What is MI?
Where Science Fiction Becomes Science Fact
Introduction
In our last post, “Your Way With Words,” I had occasion to refer a number of times to MI, and to say some important things about it. But I was acutely aware, in posting that piece, that nowhere in Change had I ever yet got round to offering our subscribers a definitive statement in one place of what MI actually is, what it does, can do, has done, along with a very brief history of it, and a brief sketch of the nature of the theory behind it—and its genuinely revolutionary implications.
Which when you think about it is quite an omission, because every one of the 75+ articles here in Change, is about MI.
This long-delayed post, which I now realize it would have been useful for our subscribers and others to have online sooner, had to wait until I had the time, and inspiration, to set something down that would do the job, if only to be getting on with. It is less polished than I would have liked, but once I realized how much it was needed I felt I could not afford to delay publication any longer—it can always be polished later, and over time.
So here it is, for better or worse, a definitive introductory account of MI in 2025. It’s not short, or a quick read, but as short as I could make it without boring you and selling you and MI short.
There are lots of exciting things in the world and in books (well, exciting to me), that I have been very interested in and still am. But the single most exciting thing I’ve ever encountered in my entire life is MI. After decades of learning about it, I am more excited today than ever about MI and the theory behind it, and its mind-blowing implications. And like AI, MI’s time to shine on the world stage has finally come. Today’s post was exciting to write and exciting for me to read.
But even though I myself find it thrilling, I fear it may come across as too dry, and too hurriedly composed, and too long (it’s by far our longest ever post), to hold the attention of our readers. I tried out the material on one reader new to the subject, who to my surprise and delight found it “inspiring.” Nonetheless, my greatest fear as a writer is in boring you with my own enthusiasms. But for reasons I explain in the article, the subject matter is important for everyone to know about, and so I offer it for what it’s worth. I hope you find something in it to interest you, and maybe inspire you.
Trigger warning: Sensitive readers who are new to MI, may find this comes as something of a shock. Contains graphic details of venerable, received views of change—and of reality itself—being cavalierly consigned to the dustbin of history, albeit on solid, unimpugnable scientific evidence. It may be difficult going back to how you thought of things before. And therefore, it’s only fair to say, read this at your peril. You will not be able to look at change the same way again.
On the plus side, you will be exposed to an empowering, life-affirming, truly revolutionary new view of the world you won’t be likely to encounter anywhere else (other than here in the pages of Change), based on hard science, and opening up thrilling new vistas, a whole universe of possibilities. One thing at least is certain: you will also catch a reliable glimpse of the future.
If you want to change your world, and our world, this is as good a place as any to begin your journey.
Bon voyage!
—James
What is MI?
Where Science Fiction Becomes Science Fact
The ignorant never realize that the marvelous is possible, and they measure the power of nature by the capacity of their own minds. Hence they are fooled, as completely as if they were blind.
—Trithemius (1462–1516), 1506
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‘Such nonsense,’ says Y, ‘I’ve never heard of it.’
—Gordon Pask (1928–1996)
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Question everything.
—G. C. Lichtenberg (1742–1799)
What is MI?
To1 set the stage and put the subject in proper perspective, the first thing to say is this: It is my long-held view and carefully considered assessment, that MI is one of the most innovative and powerful, radically new technologies of the 21st Century, with mind-blowing demonstrated capabilities and achievements to date that read like science fiction.
And moreover, that—even though still comparatively little known and very much the new kid on the block—MI can already be seen to be destined to change the world every bit as much as its currently better-known scientific first cousin AI and across an equally broad range of applications.
Above all, I firmly believe that MI, even more than any form of AI (including superintelligence), represents the future, a very bright human future, and that MI will be the principal way we will most effectively take on the most daunting challenges facing humanity. This is not a mere pious hope, for even now MI already has demonstrated that it has the capability to do so. In fact, MI has already changed the world significantly for the better, and it has hardly got off the starting blocks.
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Three Examples: All In (Half) a Day’s Work
To give you an idea of my basis for saying these things, and to dispel any deceptive appearance of hype in my account, I will merely cite just three varied, real-life examples of 21st Century achievements of MI, and its contribution to the world, just three out of the thousands of large-scale, successful MI applications to date—one example each of MI applied to a start-up, to a large established company, and to a national economy.
Each required only a single session of a few hours using MI to accomplish the “impossible,” and what certainly could never have been done without using MI. And it’s a timely reminder to myself that the world today would be a rather different place if it hadn’t been for MI. I know these examples2 intimately, because I personally conducted all three cases, and deployed MI myself in them and nothing else:
1. Three of us, including the client, working together in just an afternoon using MI, starting from a literal blank sheet of paper, invented an innovative new technology and novel business model through MI alone, both the technology and business model working like a charm, successfully pioneering, as the first to succeed, in a new and almost untried corner of the commercial world. We were followed by other entrants, hot on our heels, in what was a then nascent industry, which has since that time exploded into a fast-growing $265 billion dollar mature industry (as of 2025), set to reach nearly $700 billion within a decade.
2. With just three people working together in a private dining room, in a morning and afternoon (interrupted by a lunch break), MI created from scratch an entirely novel, unprecedented and unanticipated, highly disruptive, fast-growing, $600 billion dollar global industry—for which the required technology, or even any language to describe what it would do or be when the first product came to market, did not even exist yet at the time. The whole new industry was catalyzed by this single visionary innovation designed by MI, billions of dollars in investment quickly backing up the radical, ingenious, industry-making invention.
Today the new industry already provides employment to tens of millions of people worldwide, and it is expected to double in size to $1.2 trillion dollars in sales within ten years, by 2035. And it is already transforming and improving the lives of billions of customers in every country in the world. Born of an application of MI of just four hours, from a blank sheet of paper, it is currently contributing over $6 trillion of economic value added to the global economy annually, and, in less than five years (by 2030), that figure is expected to increase to almost $11 trillion.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that that may not be much compared to the total size of the global economy (only about 8.5% of it), but hey, $11 trillion dollars a year here, $11 trillion dollars a year there, and soon you’re talking a lot of money! (Well, not a bad effort for four hours work, anyway, I think we can all agree.) That’s MI for you.
3. Following the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash and particularly the subsequent loss of both its largest industry and biggest trading partner, a suddenly crippled, virtually bankrupt, developed national economy, with high unemployment as a consequence, managed, thanks to an intervention designed by MI in barely five hours (when we were called in at the eleventh hour by the office of the Prime Minister), to transform itself into a successful and superfast-growing economy within five years, posting eight consecutive quarters of stellar economic growth and an annualized growth rate of nearly 3%, the country’s economy growing faster than its neighbours who had not even faced the same daunting challenges, growing faster than then fast-growing Germany and faster than the Eurozone as a whole, with a long-sought increase in incoming corporate investment from abroad coming with increased confidence in the country’s miraculous economic boom, creating a virtuous circle exactly as intended. The Financial Times and all the world’s financial press declared the country an economic miracle. It is now, according to Harvard’s Atlas of Global Complexity, one of the richest countries in the world per capita, with average incomes having already galloped well ahead of the United Kingdom, another of the richest. [Enter MI as superhero, or more accurately, as helping to make a superhero of the end-user.]
There is no way that any form of AI could have pulled off any of these three extraordinary feats, now or in the future; MI alone could, and did.
These are three typical examples of an impossibly rapid major transformation achieved in a single application of MI of a few hours, that could not have been achieved any other way.
They are only somewhat atypical in one respect: the sheer gigantic scale of the results (many hundreds of billions or, in one case, many trillions of dollars). But a few hours applying MI has long been routinely applied to creating transformations valued in the tens of billions of dollars, and such is my bread-and-butter work today, and has been for many years, in countless assignments on both sides of the Atlantic.
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An Olympic World Record, Epiphanies-on-Demand, and Code
Oh, and all this talk of superheroes a few moments ago just reminded me: the Olympics. I wanted to stop at three examples, but I can’t resist telling you about one other, perhaps rather unexpected application of MI, if only because some readers may enjoy hearing about it (and again, the following examples were likewise all selected from my own casebook), and because it will give a further hint of the sheer range of applications of MI, which is as wide as the world.
Or wider—if “the world” means only what everyone currently takes for the world, and takes for its possibilities.
(And I relate it too because it was particularly fun!)
Starting in 2010, the English Institute of Sport deployed a series of targeted interventions pinpointed with MI, in groundbreaking work aimed at significantly improving the medal chances of Team GB, the British Olympic Team, in the London 2012 Olympics, across 70% of the events.
In what turned out to be its most successful Olympics since 1908, Great Britain finished the 2012 Summer Olympic Games coming third in the medal table rankings overall, behind only China and the United States, and well ahead of Russia, finishing with a total of 65 medals (29 gold, 17 silver, and 19 bronze)—Britain’s biggest Olympic gold medal haul for 104 years, far surpassing its 19 gold-medal tally at the Beijing Olympics, which was barely two years before starting the deployment of MI.
MI was also deployed on one occasion in the 2014 Winter Olympics, where I am informed that a single application of MI, which took only a couple of hours, “has transformed one of my athletes from number 32 in the world to number one! She moved up 30 world-ranking places in one competition after the intervention took place.” Again, this is typical of the interventions in elite sport.
A number of other successful MI applications in elite sport have included transforming the fortunes of a celebrated national cricket team. A dramatic turnaround in the performance of one of the world’s leading cricketers—sufficiently dramatic to make front-page national and international newspaper headlines (n.b. front-page full stop, not “front-page-of-the-sports-section”!)—was the result of an intervention designed in less than two hours using only MI.
There’s a moral to all these stories, two morals in fact, which may not be obvious:
First, you know how changes and major advances, especially in the tech world, result from breakthroughs. But what if such epiphanies could be designed to order?
That is precisely what MI does.
Second, most readers are also aware of the impact on the world just a few lines of code can have—work hard over a weekend, and you’ve the basis for a commerce-changing eBay, a global transportation-transforming Uber, a WhatsApp or a Tik-Tok.
But as you’ve begun to see, elite sport, large organizations, national economies, organizational culture, geopolitical crises, global markets and the growth of businesses are no different.
That’s where MI comes in.
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AI and MI: The Two First Cousins Who Grew Up Together as Kids
Like AI, MI has been a long time in development. Both AI and MI took decades of research and development even to begin to show their real promise, spending many long decades in obscurity, and they share many of the same early conceptual roots.
That’s no coincidence, of course, because AI and MI actually share a common early history that lasted nearly six decades before they began to diverge—going back as far as the 1930s and earlier, and continuing at least through the 1970s and to some extent, mid ‘80s—and they share many of the same pioneers.
In fact, both AI and MI were the brainchild, or rather the brain-grandchild, of a large number of the selfsame scientific geniuses and tireless investigators in the field, without whom neither AI nor MI would exist today. I suppose this makes AI and MI “first cousins once removed”!
Had you talked to those working on, or at least knowledgeable about MI, in as late as, say, early 1987, and asked for their view, whether by 2025 MI and AI would have evolved to be two unrecognizably different and apparently unrelated things, or to be fused inextricably into one single blend of the two, now indistinguishable, they would have found it hard even to hazard a prediction. The answer was anything but obvious at that early juncture, and the boundary between AI and MI was still far from clear in those dim and distant days. It certainly wasn’t obvious to me, or my closest colleagues—the two cousins could have gone either way.
However the histories of MI and AI did eventually, after some 60 years or so, by the late 1980s, begin to diverge widely at an ever accelerating rate.
From the early 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, MI had already gradually begun incorporating a far broader range of cognate scientific influences, discoveries, advances, and fundamental theoretical breakthroughs and contributions than AI, from a much wider range of scientific disciplines, for even back then it had very different but equally great ambitions.
Moreover, while MI thrived on maintaining the same level of transdisciplinary work that the pioneers behind both AI and MI had virtually all represented from the 1930s through at least the 1970s, AI began gradually to shift away from this very wide-ranging transdisciplinary tradition by the 1980s. AI became much narrower, more focused, and increasingly highly specialized. MI became even broader still.
And so AI and MI began developing in significantly very different directions by the late 1980s3 and early 1990s, evolving along very different lines, until the two technologies have ended up today as fundamentally different in every respect as chemistry and biology, and have come to differ in many of their key, foundational scientific assumptions. Far from being a species of AI, MI has matured into something altogether different and apparently utterly unrelated—now worlds apart, and if you didn’t know you would never have guessed their common origins.
Yet the two estranged “first cousins once removed,” AI and MI, still share a potential to shake the world from its dogmatic slumbers and truly bring us into the Information Age.
Unlike AI, MI alone draws extensively upon what is—again in my considered (and incidentally, extremely well-informed) assessment —one of the most important fundamental scientific developments and clusters of scientific discoveries of the past century. Nor have I been the only scientist or historian of science to think so—far from it. And I have been chronicling the history of these scientific developments for the past sixteen years and counting, for a definitive book-length history of MI and the ideas behind it.
It is worth noting that both AI and MI have developed in recent decades as proprietary technologies, and in both cases were advanced increasingly in the realm of what the late Professor John Ziman called “post-academic science” and wrote about so compellingly. Like other, vastly larger and better-funded private labs, from Xerox PARC and Bell Labs (two original and probably most famous early bastions of post-academic science), to OpenAI and Google DeepMind, both the pure and applied science conducted by Interchange Research, the lab that uniquely developed MI during the past half-century, is strictly proprietary.
To date, MI has been commercially licensed by Interchange Research exclusively to the CEOs and C-suite of Fortune 50 and Fortune 100 companies as their secret weapon to rapidly accelerate corporate growth, and to make their most audacious ambitions, and even the apparently impossible, not only possible but actual.
But MI’s potential, even as it is today, is very, very much greater. Much greater in fact than the billions and trillions of dollars of industry making, and job creation, and contributions to the global economy and to national turnarounds that we’ve cited. In fact, with MI the sky’s the limit—er, well, actually, I tell a lie, for I forgot about the exploration of outer space—in fact, the limits are unknown, unknowable and unfathomable. The possibilities, even today, are mind-boggling; they boggle my mind anyway.
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Optimally Intelligent Action: Some Other Fundamental Differences between AI and MI
So what exactly is MI anyway?
What can it do today or in the future that I think is so extraordinary, so improbably futuristic?
Why have these CEOs of world-leading companies already deployed it, over and over again for so many years and even for decades, as their competitive secret weapon?
And why should you care?
To these questions we turn next.
“MI” stands for “Minimalist Intervention” (not “Minimalist Intelligence” which it might well otherwise have been named4 except for a historical accident), which should already tell you it is much more directly concerned with action than Artificial Intelligence is, and indeed the action focus was core to MI from the beginning, and of equal importance to its aim of minimalism.
Agentic AI, and even Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and even superintelligence (ASI) when and if that is eventually developed, are only based upon the goal-seeking and problem-solving capabilities of human beings, such as they already are, which provide agentic AI, AGI and ASI with their model initially to aspire to and in time, where possible, greatly outdo, of course leaving aside all-important debates on the extent to which AGI/ASI could ever equal the extraordinary human capacity for imagination and genuine creativity.
By contrast, unlike AI (including AGI, and ASI), MI sought from the early 1970s onwards to develop capabilities which were otherwise forever far beyond what human reason and creativity, with or without the help of computers and AI in the distant future, could possibly achieve.
And unlike agentic AI or AGI or ASI, MI necessarily requires human beings purposefully using it as a tool and needs real people with their invaluable local knowledge, perception, and judgement, to stay very much in the driver’s seat at all times.
Again unlike extant versions of AI in the present state of the technology, at least the LLMs such as ChatGPT, which are incapable of getting at truth as opposed to recycling consensual received views, MI deals in the true and verifiable, and ignores whatever the received view on a matter may be.
By 1985, MI had already succeeded in developing such capabilities, far beyond unaided human reason and creativity with or without computers, and its development and achievements over the 40 years since then have been nothing short of breathtaking. The goal: enabling optimally intelligent action.
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In the Beginning
To understand what MI can do, you need above all to understand how it came about.
The research programme of MI from 1971 onwards, focussed on a single question: Is it possible to identify, in any self-organizing complex system, the shortest route from one defined stable state of the system to another defined stable state? Abstract as it sounds, that was the proverbial $64,000 question—or sixty-four trillion dollar question. Answer that and you unlock the secrets of the universe.
It all began in earnest when that very question was first posed by an intellectually curious 16-year-old high school kid, a popular, gregarious all-rounder who had a precocious knowledge of and keen interest in the more recondite branches of higher mathematics, formal logic, and philosophy. He became interested in that question when he simultaneously had a hunch about the way to derive the answer, a solution—and at the same time envisioned a whole research programme he was prepared to devote his life to (and eventually did), including, from the very beginning, a whole series of questions to which he was determined to find the answer:
In particular, he wondered, in practical terms, is it possible to pinpoint, in advance of intervening in a system, the smallest intervention in that system sufficient to trigger a transformation or ‘flip’ from one state of the system to another, pre-selected state?
And even more to the point, is it possible to identify, predictably, the smallest intervention that will trigger an all-or-none flip from the existing state of a system to some specific desired state and no other, all at once, with nothing in between, and with absolute precision?
The questions, along with some others he posed right at the start, were all intertwined. It was the ambition, from the beginning, one day to arrive at a comprehensive scientific theory of such purposeful, all-or-none, systemic transformations across the board, along with a technology for pinpointing the smallest intervention into any system that would flip it immediately from the existing state to the desired state in one hit.
In any case, the ultimate prize, self-evident from the outset, was that if he could one day pull it off, the eventual solution to the problem he had set himself would be tantamount to a General Theory of Intervention, pure and applied, whose potentially world-changing practical applications and inestimable value were self-evident. He dreamt of publishing the results in a book one day that he would call, with only a dash of irony, The Secrets of the Universe. (It probably will be published one day.)
For one tantalising implication beckoned from the very start: If indeed he was onto something here, and could develop such a general theory of change, then it ought to be possible in any practical situation, by finding the right questions to ask, the right way to construe matters, systematically to identify the smallest intervention that would be sufficient to create the maximum desired change, all at once, and with precision.
By the time he was in his junior year of high school, the kid lost no time in gathering a bunch of friends together and forming his first think-tank (there were about a dozen invitees eagerly signing up, and a hard core of about 5 or 6 attending all the weekly meetings—they still talk about it all these years later) to discuss the ideas he was exploring so that he’d have a forum of people whose thinking he valued, to bat various random ideas around with him. It was the predecessor (with a series of three other lineups in between, in Oxford and London) of what for the past 40 years or so has been the Interchange Research think-tank.
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R&D: The Incredible Story of a Coffee Pot, the Very First One
In November–December of 1976, MI went live and scored its first successes, and the rudiments of the technology were in place. However the experiments had so far only been conducted with a handful of relatively small and self-contained, self-organizing complex systems.
It took a full further decade, until 1986, and countless further successful experiments and theoretical breakthroughs, before MI was a finished product that was capable of dealing with and transforming any system, including very large complex systems.
But as has so often happened in the history of science and technology, by 1986 the success of MI in practice was actually already way ahead of the theory. Major advances in practice needed to be accounted for in terms of the rapidly evolving, already large body of theory behind MI.
Key developments in MI, both in theory and in practice, would eventually be made between 1986 and 1996, in both pure and applied scientific research, through an ambitious ten-year R&D programme funded by government and industry, and carried out in parallel in the Division of Cybernetics of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Technology, Brunel University, London, at the University of Oxford, and in the private sector, at Interchange Research, with distinguished investigators from universities around the world.
When the R&D programme first commenced, the first thing that needed more fully explaining theoretically, and extending or generalizing by means of further development of the theory was…wait for it… a coffee pot—an ordinary glass coffee pot on a hotplate! For real.
In the world’s first successful experiment in applying MI to creating large-scale, permanent organizational change, in February 1985, the beleaguered CEO of a big organization in turmoil was asked by this same, still disarmingly young guy, to move the coffee pot fifty centimeters, from one side of a partition wall to the other.
Why?
Well, strange to tell, MI had predicted that this would be a catalyst sufficient to transform the organization’s intractable culture and functioning overnight. It sounded bizarre, defying all common sense, but it seemed at least worth a shot. After all, the CEO was by now getting pretty desperate. What was there to lose?
Believe it or not, it worked! Moving the coffee pot 50 centimetres did transform the organization literally overnight. The experiment was a success, the organization’s culture and functioning were improved beyond recognition, the ambitious desired outcome was achieved and harmony restored, the CEO was covered in glory, and the coffee pot that saved the day became iconic in the MI world—“a coffee pot” came to mean, in MI, such a pinpointed, idiosyncratic minimalist intervention.
Now, the detailed intervention, when the story of the coffee pot is more fully told (and it would take a book), makes perfect sense, up to a point, even to a layman, and it certainly made sense to the CEO at the time, and afterwards, though they would never have thought of it in a million years, and did not reckon beforehand on the sheer power of the intervention and the rapidity and comprehensiveness of the transformation which followed. But MI theory had successfully predicted exactly what happened and in theoretical terms it was obvious that moving the pot would have worked exactly as it did.
A number of further successful experiments in large corporations, intervening in and transforming very large complex systems overnight, soon followed by 1986, all deploying interventions as small, and seemingly irrelevant and innocuous, as the iconic coffee pot. The analysis to design the intervention, in most cases and certainly by 1989 or 1990, was taking no more than three or four hours of MI.
But the theory had to catch up with what was by then clearly eminently doable in practice, and meanwhile the successful experiments with MI multiplied rapidly over the next few years, intervening exclusively now in very large, complex systems.
By the time the R&D programme had wrapped up in 1996, the General Theory of Intervention was complete (though it subsequently grew significantly in scope and depth and has been extended greatly over the next thirty years), and MI already had an incredible track record behind it of corporate transformation by means of minimalist interventions—“coffee pots”—pinpointed with absolute precision, in each case.
What is more, by 1996, the radical scientific theory at the heart of Minimalist Intervention had been given unimpugnable empirical support, and had twice been formally recognized by the scientific community at large as constituting a significant contribution to knowledge.
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Fast Forward: the “Miracle”-Working…Thirty Years On
Thirty years after wrapping up the R&D programme, the theory and practice of MI have both advanced immeasurably, as you’d expect, and the number of successful MI applications have grown into four figures, almost entirely in Europe and North America so far. And it’s early days.
The success rate is what you would expect of any technology well-grounded in the natural sciences: near enough to 100%—very different from the success rate in management approaches based instead, if at all, on social science, which by the nature of the beast is comparatively very imprecise. Later on, we will throw a little light on the reason for the incredible precision and high success rate of MI, which again follows directly from the theory.
There’s no point in trivializing the extremely sophisticated and complex technology of MI by rattling off dozens of examples of interventions, however much they may be enormous fun to relate. I have a summary of about a hundred case examples to hand, which I consulted in writing this, originally intending to pick a lot more before thinking better of it. For they make no more sense to read, for the most part, than the coffee-pot example above, and just sound downright weird to anyone unfamiliar with MI from their own experience.
But you can take it as read that most of the minimalist interventions designed with MI are very tiny, irrelevant and make little or no sense to the outsider, pretty close to the coffee-pot in irrelevance, seeming triviality or banality, and scale, and yet they created incredibly massive change.
Needless to say, in 49 years, MI has never come up with the same intervention twice. The interventions, the coffee-pots, are all highly idiosyncratic. Indeed, each is utterly unique.
Imagine a sphere roughly the size of a football stadium, with an ordinary glass marble at its very centre. The marble is about 10,000 times smaller than that huge sphere. The nucleus of the uranium atom is on the scale of 10,000 times smaller than the atom as a whole, which is already on the scale of less than 200 billionths of a millimetre. Now though it had never been tried, a group of physicists working together had done the very fancy math and worked out that in theory, if they were to split that submicroscopic nucleus, under certain definable conditions, it would unleash enough energy to power (or destroy) the world. It sounds so contrary to common sense, but they couldn’t argue with the theory, couldn’t argue with the math.
After thousands of minimalist interventions and in excess of 25,000 hours directly applying MI personally, I’m still amazed by the immense power of these very tiny and trivial-seeming idiosyncratic interventions. Even though I understand the scientific theory behind MI better than anyone, the smallness of coffee-pots never ceases to amaze me, in practice, when I see the vast scale and predictable precision of the impact they unleash, and it still fills me with awe. The scientists behind the nuclear bomb, witnessing the first nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, must have felt much the same sense of awe even though—indeed precisely because—it was their own theory, their own math, that had predicted something so extraordinary, so absurdly unlikely to result from splitting the nucleus of an atom.
And of course, the precision of MI, and the unnoticeable tiny interventions, combine to make the intervention risk-free: if the analysis is wrong or incomplete because it was based on a false assumption of the end-user (the client), or because of their inadequate knowledge of the territory, nothing at all will happen in response—had the coffee-pot intervention misfired, it would simply be an unremarkable 50 cm shift of the location of the hotplate.
On these occasions, the intervention is simply tweaked, in a second MI session, in response to the new knowledge gained or newly amended assumptions, and then tried again, with the whole of the desired transformation usually following swiftly, second time around.
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MI for CEOs: Filtering Complexity, Revealing Possibilites, Pinpointing Change
In case it isn’t already obvious why MI has been so attractive to the CEOs and boards of leading organizations, and why every ambitious big-company CEO on the planet ought to be clamouring to bring MI into their organization, let me spell it out.
When you look back on your own hard-won successes in your personal life or in your career, you can often identify one key thing you did—one lunch, phone call, or tiny shift in how you did or looked at something—where, if you’d only done that one small thing at the start, you’d have been spared 90% of your struggle and got there much sooner.
The game-changer would be to pinpoint these catalytic actions in advance. And that’s precisely what MI delivers. If you’re a CEO or C-level executive, that’s all the difference between stellar success and just doing a reasonably good job.
Using MI, in private, behind closed doors, the CEOs and the C-suite of some of the world’s most successful corporations have discreetly utilized MI as their secret weapon, over and over again over the past 40 years, in creating permanent, across-the-board corporate transformations extremely fast through the minimum necessary actions—enabling decision-makers to reach ambitious targets in “impossible” time frames, creating unreasonably high levels of growth. Today the MI technology is more advanced and more effective than ever.
MI makes so much possible, and brings it within reach, that could not even be imagined beforehand. For MI enables the complexity of even the most challenging practical situations to be rapidly filtered to reveal, in each case, a rich field of latent possibilities—possibilities that had previously been obscured by tacit assumptions and blurry abstractions.
The analysis then pinpoints one or more small, catalytic actions that can be taken immediately, that are sufficient to trigger, reliably, an all-or-none transformation from the existing state-of-affairs to the desired state-of-affairs.
The upshot is that enduring, major change can be achieved in far less time (days or weeks rather than months or years), with greater precision, at much lower cost, with less resistance, and with far less risk than conventional wisdom currently leads everyone to suppose.
How wrong conventional wisdom can be!
CEOs can be forgiven for not seeing what was obvious afterwards. No one could see it, because only the MI technology can enable decision makers to catalyze such very fast, major, across-the-board change that sticks, completing permanent real-world transformations overnight, sometimes literally, but certainly achieving in days or weeks what would otherwise have taken months or years, or which had been thought impossible to achieve at all.
Swiftly filtering complexity, the application of MI reveals otherwise invisible options for immediate, same-day action, and enables decision makers to tap vast, unsuspected reserves of value through precisely pinpointed, custom-designed, risk-free catalytic actions, quietly and without a lot of fanfare, no one even noticing the coffee pot they moved. Nothing to brag about or feature in a business school case study, I’m afraid; nothing at all to show for their efforts with MI but the tremendous results themselves and the accelerated growth of their business for which they, and not MI, get—and deserve—the full credit.
And it’s change that is not only enduring but to say it again, very, very fast. Sustainable, across-the-board transformations, even in such notoriously difficult areas as corporate culture, are rapidly and reliably secured—not by programmatic, gradual steps over time but straightaway, all at once, in precisely predictable leaps and bounds, enabling decision makers to underpin and effortlessly accelerate the growth of their P&L and market cap.
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Changing Corporate Culture Quickly and Easily
While change, in organizations, can be hard, slow, stubbornly resisted, time-burning, uncertain, expensive, and take years if you go about it in any of the myriad of conventional approaches to change, the selfsame change, using MI, can invariably be easy, effortless, certain, meet zero resistance, cost nothing, and be completed in weeks or days. I’m talking about the same change, without and with the assistance of MI.
Even major culture change in large, multinational corporations, using MI, is really fast and easy to achieve. After all, I should know!
It has been accomplished many hundreds of times with MI, and is particularly amenable to coffee-pot interventions and can sometimes be achieved literally overnight, and certainly within days or weeks rather than months or years. Such is my consistent first-hand experience.
In February 1990, The Economist, in a special report5 on transforming corporate culture, selected my firm Interchange Research as one of only eight “leading” firms (including also McKinsey & Company and six others) out of their estimated 20,000 or so firms in the world whom they said were actively working in the area of culture change. 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 MI work running to two full pages, the Economist report drew particular attention to what they saw as 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, with detailed long-term follow-up, an in-depth case report, running to some twelve pages, summarizing Interchange’s rapid transformation by 1988 of the culture of what is today one of the world’s ten largest corporations.
That Economist report’s account of MI was published more than thirty-five years ago! What The Economist was so excited about with MI, to devote 14 pages to, today seems to me unbelievably crude and primitive—and slow!—compared to what MI can do today in 2025. Even the ca. 1988 work was admittedly much faster than anything else in 2025, in fact unbelievably faster than what is done nowadays, but slower than molasses running uphill in January in a snowstorm in Maine compared to MI today.
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 predictive precision.
Culture change, with MI, is frankly, a piece of cake. It should never, ever take several months, let alone years. As I said, it takes only weeks a lot of the time, but sometimes only a matter of days.
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—three and a half decades!—and too consistent to be ignored by any board or CEO in the world.
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What Is It Like to Use MI?
What happens in an MI session? A full description would take a book, but in a nutshell:
Two or three, or as many as five people, including the CEO or C-level client, are in a room hard at work, behind closed doors, for three or four hours, rarely more. The client is typically someone who rarely saw any of his direct reports for anything near that amount of time, and is normally unlikely to give anything more than an hour.
(And yet some of the busiest decision makers in the corporate world have regularly blocked out half a day or more, some as frequently as every month, devoted to MI, with an all-day session arranged at their request once or twice a year on top, and they continued doing so for five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years.)
The first part of an MI session we call “getting a Permit to Work” (with an allusion to health and safety preliminary procedures in the construction industry), asking the client a brief series of questions, much the same ones each time, to ensure, among other things, that before the work of MI begins, we are actually setting about working on the right matter to be working on, properly scoped out.
Thereafter, for as much as three or four hours or as little sometimes as forty minutes, the client faces a barrage of questions, like a witness under ruthless cross-examination, or for all the world like a baseball player in a batting cage being relentlessly fed balls by a pitching machine. These questions making up the heart of MI are different every time, there’s no predefined order, rather each question is specifically elicited by the response to the preceding question.
The questions are unique and completely idiosyncratic to the particular situation. MI alone dictates what question is asked when. Complexity is being progressively filtered by MI, tacit assumptions are exposed by MI and challenged, and, if necessary, as it usually is, discarded, and abstractions are methodically, meticulously unpacked.
Having walked in the door with a seemingly impossibly ambitious, audacious aim (which we helped the client to select while getting the Permit to Work, because the ante can almost always be upped in line with what we know MI to be capable of delivering in a session, and our CEO clients, working with us over time, gradually learn to be much more ambitious), they walk out a few hours later with an easy, immediately implementable, trivially small action or set of actions that will deliver the whole of the desired transformation in one hit, the impossible dream now free-falling into reality as business as usual. Much of the uncertainty and risk is now gone and the client can exhale.
A good minimalist intervention, derived through MI, should ideally be an ordinary everyday action or, more often, a to-do list of a small set of ordinary actions, nothing fancy; ideally it should be obvious to the client as well as to us that it is sure to work, and should be such that if they’d thought of it themselves ages ago they would have done it by now. But the chances they would have thought of it without MI are less than one in a million.
The intervention must be small, apparently trivial and innocuous, will typically be topically irrelevant to the situation or conundrum they walked in with, must be immediately implementable, and must be able to be validated as working or not within days or weeks at most.
But the intervention, the Rx, is like a doctor’s prescription—the “medicine” prescribed must be taken exactly as directed by your doctor. It’s very precise. Like the precision movement of a fine watch. Otherwise it may be go off like a damp squib.
If the client takes away anything of value from the session then that’s all well and good, an unintended bonus, a nice-to-have freebie, but is not expected. The session itself is not for the client’s benefit. The session is purely for our benefit, or rather for the benefit of MI, enabling a pinpointed Rx to be precisely formulated. The client derives all of the enormous value they get solely, or mainly, from implementing the Rx exactly as detailed.
Again, it’s like a visit to the doctor—the doctor asks what she asks, and pokes around and examines what she needs to examine, not so that you can feel better after the appointment (like when you go for a massage or physiotherapy), but so that she can make the correct diagnosis, and order the right tests or write the correct prescription.
Strange to relate, but when the session is over, the client should typically have a degree of amnesia for the challenging situation they came in describing. They can’t quite remember what was so hard about it. And the more perfectly, elegantly executed an intervention-design MI session is, the more likely it is that the client will, by the end, have near total amnesia for the difficulties, and the more elegantly the session is conducted then deeper that amnesia will be, all things being equal.
The amnesia phenomenon in MI turns out to be of great significance for both theory and practice. In practical terms, while getting the work permit, special measures are taken, to ensure that the client, by the end of the session, would be able to remember to some degree at least the nature and extent of the challenge with which they came in a few hours earlier. However the amnesia phenomenon, which has been studied by the scientific team for many years, turns out to be of even greater theoretical significance.
Here, let me just give you an analogy which may help some of you at least to understand this extraordinary feature of MI.
If you look back through old photos of friends, or of your children, or other relatives from over the years, you can recognise them and recall what they used to look like when they were younger, but it’s so hard to take yourself back and vividly remember them actually being that young and it still really being them (many people report this at least as a familiar experience).
The reason is, to put it in non-technical terms, that the place in your psyche for, say, “my oldest son, John,” is already occupied by your image of John as he is now. For the client, the place in their psyche for “the finance department situation” is now occupied by a very congenial situation, but before the application of MI it seemed like a hornet’s nest, and yet it was still, for them, “the same thing” although it is now different in every way, not least because they are now very differently situated in relation to it. This is, by analogy, roughly why they have the amnesia (the full explanation soon gets very, very technical).
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The End of Management Consultancy As We Know It?
A rather fun fact but a crucial one, is that transformations that CEOs had previously been reliably advised—by numerous leading experts from top management consultancies—would take years to achieve at a cost of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars or more, were instead catalyzed overnight using MI, and were invariably achieved, with precision, in an all-or-none flip within days or weeks, typically at nil marginal cost.
Here’s one notable, but fairly typical example of that phenomenon, with a particularly sophisticated and knowledgeable CEO:
A leading financial services institution was struggling with long-running cultural challenges in the area of risk, along with an unfortunate corporate culture around risk, that was costing it many billions of dollars annually. Having secured Board approval to do so, the CEO had just instructed a leading global management consulting company to embark on a multi-year consulting assignment with an agreed minimum retainer of $50 million dollars per annum as a “floor” (it was understood by both parties that the actual annual fees billed would run to a figure very much higher).
The project involved over 400 specialist consultants, and was headed by the consulting firm’s internationally eminent Senior Partner who led its Risk Management and Internal Control consulting practice for a decade. The assignment was estimated by the Partner to take five to seven years to complete, and the corporation budgeted accordingly. The total budget for the consulting project, including travel and expenses, as approved by the Board, was well in excess of $1 billion in today’s money.
Interchange knew nothing of any of this, and only learned the full backstory from the client some twenty years later. However, having already been working for some years with Interchange, using MI, the CEO who had commissioned the consulting engagement figured that before actually embarking on such a protracted, highly disruptive, time-consuming 5- to 7-year, billion-dollar-plus consulting project, it seemed worth giving MI a shot at least at creating the whole transformation in four hours, in one hit, however implausible that might have seemed—even to the CEO who was by then a veteran of many scores of seemingly impossible MI big wins. If it worked, against all the odds, the CEO would not need to bring in any management consultants at all.
Unsurprisingly, after four hours, Interchange and the CEO were nowhere near an intervention design, and so the session had to be resumed after lunch. After barely eight hours in total, but before heading off to dinner and cracking open the champagne, victory was finally declared. The design of a minimalist intervention had been completed in detail and the transformation designed by MI was deemed by the CEO to have been all but achieved, and implementation was underway by the following day.
Three weeks after the MI design session, the CEO cancelled the billion-dollar consulting contract before it started, on the grounds that the cultural transformation had already been achieved, the transformation was a done deal, the issues with risk as good as solved, and there was nothing more remaining to be done.
The entire transformation had been pulled off overnight without bringing in a single management consultant.
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Why You Should Care: the Future has Already Arrived
So why should you care, if you’re not an executive of a large corporation yourself? Why should you bother to learn about the existence of MI?
First of all, because this is the future, mark my words, and it’s already here now.
In 1996 I gave an invited address on MI to the World Future Society Congress in Washington, DC. I had an hour to present and a further 30 minutes for questions. I decided to have only a single slide, and to talk for only ten minutes, with an hour and twenty minutes for questions, in order to make the event more spontaneous and interactive. The slide was headed, “Management in the Year 3050 [sic],” and read as follows, the lines popping up on-screen one at a time as I talked through the seventeen lines:
1. Managing through the design of small interventions
2. Catalyzing swift, painless transformations
3. Rapid, rigorous filtering of complexity, without models
4. Filtering future uncertainties out of account
5. Achieving major changes without resistance
6. Making scale, time, & history irrelevant
7. Altering large-scale patterns with pinpointed actions
8. Eliminating the need for input of time, energy or effort
9. Releasing desired change, viewed as immanent
10. Solutions becoming ‘irrelevant’; “panaceas” disappear
11. Making large-scale initiatives unnecessary
12. Opening up rich fields of “ordinary” possibilities
13. Management actions becoming simple, elegant
14. Designing actions from multiple points of view
15. Unhooking ourselves from limiting assumptions
16. Results in hours or days instead of months or years
17. Radically transforming our ideas of what is possible
After running through the list, I said that we could be quite certain that this description of management in the Year 3050 was sure to be accurate, absent any thermonuclear, ecological, or biological catastrophes.
Which begged the question, But how could we know?
I replied to my own question and said that if people could manage this way, why would they not? That’s how we know!
Of course, but how do we know they will be able to?
I then explained to the audience that there are no known theoretical obstacles. The practical obstacles are known, and known to be surmountable, as they consist only of almost universal, false tacit assumptions and lack of widespread awareness of and availability of the necessary technology, MI, “which already exists today, in 1996,” I said.
This future is already immanent, I explained, it was developed in scientific work going back decades, and has now been extensively field-tested for over a decade, since 1985, in a way that blew all the false tacit assumptions out of the water. The technology was already here, and I said that what I had described doesn’t take a crystal ball or any speculation, as long as knowledge of MI doesn’t get lost, and so long as, instead of getting lost, it gets scaled. For it is already possible right now.
That took ten minutes, and I then opened the floor up to questions. The discussion before the large audience, even though right after lunch, the notorious ‘graveyard slot’ for any speaker, was extremely lively, to say the least, and after 90 minutes and running overtime had to adjourn to another room where it continued all afternoon and into the evening, and later adjourned to the bar and then the restaurant with, by the end, about fifteen or twenty stalwarts, until I insisted I was wiped, I really was on my last legs, and retired to bed at 11.00 p.m. Very few of the attendees were executives of large corporations, but they saw the importance.
The ability to catalyze major, enduring, desired transformations rapidly, with minimal risk, and with scientific precision, is new and unique to MI. Totally new and unprecedented. Before the advent of MI it just wasn’t possible. Now it is. And that’s big, big news, by any estimation.
And the implications are bigger. In practical terms, in the first place, it changes forever your conception of what is and isn’t possible in the world. And that’s really good news!
That’s the first reason why everyone, in every walk of life, every thinking person who cares about or is curious about the future (as the attendees in DC all were), or who is interested in ideas or the world of affairs, or both, every would-be mover and shaker, should make it their business to know about the existence of MI, what it is and does, what difference it has made, is making, and is likely to make in the future.
Not just those with a potential stake in it, namely: decision makers who might personally actually want to make use of MI, or want their organization to make use of it; or else young people—students, scientists and practitioners—interested in training in it and possibly making a career out of it. Not just them. Not just those who stand to gain from MI, the decision makers and ambitious young people. But everybody.
It is hardly different from why people ought to make it their business at least to know of the existence of AI. Though in the case of AI, thanks to some impressive performances that everyone can appreciate up to a point, and personally make use of, and thanks to its lately getting such excellent publicity and marketing at last after many decades of labouring in relative obscurity, we can hardly avoid, all of us, knowing of AI’s existence. Not yet the case with MI.
(Which is where you come in, intrepid readers, spreading the word! I’m serious. Knowledge, as Agatha Christie once said, is responsibility. Don’t keep it to yourself. Share the good news.)
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A Door Like This: The End of Causality and the Primacy of the Local
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. …A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Act I (1993)
A second reason you should care, is this: Because the theory itself changes everything, much more sweepingly still, and much more fundamentally, than even the application of MI.
And no thinking person of any age, and by no means just students and young people under thirty-five, no one but no one can afford to miss the opportunity to acquaint themselves with at least the main takeaways from the theory, in ways that can enrich their thinking and understanding and experience of the world immeasurably, and make sense of so much that just didn’t make sense before.
After all, it turns on its head much of what you learned in school. Why continue to labour under a false picture of reality unnecessarily? Knowledge has moved on and there can ultimately be no going back.
As the 19th-Century humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw once quipped, “The trouble ain’t that folks are ignorant, it’s that they know so much that ain’t so.”
And where did they learn it? …In school, right up through grad school. I shudder when I think how much rubbish all young people get fed to them in school as gospel truth.
(Hence the 75+ articles here in Change, and growing all the time, that are published with this aim in mind: to enrich your thinking and understanding and experience of the world immeasurably, and to make a difference to your practical change work by drawing on some of the lessons we’ve learned from our own adventures in MI.)
Now I said that this second reason for taking the trouble to acquaint yourself with MI is because the theory itself changes everything, much more sweepingly still, and much more fundamentally than even the startling reality of the sheer pragmatic power of MI. The theory itself changes everything.
Whoa! “Changes everything” is a big statement!
Everything we thought we knew??
More or less, er, in a sense, in an important sense, well, in a word: Yes. Totally. For sure. It does.
It changes everything, full stop, or almost everything, we thought we knew. And it means that no one, especially those responsible to their shareholders, can afford to ignore what I am saying.
I thought so forty years ago and was vocal about saying so publicly to people in senior management. For example, this from 1986–87, in a speech6 to senior managers:
“[T]he opportunity costs of continuing adherence to an outmoded epistemology… are incalculably great. To continue to operate from within [the old epistemology] would be dangerous and foolish. Moreover, much of your present undertakings would prove to be, in relative terms, an expensive waste of time. In short, … there is not a Chief Executive in the country or in the world who can afford to ignore what I am saying, who can afford not to exploit the potential of …[MI], if he is to successfully position his organization for the future.”
My PhD research, for me, more than amply confirmed that verdict. And the past 23 years as a Faculty member researching and teaching at the University of Oxford, where I had first presented my work on this in a MSc dissertation in 1980, has only amplified my conviction further, especially teaching two generations of bright undergraduates, some of whom went on to study MI with me as a postgraduate of post-doc, with some hoping to make a career of it.
Learning more about MI is a responsibility. CEOs merely owe it to their shareholders. But students, young professionals, and individuals owe it to themselves, to their own future, and to the next generation. Why wander blindly in the mists inside an antiquated 17th Century illusion, when the knowledge is already available to dispel the mists?
Let me say a little about how, specifically, the theory behind MI changes everything we thought we knew, though all the aforementioned 75+ articles in Change so far go into the details, if you want to take a deeper dive. I only have time in today’s post to drop hints.
As I have indicated, none of the examples of MI really make sense in our usual ways of making sense. There are no proper case histories to be related, no true narratives with a beginning, middle and end that can show how it all played out.
This is a crucial point, saying much about how people have long misunderstood complexity. Wearing our current cultural blinkers, we think in narratives, but the world is not narrative in structure, following plot lines. Reality is infinitely multi-dimensional, and has none of the sequential, narrative structure we impose on it. Rather, reality is more nearly kaleidoscopic, and change occurs kaleidoscopically.
In a well-made kaleidoscope, if you apply the most delicate of disturbances by rotating all or part of it, you observe sudden, all-or-none transformations of colors and patterns out of all proportion to the magnitude of the disturbance applied. The image does not shift by degrees, but flips over from one complex symmetrical pattern to a radically different one.
Yet the jump does not take the form of a random leap, as if you were watching a slideshow, moving from one slide of a stained glass window to another. The kaleidoscopic shift appears as a natural, unfolding or metamorphosis of the image, as if one were watching, in time-lapse photography, the embryogenesis of a plant from a seed, or the opening of the petals of a rose.
Similarly, when we are seeking to create any desired change, it is the observed pattern, and transformations of the observed pattern, in which we are interested. You cannot “slightly” alter a pattern without it then being an entirely new pattern. If you want to change the pattern that you observe through the eyepiece of the kaleidoscope, there are a number of options at your disposal.
The pattern you observe through the eyepiece can shift in a number of ways (try this sometime): You can alter the distance of your eye from the eyepiece; you can change your viewing angle; you can alter the angle between the mirrors, or you can nudge the coloured glass shards.
MI, by taking into account, in the analysis, the points of view of the players and the way in which these points of view produce the patterns of interest to us, as well as the way in which the shards happen to be reflected from these different points of view, you can use MI to precision-engineer seemingly trivial manipulations of the “shards” of mundane reality to produce, in breathtaking all-or-none fashion, the precise transformations desired.
In metamorphology, the science behind MI, the concept of flux-and-constraint completely replaces that of cause-and-effect, and the negative form of explanation in terms of constraint means that explanation can now take a more definitive form—it can come to an end.
For MI, whatever is, is all that can obtain given the constraints in place. Whatever is currently happening is the only thing that is not currently prevented or precluded from happening. Thus, on this figure-ground reversal of the received view of the universe, our “logical negativism,” we look at any state-of-affairs as being the only state-of-affairs currently possible, given the constraints in place.
It thus becomes literally meaningless to ask for the cause of anything, and instead MI seeks to account for it with scientific rigour by specifying the set of currently operative constraints. In MI, the analysis probes, “How is it that this (that currently obtains) is the only thing not currently prevented from happening?” Or, “what constraints are keeping this situation from being any other than it currently is?” And the analysis arrives at an explanatory account (akin to a reductio ad absurdum in logic, or to an inductive proof in mathematics) effectively proving that anything else would be impossible.
As we strive to find our way about a kaleidoscopically changing, infinitely multi-dimensional world in which cause-and-effect are nowhere to be found, we will need to take our bearings from the epistemological equivalent of the fixed stars—the relative certainties such as are to be found in this protean world, namely, from the certainty of our explanations of why things are the way they are.
If you regard the universe as being governed by cause-and-effect, explanations are the least certain things of all. Any causal explanation is readily defeasible.
However, in our new epistemology explanation always takes an inherently negative form, demonstrating how nothing other than what obtains locally is currently possible given the constraints in place. Empirical impossibility then collapses into logical impossibility, and, as I said, explanation can come to an end. Explanations now have the potential of being the most certain things there are.
This by the way is what accounts for both the preternatural precision and near-100% hit rate of MI, which otherwise seem at once surprising, unlikely and mysterious, even uncanny, and which I promised to throw some light on. How do I put this? This “negative” form of analysis and explanation in MI permits a definitive delineation of the operative constraints making anything but the present situation impossible, and MI does the same for the desired state-of-affairs—what set of constraints would make anything else but that impossible.
By identifying these with absolute precision, MI can correspondingly precision-engineer the flip from the existing situation to the desired situation and no other—definitively. As Aristotle put it, there’s only one way to hit the bullseye but an infinite number of ways to miss it, which is why abrogating causality and dealing instead with constraints and absolute provable impossibilities mean that the desired result can be assured with close to 100% reliability.
On our view of the universe, integral to MI, the way things obtain in the world is a function of what unfolds purely locally and idiosyncratically, in the local, natural histories of players engaged in doing what they are wont to do, responding to contexts which are entirely idiosyncratic to them, thus creating unique patterns of local constraints, together ensuring that what obtains here is all that can obtain here as things have played out so far, and at least until one intervenes to flip the kaleidoscope to another more-or-less temporary configuration.
Moreover, substituting our triad of notions of flux-and-constraint, purpose-and-design and adjustment to locally prevailing conditions, for the prevailing 16th and 17th Century triad of object-and-forces, cause-and-effect and conformity to universal laws or regularities, enables scientific analysis and rigour to be applied equally to the understanding and harnessing of those aspects of the natural and human world which are unique and unrepeatable.
Any minimalist intervention depends on idiosyncratic details of the situation quite irrelevant to the desired change as defined before application of MI, for it is impossible to know from a statement of the wished-for outcome, just which idiosyncratic constraints must be lifted and/or inserted to release the change desired.
Pinpointing a coffee-pot intervention is like looking for a needle in a haystack. MI enables you to put the haystack through a giant CT (CAT) scanner to find that one simple and obvious needle, knowing in advance that it will do the job, because the hay is invisible to the scanner.
Reality is infinitely re-describable, and MI is not interested in mid-level abstractions like “corporate culture,” or “alignment” or “finance,” or what have you, indeed it is uninterested in 95% of the things managers, for example, normally talk about. It only processes salient concrete idiosyncratic details which are unique and unrepeatable. The rest is invisible to MI just as the hay is invisible to the scanner.
The thing is, the necessary shift can be very rapidly identified, in a matter of hours, because with MI we are rapidly filtering the complexity, not seeking to understand it. What we’re addressing here is, after all, unmappably complex. Fortunately, we do not need to map or model anything.
A truly scientific model answers but one question or class of questions at a time; every time you ask a different question, you have to throw away your model. The model of light as moving in a straight line from a point source explains why your shadow is shorter at noon than at sunrise, but we need a model of light as a wave to explain the refraction of light by a prism.
Every map or model is the answer to a very specific question. No matter how good our model, if it is answering the wrong question it will be as good as useless. The map of the London Underground is very useful, but not for navigating the city on foot or negotiating the one-way streets. The point is not to model complexity, but to filter it.
At the outset of the analysis, with MI, the existing state and the desired state may appear to be as far apart as can be imagined. That’s a function largely of how they have been described. For reality is infinitely redescribable, and there are an infinity of descriptive dimensions that may be salient. In the analysis what we’re looking for is the descriptive space in which the existing state and the desired state are already so near to one another, that one will merge or readily morph into the other with the smallest possible intervention, simply by shifting one or two key constraints.
Finding that space is at the heart of the MI technology. When people describe their situation, they only describe it along an arbitrary set of dimensions, and like the proverbial drunk they look for their lost house key under the streetlamp, not because that’s where they dropped it but because that’s where the light is.
Now the upshot of this scientific work, as my dear late friend and colleague Esko Kilpi once mused, was that in developing the MI technology I had “managed to reverse-engineer causality itself.” That was after all no big deal, I told Esko, since the concept of causality was already back-to-front!
Basically, you could say that all that my scientific colleagues and I had to do was to reverse the concept of causality, and then spend a few hundred man-years of pure scientific research and R&D deducing the theoretical, empirical, and practical consequences and building a useable technology. Then voilà! and we had MI.
We scrapped the 17th Century view that took persistence to be the status quo and which sought to account for any change causally. Instead, we viewed the photographic negative of that, and expected to find random flux as a constant everywhere in the universe. So now what needed explaining was not change, but persistence. To change any pattern we would need to pinpoint the constraints in place making anything else impossible.
The implications are huge.
If we are to understand how the world really works, we need first to abandon the pseudo-scientific fairy-tale of The Atoms and the Molecules: the antiquated 17th-Century narrative of colliding corpuscles, matter-and-energy, cause-and-effect; the myth that the concepts of a pre-nineteenth-century physics and chemistry provide a sufficient basis for explaining the mechanics of the universe; the fantasy of all human behaviour as being causally explained in terms of pulsing nerve cells and neurotransmitters, and of living things parsed in terms of crude, chemistry-set conceptions of the role of DNA in biological inheritance, as opposed to the full complexity of not only the genetics but the epigenetics.
Likewise, we must jettison the notion that complex human events, from businesses and markets to wars, are in an entirely separate category of analysis. Truly revolutionary scientific work over the past century, work cutting across disciplines, has reconceived the fundamental mechanics of the universe in terms not of matter and energy, power and forces, cause and effect, but in terms of form and pattern, flux and constraint, information and design.
The very fabric of reality has been reconceived in metamorphology, in terms of infinitely multidimensional networks of information flows, patterns of purely communicational interaction, at every level of description.
Purpose and desire, perception and context can be shown to form a fundamental part of the mechanics of the physical universe itself and can be rigorously compassed in hard scientific terms, dissolving entirely the superseded Galilean divide between human and natural domains, between subjective and objective.
If the very fabric of reality consists of information at every level of description, we can derive “it from bit” (to borrow Wheeler’s phrase). When we understand this we will have truly entered the Information Age.
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The Big Announcement
In 2010 I said as much, word for word, to what should have been an ideally receptive audience. Or so you would think.
I was invited both to attend and to give a keynote speech at f.ounders, an annual, invitation-only, four-day private meeting of the world’s top 100 technology founders, held that year in Dublin from 28th to 31st October.
The event was attended also by the President of Ireland, the President of the European Parliament, the International Chairman of Goldman Sachs, the Chief Economist of the World Bank, the Honorary Director General of the European Commission, stars like Bob Geldof, et al. and a host of other luminaries there to schmooze with the marquis names behind Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Square and all the rest—each dignitary there was ‘a schmoozer on a mission’, not least those representing the Republic of Ireland, who were seeking to persuade the world’s tech giants that Eire was their ideal future home from home. After all, Le Tout Paris of the tech world was there. For Ireland it was an opportunity for inward investment not to be missed.
Perhaps one of the biggest gatherings of billionaires anywhere on earth, the f.ounders wined and dined in sumptuous fashion, meeting ‘round the clock under über-tight security at the five-star luxe Westbury Hotel where all of us were staying (the top hotel in Ireland), and informally at various other secret VIP destinations around Dublin, to which we were ferried behind blackened windows. No expense was spared, no extravagance too extravagant, but over four days of the very finest Dublin had to offer, we never once, any of us, had to reach for a credit card—everything was on the house, courtesy of our Irish hosts.
The press (including the FT, Wall Street Journal, etc.), who were in town from all over the world to cover an event they couldn’t even get into, had a field day as the rumour mill ran at full-throttle and leaked copiously from the meetings otherwise held in camera. London’s Daily Telegraph reported that a heated debate on European tech vs. Silicon Valley tech was going on amongst twenty or so celebrity tech founders in the Westbury’s lobby at 6.00 a.m. over Moët and McDonald’s, after a hard-drinking all-nighter, all business.
Lady Gaga was overheard fuming at the Westbury’s Front Desk at check-in because she wasn’t automatically given, and couldn’t even get, the class of room she was used to; unfortunately, there was nothing else the hotel management could offer her, so she had to slum it—for the first time in many years she’d been upstaged, … “and by some engineers!”
“The only invitees missing,” one f.ounders participant told the Telegraph, “were Princess Diana and God.” We broke bread and downed Guinness and champagne around town and drank endless cups of coffee. Other than the night before my keynote speech, I hardly slept more than three hours a night as there was just too much going on literally ‘round the clock—too much one didn’t want to miss out on, not for anything.
After all, for instance, who’d want to miss the chance of going clubbing with a hundred of the most accomplished and stimulating, utterly delightful, and fun people on earth in the VIP room of the tackiest upscale mega-nightclub in town and together watching a spontaneous 3.00 a.m. show-stopping hiphop dance-off, fuelled by buckets of Taittinger Brut Reserve, between two world-class breakdancing, budding billionaire boffins in baseball caps, duelling it out on the dance floor and cheered on by their celebrity peers? Talk about “multi-talented”! If they failed to take over the world with their latest innovations they could always dance their way to stardom.
I later learned that I almost certainly had had more sleep over those four days than almost any of the others had, in spite of never once heading off to bed before 4.30 a.m. with an early start each day. Many participants virtually went without sleep for the duration of the four-day event.
But though I was having a great time from the get-go and making a number of new and lasting friends and colleagues, I was invited to give the Keynote, and that was above all why I had been so thrilled to be attending in the first place, though I knew it would be fun: I was there to showcase my own Next Big Thing. To make my own Big Announcement, just as Jack Dorsey at f.ounders that year announced the launch of Square.
I had been warned weeks ahead of time by two friends who couldn’t make it to f.ounders that year but knew all or most of the attendees well, “not to expect miracles.” For while these were incredibly smart people (they each told me independently), the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, still, at the end of the day, by training and by mindset they were all still just “linear-thinking engineers” who, may not have a clue what on earth to make of what I was there to tell them.
To address this issue, my speech was carefully edited, over several weeks, by some of the best editors in the business press and others, making it as accessible and entertaining as possible, and I then learned my 30-minute speech off by heart.
When I was called to the podium to deliver the keynote speech, I was very much “in the zone” and delivered the talk flawlessly and passionately to a packed room of the 100 assembled luminaries and a smattering of dignitaries, along with one or two of their hand-picked, invited journalists.
“I’m here at f.ounders this year,” I began, “to make a rather startling announcement.” I paused for dramatic effect. And then I continued:
But if nothing can prepare you for what I’m about to say, it’s not because it is at odds with your experience of the world.
It is at odds with what you’ve been taught to make of that experience. And that’s the crunch.
You remember “the butterfly effect” from Chaos Theory in mathematics? How a butterfly flapping its wings in China can alter the weather over New England?
Suppose you could turn it around, and figure out in advance, OK, which butterfly, on which gatepost in Shenzhen (say) would have to flap its wings at what time, at so many beats per second for exactly how long, to guarantee a beautiful Labor Day weekend on Cape Cod?
What if you could do the equivalent of that in society, or in business, or in the development of new technology or new applications?
And what if it worked, reliably, every time?
What I’m talking about, however, has nothing to do with Chaos Theory—it hinges on a different set of scientific concepts altogether.
What I’m talking about is the analysis of highly complex systems in order to deliberately create major transformations swiftly and reliably by pinpointing and implementing such irrelevant butterfly wing-flaps.
Opening with those words, I went on to talk for half an hour about creating new technologies or transforming large corporations across the board overnight with a tiny catalytic intervention such as moving a coffee pot fifty centimetres, following less than four-hours of MI’s rigorous analysis in a one-on-one meeting with the Chief Executive.
I gently introduced the scientific theory behind it all, patiently laying it out in an accessible, lively fashion, and made use of metaphors and familiar experiences to take the extraordinary discoveries and the science behind them and make sense of them for these world-leading and innovation-hungry but thick-thumbed engineers and business people, and I illustrated my talk with example after entertaining example, anecdote after anecdote, business case history after case history.
I covered much the same ground as I covered in this week’s Substack post, except that I went a bit more into the technical stuff for these guys, and though much has happened since then that I have been able to add here in the present longer and more up-to-date article.
My keynote was a tour de force, the best talk on MI I’d ever given, and my audience consisted of the most forward-looking, brilliant and successful technological and business brains on the planet, always well ahead of the curve, ever on the lookout for anything that could help them get where they were going faster, better, cheaper…yes, and smaller. What I had to say should have been music to their ears—and not just any music but thrilling, just-gotta-get-up-and-dance music.
Yet throughout the keynote the audience seemed to me to be looking on with glazed eyes.
Was it just my imagination? Perhaps they were simply, literally, entranced by what I was telling them, excited and stunned by the announcement of a radically new technology none of them had seen coming, which none of them had heard of or could imagine, so far beyond anything they could figure out how to build, and they were simply caught like bunnies in the headlamps. Ah. That must have been it.
When at last I’d finished, breathless after delivering my dazzling peroration—presenting an inspiring, enchanting vision of how things can be done now, today, in a way that to most people would seem like magic—all delivered in a blaze of rhetorical fireworks, closing with the usual, exquisitely timed,“Thank you very much,” I expected all but a standing ovation, as I had experienced once or twice on such occasions in the past when introducing MI.
But the assembled worthies of the tech world, eyes still glazed over, limply and only barely audibly clapped, and only for about two to three seconds at most, the minimum they could get away with, at least without seeming downright rude. When I, as instructed, then opened the floor to questions, you could have heard a pin drop.
I graciously and congenially repeated the offer to take questions, providing a few prompts in the usual way. I tried self-mocking humour, non-verbal expectation cues, everything—you name it, I tried it, and finally just requested that perhaps someone might want to kick off the discussion. More silence. At last, one brave soul in the audience raised his hand and the usher passed him the wireless microphone. I brightened up.
Now, I thought, a lively discussion could ensue in the 17 minutes of scheduled time remaining. “James,” asked the lone questioner, [drum roll in my head, as I steeled myself to parry any challenge], [long pause] “hey James. uh, do you happen to know whether coffee will be out there yet?”
Crestfallen, I replied, “Erm, not sure, uh…,” but a second later, when the usher nodded in the affirmative, the room cleared out in seconds as all bustled noisily and energetically out of the room to grab coffee and pastries from the buffet outside, chattering non-stop about other matters, leaving me on my own in a room full of empty chairs with coats and rucksacks, hearing the din of a hundred voices all talking at once in the packed coffee room next door, and I was left wondering what on earth I’d said to bore them all out of their seats.
Only two amongst the hundred or so in the conference room even bothered to speak to me or throw me a smile on their way to get coffee, other than buddies of mine. One said, as he rushed past me, “Thanks! Enjoyed it— beautiful idea! Hope it’ll be possible one day! Doubt it, but a lovely dream anyway!” and was gone in a flash, nowhere to be seen.
The other, a Danish entrepreneur with an academic philosophy background (as it turned out) smiled in a good-natured way as he turned his wrist inwards to make an elbow-poking-ribs gesture in the air beside me, and said, “Haha! you nearly had me there!” and chuckled. “How do you mean?” I asked. “I mean, for a while I actually thought you were serious!” “I was serious.” “Well, no, to be honest I was avidly taking notes, hanging on your every word, and I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d heard about in ages, I was enthralled, …until the guy sitting next to me let me in on the joke.” “Joke? What joke?” “Why,” he laughed, “your talk of course!” “Excuse me?” “My neighbour just leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a hoax.’” “What?? Who on earth told you that? Who were you sitting next to?” And he told me the name.
“Aha! That explains it!” This time it was my turn to laugh. “I guess you don’t know him personally, then!” “No." “He’s a pal of mine,” I informed him, “he was just pulling your leg.” “Whaddya mean?” “He’s a bit of a wag, an irrepressible practical joker. He was just kidding you!” “You mean, MI is real after all?” “Of course it is. I wouldn’t have been invited to give this keynote otherwise.” “Ohh!! …Ohhhh!!!” scowled the Dane, as his face played out the truth’s dawning on him in stages, and, plainly seething now in a fit of pique, he finally shook his head and blurted out, practically snarling with righteous indignation, “No one, no one, should ever pull the leg of an earnest Danish person!”
He was visibly shaken, plainly embarrassed. We joined the others for coffee and began talking in more depth about MI and became fast friends, and talked frequently and deeply about MI and other matters over the course of the next few days. I had made a fascinating and delightful new friend and gained a fan of MI for my pains. But to my relief, I talked to a number of my friends at f.ounders over the next few days about my speech, and they of course had got it, but to most of those who didn’t know me before, it came as something of a shock for which they were genuinely unprepared. Such was the consensus of my friends, anyway. Lack of sleep couldn’t have helped either.
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Nothing Can Prepare You for This
Let’s be honest. No matter who you are, and what you have achieved or how much you know, billionaire serial unicorn breeder or not, nothing in your prior experience can prepare you for this. That’s the stark reality, the bottom line.
It’s true in spades for being in your first MI session, especially as a client, but probably equally true for exposure to the whole epistemology, the radically different epistemology to which MI gives rise and which at the same time makes MI possible in the first place.
It’s difficult for me to know, the last person to be able to judge, as I’m probably the first person to have grown up as a “new epistemology” native. I started thinking like this from the age of 16 or 17, and by 18 anyway I no longer believed in causality, saw it as a myth, and haven’t been able to take it seriously ever since. And I’m so used to MI, having by now had coffee pots coming out of my ears! And still amazed by it all, as I related: Los Alamos redux.
I first identified the new epistemology explicitly in print in 1986 (though I’d already written a youthful book about it without naming it or explicitly defining it in detail), and delineated it in detail in a lecture, calling it “E2.” After more than forty years of writing about it and teaching it, no one else has yet written about it or about an epistemology anything like it. Disappointing, but it’s that alien, I guess.
And yet I could trace its roots, it’s genealogy, through 100s of authors writing since the early 17th Century to the present, a plurality of them in the mid-Twentieth Century, but none of whom glimpsed more than one or two pieces of it, and/or wildly misidentified it, like the proverbial blind men and the elephant.
The pages of Change, the 75+ articles and counting, are all in different ways about E2, the epistemology of MI, and repay close study. Or else they are about the shortcomings and outright demonstrable falsity of E1, our name for the old, prevailing epistemology, still sadly with us and dominating all or most discourse since the late Sixteenth Century and rarely challenged; and only challenged in the name of E2 by me and one or two close colleagues. It’s tacitly taken for reality itself, and the whole of it, almost universally, even by scientists, but it is nothing but a tissue of fantasy.
E2 admittedly sounds impossibly strange to the denizens of E1-land, And like the celebrated denizens of a two-dimensional universe Flatland, where, when those aware of three dimensions move in and out of the Flatlanders’ two-dimensional slice, things seem to the Flatlanders magically to disappear in one spot and seconds later reappear magically in another, so the denizens of E1 look on agog at what to them appear as miracles because of their impoverished view of the world, when the E2 people do what seem to us to be only ordinary, obvious things, especially the coffee-pots revealed by MI. Poor E1-ers. They just can’t fathom it.
Arthur C. Clarke’s epigram that any technology sufficiently advanced (like MI for instance) appears to be magic, applies all the more to any epistemology sufficiently advanced.
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The Case of Gregory Bateson
The great biologist, ecologist, cybernetician, anthropologist, zoologist, and naturalist, a pioneer of kinesics and one of the founding fathers of biosemiotics (and much else besides) Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), a scientist’s scientist, who in some ways came nearest before me to grasping and embracing the epistemology we call E2, had a decidedly strange view of reality, in the sense of alien or unfamiliar.
I think he was one of our predecessors who came tantalizingly closest to getting it, but frustratingly still didn’t (which is why some of my closest colleagues despair of Bateson, even disapprove of his views, which I can fully understand—so close and yet so far).
In the introductory lecture on Bateson I gave my second-year grad students every year, I opened by characterizing his views, by way of a thought experiment I invited the lecture audience to undertake—which as later spelled out in the lecture was perhaps charitably reading into (the never systematic) Bateson our own E2 epistemology, and in some ways it probably is a curious amalgam of Bateson’s view of the world and my own:
Imagine a world which, to the naked eye, is otherwise just like our own familiar world, but in which all our age-old notions of cause-and-effect have been forever relegated to the scrapheap of discredited, ancient scientific myths (like the conception of the world as a giant platter on the back of a giant tortoise, on top of another such tortoise, and with “tortoises all the way down”).
Instead imagine a world where all events are ultimately ruled not by cause and effect, and certainly not by any supposedly immutable laws of physics (to which chemical, and biological and even psychological and sociological phenomena can allegedly in principle one day be reduced), nor by quantum phenomena or what have you.
Rather, this world I am asking you to imagine would be one in which all such physical laws and properties—the stock-in-trade of the physicist—even when taken together, have little or no role to play in the vast majority of phenomena in the universe.
In this strange world we are conjuring up together, the notions of object-and-forces, cause-and-effect, are entirely replaced by the notions of pattern-and-context, flux-and-constraint. In fact I am inviting you now to imagine a world without any laws of nature at all—other than the One Commandment addressed to every being and particle in all of Creation, that “Thou shalt know no such laws, for everything may and must be improvised!”—a world which is an improvised product of countless individual actors’ pure and inalienable free will.
But the curious kind of world I am asking you to imagine is far stranger still. For in such a world, everything is made not of matter and energy at all, not as we think of them, anyway. Rather, I am asking you to imagine a world that consists entirely and purely of information, of differentiae—distinguishing characteristics—and distinctions, descriptive differences and news of such differences, where “news” is news of any difference that makes a difference elsewhere, a difference making a difference to something or someone else.
I am asking you, if you can, to imagine an entire world, an entire universe, as Bateson never tired of repeating, “made only of news”! Differences that make a difference. Not a physical universe of matter and energy on the move, but a purely communicational universe of differences on the move and news of such differences, where matter and energy can, for the most part, be safely ignored.
Let me suggest an analogy. When you gaze upon a gorgeous work of architecture, and remark upon its beauty or ingeniousness, or grace, I bet you are not in the first instance thinking about the various individual stones or bricks-and-mortar or glass and steel of which it is made, or the heavy lifting of the cranes and workmen who built it (let alone atoms and molecules and quanta of energy!), though as you survey the wondrous construction you may also find yourself wondering at the builders’ and engineers’ incredible achievement too.
What really matters to you, as an admirer or critic, is not the building materials and construction equipment but the design, the architecture, which guided and completely determined which stones should go where and what efforts needed to be made to put them there.
Like a hod-carrier or a forklift truck, energy could do the heavy lifting and matter could provide the bricks and mortar, but these merely enabled the work of organization to be implemented, the structures to be built and moved, in the context, according to the architectural demands of the blueprint: intention and design, purpose, reason, and custom. All that energy would only have moved all that matter in the first place, and put it down just where we find it now, in order to fulfil the requirements of the architectural design.
So I am merely asking you to imagine, in effect, an architectural world, where every architect is sovereign and directs her builders; where the matter and energy are recruited, summoned as needed, but where all the phenomena of the entire world are, in essence, nothing but information, just as someone once characterized architecture as “frozen music.”
So, next, imagine such a world to be a harmonious, beautiful and above all graceful, elegantly unfolding world, apparently exquisitely choreographed but in fact, underneath it all, completely anarchic, in which all phenomena emerge in a grand, unpredictable, glorious improvisation by an infinity of architects.
Here, everything that happens in the world, in nature, in human affairs, everywhere, is continually being improvised in response to idiosyncratic local contingencies. Here all happenings in the world are purely a function of unique local contexts, where the context will be different for each and every participant, every observer. And above all, those micro-contexts will be mutually irrelevant. They don’t even join up at the back.
Imagine a world in which, therefore, all narratives one may happen to construct about the world are ultimately false and dangerously misleading, but a world in which, in the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s words, “(Say it. Say it.) the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” and where there is no story, no narrative that can even begin, however partially, to describe any of it with any accuracy, any validity.
Certainly not in story form, with a beginning, middle and end, because in this world we are imagining, the state of the universe at any given moment consists, if you will, of a kind of “interference pattern” produced by the collision of an infinite number of idiosyncratic individual narratives. In fact, all is not merely caught in the crossfire of stories; rather, everything, the whole shebang, simply consists of the crossfire of stories!
Now if I may ask you, please, to stay with me just a little while longer, as we continue on this crazy roller-coaster ride through the curious world I am asking you to imagine, you will find that the strangest of all is yet to come.
For in this world as we are imagining it, it follows that the behaviour of all living things can no longer be explained as a response to external stimuli or as the effect of internal or external causes or both, because in this world we are exploring, we can recognize that nature just doesn’t work that way. Not here, not in this particular world.
In fact, the behaviour of living things at all levels, down to the lowliest mycoplasma or mitochondrion, can be seen to consist of taking a selected environmental variable and extracting it from what would otherwise be the causal nexus.
Far from being seen as the creature of causes, living things in this world are recognized as living only insofar as they are free and autonomous, completely cancelling out the effects of any would-be causes before those can have any effect (that is, before they can be causes!). And in this fantastic, E. T. A. Hoffmanesque or Disneyesque world, living things function purely autonomously at every level, as I say, down to the tiniest organelle.
Therefore, in this strange world we are describing, the whole of the organic realm, and especially the psychological realm, can henceforth only be understood scientifically as not the creature of causes at all but as autonomous and purposeful—the systematic nullifying of any and all causal influences. Life, in this world, could in fact be conveniently defined as the undoing of cause and effect.
And in this world through which we are journeying in imagination, life is everywhere. All is living, complete with Shakespeare’s “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.” Saxa loquntur. Stones speak. Life and mind are one, and it is life, mind, that forms the very fabric of reality, that crossfire of stories.
What’s more, in this little world we’re imagining, at least (but not only) in all of this world’s higher mammals, all behaviour is fundamentally and inextricably expressive, communicative, purposeful and concerned above all with relationships. All organization takes the form of spontaneous, autonomous, purposeful self-organization of entities responding, of their own free will, to their own idiosyncratic micro-context.
In every moment any living organism forms an inextricable unity with its immediate environment as seen from its own point of view: a unity in perfect synchrony with a self-contained micro-universe of its own. Spontaneity of action turns out in such a world to be an irreducible biologic phenomenon, and even more fundamental than response to the micro-context.
And spontaneity is always, always, always in the context of a relationship. Indeed, henceforward, spontaneity and relationship are now inseparable. The one cannot be conceived without the other. Meanwhile, neither the past nor the future exist; only the present moment is real; yet we are, in every fibre of our being, pulled from the future, not pushed from the past.
Moreover, especially in the human sphere, in the world I am describing, since all behaviour is communication and cannot be considered apart from the conversation in which it is but one voice, all behaviour in this universe we are portraying can now only be understood contextually in terms of interactional patterns embedded integrally within the whole interpersonal network in which those patterns live and move and have their being.
All the same, individuals, though embedded inextricably in patterns of interpersonal interaction, at the nexus of multiple relationships, nonetheless all remain free agents, responding to their understood, self-defined, contingent situations by electing to do one thing rather than another in relation to their desires. Patterns of interpersonal interaction provide the essential context for the deliberation and choice of actions, but those interactions in no way determine or direct specific, substantive actions, nor have they [any means of doing so]. …
All right. Now it’s okay to exhale! After that whirlwind tour, it will doubtless be a relief at last to come back down to earth, and, I expect, not a moment too soon! And thank you for bearing with me. But as I’m sure you’ve tumbled to by now, the curious world I have been describing on our journey together, strange to tell, is not an imaginary world at all.
The world I have been describing is of course our own world, the one-and-only real world. It is the very world where you and I really live, and move, and have our being, as Bateson saw it. At least that is more or less, I think, after a lifetime exploring his work, roughly how Gregory Bateson saw the world, though he never spelled it out in this way or indeed in any single place, but only in hints widely scattered throughout his work.7
What I have just described, as much Wilk as Bateson, perhaps more so, forms some of the subject matter of the field of metamorphology, the science I initiated and the science behind MI, borrowing and repurposing an archaic 19th Century word for the name of the new science. I gave something of a potted prehistory of metamorphology in my post, “Catching Up with the Past,” and I gave a brief introduction to metamorphology in my four-part “Science of Change.” So I won’t repeat myself here, as those interested to dig a little deeper can readily find the resources right here in the pages of Change.
And when taken together with the description above of the World According to Wilk (and in many or most respects, according to Bateson too I suspect), and together with our revised view of nature, which I sum up very concisely in my short post “The Renaissance of the Universe,” these articles should begin to give you a flavour, at least, of how MI goes about its analysis, insofar as you can get a rough idea of what MI is actually processing, were we to take a look under the hood (or what in Britain we call the bonnet).
In a literal sense, MI is just one of the many first practical byproducts of metamorphology.
Rest assured that E2 and metamorphology can account for anything accounted for by E1, the prevailing, superannuated 16th Century epistemology, but unlike E1, only E2, the new, challenger epistemology, can account for the extraordinary phenomena produced and uncovered by MI—the coffee pots and the results of applying the technology, rendering them perfectly normal and expectable miracles, and revealing them to be not really miracles at all. It reveals them instead to be merely ordinary life lived in the full light of day, with the clarity of the noonday sun with its absence of shadows, life life lived without the dark glasses on, without being ridden by illusion.
For its part, MI is not only the ultimate liberating technology, available now, but also the ultimate healing technology, grounded as it is in the new epistemology which makes strife unnecessary, and allows it to just fall away. But these are not subjects for a synoptic, introductory post.
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Envoi
MI is a powerful competitive secret weapon for ambitious CEOs, allowing the decision maker free to grow their company without all the unnecessary rigmarole. A universe of untold possibilities for action open up at once.
Reality, viewed with the help of MI, all at once appears infinitely richer, more colourful, more dynamic, more fluid, more malleable than we could ever have imagined. More wondrously than in even the most whimsical and fantastic confections of E. T. A. Hoffmann, our everyday world is revealed to be immanently capable of the most miraculous transformations with such ease and fluidity, and in such endlessly rich kaleidoscopic combinations and re-combinations, that it constitutes a magnificent, glittering, magical realm, much nearer to hand than anyone could have dreamed, in which, “the human spirit governing according to its own pleasure,” you can command as a lord so long as you obey the laws of this realm like a vassal.
These laws are themselves readily discoverable. And, once you get in the habit, they are effortlessly obeyed. As Francis Bacon put it in his 1620 Novum Organum, the birth certificate of modern science, “Nature can be commanded only by obeying her.”
What is more, when we view the world through through the new epistemology we can perceive reality directly in all its infinite richness and diversity and endless possibilities, instead of merely perceiving, as most of us do most of the time, “a dim reflexion in a dull mirror.” As if equipped with a kind of x-ray vision, we can descry the springs of action and the actual mechanisms of the world, thus conferring upon us an unprecedented ability to transform states-of-affairs at will, to pinpoint effective minimalist interventions (“coffee pots”), to collapse or expand time, and to direct the course of events to achieve our desired ends.
This rich, fluid, protean phantasmagoria, teeming with infinite possibilities awaiting our every command, this reality of everyday life, had previously appeared to us comparatively dull, dry, rigid, mechanical and opaque to our understanding.
It is as if we now held in our hands the most exquisite, dazzling masterpiece of a Fabergé egg suddenly come magically to life as all of Fabergé’s designs in one, pulsing and transforming itself kaleidoscopically from one design to another, inside and out, before our very eyes, in ceaselessly shifting gorgeous combinations of colours and patterns of precious metals and glittering rare jewels…, where before we could only perceive the dull, pale brown shell of an ordinary hen’s egg, just out of our fridge.
In our everyday world as it now appears laid out wondrously before us, as if for the first time, we can suddenly perceive endless and irreducible diversity along each of an infinity of dimensions—a multiplicity of independent, intermingled, interpenetrating realities, characterized everywhere by singularity and autonomy, freedom and spontaneity, improvization and creativity, alive in every part; an enchanted world through which we can navigate our way at will, fluidly and almost effortlessly, directing the course of events as they unfold.
Here, at last, nothing is hidden, or if so, it is hidden in plain view. Limitless possibilities, any of which, at our command, can be singled out and realized at a stroke, offer themselves up to our sight and touch. Indeed, almost any conceivable desired state-of-affairs can readily be discerned to be inherent in, immanent in, the existing situation, and even the most fragile and isolated instances of desired patterns can be strengthened, cloned and propagated, and released to proliferate themselves endlessly.
Change does not need to be brought about, but merely needs to be released. The future is no longer something “out there” which we seek to anticipate and for which we prepare ourselves that we might better thrive in it; rather, it becomes something we create according to our desires. No longer can the environment in which we act be thought of as something to which we must adapt, and instead it becomes something we merely make irrelevant, immaterial to the success, soundness and sustainability of our actions. No longer are we at the mercy of events, but instead it is we ourselves who direct the course of events as they unfold.
Any significant change in this world can be achieved swiftly and painlessly, at our pleasure, without the slightest resistance. Indeed, no matter how major or longstanding a problem or desired change, or how significant and costly or richly rewarding its consequences, the intervention required to flip the situation from the existing to the desired state can be pinpointed with precision and requires no more effort or resources on our part than that required to achieve any purportedly lesser change.
Scale and scope, power and energy, time and effort, even cause and effect simply become irrelevant. All is clearly revealed to be a function purely of purpose, design and context, and even contexts themselves can now be made suddenly to appear or disappear or be utterly transformed at will with the aid of MI.
Effective “coffee pots,” as we have characterized them, in which across-the-board transformations occur all at once in response to your well-placed tiny intervention, become not only possible, but commonplace—the way important things get done from now on.
That’s what the world-changing technology of MI is all about. That’s why I’ve devoted my career to it, and to teaching it and writing about it, and why I am so excited about it.
It is a calling, for me and for one or two others at least, and like any calling, you know it’s your calling because it just won’t stop calling.
And perhaps you’ll understand why I’m just as excited about MI today as I’ve ever been.
Won’t you join us? . . . Welcome to Change, a publication on MI, or if you’re already one of our loyal subscribers across 19 US states and 34 countries, or a follower or regular reader, then, welcome back! Together we can change the world and make it a better place for all. And for once this isn’t just a platitude. Armed with MI and the new epistemology E2, these words no longer express a mere pious hope. And that’s the third reason, and the most important, why you should care.
© Copyright 2025 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
To those dear friends who in many different ways at many widely different times inspired the writing of this long gestating and long overdue article and/or contributed to, or inspired, some of the specific ways of conveying a very difficult and highly technical subject in ordinary language, that I otherwise might not have considered, or who helped with the editing of this or that passage, or encouraged me to overcome my natural reticence and write it at all, telling it like it is: this post goes out with credit where it’s due, and much love and gratitude, to Marko Ahtisaari, Pekka Ala-Pietilä, Ellen Arkfeld, the late John Chandler, the late Napier Collyns, Martha Goss, Beatrice Gutmann, Quentin Hardy, the late Esko Kilpi, Pertti Korhonen, Jack Martin Leith, Esa Saarinen, Anders Schepelern, Ed Shapiro, Michael Bungay Stanier, David Stewart, Simon Waterfall and Jaime Wolf, as well as all the usual suspects (you know who you are). But I alone am responsible for the content, for any errors or shortcomings of this piece, and for the faults which I know remain, as I did not want to delay publication any longer.
Professional discretion forbids me from identifying the examples further, as we never name clients at Interchange Research, and they would be too easy to identify in saying more, but the facts and figures are accurate and taken from standard, authoritative industry sources. The exception is the Olympic examples, where we obtained permission to disclose their identity as a condition of undertaking the work.
particularly once it was proven in mid-1987 that MI was necessarily non-algorithmic
An early 1986 brochure referred to it as “Intelligent Action” (IA) and talked about the technology drawing upon “the science of change” to create “major transformations by minimalist means”—the moniker “Minimalist Intervention,” which stuck ever since, wasn’t adopted until the following year. But the focus was always on intelligent action, not cognition. The historical accident was a client, who was a marketing top manager, christening MI in 1987.
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
James Wilk (1986) “Knowledge and Know-How,” Originally presented (twice, by popular demand) at the Second Biennial Ashridge Research Conference, "Positioning Managers for the Future," Ashridge Management College, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, January 1987.
Dr James Wilk, “Getting to Know Gregory Bateson: A brief invitation to his work,” a lecture first presented to the 1st-Year DClinPsy doctoral students in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, 4th October 2016, and given annually for a while. It will find its way into book form in due course.
Stunningly comprehensive. Thank you James.
worth waiting for.