Reclaiming the Scientific Mainstream
The Triumphal Return of the Interactional View
Introduction
This will be a somewhat briefer post today, to make up for last time’s marathon-length post on quantum mechanics, which turned out nonetheless to be surprisingly but gratifyingly popular despite its length, rather discursive, personal and autobiographical style, its complex, somewhat experimental, narrative structure, and the inherent difficulty of the subject matter.
Today’s post is a kind of postscript to that one (but with no knowledge of or interest in quantum mechanics required this time!), first to clarify a few important things, and then to outline some of the most important practical implications for creating change.
—The Editors
Reclaiming the Scientific Mainstream: The Triumphal Return of the Interactional View
As promised last time, we will be offering, in the form of a brief, almost bullet-point summary, a review of some of the more startling and exciting things that we and our scientific team have learned about change over the past half-century of research on the subject—results completely undoing the age-old, traditional, yet still received view of what’s possible and practicable in the corporate world and in the world of affairs, as well as in science more generally.
For the past few articles (“Catching Up With the Past,” “The Renaissance of the Universe,” and “A Science of the Singular”) we’ve been briefly surveying the mainly 20th Century scientific revolution (with roots chiefly going back to an influential group amongst the philosopher-physiologists of the Aufklärung from about 1720 onwards), a revolution temporarily sidelined and nowadays all but forgotten, along with its radical new view of the nature of reality and the mechanics of the universe.
The revolutionary new challenger epistemology, rescinding and replacing the dominant, legacy epistemology going back some 400 years, was for a few decades in the middle of the 20th Century, along with the interactional view it generated, beginning to enter—and in some fields dominate—the scientific mainstream.
For a series of purely adventitious reasons (which I have been researching for many years)—reasons mainly social, political and economic rather than scientific or philosophical—the displaced 16th and 17th Century epistemology managed to make an extraordinary comeback by the mid-1980s, eclipsing not only the new epistemology but also all but burying the most remarkable body of scientific work of the past few hundred years.
In our past three posts we have attempted to summarize in layman’s terms some of the main themes of the new epistemology and the interactional view, as well as the new science and its findings, along with the radically, in some ways startlingly altered view of the workings of nature which emerged from it almost as an afterthought.
Particularly in our most recent post, we have also had something to say about the far greater prospects for science it has opened up, possibilities still almost entirely untapped.
Along the way we also surveyed the most significant departures this extraordinary revolution in ideas has made from what is even today, depressingly, the still hegemonic 16th and 17th Century view of reality—which was nothing more than a superannuated bit of science fiction from the 1600s still taken vulgarly for fact, a phantasm which has arguably hamstrung scientific progress considerably, and continues to do so today, while never having made any substantive contribution to it, as historians of science and technology are nowadays generally agreed.
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Why the Old Epistemology is Little Better than an Old Wives’ Tale
As we have previously pointed out, the old Galilean-Cartesian metaphysics of nature was dreamt up (literally) sitting in an armchair by the fire, not even by any of the well-known Enlightenment generation of scientists and philosophers sporting powdered wigs, tricorne hats, knee breeches and frock coats, but in fact by their great-great-grandfathers, indeed by two Renaissance figures far nearer to the Middle Ages—in time and in mindset—than to our present technological age.
The old mechanistic, billiard-ball Galilean-Cartesian model had of course been concocted not on the basis of any scientific observations whatsoever but purely a priori, albeit at a time (to be fair to its “co-authors” Galileo and Descartes) when modern science as it came to be could not even have been imagined—indeed, at a time when the so-called scientific renaissance presaging the later 18th Century scientific revolution proper was but in its earliest infancy.
In fact at that point in history, modern science and technology as we have come to know them, then still far in the future, had been conceived in remarkable detail only by a single visionary thinker, Lord Verulam, Viscount St Albans (Sir Francis Bacon 1561–1626), the father of modern science, along with a handful of other visionary thinkers, including many or even most of the early members of the Royal Society, who followed Bacon in opposing the straitjacket of the Galilean-Cartesian model while similarly jettisoning uncritical deference to Aristotle left over from the Middle Ages.
The Galilean-Cartesian model, as we mentioned above and in a number of previous articles, would prove to have practically nothing whatsoever to contribute to the scientific and technological progress of the past four hundred years.
We described too how the naïve, indeed almost jejune Galilean-Cartesian cosmology of nature had been all but demolished by Newton (1642–1727) and the Newtonian experimentalists who set their face against it, and yet it made a surprise comeback after a century or so for the purely social and political reasons we indicated last time, reasons which are now well understood by historians of science, thanks not least to the pioneering work in this area of Prof. Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009).
And yet, strange to report, the superannuated 16th and 17th Century view of nature remains the received view today, even amongst 21st Century philosophers and scientists who ought to know better by now.
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From the Internet to Psychological Medicine to Quantum Physics
By contrast, our new, challenger epistemology (which we have called “E2”) which has in recent decades been temporarily sidelined and bypassed along with the staunchly empiricist scientific revolution of the 20th Century, has done so much to create our contemporary world. Tragically, this remarkable scientific work had hardly got started before it began to get lost.
This is in despite of the fact that it has already contributed much to our modern world that we have come to take for granted, including, to name a few obvious and familiar examples, such spinoffs as computing, mobile telephony, the internet, artificial intelligence—indeed information technology in all its forms, and in fact the whole of the Information Age which could never have come into being without it.
The interactional view and the new epistemology were in fact for decades also more or less dominant in a number of fields as far-flung from the digital world as British psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, family therapy, and the most progressive in-patient psychiatry on both sides of the Atlantic right through the mid-1980s or so, just to pick a few examples I happen to know a great deal about.
What is more, our most recent post, “A Science of the Singular,” in our review of the most recent popular work on the philosophy of physics by the leading quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli, known for his work on quantum gravity, revealed how the latest advances in quantum physics in the form of relational quantum mechanics once again drew upon the selfsame scientific treasure-trove of the interactional view, the new epistemology and the revolution in ideas that we have been discussing throughout the pages of Change, in order to resolve the most intractable paradoxes of quantum mechanics which had remained unresolvable for a century until now.
However, it is important to understand the way in which the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics lends yet further support, as if any further support were needed, to our and others’ claims for the unsurpassed power of the interactional view and the new epistemology.
It is not as if we or Prof. Rovelli are talking about some kind of intriguing subatomic phenomena, and then crudely applying them to phenomena on a physically much larger scale, such as human behaviour and the world of affairs, in the way you find in a lot of pseudo-science allegedly drawing upon quantum mechanics. Quite the contrary.
As we emphasized last time, and as Prof, Rovelli himself particularly emphasizes, what he has done in order to render quantum mechanics, for the first time, as conceptually coherent and non-paradoxical as it is mathematically irrefutable and theoretically and practically powerful, was quite the reverse.
The interactional view and the new epistemology Prof. Rovelli adopts, effectively an important slice of our new epistemology we have called E2 throughout the pages of Change, applies at every level of phenomena equally, as it does not recognize the notion of reality as being hierarchically arranged in levels, as it was portrayed in the old Galilean-Cartesian myth in which the course of all events in nature is ultimately dictated by particles or sub-particles of matter on the move.
What Rovelli calls “the relational view,” was unmistakably a subset or corollary of the broader interactional view which originated in the biological sciences. Again, as we discussed last time in detail, Prof. Rovelli had drawn upon some of the same tradition of thought on which we ourselves drew in our work on change over the past half-century, including—particularly in Prof. Rovelli’s case—the pioneering work of Bogdanov which had likewise influenced our own work considerably as discussed in our review of Prof. Rovelli’s latest book, and who had a pivotal role to play in the early 20th Century history of the interactional view.
And what Rovelli and his colleagues found is that the interactional or (in his terminology) “relational” (relazionale) view and this new epistemology could be applied not just at the macro level but at the subatomic level too, to make sense at long last of the most notoriously puzzling findings of quantum mechanics.
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So What Has Any of This to Do with Me?
Now you may be thinking to yourself, “I’m not a quantum physicist,” or “I’m not a professional philosopher” or “I’m not a biologist,” or what have you, “…so what does all this clever stuff mean to me?” What practical implications does all this stuff have for you, as an executive, or a sociologist, or a psychotherapist, or whatever your profession or whatever line of work you may be in?
So let me answer the question, as I promised to answer last time at the end of A Science of the Singular, in the simplest, starkest possible way, by putting into what are little more than bullet points for now, what we at Interchange Research have learned about change in over half a century of dedicated research on the subject including many hundreds of man-years of in-house scientific research and R&D—and what we have learned in applying our theories to the very practical business of creating large-scale change in the human realm and the world of affairs, in literally thousands of major change efforts over the past four-and-a-half decades.
Last time, in A Science of the Singular, we described in the last section how our new epistemology E2 and the interactional view have at long last made it possible to apply scientific rigour equally to the analysis and resolution of completely idiosyncratic, one-off situations.
We promised that in today’s post we would say something about the real-life practical implications of this capability, which we said have proved “even more mind-blowing than the radical new picture emerging of the functioning of everything in nature.”
So here, in brief, is a summary of just a few of the things we have learned, in our team’s research over the past fifty years on the nature and dynamics of change—deliberate, large-scale systemic change in particular:
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What We Now Know About Change
We have found that any decision-maker’s command of complex practical situations can be transformed to an extent which one has a right to expect of any approach claiming to be scientific. The methods of analysis developed by my team and me over the years have demonstrably permitted the complexity of every practical situation we have tackled to be rapidly filtered.
Even the most complex and intractable states-of-affairs, we found, could be tackled successfully in a matter of a few hours of rigorous inquiry, analysis, and design—and this was our consistent experience across thousands of major change initiatives over four decades.
In each case, the technology we developed could precisely pinpoint some small, catalytic action or actions which, when taken personally by the decision-maker, would be sufficient to trigger a transformation to the desired state-of-affairs, swiftly and reliably.
The actions identified were always so close to what was already being done that they were capable of immediate implementation.
And the transformation which ensued occurred in an all-or-none fashion, as a flip from the existing state to the desired state, with nothing in between.
We found, for example, that major change in corporate performance or in organizational culture and behaviour, across the board, could be achieved virtually overnight through the catalytic effect of such precisely pinpointed actions.
In every case, the analysis eschewed abstractions and stayed close to the rich, idiosyncratic, concrete details of the practical situation being examined and into which the decision maker intervened once the catalytic intervention required had been identified.
This enabled decision-makers to release latent potentials which could only be revealed by staying close to the unique details of what we always viewed as an entirely unique, idiosyncratic situation to be considered afresh, and analyzed with uncompromising scientific rigour.
The upshot of our half-century of research, in turn building upon the scientific work we have described in previous posts going back to the early 20th Century and all firmly rooted in the interactional view and our new epistemology which we have called E2 turned out to be tremendous—philosophically and scientifically as well as practically.
What is more, our findings required us to shift our whole view of the very fabric of reality.
Indeed, much of what we have learned over hundreds of man-years of scientific work on change flies in the face of commonly held assumptions.
Among the purely practical findings from our research, here are a few of the things we have found:
Change does not take time, and when it occurs, it happens all at once.
The scale and scope of a problem, and the amount of time it has persisted, are irrelevant to what is required to resolve it or how long that will take.
Indeed, problems don’t come in sizes; there are no big problems and small problems, only lesser and greater consequences.
Any significant change can be achieved instantly and painlessly if it can be achieved at all.
The desired change can always be found to be already immanent in the existing situation and needs merely to be released by pinpointing a tiny intervention into the system.
Such an intervention rarely involves more than a subtle, innocuous, single communication, often delivered to a single individual, or at most, a few such communications to a few individuals.
The result is then an all-or-none flip from the existing state to the desired state all at once, across the board.
The most startling thing of all, however, was that the analysis to pinpoint the catalytic intervention that released the desired change typically took three to five people, working face-to-face with the decision maker, about four hours.
We have so far found all of these principles to hold universally and in all our experience to date we have found no exceptions.
Such a catalytic intervention (again, in our experience to date) can always be found that will predictably create transformations in days or weeks which had been judged by all the experts—by the partners and principals of leading management consulting firms for example—to take many months or more often, several years. It rarely took more than a few hours to prove them wrong.
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Transforming Corporate Culture
Deploying the new epistemology and the new science, even changing the corporate culture of a major organization likewise turned out to take not years, but weeks, or even days. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given such results, by the early 1990s the work of Interchange Research was rapidly becoming more and more widely known in top management circles globally.
In February 1990, The Economist, in a special report1 on transforming corporate culture, selected Interchange Research as one of only eight “leading” firms (including also McKinsey & Company and six others) out of the estimated 20,000 or so firms in the world whom they said were actively working in the area. These were the top eight expert advisory firms who according to their report “may be judged to have ‘started something’.” The Economist said it was directing its readers to these eight “leading” firms “whom consultants consult,” in order to provide readers with “insight into some of the most challenging thinking on corporate culture.”
In a detailed profile of Interchange’s work running to two full pages, the Economist report drew particular attention to our approach’s
three lynch-pins: an unusual insistence upon the rigours of the natural sciences; the use of the [existing] culture; and minimalist intervention in that culture. … ‘Minimalist intervention’ means making an intervention that is small in the expenditure of time and effort yet has maximum impact and transformative power. It derives from the principle that if anyone truly understands a living organizational system, a mere nudge at the right point will send it off in a new direction. … [For these] are circular systems packed with the energy of their own momentum. Minimalism is thus more than a philosophy. It should prove that the diagnosis of the client’s problem was accurate. You have demonstrated good analysis when your nudge alters the system in the way you intended. … [Therefore corporate leaders] neither need some extraordinary vision, … nor do they need to resort to push and shove. They need only touch the spinning wheels of corporate culture, …a way of transforming organizations that respects their continuity.
The Economist had already been investigating our very earliest work on rapid culture change starting a mere two years after we had first begun working exclusively in the C‑suite, and well before this special report was finally published. The 1990 Economist report was therefore also able to include a detailed case study, running to some twelve pages, summarizing Interchange’s rapid transformation in 1988 of the culture of what is today one of the world’s ten largest corporations.
That report was published nearly thirty-four years ago.
After three-and-a-half decades of further scientific research and in-house technological R&D, and thousands of successful corporate transformations later, the time required to complete a transformation got ever shorter, and the enduring desired results were achieved with increasingly greater precision.
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Envoi
Such findings, much as they challenge everything we previously thought we knew about how things work, let alone what’s possible in creating change in the world of affairs, are just too dramatic, too thoroughly tested over too many years, and too consistent to continue to be ignored by 21st Century mainstream thought.
The selfsame new epistemology, interactional view, and total reconceptualization of nature that made all these remarkable and undeniable results possible in the corporate world in the first place, was, as we discussed last time, precisely what, according to Prof. Rovelli, a leading quantum physicist, at last made possible the solution of a century’s worth of unresolved paradoxes in quantum mechanics.
After nearly four decades of comparative obscurity, following four decades during which the interactional view and the new epistemology were prominent in scientific work globally and at the forefront of numerous scientific fields, does it not seem high time that this now all-but-forgotten scientific revolution, whose potential has hardly begun to be tapped, once again staked its claim to be in the vanguard of the 21st Century scientific mainstream over the decades to come?
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© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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