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.
1971–1985
Beginning in 1971, our quest meandered its way through a wide range of academic 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, initially at the University of Oxford, 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. Further research we carried out at Oxford between 1978 and 1980 led to the earliest systematic, formal presentation of the theory behind Minimalist Intervention. Significant advances in outpatient clinical psychotherapy swiftly followed, including the successful development of single-session psychotherapy.
Meanwhile, the General Theory of Intervention, which we had been pursuing for over a decade, began to take shape.
The independent scientific think tank itself was formally 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 think-tank lineup. They were soon joined by a number of more far-flung colleagues, from Paris, France to Omaha, Nebraska, all drawn by the radical ideas themselves and the promise they held, the scientific ambitions they all harboured in common, and a shared intellectual legacy including, above all, a shared, radical new epistemology.
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 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 followed in swift succession.
1986–1995
By late 1986 the think-tank’s fast-growing lineup had already expanded to ten scientific investigators from around the world, dedicated to pure and applied scientific research and development in the theory and practice of Minimalist Intervention. 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 nascent, revolutionary new theory and technology of Minimalist Intervention for catalysing major, across-the-board transformations in large organizations with trivially small, precisely pinpointed interventions co-designed at executive board level.
Through the early 1990s the work of Interchange Research was already becoming more widely known in the global C-suite. In 1990 The Economist, in a special report on transforming corporate culture, had singled-out the Interchange think-tank for a detailed two-page profile, as one of only eight “leading” firms globally (including also McKinsey and six others, out of roughly 20,000 firms, by their estimate)—experts, they said, “whom consultants consult,” and who according to The Economist report “may be judged to have ‘started something’,” and who were engaged in “some of the most challenging thinking on corporate culture” anywhere.
By the time The Economist report appeared, Minimalist Intervention had already been successfully deployed not only in the corporate C-suite but in government at the highest level—in strategic planning in defense, social policy, health policy and beyond. Minimalist Intervention was 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.
By the mid-1990s, 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 more and more widely recognized as “the next big thing.”
1996–2021
In 1996, exactly 25 years after first embarking on its scientific quest, 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 successful intervention, with only a small percentage requiring a second follow-up session to tweak the intervention design and only very rarely did a major challenge require as many as three sessions to get to checkmate.
Over the next twenty-five years, Interchange’s work with organizations would for the most part be fairly evenly divided between Europe and North America, as the Minimalist Intervention technology was progressively refined and made increasingly powerful, and more and more widely applicable. 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 exclusively working directly with the CEO or a principal C-level P&L-holder.
Minimalist Intervention, as well as being deployed in resolving intractable problems, dramatically accelerating P&L growth and rapidly transforming cultures, corporations, government ministries, health-care systems and so on, has also been deployed in a wide range of other areas, for example, in elite sport to dramatically improve the competitive performance of some of the world’s leading athletes and teams, in developing radical new technologies and bringing them to market, and in successfully transforming entire national economies, all in record time.
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