakness of will possible at all?’ ‘Can I know anything of the true nature of the world outside my own head?’—the existence of the question implies an answer, which encourages the student to find the answer himself, or at least an answer that satisfies him and can be defended against all objections.

Even compared to the ever contentious arena of philosophy (let alone questions in engineering science or physiology!) we don’t have that kind of advantage in other areas of our lives—we don’t have the comfort of knowing that an answer must exist, which gives us the courage to carry on.

In this respect, in MI the situation is even further removed from an Oxford tutorial. We know we are tackling an impossible problem that has defied all previous attempts at solution, and we are looking for an answer that will be implementable immediately and solve everything all at once.

And throughout our shared journey through the unknown with the client, as we filter the galaxy of possible avenues, neither of us has any idea where we are headed or if we will get there, yet we always get there at the end of the four or five hours an MI session lasts. In the meantime, however, the uncertainty can be overwhelming.

The client can rarely, if ever, see the point of a question aimed squarely at their blindspot—who can?

But that can be frustrating and takes the ability to trust, to leave egos at home in pursuit of the greater corporate good, and to let go of their favourite assumptions, not least assumptions they are not even aware of making because they are tacit and part of the wallpaper, taken as just the way the world is—it cannot possibly be any other way, can it?—though the world is not in fact that way at all.

The process also requires of the client the courage to create, to invent something new that their peers are not already doing.

Getting the client to dance with us, enabling us to play our own part in the dance, effectively requires the client, like the tutorial student, to do his or her thinking out loud, responding to our questions especially if they don’t know an answer, neither showing off what they know nor teaching us, nor attempting to give us information, nor repeating things they have said before, even if only to themselves.

They can’t be taking notes during an MI session because when they are taking notes they aren’t dancing and the dance has to be put on hold. They can’t be in their head. They need to let go and play with the parameters of the problem as they engage in the to-and-fro of question-and-answer.

As in an Oxford tutorial, our ability to deploy our MI methodology in the first place is predicated on having a cooperative interlocutor who follows such rules as these that we have laid down to enable them to play their part in the interaction.

If both are trying to lead, it won’t work; the session conductor needs to lead, since of the two of them only he knows how this dance is danced in such a way as to yield an obvious solution to a seemingly impossible problem, or a way of doing something out of this world that no one has ever done before.

There must at the same time be real reciprocity. The MI client cannot ever just retreat and say ‘ok I give in’ any more than the student can in a tutorial. For again, only the client can judge whether a solution we have come up with together will solve all of the problem or not, and if so, whether it needs further tweaking.

In one of my philosophy tutorials, you have to defend your argument, but only so long as you are convinced your point is valid. It’s not a competition.

Nor is it a matter of learning how to win every argument, but rather it's about learning how to argue collaboratively to arrive at the truth, the best available answer the two of you can come up with. And if you conceded a point, then you have to weave it into some other way of coming at an answer.

The client knows what he wants. And we respect that.

But we know what he could want, if only he’d let himself want something a little less reasonable and a little more ideal. We need to make him more of a dreamer by showing him how he can do more than he thought he could do when he came in.

It’s curious how we get to find out just how effective an intervention we co-designed with a client in an MI session turned out to be. Sometimes we have seen the result in a gadget on sale in a shop we are browsing in. On a number of occasions we have found out the final outcome by reading an article in the newspaper, sometimes in front-page news, that lets us know we’ve succeeded in enabling the client to create the “impossible” future they were after.

Just as there is no single form of explanation, and what counts as an explanation is what satisfies the questioner, the answer to a philosophical question, like the solution to a real-world problem, is always fluid. Student and client both want to find the right answer. But what they learn is that there is no one right answer, no one best solution. We just want the one that will fit best for you.
.

Endnote

To read more about the experience of an Oxford tutorial from other points of view, see The Oxford Tutorial: ‘Thanks, you taught me how to think’ edited by David Palfreyman, with contributions by James Clark, Richard Dawkins, Robin Lane Fox, Richard Mash, Peter Mirfield, Roger Pearson, Penny Probert, Alan Ryan, Suzanne Shale, Andrew Smith, and Emma Smith

Share Change

Change