Interchange Research, an independent, international scientific think-tank, has been dedicated for half a century to the development of the proprietary technology of Minimalist Intervention and the scientific theory behind it.  

For fifty years of continuous, dedicated scientific research, the Interchange Research team has been at the forefront of the scientific study of change, working to develop and refine a groundbreaking analytical technology with demonstrated, unprecedented power to catalyze desired change overnight in the world of affairs, on a scale and with a degree of precision previously unimaginable—indeed, for most people, still unimaginable even today.  

As an academic research enterprise Interchange investigators have pursued decades of scientific investigation into the phenomena of ‘directiveness’ in nature and in human affairs. The rigorous study of these phenomena—including inter alia change, control, ontogenesis, evolution, adaptation, purpose, intervention, and design—has given rise to powerful new concepts and methods of analysis. Out of this highly abstract and technical scientific research have come a series of radical breakthroughs, simultaneously revolutionizing both theory and practice. For in arriving at the radical body of theory which alone has made Minimalist Intervention conceivable, let alone possible, Interchange has been furthering a century-old scientific revolution with the potential to change everything we thought we understood about the world—about man, nature and our place in it—indeed, with the potential to change everything that even in 2020 most well-educated people still think they know.

The legacy: the scientific revolution of the millennium (1912–1970)

Although the Interchange team’s concerted scientific research programme on Minimalist Intervention did not kick off until the Summer of 1971, barely half a century ago, its roots go much further back to the work of the Interchange think-tank’s immediate scientific forebears—the team’s university teachers, and their teacher’s teachers, who themselves had formed a long-running, concerted transatlantic collaboration, which was arguably the single most remarkable, fertile and influential large-scale scientific collaboration of the 20th Century.1

According to the still prevailing “creation myth” in the literature, the official birthdate of this unparalleled scientific movement (one which, to this day, was never to acquire an agreed-upon name) was 6th August 1927, and its improbable-sounding birthplace a commuter ferry crossing the Hudson river. In point of fact, however, this audacious research programme had already been commenced in earnest over a decade earlier in Britain (at least as early as 1916) by scientists working together for the Allied war effort (1914–18), and in Russia before 1912, while this scientific revolution had gathered a head of steam just after the First World War in Central Europe, though much of the theoretical foundations had already been laid in prior scientific work published throughout the 19th Century, with some of the foundational work going as far back as 1620 in England, and earlier still in Germany. This revolution in ideas, despite its earlier roots, was in many ways, like so many great things, the fruit of the “Golden Twenties” of the Weimar Renaissance in Germany between the wars, and without this earlier, wide-ranging body of innovative work spanning multiple fields, from biology and medicine to philosophy, psychoanalysis and education, that legendary 1927 ferry crossing would not have had as broad and profound an impact on future developments as it was destined to have.

Both of the 20th Century’s great Allied war efforts proved to be major spurs to this veritable tsunami of research. In a continuous development stretching from just before and during World War I, through the 1920s and 1930s, and finally burgeoning in the years just before, during, and throughout the decade just following the Second World War (and continuing through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s), some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century—a host of more-or-less maverick but highly distinguished scientists working across countless disciplines—were thrown together in the course of their professional work on various, apparently unrelated and usually practical problems, many or perhaps most of these initially in war work spanning two world wars, and often far from their day jobs. Almost all were based either in Britain or in America, and a significant proportion had been refugees from Hitler. The scientific revolutionaries’ epoch-making work, conducted field of research by field of research, was in time to comprise tens of thousands of man-years of tireless work by first-rate scientific investigators. Some hundreds of those scientists who were most prominent in developing and promulgating the revolutionary new thinking were among the 20th Century’s most distinguished names within the confines of their own disciplines, and they were to number amongst them a dazzling array of Fellows of the Royal Society and a prodigious number of Nobel Laureates and Nominees. For these were intellectual giants in an age of giants, and this work could only have been the work of giants, to be sure.  

Despite coming from wildly different scientific disciplines, the investigators worked side-by-side in ever varying multidisciplinary groupings, labouring on the frontiers of their own fields and of Science writ large. Working together were the century’s most distinguished mathematicians and linguists, anthropologists and engineers, ethologists and ethnologists, physicists and physiologists, philologists and geneticists, chemists and biochemists, psychologists and zoologists, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists, anatomists and astrophysicists, quantum mechanicists and biosemioticians, mathematical logicians and ecologists, economists and computer scientists, statisticians and physicians, cognitive scientists and epidemiologists, information theorists and psychiatrists, and a bewilderingly diverse host of others. They published their results prolifically in the most prestigious, peer-reviewed2 scientific journals, now in one discipline, now in another, or else in Nature or in Science or in the new journals demanded by the multiple new fields of study they were opening up.

They worked together on the most bewildering array of pure and applied, often arcane scientific problems: the chemical mediation of homeostasis, the eerie similarities in nerve-firing pattern between epileptic seizures and normal contraction in heart muscle, the mathematics of controlling antiaircraft guns, the phenomena of hypnotic trance and of psychotic hallucinations, fluid mechanics, the communicative behavior of dolphins, the construction of reliable signal amplifiers from unreliable components, nervous system organization, the complex communicative significance of lighting someone’s cigarette, embryogenesis, the selection of army officers, the pseudo-mating rituals of groups of artificial turtles (each with two-neuron “brains”), the sophisticated chemotaxic navigational abilities of E. coli (which they found could navigate a 17-dimensional chemical space just by tumbling), the mechanics of frogs’ visual perception, psychopathology, brief psychotherapy, group therapy and group dynamics, the training of guide dogs, the psychology and neurophysiology of laughter and humour, the organization of mental hospitals, communication between Down’s Syndrome children, the psychoanalytic treatment of schizophrenia, the interaction between ventriloquists and their puppets, family dynamics, the development of optical devices for the Apollo space program, the genesis of self-organizing dynamic systems, the word-salad of schizophrenics and the play of otters, along with such miscellaneous curiosities as the movement of circling-arm lawn sprinklers, as well as more central concerns such as the microdynamics of subcellular and intercellular processes and of human interaction-in-context—just to pick a handful of examples, more-or-less at random, of the problems on which they worked seamlessly together in multidisciplinary teams to make what were often groundbreaking scientific discoveries. These scientists from far-flung fields of research, working in surprising combinations (strange bedfellows indeed!), with few exceptions became better known for their narrower, disciplinary contributions to their own fields, which very few of them saw as being their main contribution to knowledge. For these investigators saw themselves as part of a superficially disorderly but deeply unified global scientific movement, working primarily across disciplines, and they quite explicitly described themselves as together making a scientific revolution on a scale and with a scope not seen since the 18th Century. They knew just how high the stakes were. Their shared rhetoric was in terms of “revolution,” a word they used frequently and without even a trace of hyperbole. In an early, book-length review of this (mostly anglophone) work in 1953, a philosophically and scientifically sophisticated, contemporary Parisian observer, Pierre de Latil, set out the new ideas for the French intellectual public3 and heralded them, with great prescience, as not only marking the biggest scientific revolution of our time, but—in true French style—declared this work to be, “more significantly,” making for no less than “a revolution in metaphysics,” taking up where Kant had left off. Yet it was already evident from his own masterful philosophical and scientific synthesis that the new thinking would eventually knock Kant’s whole metaphysics into a cocked hat, or at least revise it beyond recognition. One or two of these self-styled scientific revolutionaries, from amongst the many polymaths who had had formal training in philosophy, throughout their life’s work indeed quite explicitly took on Kant as their chief adversary, while others took aim chiefly at Descartes. Many others remained amongst the most distinguished neo-Kantians. But one way and another, they were all convinced that philosophy, let alone science or technology or medicine, would never be the same again.

This was the intellectual heritage on which the scientific work of Interchange Research drew, which inspired its formation and all of its work in the first place, and on which it would always be firmly based—the think-tank’s direct scientific lineage. The distinguished investigators who collaborated in this remarkable scientific movement were, as noted earlier, the teachers of the founding Interchange Research scientists, and their teachers’ teachers. Today, although most of the scientists who first made this revolution between 1912 and 1970 are still remembered and honoured as marquee names in their own individual fields, their far more revolutionary, multidisciplinary research collaboration over a period spanning the middle fifty years of the 20th Century remains unchronicled to this day. For its history has only ever been researched now from one point of view, now from another, like the proverbial blind men describing the elephant, and never once comprehensively—so far anyway, and with only one or two exceptions outside Interchange4; and those few efforts to write the history of a movement so unfathomable in scale and scope were not made by those who had been active participants in it and trained in the multiple scientific disciplines required to understand it properly, but rather by lay historians looking in from outside, trying to get the measure of something that would always be beyond their ken.

Indeed, the Interchange Research think-tank represents one of the last surviving scientific heirs to the whole of this extraordinary, rich legacy taken in the round, and are today amongst its only remaining custodians who have not only been chronicling but actively continuing that still largely-untapped revolutionary work uninterrupted for over half a century in an unbroken lineage, preserving this scientific heritage in its original spirit and, above all, largely with its original aims. Through concerted research on much the same cluster of recondite scientific problems, deploying and refining the original, radically innovative conceptual tools, Interchange has from the outset been devoted to preserving and extending this knowledge and taking it into realms only dreamed of by the pioneers of the previous half-century. For over the course of the past fifty years spanned by this most recent chapter in the history of a scientific movement now over a century old, Interchange Research was to make yet more radical philosophical and scientific breakthroughs not only in theory but in stunning practical applications with remarkable findings and equally remarkable, impactful, real-world results.

The quest begins (1971–1980)

The Interchange team’s own in-house scientific research in the field began with a quest on which we embarked in the summer of 1971, when we first formulated a problem which was to become the concerted focus of the work of Interchange Research ever since:

If and only if we could first prove this to be theoretically possible (very much an open question when we set out, though we had a strong hunch it was), then the next step in this nascent research programme would be this: Once having shown it to be possible in principle, we needed to determine whether the analytic or algebraic task required would turn out to be algorithmic and readily computable, or whether it was heuristic, and if the latter, once again, we would need to determine whether it was nonetheless computable or not.

Only once this second set of questions could be settled, it was our ambition one day to arrive at a comprehensive scientific theory of such purposeful, all-or-none, systemic transformations across the board, along with a practical methodology for identifying 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, we knew from the outset that if we could one day pull it off, the eventual solution to the problem we had set ourselves would be tantamount to a General Theory of Intervention, pure and applied, whose potentially world-changing practical applications and inestimable value were self-evident.

The quest came more-or-less out of nowhere, but actually began with the sketch of a solution on one fateful late summer’s day in 1971:

It was thus the direction of a novel solution that came first, and only from there did we go on to formulate the problem it promised one day to solve. While we

This specific ambition was only natural, bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of those who had previously led the scientific revolution (1912–1970) that we described briefly above, while they were all multiply-distinguished polymaths, were first and foremost7 psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists or social scientists—the remainder, with only a few notable exceptions, being physicians, medical researchers or biologists. The predominant interests of the founders of this extraordinary scientific movement were from the get-go focused on human health and welfare, and particularly mental health, as their driving purpose.

The Interchange Research quest, pursued in academic research at the University of Oxford from 1973–76, in London from 1976–78 and back at Oxford from 1978–80, meandered its way purposefully through a bewilderingly wide range of scientific fields, including cybernetics, neuroscience, self-organizing complex adaptive systems, linguistics (especially semantics and pragmatics), psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychology, sociology, social policy, social intervention, semiotics and especially biosemiotics, as well as analytic philosophy. However, from the beginning, the theoretical crux that was to become the basis of Minimalist Intervention was first forged and explored strictly within the context of the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, with one eye fixed on demonstrable physical realizations of the concepts—a focus that was retained ever after—while all the while keeping the other eye fixed on possible further generalizations or extensions to the behavioural sciences. Along the way, the developing theoretical foundations were always first grounded in rigorous logical and philosophical analysis.

Battle stations: the Falklands War, the formation of the think-tank, and the development of very brief psychotherapy (1980–85)

Out of this rich interdisciplinary matrix the bones of a skeletal solution began to be pieced together. Between 1976 and 1982 empirically testable hypotheses were starting to be formed and experimentally tested, and interventions successfully designed, with often extraordinary results. It was, above all, others’ fortuitous extraordinary results that had gone unnoticed or unexplained—or which had been explained away as flukes of no scientific interest—that particularly piqued the investigators’ scientific curiosity and ensuing research, and stimulated the development of their nascent General Theory of Intervention.

The first practical breakthroughs were to be in the psychiatric field. Working clinically to tackle longstanding intractable psychiatric problems in an inpatient hospital setting, we trialled new techniques of brief psychotherapy based on our emerging theoretical framework. Viewing psychopathology as meaningful communication inextricable from its interactional context, including above all the patterns of therapist-patient interaction which would be the principal focus of treatment, therapy was aimed at swiftly identifying recurring patterns and then intervening to break those patterns by subtly manipulating communicational “context-markers,” resulting in an all-or-none flip from the pathological pattern to a normal one, sometimes requiring no more than three hours of “talking therapy,” all based purely on the revolutionary new ideas. The desired therapeutic change invariably occurred all at once—and predictably—in response to a carefully crafted communication inserted simultaneously into the therapeutic context and symptom context in such a way that the symptomatic pattern was short-circuited and only the desiderated pattern remained as a possibility. The changes that occurred in case after case could by the Spring of 1977 be fully explained in scientific terms, and by the Autumn of 1977 the approach to brief psychotherapy was successfully extended across a wide range of presenting clinical problems within the hospital setting, deploying a number of original therapeutic strategies of what we dubbed ‘context intervention’. At the same time, a nascent generic methodology was being developed along with a radical new theory of therapeutic change, though at that point it remained but a pious hope and a hunch (which would later prove correct) that this avenue of research would in time lead to a General Theory of Intervention. By the summer of 1978 the theory and approach would be further extended to radical, groundbreaking work in rapidly addressing juvenile delinquency successfully.

From 1978 to 1980, as the new theory of change in psychotherapy suddenly started taking shape and taking off, explaining the remarkable successes being achieved clinically, further research we carried out at the University of Oxford in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention led to the earliest systematic presentation of the theory behind Minimalist Intervention, with further potential applications to social policy being sketched out. Meanwhile, between 1976 and 1982, as the empirical and theoretical work continued, a continuous search was on to track down work by any other colleagues around the world who had over the previous two decades been drawing on the selfsame scientific legacy, and who had been independently working on similar problems and in at least one respect or another were working and thinking along similar lines. There turned out to be a surprisingly rich trawl. This promising, highly relevant work was carefully studied, and these other findings were systematically integrated with the in-house research.

Where the other pioneering psychotherapy investigators (mostly in the States) were still around to be consulted, and especially where they were still in professional practice and working on these issues, they were approached, findings were shared, and new transatlantic research, clinical and teaching collaborations were forged. Many of the Americans were receptive to these British clinical and theoretical innovations, but disappointingly, none of the Americans seemed to have an explicit, generic, scientific theoretical framework of the kind that we ourselves had been developing, based on the theory of context-markers, for systematically flipping interactional patterns by shifting contexts with purely semiotic interventions. The focus now turned to developing the theory and the clinical practice to the point where any problems of the kind brought to psychotherapists’ offices could be successfully treated in a single psychotherapy session.

The international scientific think-tank itself was finally launched on 12th April 1982, when four colleagues who had first met one another at Oxford joined with a close German colleague and another London-based colleague to form the original think-tank lineup. Within the year they would be joined by a number of more far-flung colleagues, from as near as Paris to as far away as Omaha, Nebraska. They were all drawn by the radical ideas themselves and the promise they held, and by the scientific ambitions they harboured in common, and they were united above all by a shared intellectual legacy and radical new epistemology.  

However, the original stimulus for the investigators’ forming a think-tank in the first place was the rapidly worsening geopolitical situation, with tensions swiftly building alarmingly between Britain and Argentina. On 5th April 1982, a British task force of more than 100 ships including two aircraft carriers had set sail for the South Atlantic in response to Argentina’s unprovoked April 2nd invasion of a group of British Overseas Territories off the Argentinian coast—the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Islands, and South Sandwich Islands. The Americans were already involved, initially as peace brokers and later on the British side, determined to fend off the threat posed by the Soviet Union being drawn in on the side of the Argentinian junta in the event, however unlikely, of prolonged all-out war between Britain and Argentina, but even should the existing standoff get drawn out. For the Soviets were known already to be actively eyeing this golden opportunity to intervene militarily on the Argentine side against the British “imperialists” and thereby expand Soviet influence in Latin America, their longstanding ambition, as Argentina seemed particularly ripe for Soviet intervention at that moment—not least in view of its economic woes and workers’ mass demonstrations just days before the invasion, which had been intended in the first place to create a diversion from the civil unrest and garner jingoistic popular support for the junta. Direct Soviet military intervention in the Americas of course would not have been treated lightly by the Americans barely twenty years after the Bay of Pigs, and the spectre of thermonuclear war between the superpowers suddenly loomed large. However, with such a show of military force from Britain already on its way to the South Atlantic, with both the UN and the Americans onside, and now with the redoubtable American Secretary of State Alexander Haig—a former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and an experienced foreign policy maker and statesman—stepping in as peacemaker deploying what was by then the time-honoured Kissinger method of shuttle diplomacy, it was thought certain, more or less universally in anglophone diplomatic circles, that common sense and a peaceful settlement of differences would prevail and no further shots need be fired.

Although Haig’s initiative had been greeted with confident, universal optimism by the British press, two of the London-based founding think-tank members, who had for a couple of years been working together applying the new ideas in the psychotherapy field, read those same newspapers but came to the polar opposite conclusion. On their analysis, such shuttle diplomacy could only have an effect precisely the reverse of the one intended by the US and UK. In discussions late afternoon on Friday the 9th of April, they agreed that on the basis of their fast-evolving body of scientific theory, a large-scale war was not only imminent but inevitable so long as Haig proceeded with and persisted in “his folly”—his planned shuttle diplomacy, which however well-intentioned (and right out of the then-standard diplomatic playbook), was not only totally misguided in their professional opinion but could only inflame tensions rapidly and catastrophically between the two sides in an unstoppable vicious spiral, and beyond any possibility of peaceful resolution. As night follows day, that contrarian, gloomy joint conclusion had simply followed directly from the theoretical work on change that they had been exploring, developing, discussing and putting into practice clinically on a daily basis, work they’d begun over a decade earlier. In any case, first thing Monday morning, 12th April, having had the weekend to think it over and still convinced that a major war was about to break out if someone didn’t stop Haig’s well-meaning ‘bungling’ in the dispute, the two clinicians met and resolved at once to form a think-tank of those investigators (again, mostly clinicians) who shared their own epistemology and view of change, explicitly to try and avert war in the South Atlantic and ultimately, the way they could see things were going, to save the world from thermonuclear disaster. For it was a time when the ink had hardly dried on the SALT II treaty—a particularly tense juncture in the Cold War when intelligent professionals, friends and colleagues of theirs, were moving their families from London to remote parts of the UK where a direct nuclear strike was deemed least likely and were busy building nuclear fallout shelters. It was a time when a nuclear armageddon remained a very live possibility and for a brief period was nearly as common a topic of daily conversation in England as Brexit was in 2018, global warming in 2019, or the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

At a time when it still strained credibility for the two clinicians to suggest, as they did, to anyone who would listen—including, above all, scoffing friends in the UK Foreign Office—that Britain was about to enter into its first, full-scale armed conflict since the Suez Crisis of 1956–7, events nevertheless slid swiftly and inexorably into what was to be the very bloody Falklands War. The young contrarians could only look on in horror from the sidelines, Cassandra-like, as tragedy unfolded. Haig’s shuttle diplomacy was to span two weeks and, precisely as the two clinicians had predicted, the conflict situation steadily escalated until talks finally collapsed altogether on Thursday 29th April when Argentina pulled out of discussions, four days after South Georgia had been retaken by the Royal Marines with few casualties. Within two days of the breakdown in talks there was all-out war—the largest air-naval combat operation between any modern forces since World War II, some thirty-five years earlier—which within the next six weeks was to claim nearly a thousand lives with two thousand further casualties and hundreds of later suicides amongst veterans of the war, not to mention a $1.19 billion bill to the British taxpayer, more than $3,000,000,000 dollars in today’s money. Thankfully, the Soviets were forced to content themselves with providing covert logistical and intelligence support to Argentina, as continuing ambiguity in the junta’s intentions made direct armed intervention too risky a proposition. It had all been a foreseeable and preventable tragedy on a vast scale. Yet the think-tank members had been ridiculed and pooh-poohed as naïve doomsayers by Foreign Office colleagues less than three weeks before full-scale war erupted.

It was the view of the nascent think-tank, explicitly echoing a number of earlier scientists’ own many warnings, that it was above all a warped epistemology that was leading us straight to our doom—an armageddon either thermonuclear or ecological or pandemic, no one could know; for it was only a matter of whichever of the three kinds of global catastrophe struck first. Such forms of total devastation, they argued, would be the inevitable outcome of large-scale behaviour grounded in a completely erroneous, back-to-front view of how the world works—a superannuated, 400-year old rationalist epistemology of object-and-forces, matter and energy, power and control, which they were seeking to replace with a radically new epistemology of flux-and-constraint, pattern and context, information and communication. In the think-tank’s view, the new epistemology, which it had already been proven could work wonders in terms of rapid, transformative behavioural change in the notoriously difficult psychiatric arena, could alone avert Armageddon.

Such was the birth of the think-tank that would be devoted for the succeeding decades to the development of the theory and practical application of this work in the world of affairs. The first thing the newly formed group did was to launch two rather modest, formal initiatives while laying more ambitious future plans for transforming the practice of international relations. The first initiative, based in Oxford, was to set up programmes bringing likeminded, pioneering stateside clinicians and theorists to the UK to lead regular workshops and seminars around the country alongside UK-based, leading-edge investigators, the think-tank members chief among them. The second initiative was a Harley Street-based clinical supervision group in London with regular evening seminars, for psychotherapists thinking and working along their own radical new lines. This two-pronged approach was aimed at: (i) spreading awareness of the new thinking amongst professionals in the field, while (ii) acting as a magnet for those who were already exploring these new avenues, not least in order to foster new collaborations; (iii) providing a regular clinical discussion group where cases could be discussed in depth and new techniques and perspectives shared on an ongoing basis, as well as (iv) offering mutual clinical supervisory support with intractable clinical issues, in a field (and at a time) where most of the participants’ professional work colleagues were operating from a different epistemology altogether and couldn’t even begin to fathom what on earth any of them were doing; in turn (v) leading to a series of scientific publications and (vi) ultimately support for a new scholarly and professional journal.

At the same time they enthusiastically pursued, above all, the idea of their little group, however implausibly, acting as a think-tank advising national governments, and “the sooner the better” given the widely perceived, persisting nuclear threat. On the strength of their Foreign Office friends’ previous failure to take seriously their dire warnings about “the only certain outcome of” Haig’s ill-fated shuttle diplomacy, they could realistically expect a respectful and interested hearing this time around, which is just what they received. But while a shift in epistemology may have seemed an innocent enough philosophical proposal to put to sympathetic, thoughtful peers in the diplomatic service after events had just proved their contrarian dire predictions right, the perfectly understandable caveat was entered that if the young clinicians’ radically “counterintuitive” approach was potentially as powerful as they held it to be, then it was not to be toyed with either, and of course neither was the Cold War.

Clearly, before anyone would even take any notice at all of the group’s still only newly emerging views there was the all-important intermediate step, or so they were earnestly advised, of trying out their radical new approach to change on much larger systems than those they encountered in the psychiatric field, yet on systemic problems where the risks were infinitely lower than in nuclear geopolitics. This, they hardly needed to be told, therefore meant addressing problems in the corporate world, applying their novel change methodology to large-scale commercial challenges. “First prove your approach in that arena and then let’s talk again” was the gist of the reactions they received. Nor was it a brush-off, as things turned out in time. It was a sincerely meant, constructive suggestion regarding “next steps.” And so the die was cast.

From the Spring of 1982 the group’s two principal, immediately practical initiatives got rapidly underway and their work proceeded much as before, but now with a dramatically heightened, Cold War sense of urgency and more methodical organization, for after all, “there [was] a war on.”  Their own war would be fought on four fronts: (i) working in small clinical teams, or at a minimum with a co-therapist and theoretical sparring partner at all times (and tape-recording or video-recording all treatment sessions where practicable) to accelerate the development of clinical theory and practice along the new lines; (ii) developing training programmes to teach the emerging theory and psychotherapy methodology to as many qualified clinicians as possible worldwide, and learning from their reports of their experiences when trying out, in other clinical contexts, what they had learned; (iii) collaborating with other groups of investigators around the world working on similar or complementary lines, freely sharing everything they were learning as they went along; and (iv) generalizing from the evolving clinical work to develop a generic theoretical and methodological framework that could be extended beyond clinical psychotherapeutic issues to apply equally to corporate problems, the policy arena and ultimately to international relations, international law, nuclear geopolitics, and global environmental and public health issues.

The focus of the investigators’ newly-forged transatlantic collaborations would meanwhile be on researching and expediting the development of successful single-session psychotherapy in outpatient settings—discovering what made such ‘improbably’ rapid therapeutic change possible, and in time endeavouring to see if they could achieve single-session psychotherapy results on a more regular basis and above all teach other professionals to do the same. The result was a flurry of research initiatives, academic publications, training courses and seminars stateside and in the UK, and further and more diverse international collaborations. At the same time, the team’s views on change and intervention were evolving rapidly, and significant further advances in theory and methodology were forthcoming, now generalizing to wider systems, including, most enticingly of all, transforming organizations—the new “name of the game” since the post-Falklands rebuff.

The work on single-session psychotherapy proved to be an unqualified success, demonstrating conclusively that almost any outpatient psychotherapeutic challenge could be successfully addressed in the first and only psychotherapy session, deploying the new ideas and the team’s radically new approach to treatment. Having already taken the successful development of single-session psychotherapy and the theory of change in psychotherapy as far as they possibly could, and arguably as far as anyone could ever take it, the investigators now were free to set their sights on other, far bigger things. The new dual focus of the research was to be on experimentally transforming organizations in a similar fashion, and on developing the scientific theoretical framework along with its philosophical foundations, while putting the theory to the test empirically. By late 1984, the body of scientific theory was ready to begin trying out tentatively on these larger systems, even though it remained such a very long way away from being complete as a General Theory of Intervention. For even to take the generalized theory itself any further necessitated first testing it out on larger systems than those implicated in family and individual pathology.

Settling into the C-suite: the expanded think-tank lineup and the 10-year Interchange R&D Programme (1985–96)

February of 1985 saw the very first deliberately designed, large-system-transforming minimalist intervention to emerge from the new theory, applied to an intractable, mission-critical organizational problem. The intervention—idiosyncratic to the specific case as all of these “minimalist interventions” are—may have seemed to be innocent enough, even trivial, and certainly quite tangential to the problem from an outsider’s point of view. Yet the results—defying all common sense—were dramatic, almost instantaneous, and lasting, with a complete transformation from the existing state of the organization to the desired state being achieved and consolidated within less than a fortnight, after the intractable problems had previously escalated over a period of more than a year. The client, the organization’s CEO, was duly covered in glory for achieving the dramatic organizational turnaround, and letters of congratulation poured in, though no one was quite sure what it was exactly to which the change might be attributed; for the inexplicable, seemingly magical organizational transformation had happened literally overnight.  

In the wake of this first big success in designing a catalytic, transformative organizational intervention based on the fast-evolving, now generalized, radical new theory and methodology, with such dramatic and enduring, precisely predicted and documented results, there was a pressing need to ensure a steady stream of such issues to work on. At first, the strategy adopted was one of working through established management consulting firms: The first port of call was working with one of the oldest and most prestigious management consulting firms in the world. This was followed, next, by a collaboration with a distinguished and influential, independent applied social research institute (which had been drawing indirectly on at least some of the same scientific legacy), an institute with an enviable client list, working with the CEOs and C-suite of blue-chip corporations, major financial institutions, and regional and central government departments and third-sector bodies globally. In this way, a further handful of successful, large-scale, organizational transformations followed in swift succession, based on the fast-evolving theory and methodology of Minimalist Intervention—perhaps most notably, the transformation of a formerly market-leading engineering company, long ago fallen to a distant number two, restoring its fortunes and enabling it to regain its leadership position, achieved simply by means of a single, brief, precisely-worded telephone communication to a few of its existing customers.

Yet things were still moving far more slowly than the erstwhile clinicians had been used to, as there still seemed insufficient scope to tackle the broadest possible range of the biggest organizational problems in the rapid-fire, case-after-case fashion, one after another, hour by hour, day after day, five days a week, in the way that had previously done so much to accelerate the development of single-session psychotherapy. And so the decision was taken for the think-tank to go it alone and take matters into their own hands. The complete break, planned over a six-month period, was finally made in the autumn of 1986, and the think-tank lineup was expanded accordingly to tackle this ambitious challenge as a freestanding organization in its own right.

Meanwhile, from its modest 1982 starting point in London and Oxford, the think-tank team’s centre of gravity had shifted briefly to the States (first in Nebraska, Arizona, and California before settling for a year in Wisconsin), finally shifting back to London in 1985. By late 1986 the think-tank’s expanded international lineup of ten investigators now increasingly revolved around a distinguished core group of Interchange Research scientists who had met in the Faculty of Technology at Brunel University in West London, where they worked in what was formerly the world-renowned Institute of Cybernetics, the leading centre for cybernetics in the world at the time, where the think-tank at last had its formal foundation in its present form in October of that year. This team of still mostly British researchers, including half the original 1982 think-tank lineup, would by 1990 be joined by three researchers from Canada (one based in Toronto, one from Montreal, and a distinguished Belarusian/Polish émigré scientist from the Soviet Union, based in Vancouver) and by quite a number of other Americans, and their ranks would be swelled in time by a host of other investigators from Australasia, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere, including two (a Dane and an American) based in Luxembourg. From 1986 onwards the think-tank would be explicitly dedicated exclusively to pure and applied scientific research and development in Minimalist Intervention, which they applied in creating major, across-the-board organizational transformations, working closely with CEOs and other C-level executives to co-design the interventions, together carefully tracking the success of the interventions in catalyzing the desired transformations.

Between 1986 and 1996 Interchange Research embarked on an ambitious 10-year R&D programme, funded by governmental and multi-governmental agencies and by major multinationals on both sides of the Atlantic, researching the organizational applications of the revolutionary new theory and technology of Minimalist Intervention for catalyzing major, across-the-board transformations in large organizations with trivially small, precisely pinpointed interventions (such as moving a coffee pot or making a few phone calls). Effectively, the quid pro quo was that in return for funding the costly work and permitting some of their own very large corporate (or governmental) systemic challenges to be worked on experimentally by Interchange, the blue-chip corporations and public sector bodies got to have some of their otherwise unresolvable, major intractable problems solved, impossibly ambitious objectives reached, and major transformations achieved, all in record time. All in all, the Interchange Research R&D programme gave organizations’ CEOs and top management advance access to the absolute state-of-the-art in organizational transformation. Within the first two years alone, from a standing start, the team’s corporate- and government-sponsored R&D work on Minimalist Intervention managed to attract a significant amount of funding (about $4 million in today’s money) and within the first five years Interchange had been able to try out the still experimental methodology, with considerable success, on virtually every conceivable category of problem, in every kind of function across a wide range of industries, as well as in the public sector, and always at top management (CEO or C-suite) level.

As expected and intended when Interchange first embarked upon the R&D programme, both the theory and the methodology evolved rapidly in consequence. The time required to identify a successful minimalist intervention began to get shorter and shorter, and the scientific team sought to understand why, and how, and what the limits were. As late as 1988, designing a minimalist intervention to create a major transformation in a large multinational corporation could, in some situations at least, still take up to several months of work with the chief executive and a number of his direct reports from right across the organization. By 1991, however, it was typically proving sufficient, indeed optimal, for Interchange analysts to work just with the CEO on his or her own, and a successful intervention design (as assessed by the results of the intervention once implemented) could invariably be completed within a few half-day sessions at most, and, oftentimes, even in a single session of just a few hours’ duration.

That same year (1991) saw the first long, consistent run of single-session Minimalist Intervention design sessions, with less than four hours being required—from start to finish—to design each intervention, successfully catalyzing the desired transformation with absolute precision, and the transformation would in each case be achieved within a matter of days. These were transformations previously thought (and would still be almost universally assumed today, in 2020) to require years of large-scale “change programmes,” or to be all but impossible to achieve at all. And so from 1991–1996 the search was on within Interchange Research to try and discover the secret of “the direct hit,” defined as a minimalist intervention design completed in a single session (of no more than three or four hours, start to finish, one-on-one), leading to an across-the-board transformation occurring more-or-less precisely as predicted in the session. In the case of a “direct hit,” the CEO client would typically walk in the door and describe, for the first time, a major, intractable corporate problem or impossibly ambitious, mission-critical corporate challenge, and four hours later they would walk out with a custom-designed set of detailed executive actions, implementable at once (typical marginal cost = zero), delivering immediate and bankable results, with nothing more left for anyone to do for the desired state-of-affairs suddenly to be just “business as usual,” the new normal. Since the team already knew that this was possible in theory, we worked tirelessly to try and refine the methodology to the point where a direct hit could be expected as the rule every single time.

Meanwhile, perhaps unsurprisingly, the work of Interchange Research was becoming more widely known in top management circles globally. According to The Economist, in their 1990 account of the work of the Interchange think-tank:

This account of the Interchange’s think-tank work, running unabridged to two full pages, was published on 28th February 1990 in The Economist Intelligence Unit Special Report no. 1196.  In the introduction to the section of the report in which this two-page profile of the think-tank’s work appeared, The Economist put forward the estimate that there were, as of the date of publication of the Special Report, “probably in excess of 20,000 consulting groups or individual practitioners who invoke the idea of corporate culture.” From all these, the report singled out a mere eight “leading” consultants—“consultants,” they said, “whom consultants consult,” and who according to the report “may be judged to have ‘started something’.” The Interchange think-tank was one of these eight consulting groups (out of 20,000) selected for detailed profiling. The Economist report was directing its corporate subscribers to these eight groups in order, they said, to provide them with “insight into some of the most challenging thinking on corporate culture.”

By the time The Economist report appeared in January 1990, Minimalist Intervention had already been successfully deployed in Whitehall at the highest level, playing a role in the British government’s strategic planning, including work in defence and social policy, as well as soon playing a prominent role amongst the leadership at the King’s Fund, at that time the government’s official independent NHS (National Health Service) policy think-tank. Nor was the pioneering work of Interchange a “military secret” or even a well-kept secret at that time, or subsequently. Quite the contrary, for even by 1990 “Minimalist Intervention” was in many circles already a bit of jargon to conjure with and the work of the think-tank widely discussed, and by no means only in the executive suite of the large corporations where Interchange worked, for their work had already garnered attention in high places on both sides of the Atlantic.

Indeed, Minimalist Intervention was already the topic of extensive research, teaching, writing, lecturing, frequent academic conference reports, occasional publications and numerous high-level management seminars by the Interchange team throughout the 1980s and 1990s and well into the new millennium. From Whitehall and the City of London to Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, Southampton, The Hague, Rotterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Helsinki, Sophia Antipolis, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and beyond, our work was already the talk of the town amongst the cognoscenti in government and corporate executive offices, think-tanks, academic seminars, executive workshops, scientific and management conferences, policy and planning meetings, and intellectual salons. As Minimalist Intervention was starting to get recognized in the global C-suite as “the next big thing,” a major business publisher sent an Editor from New York to London to try and get a book out of us, offering a handsome five-figure advance (six figures in today’s money). The Research Director demurred—for, he argued, this was serious scientific work and not readily explicable in layman’s terms, and therefore not a suitable topic for a popular account.

Meanwhile, in the day-to-day R&D effort, one significant further theoretical or practical breakthrough followed another, in rapid succession, including a further range of practical applications, equally based on the radical new scientific theory but quite distinct from Minimalist Intervention proper. The first of those “side” breakthroughs was Criterial Planning. In work originally commissioned by Shell, which had previously been renowned as the birthplace and longtime home of Scenario Planning in the 1970s and through the 1980s, Criterial Planning was first successfully developed there by the Interchange think-tank from 1989–90 as an innovative scientific methodology for real-time strategic planning. It was deployed for a time as a key strategic planning methodology as a successor to Scenario Planning approaches in parts of Royal Dutch Shell, while Interchange retained the intellectual property rights to the Criterial Planning methodology itself. Criterial Planning would later be further developed and deployed by Interchange in leading corporations in the energy, technology, and financial services sectors as well as in health care, health policy, and elsewhere, right through the 1990s and into the new millennium, with dramatic—in some instances even industry-transforming—strategic impact, particularly in technology and especially between 2000 and 2013.

Declaring victory, building a track record, making fresh breakthroughs (1996–2009)

However, these other developments were merely side dishes; the main course at the Interchange feast remained, and would always remain, Minimalist Intervention. In 1996, exactly 25 years after first formulating the theoretical problem that it was hoped would lead to a General Theory of Intervention, and a decade after re-launching the Interchange think-tank with an expanded scientific lineup and embarking on the 10-year Minimalist Intervention R&D programme (not to mention a full five years after embarking on the quest to find the key to landing “a direct hit” intervention each and every time), the Interchange Research team were at long last able to declare victory.

The General Theory of Intervention, the radical scientific theory at the heart of Minimalist Intervention, had been given unimpugnable empirical support, and had (the previous year) been formally recognized by the scientific community8 as constituting a significant contribution to knowledge. But more to the point, virtually every four-hour Interchange session now resulted in a direct hit, with only a small percentage requiring a second follow-up session to tweak the intervention design and only very rarely required as many as three sessions to get to checkmate. And so, after twenty-five years of dedicated, in-house proprietary scientific research and development—including a decade of extensive beta-testing at C-level in organizations internationally, extending beyond the private sector to span also third-sector, governmental, and multi-governmental bodies on both sides of the Atlantic in the highest echelons—at long last the revolutionary Interchange technology was to all intents and purposes a finished product.

The Interchange intellectual property lawyers were able to declare the Minimalist Intervention technology protectable and ready for IP-licensing and full-scale commercialization. Accordingly, in late summer of 1996, “Minimalist Intervention 1.0” was launched. The “1.0” designation was to be added only much later, for it was hard for the Interchange think-tank team to see back in 1996 how there could possibly be much room left to improve the Minimalist Intervention methodology any further. How wrong we were! For unbeknownst to us at the time, we were hardly getting started.

The Interchange intellectual property lawyers had dictated that, going forward, the Minimalist Intervention technology was to be best protected as proprietary know-how under the trade secrets legislation in English law, which formed part of the law of equity. Henceforth, therefore, the many hundreds of man-years of original, proprietary scientific work by Interchange which had already resulted in—and would continue to result in—numerous major breakthroughs, both in the theory and in the practical methodology, needed to remain largely unpublished and so was destined to be almost entirely unknown outside a small circle, and the practical methodology would above all be fated to remain largely proprietary, and if need be, unsung. Even the pure scientific work in the British Library had to be placed under a “Commercial in Confidence” embargo indefinitely.

From now on the Interchange team would be flying under the radar. In keeping with the requirements of the legislation, no longer were the Interchange Research team able to share any details whatsoever of their proprietary technology outside the confines of the Interchange think-tank, and Interchange accordingly went to even greater lengths than previously to ensure that their proprietary know-how remained tightly protected through strict secrecy. Even by 1996 this was not an uncommon situation in the scientific world, and in the succeeding decades has become an increasingly common one as more and more basic and applied science in our technology-driven economy has come to acquire commercial value as intellectual property, and as a greater and greater proportion of fundamental scientific research has been conducted outside of universities. Henceforward, from that point in 1996 onward, the evolution of Minimalist Intervention needed, for commercial legal reasons, to follow the pattern of the increasingly ubiquitous “Mode 2” of postindustrial, postacademic knowledge production in science, as described in detail in the groundbreaking work of the influential multinational research policy think-tank, the GLNSST group9 first assembled by Roger Svensson of the Swedish Council for Research and Planning in Stockholm in 199010. At the same time, from 1996, as standard practice, Interchange offered corporate licensees (in addition to strict confidentiality) total anonymity—as was in any case already the norm amongst all major consulting firms who, like Interchange, were hired by the CEO and Board. This was in contrast to the situation that had prevailed for a decade previously during the R&D programme, when most Interchange corporate clients had been only too pleased to be named and thereby to identify themselves publicly with the cutting edge of management thinking.

Starting in 1996, with the full-scale commercial launch, the Minimalist Intervention technology would be licensed exclusively to a small group of leading corporations at CEO level, with a stipulated upper limit of nine corporate C-suite licensees in total and a limit of only one licensee corporation per industry at any point in time. Industry exclusivity was defined by veto: namely, any proposed new licensee required the leave of all existing licensees to gain access to the Interchange technology. If any existing licensee considered a new potential licensee a competitor, then, as far as Interchange was concerned, they were. Interchange corporate clients each gained exclusive access to the Minimalist Intervention methodology through at most two named decision makers (C-level executives) who thereby became associate members of the Interchange think-tank, or “Associates” for short (hence the name of Interchange Research’s head licensee, “Interchange Associates, Inc.” which contracts directly with corporate clients to license the IP through a named Associate from the client corporation).

Over the next twenty-five years, Interchange’s “clinical” work—as the think-tank team has always called its work with corporate Associates—would be fairly evenly divided between Europe and North America. The work would in time span practically every industry, every function, and every kind of organizational problem encountered anywhere in the corporate world, with an invariant overall thrust on growing the client’s P&L. Interchange clients were mostly Fortune 100 companies in virtually every major industry, where the think-tank team worked directly with the CEO or a principal C-level P&L-holder. By the time Interchange had chalked up, all told, some USD $1tn of P&L under chief advisory, and by the time more than a thousand minimalist interventions co-designed with Interchange had been implemented by its clients (many of which individually yielded billions of dollars in value for the client)—thus creating countless tens of billions of dollars for the world’s leading corporations around the world in every virtually industry and driving corporate growth in record timeframes—it had become clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that there was bound to be no challenge, no transformation, however daunting or ambitious, undertaken by CEOs and other C-level executives anywhere—nor any problem they were tackling, no matter how large and intractable—that would not, in principle or in practice, succumb to a minimalist intervention designed in a single, four-hour, face-to-face session, or at most two or three such sessions.

Over the years, while all this was going on, Interchange continuously sought and recruited to the think-tank the best and most creative scientific minds from around the world, from a wide variety of fields of research, who both shared their radical epistemology and who brought something unique to the party, contributors whose work they either deemed vital to the think-tank’s research and development effort or at least thought highly promising. From the start Interchange was run the way any other scientific lab has ever been run anywhere: with all the scientific team members working under the strict control of the lead investigator, working exclusively on the Interchange research programme, not on their own research, no matter how eminent each might be outside Interchange within their own specialisms. Most of the think-tank team members would independently, meanwhile, continue to pursue their own careers in their own fields in parallel with their work for Interchange, again as is true of any such lab.  

As older members retired and stepped back from active involvement in the team’s work, and as others moved on to concentrate on their own work (often in far-flung corners of the world), new, highly qualified investigators were recruited and brought on board and younger members were constantly being recruited and trained over a period of 35 years. In this way, the dedicated, highly focused research programme continued uninterrupted, year in, year out, for decades, progressing under the same scientific leadership since the work’s inception, with unbroken continuity, while constantly being refreshed by the infusion of new blood. At practically every point in time the think-tank comprised a very energetic team of predominantly young professionals. However, there was never any shortage of greybeards on tap for their considerable knowledge and experience, the most senior investigators always leading from the front and actively training up the younger generation of Research Fellows, who in turn were typically selected from amongst the senior researchers’ most highly gifted former students with whom they had worked closely at the University of Oxford and elsewhere in the world. Most of the new recruits were polymaths, all had directly relevant academic and professional backgrounds, and all were unusual in sharing the radical new epistemology so central to the work of Interchange. From among these Research Fellows, only the most qualified were then selected for undertaking the sensitive front-line work with clients.

Held at roughly six-week intervals with any given client executive, these front-line sessions were four hours in length, including consultation breaks and sometimes a working lunch, and were often scheduled back-to-back so that a CEO client would be able to tackle more than one mission-critical challenge that day, while he and the Interchange advisors were in town. For all of these sessions, ample space was essential. The Session Conductor (“pilot”) and client (“navigator”) would sit comfortably apart on upholstered sofas at ninety degrees to one another, sharing a low coffee-table stocked with refreshments. The Session Director and his “flight-engineering” team (sometimes only one, usually two, and occasionally, and increasingly, three or more Interchange advisors in all) were seated at a table well out of the line of sight of the client, but with an uninterrupted view of the whole of the interaction between the client and the Session Conductor piloting the session, and able to carefully observe the client’s facial expressions and body language throughout the interview. The team needed to be able to signal to the “pilot” by means of gesturing, as necessary, in order to direct his questioning, and frequent consultation breaks were called when the Interchange team withdrew to confer in private, during which time the client would be set “homework” to do, on paper, ready for the next phase of intensive questioning. The consultation breaks required a soundproofed, comfortably large breakout room, preferably in the immediate vicinity of the main session room so that very short consultation breaks could also be called at a moment’s notice without unduly interrupting the flow of the sessions. The suite of rooms required all the usual facilities including, where possible (always in Europe, more rarely in the US) provision for catering staff to be stationed discretely out of earshot.

The sessions were normally held either in New York City at Interchange “home base,” a spacious Midtown duplex penthouse across the street from Rockefeller Center (for North American clients who would fly in monthly from various locations), or (for European clients) in other locations in Europe: for example, a smart, modernist, dedicated suite atop a skyscraper, with floor-to-ceiling windows and views across the sea; or taking over the whole of a 5000-square-foot seaside villa with its own jetty and top chef; or in various equally glamorous and inspiring locations including, memorably, for a year or so, commandeering a vintage penthouse suite of meeting and dining rooms, designed in every detail by a world-famous architect, down to the doorhandles, lighting, artwork, furniture, crockery and cutlery, again catered by one of the top chefs in the city. Much of the scientific research on which the methodology was based, however, was also conducted elsewhere, and since 2003 has been divided principally between the University of Oxford and Interchange HQ. Previously headquartered through the 1980s and ‘90s successively in Oxford (1982–84), London (1985–90) and Cambridge (1991–98—first on Cambridge Science Park and then at the Daly Laboratories, Babraham Hall, Cambridge), since 1998 the research activities of Interchange Research have been based in the beautiful, ancient, World Heritage City of Bath. Client sessions as well as meetings with visiting scholars are also held at the Interchange Research Centre by arrangement.

Over the next twenty-five years of sedulous further in-house research (from early 1996 through 2020), arguably the biggest philosophical and scientific discoveries of all, and the most radical theoretical breakthroughs, were to be made. These breakthroughs revealed the scientific theoretical basis for a number of important technical phenomena, ubiquitous in Interchange clinical practice, for which no satisfying theoretical explanation had previously been forthcoming. This led in turn to corresponding refinements in the technology of Minimalist Intervention, further broadening its scope and increasing its power and predictive accuracy, in a manner and to an extent that could not have been imagined at the time of the 1996 launch of “Minimalist Intervention 1.0.”

During these same years, the client sessions were not infrequently also the birthplace of game-changing new commercial products and disruptive technologies, from telecommunications to financial services to digital transformation. This had happened previously from time to time, but was now becoming a more frequent, and, with some clients, even at times a fairly regular occurrence. One such client, who had come to expect this pattern of output— which was often merely a ‘throwaway’ freebie separate from the main intervention design—had taken to calling it “the invention du jour.” For the most part, these innovations remained the sole property of the client corporations themselves; but not always, where continued involvement of Interchange was specifically requested in developing the innovations and taking them to market. One such notable exception occurred on the afternoon of the 25th of November 2005, in the course of a minimalist intervention design session held at Interchange offices in Chelsea, London, from which a new startup venture emerged, literally, onto the back of an envelope. In less than six years, a multiple-award-winning, pioneering mobile advertising platform and the world’s first successful ad-funded free mobile network would go from the back of that envelope to a well-funded tech startup, to a fast-growing white-label global business with over 4 million customers, and would raise capital through four funding rounds backed by the likes of Sofinnova and Goldman Sachs. It would go on to serve millions of opted-in customers all over the world with thousands of successful, innovative mobile advertising campaigns for leading international brands—from very simple, yet highly effective, cast SMS campaigns to very advanced, rich media campaigns, to insightful dialogue campaigns, before eventually exiting more than a decade after its launch and selling the technology to one of the technology giants for an undisclosed sum.

Following an invitation from the President of the New York Academy of Medicine, from September 2008 through April 2009 the Research Director of Interchange Research Dr James Wilk conducted a two-semester course on metamorphology, the science behind Minimalist Intervention, with the President of the Academy acting as Convenor. Structured around nine monthly lectures followed by seminar discussion on the philosophical and scientific understanding of change, the one-year programme attracted a distinguished audience of 50 registered course participants (the maximum number accepted), most of whom were physicians and Fellows of the Academy, but which also included at least two Oxford philosophers, a smattering of psychologists, and a senior adviser to the Pentagon. The challenge, no mean feat, was to teach as much as could be taught of the epistemology and the pure science while methodically redacting everything directly pertinent to the technology of Minimalist Intervention and the trade secrets themselves.

Pastures new: Coming home (2010–2020)

Despite best efforts to stay under the radar (for example, Interchange Research would not even have its first website until 2021), word of the results of its pioneering work once again began slowly to leak out beyond the global C-suite, as had happened 20 years previously.

After more than a decade at the forefront of digital transformation across the full range of new technologies, from Big Tech (where Interchange work in digital has mainly been centred) and the development of international de facto industry standards to disruptive tech startups, it came as no surprise to Interchange insiders when in early 2010 its Research Director, Wilk, was nominated for the “Wired 100,” Wired magazine’s annual listing of the top 100 individuals shaping the digital world. However the Editor of Wired, in considering the nomination, thought the Interchange work too difficult to summarize in the short space permitted and instead commissioned one of its editors to do a feature article on the work of Interchange for the August issue. Originally to be a short feature of 3000 words, the brief was soon expanded to be a full-length 18,000-word feature article, complete with box-out text and explanatory diagrams illustrating the scientific theory. The editor interviewed a number of the Interchange think-tank team and Associates over several months and in the end produced a superb, well-researched article. However, because of its length and the sheer number of facts adduced, the 18,000-word piece (a copy of which has been donated to the Interchange Research Archive) ended up spending so much time in fact-checking that it missed the deadline for the August issue by a whisker. And so it was, that the full-length feature was never published. Instead, while the author of the feature article was away on holiday, the detailed feature was hacked down to some 3000 words by the sub-editors and the resulting piece was published in the October 2010 edition of the magazine, leaving out the scientific explanations and artificially changing the narrative from one of impactful discovery to one of mystery and controversy. One good thing that came out of the time-consuming exercise, however, was that the article attracted to Interchange a number of bright young new recruits who would in time become very important to the think-tank, and who even from the garbled, hacked-down account published had still managed to identify its roots in the very same scientific movement that had inspired some of their own work, prompting them to get in touch. Interchange might never have found them, or vice versa, otherwise.

That same year the work of Interchange in Minimalist Intervention was the sole topic of an invited keynote address 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, celebrities like Bob Geldof, and a host of other luminaries, which provided an invaluable opportunity for the work of Interchange to get more widely known amongst those of the world’s top business leaders who were not already familiar with it.

Also starting back in 2010, Interchange Research was contracted by the Division of Sport Sciences at the English Institute of Sport to lead a high-level task-force engaged in groundbreaking work aimed at significantly improving the medal chances of Team GB, the British Olympic Team, in the London 2012 Olympics, working 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, barely two years before the Interchange task-force had set to work.

Our work with Team GB was an unqualified success, and was later extended to the 2014 Winter Olympics, where, for example, we were informed afterwards that a single “minimal[ist] intervention 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.”

A number of other successful Minimalist Intervention applications in elite sport have included our 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 a minimalist intervention Interchange co-designed in less than two hours.

Our work has also been successfully applied across a diverse range of other sports from yacht racing to Formula 1 racing, not to mention applications to winning Premier League and FA Cup Championships in football, along with applications to other areas of elite sport, where we believe our work at Interchange Research represents the absolute state-of-the-art in the field today.

By the end of 2014, in the six-and-a-half years immediately following the 2008 global crash, the scaling-down of Finland’s once-dominant ICT industry including the sale of Nokia’s world-leading “feature phone” business and smartphone business to Microsoft—with the eventual laying off of tens of thousands of highly-skilled and well-paid Finnish employees throughout the sector, sending huge shock-waves throughout the economy—along with the continuing decline of Finland’s traditional forestry and paper industries and a host of other interlocked economic problems, combined to take a heavy toll on the Finnish economy. The country’s seemingly unstoppable economic decline was then further compounded by international sanctions against its neighbour Russia who had until then been a major trading partner. Nor was it possible for Finland to recover from its economic woes in the way that Sweden had, by devaluing its currency, since Finland, being part of the eurozone (unlike Sweden), couldn’t simply create an internal devaluation for its currency as it had itself done in previous downturns, nor did it have an alternative, and it was meanwhile slow to address the problem of poor price-competitiveness. All this severely hampered Finland’s recovery from the global financial crisis, and made recovery far more difficult for Finland than it had been for most other eurozone countries (in time earning it the moniker, “the sick man of Europe,” to quote a Finnish finance minister). And even by late 2015 things looked pretty dire. But while “to the blind all things are sudden,” the Finnish government had seen this coming, most of it anyway, and had already embarked upon a daring strategy to turn its economy around.  

At the start of 2012 Interchange had been invited to advise the Chairman of an international think-tank—officially coded “Prime Ministerial Working Group ICT2015”—in the Prime Minister’s Office, Government of Finland, reporting directly to the Prime Minister, to address the fallout from the global financial crisis. ICT2015 was so-called because the Working Group was tasked in the first instance with setting out the strategy for where the Finnish ICT sector would be by the end of 2015, for laying those foundations would obviously prove key, the Government recognized, to any economic turnaround in subsequent years. At the time the Working Group was formed (January 2012) it was explicitly charged with addressing the fallout from the global financial crisis and, to that end, tasked specifically with preparing a medium-term strategy to alleviate the severely adverse impacts—on the country’s technology-centred economy—of the sudden structural change experienced in the information and communications technology industry, as well as reforming the country’s ICT industry itself and increasing its global competitiveness. During the course of its work which was conducted throughout 2012, the Working Group’s remit was significantly expanded further, to cover also the broad-based application of ICT across all industries and throughout the public sector, along with the infrastructural investment required.

As the Working Group wrapped up in December 2012, Interchange conducted two pivotal Minimalist Intervention design sessions, one with the Chairman and one with his top-level “cabinet” of distinguished working-group Project Leads, including a high-ranking representative from the Finance Ministry. Out of those two sessions came the overall minimalist intervention design which was to form the core of the main findings adopted and put forward by the Chairman and Working Group. It was finally detailed in a formal set of recommendations—the Chairman’s Final Report to the Prime Minister on behalf of Working Group ICT2015. In 2013 the minimalist intervention design and full set of detailed recommendations received Prime Ministerial and all-party backing—a rarity in Finland, achieving which had indeed been a central focus of the second of the two intervention design sessions in December 2012—and the radical intervention and recommendations were all implemented in full. The Group’s work, moreover, was to remain the basis of ongoing national development policy in Finland for years to come.

Miraculously, by the third quarter of 2017 the Finnish economy had posted annualized growth of 2.8 percent, and with eight consecutive quarters of economic growth behind it (starting, right on target, in the autumn of 2015), by the end of Q3 2017 the Finnish economy was already growing faster than neighbouring Sweden’s, faster than Germany’s and faster than the eurozone’s as a whole. By the end of 2017 Finland’s recovery had clearly become broad-based, with a long-sought increase in corporate investment coming with increased confidence in the country’s miraculous economic boom, creating a virtuous circle as intended. The world’s financial press proclaimed a second “Finnish economic miracle” coming some two decades after its first. What was now clear to the Interchange team was just how powerful its Minimalist Intervention approach could be, not only for rapidly transforming cultures, corporations, government ministries and health-care systems and the like, but for transforming entire national economies successfully, and in record time.

Between 2014 and 2018 multiple avenues were pursued in an attempt to scale the advisory work of Interchange long-term into a very much larger enterprise in partnership with a succession of other professional services providers in Britain, Europe and the States who were selected as being the most congenial contenders—among them, for example, three very different global consulting giants and a century-old third-sector institute. However, each time the plan was dropped in the end, as there proved in each case to be insufficient commonality of aims and values. In 2019 the decision was taken to eschew all such corporate partnerships once and for all, not least as the obvious thought could no longer escape the Interchange team: We can do this ourselves. We don’t need anyone else. There were to be no more partnerships, no more talk of partnerships. As the decade wore on, it became increasingly self-evident that Interchange, if it was to change the world and succeed on its own terms, had to go it alone, just as the team had already decided to do way back in 1986. It was like coming home.

Envoi: A time of anniversaries (2020, 2021, 2022)

By the time Interchange Research, in late 2020, finally managed to resolve a years-long-running internal controversy over “the very idea” and finally got around to building its first ever website which would be launched in the first half of 2021, it had been quite a journey, looking back.

It had been a quarter of a century since the successful conclusion of Interchange’s 10-year R&D programme and the launch of Minimalist Intervention 1.0 as a commercially-licensed finished product; a quarter-century since the publication of its complete General Theory of Intervention providing the scientific foundations for Minimalist Intervention (following 25 prior years of intensive research), and 25 years since the formal recognition by the scientific community of its significant contribution to science.  

It had been thirty years since the first public recognition in print by the business world of the importance of the Minimalist Intervention technology, with the publication of The Economist’s report.

It was nearly thirty-five years since the first formal recognition by the scientific community of the significance of this work on Minimalist Intervention as a contribution to the field of cybernetics; and a full thirty-five years since the formal foundation of Interchange Research and Interchange Associates in their present form, licensing access to the proprietary Minimalist Intervention technology. The launch of the website also marked thirty-five years encamped in the C-suite of major corporations and of public-sector and third-sector organizations, exclusively serving chief executives and boards on both sides of the Atlantic.  

It had been forty years since the first formal academic presentation of the core theory behind Minimalist Intervention at the University of Oxford, and in 2022 it will be forty years since the think-tank was first formed, dedicated to developing applications of this scientific work to the world of affairs, initially in the arena of international relations, which provided the initial impetus for forming the think-tank.

Forty-five years (as of 2021) will have passed devoted single-mindedly to developing the practical Minimalist Intervention technology itself, starting with its earliest successful applications in clinical psychotherapy.

And 2021 also marks the 50th Anniversary of the start of the programme of dedicated in-house scientific research by Interchange think-tank team members, on a comprehensive theory of change and intervention in nature and in human affairs—Minimalist Intervention—and its applications in promoting human betterment.

Half a century! Perhaps Interchange Research had at last come of age Perhaps, having been thinking the unthinkable for half a century, was it not time for Interchange Research once again to think the unthinkable and actually put its head above the parapet at long last, cracking open some bottles of champagne in celebration? With an ambitious journey still ahead, bringing its revolutionary work to a world crying out for solutions and with no time to lose, was it not high time for Interchange finally to stand up and be counted? For while the world has a shortage of many things, it has no shortage of massive, intractable problems waiting to be solved; and as everyone knows, to solve an intractable problem requires nothing less than an epiphany. And while epiphanies don’t exactly grow on trees, at least, with the advent of Minimalist Intervention, they can now be designed to order. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. After five decades of unlocking the secrets of the universe to change the world, what Interchange has learned, it has learned anything at all, it’s this: It takes time to change the world. In fact, in the team’s experience, it can take as much as four hours.  

References Cited

Fuller, S. (2000) The Governance of Science, Buckingham, UK: Open University Press

Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwarzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge, London: Sage.

Nowotny, Helga,  Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons (2001) Rethinking science: knowledge in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity

Wilk, James (1994b) Principia Metamorphologica: Novum Organum, Brunel University

Ziman, John (1996) “‘Postacademic Science’: Constructing Knowledge with Networks and Norms,” Science Studies Vol 9, No. 1, pp. 67-80

Ziman, John (2000). Real Science. What it is, and what it means. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press