The history of Interchange Research is the story of a remarkable scientific quest for the secrets of change. Although its scientific roots go back before the First World War, the Interchange quest itself began barely half a century ago, in a search to devise a revolutionary new method for analysing any system to pinpoint—in advance of intervening in it—the smallest intervention into the system that would flip it from the existing state to the desired state and no other, all at once, with nothing in between, and with absolute precision.

The Interchange scientific team would go on to labour for half a century (and counting), pursuing a comprehensive 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—soon gave rise to powerful new concepts and methods of analysis, and out of this highly abstract and technical scientific research came a series of radical breakthroughs, simultaneously revolutionizing both theory and practice.

This work had actually been begun by 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. This extraordinary scientific revolution had been sparked by groups of British scientists working together for the Allied war effort (1914–18) at least as early as 1916 (and in Russia before 1912), and both of the 20th Century’s great Allied war efforts proved major spurs to this veritable tsunami of groundbreaking research.

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. This was the intellectual heritage on which the scientific work of Interchange Research drew, which inspired all of its work in the first place, and on which it would always be firmly based—a century-old scientific revolution which still has the potential to change everything (as of 2021) that we think we understand about the world—about man, nature and man’s place in it.

Beginning in 1971, the Interchange quest meandered its way purposefully through a bewilderingly wide range of fields, from analytical philosophy, psychology and neuroscience to cybernetics and biosemiotics. While the emerging body of radical new scientific theory was first forged and explored within the context of the natural sciences, the aim from the start was to generalize the findings and extend them to the behavioural sciences. Indeed, the first practical breakthroughs were to be in the psychiatric field. Working clinically to tackle longstanding intractable psychiatric problems in an inpatient hospital setting, the Interchange investigations trialled new techniques of brief psychotherapy based on our emerging theoretical framework, in which the desired therapeutic change invariably occurred all at once—and predictably—in response to a carefully crafted communication. The work was successfully applied to a wide range of severe psychiatric problems, and by the summer of 1978 the theory and approach would be further extended to radical, groundbreaking work in rapidly addressing juvenile delinquency successfully. Further research we carried out at the University of Oxford between 1978 and 1980 led to the earliest systematic, formal presentation of the theory behind Minimalist Intervention. Further advances in clinical psychotherapy swiftly followed, including the successful development of single-session psychotherapy, and the General Theory of Intervention which we’d been pursuing for over a decade began to take shape.

The international scientific think-tank itself was finally launched on 12th April 1982, when four young colleagues who had met at Oxford joined with a close German colleague and another London-based colleague to form the original lineup, soon joined by a number of more far-flung colleagues, from as near as Paris to as far away as Omaha, Nebraska, all drawn by the radical ideas themselves and the promise they held, the scientific ambitions they harboured in common, and a shared intellectual legacy including, above all, a shared, radical new epistemology. However, the original stimulus for forming the think-tank was the rapidly worsening geopolitical situation. The team set out to create a think-tank of those investigators (again, mostly clinicians) who shared their own epistemology and view of change, explicitly to try and save the world from thermonuclear, ecological, or pandemic disaster. Echoing their immediate scientific forebears, they saw each of these disaster scenarios as the inevitable outcome of large-scale human conduct grounded in a completely erroneous, back-to-front scientific view of how the world works—a superannuated, 400-year old rationalist epistemology of matter and energy, cause and effect, power and control, which they were seeking to replace with a radically new scientific epistemology of information and communication, flux-and-constraint, pattern and context. In the think-tank’s view, the new epistemology, which had already proven its value in creating rapid, transformative change in the notoriously difficult psychiatric arena, could alone avert Armageddon.

However, unsurprisingly, when seeking to influence diplomatic colleagues in the British Foreign Office to change tack in their approach to crisis management in international relations, despite the compelling evidence they presented, they were advised to first prove their radical new approach worked on large-scale systemic issues where the stakes were not so high as the Cold War. This meant addressing problems in the corporate world, applying the team’s novel change methodology to large-scale commercial problems, 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.

February of 1985 saw our very first deliberately designed, large-system-transforming minimalist intervention to emerge from the new theory, applied to an intractable, mission-critical organizational problem. Following a rigorous scientific analysis of several hours, a major public sector organization in turmoil and on the brink of collapse for the previous year was transformed overnight, precisely as predicted. A number of further successful, large-scale, organizational transformations in major private-sector entities followed in swift succession, based on the fast-evolving theory and nascent 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.

By late 1986 the think-tank’s international lineup was expanded to ten investigators, now increasingly revolving 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 rapidly expanding team of still mostly British researchers, including half the original 1982 think-tank lineup, would by 1990 be joined by other researchers from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australasia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. From 1986 onwards the think-tank was 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 emerging 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.

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 designs, 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 almost universally assumed even today, in 2020) to require years of large-scale “change programmes,” or to be all but impossible to achieve at all. 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, within days. In the case of a “direct hit,” the CEO client would typically walk in the door and describe to us, 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, they 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, by the early 1990s the work of Interchange Research was becoming more widely known in top management circles globally. In 1990 The Economist, in a special report on transforming corporate culture, selected Interchange as one of only eight “leading” consulting firms (out of the estimated 20,000 or so in the world whom they said were actively working in the area)—“consultants,” they said, “whom consultants consult,” and who according to their report “may be judged to have ‘started something’”—directing its readers to these eight firms in order to provide them with “insight into some of the most challenging thinking on corporate culture.” In a detailed two-page profile of Interchange’s work, the report drew particular attention to the approach’s

By the time The Economist report appeared in January 1990, Minimalist Intervention had already been successfully deployed in government at the highest level, in strategic planning in defence, social policy, health policy and beyond. 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, the work of Interchange 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, and Minimalist Intervention was starting to get more widely recognized in the global C-suite as “the next big thing.” And yet Interchange was then hardly getting started!

In 1996, exactly 25 years after first embarking on our scientific quest 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, Interchange Research could at last declare victory. 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 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.

With the full-scale commercial launch in 1996, the Minimalist Intervention technology would henceforth 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. Over the next twenty-five years, Interchange’s work with organizations 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 to date have been mostly Fortune 100 companies in virtually every major industry, with the think-tank team working directly with the CEO or a principal C-level P&L-holder and normally with no one else in their organization. By the time Interchange had chalked up, all told, some USD $1tn of P&L under 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), we had created countless tens of billions of dollars or more for the world’s leading corporations around the world in virtually every industry, driving corporate growth in record timeframes. 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, leading also, as a spinoff, to a number of pioneering tech startups.  

As well as using Minimalist Intervention for resolving intractable problems, dramatically accelerating P&L growth and rapidly transforming cultures, corporations, government ministries, health-care systems and so on, Minimalist Intervention has also been deployed in elite sport to dramatically improve the competitive performance of some of the world’s leading athletes and teams, and also in successfully transforming entire national economies, and in record time. By then it had become clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that there was bound to be no problem in the world, no matter how large and intractable—no challenge, no transformation, however daunting or ambitious, undertaken by CEOs and other C-level executives anywhere—that would not, in principle or in practice, succumb to a minimalist intervention.