As I read the article, my heart sank still further – though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the ‘bomb-detector’ has proved to be unreliable: there are huge problems on that score, without doubt. But to me the ‘betrayal’ turns out to be much more complex than it seems on the surface – because despite the ‘military-hardware’ packaging of the device in question, and its impressive-looking dials and cables and the rest, the underlying technology of the ‘bomb detector’ is a plain old ordinary everyday dowsing-rod.

Dowsing has been a serious interest of mine for several decades: over the years I’ve written what are now some of the best-known books on dowsing, in fact. Hence – unlike many of the critics – I do have some solid understanding of what’s going on in this case. And because of that longstanding background in the field, I’ll freely admit that I have few fundamental doubts about the use of dowsing in this context, not least because there’s plenty of long-documented, long-proven military practice in dowsing for land-mines and the like (contact the British Society of Dowsers for case-studies in Aden, for example, or the American Society of Dowsers for US use in Vietnam).  Like most people, I would much prefer a predictable and reliable machine to do the job, if there’s one available and it actually does work – which many don’t. But when lives are on the line and you don’t have anything else, a dowsing-rod in experienced hands can work wonders: so at least that part of this sad, messy story is no fraud. Yet that point about ‘experienced hands’ is extremely important: in unskilled hands a dowsing-rod can easily be worse than useless – as those on the receiving-end of those undetected explosives would have discovered to their cost…

(This is getting very long: better put a ‘Read more… link in here.)

Despite the protestations of pseudoscientist ‘skeptics’ like James Randi, the blunt fact is that dowsing works. Interestingly, how it works is almost irrelevant, though these days we do have a much better understanding of the psychology and physiology of what’s going on in dowsing – especially how the brain enacts pattern-processing against unconscious cues, much as in some aspects of proof-reading, for example, or ‘reading’ a stock-market ticker or a full-on fire in an apartment-block. But we also know that the instrument itself has very little impact on the quality of dowsing:  the relevant physics are so trivial that good dowsing-work can be done with a couple of bits of bent fence-wire or even a used tea-bag. The physiological constraints are also trivial – so trivial that just about anyone can do it one way or another if they put their mind to it. And the amount of knowledge needed to get started is trivial too – so trivial that most people can pick up the basics in a couple of minutes. But where so many people go so badly wrong with dowsing is that beyond that simple base, everything else depends on personal skill, on observation and self-observation, experience and interpretation – and none of that is trivial at all.

Every true skill depends on the development of judgement and awareness: my real professional interest is around identifying common-factors that apply in every skill, and using that knowledge to improve skills-education in any domain. In that sense, dowsing has been a very good test-case for that research – research which has been applied in a whole swathe of much more ‘conventional’ skills, from archaeology to enterprise-architecture, from software-development to quality-system design, and just about everything else in between. (Except sports, for some reason. I’ve never understood sports. I don’t know why, but there ’tis. )

Any skills-based technology will depend on the specific combination of the equipment and the operator: it needs to be understood as a interacting, interdependent system, not solely in terms of any of its individual components. The closer we get to a ‘pure’ skill, the more important the capabilities of the operator become – and dowsing is actually one of the closest examples we have to a ‘pure’ skill, because it consists of almost nothing but ‘judgement and awareness’. In practice, the choice and characteristics of a dowsing-instrument are often almost irrelevant, because the real ‘instrument’ you’re using in dowsing is you.

So yes, I do have some real concerns about the company selling a dowsing-based ‘bomb-detector’ for £15,000 each (or £45,000 each in Iraq, apparently), because in principle at least the job could have been done just as well with tuppence-worth of power-cable. (Belief and credibility do play an important part in dowsing-success, so there are some arguments for putting a serious price-tag on what is always going to be a very simple piece of kit – but for ethical reasons if nothing else, that price-tag should be measured in tens or low hundreds at most, not tens of thousands!)

Yet what worries me far more is the risk that this has been presented as a ‘deus ex machina’, inducing people to rely on the ‘machine’ itself (which, as the ‘skeptics’ correctly state, has just about zero capability on its own) rather than the personal skills of the operator (who can or may have the required capability, but only if the right skills-development has been applied). If the marketing-literature purports that the ‘bomb-detector’ itself does the task, it would be technological incompetence at best, because dowsing simply does not work that way – and the company should certainly have known this before they sold anything at all. If they knew, and went ahead anyway – especially without a rigorous focus on really solid skills-development – then it would indeed be fraud of a very serious kind. I would hold back any judgement on that until we’d had a chance to scrutinise the training-regime. I’d have to admit, though, that so far it doesn’t look good – which is unfortunate, to say the least.

Yet it’s important to tackle the right target here:  and I’m sure that in this case dowsing itself isn’t it. But you may think otherwise, of course – your comments, perhaps?

Update: 24 Jan

Seems there’s been quite a follow-up on this on the BBC. As usual they’ve tried to make sense of it in conventional ‘deus ex machina’ terms, with the obvious and correct conclusion that it doesn’t and can’t make sense in those terms: see the BBC article ‘Export ban on ‘useless’ detector‘. The ‘sensor card’ turns out to be a very ordinary RFID tag or some such, without any connection to any real electronics: there’s no possible way in which it can work in any conventional physical or chemical sense. But dowsers would recognise this straight away as what’s known as a ‘sample’ or ‘witness’: in effect, it’s best understood as a psychological trick to focus the operator’s mind on only the specified substance, in much the same way as the ‘cocktail party effect’, selecting out a single conversation at a very noisy party – though here the basic signal-to-noise ratio is vanishingly small, and needs to be enhanced in any way that we can. As with all dowsing, it’s based far more on psychology than physics, so attempting to assess in strictly physical terms not only makes no sense, but is literally unscientific. Worse, as with all skills – in fact, exactly as with operation of a conventional sonar/radar mine-detector – the ‘bomb-detector’ process needs to be understood as a complete system, the intersection of equipment and operator: but in this kind of analysis they’ve ignored that fundamental constraint, and instead tested the least-active part of the overall system, which again is flat-out unscientific – applying controls for parameters which are not even in play, and applying no controls for the parameters that do affect the system. Would be good if some of those self-styled ‘scientists’ had any real grasp of what true scientific investigation actually requires, but there ’tis…

Hence bleakly amusing to see the BBC’s evident surprise when the Iraqi Interior Ministry says that it does trust the devices: see ‘Iraqi Interior ministry still backing ‘bomb detector’‘. Part of that trust may come from the fact that they’ve so far spent a staggering $85m on the devices, of course. But at least that article does also make clear that a lot of emphasis has been placed on proper training: so actually there’s a fair chance that the device will work – in dowsing terms at least. And unlike the BBC, they do seem to be aware of the centrality of the operator in the system; but even so,the reliability will always be somewhat in question, especially for tired, scared, bored operators out on the street, day after day, dealing with an endless stream of vehicles and insults.

Judging from the descriptions, I really don’t think it’s fraud: at least, not in the sense of deliberately selling something that they know can’t work, though it may be fraud in other ways, of course. Only a proper investigation will be able to tell on that – and I don’t include the clumsy, myopic BBC hatchet-job as a ‘proper investigation’…

In many ways this whole sad mess is best understood as a clash of worldviews: the Western view, which focusses solely on the ‘objective’ world and tries to remove the person from the equation wherever possible; versus a more systemic worldview – pretty much any ‘non-Western’ worldview, in fact – which focusses far more on the person as an intrinsic and interdependent component of the ‘system’ in scope. The other deeper clash is between science-as-religion, which is obsessed with finding the Ultimate Answer to how everything ‘really works’, but will only accept answers within the confines a very rigid set of materialist assumptions; versus the much more practical technology view, which is less interested in ‘how things work’, and far more in ‘how things can be worked’ – which is not the same question.

The saddest part of this will be obvious to anyone who understands the psychology of skills-education, though will certainlynot be obvious to the BBC or the other ‘skeptic’ critics. This is that a very large part of this overall system depends on belief, and especially on the operator’s belief that the ‘sensing’ is separate from themselves, even though the operator is actually responsible for virtually all of the sensing and sense-interpretation – a complex double-bind described by the psychologist Kenneth Batcheldor as ‘ownership resistance’. The result is that if we ‘prove’ that the device ‘does not work’, in a suitably convincing manner, the belief in its efficacy will be destroyed, and hence the overall system will cease to work. Which would no doubt be taken as vindication of the aggressive ‘investigation’ – but in fact the investigation itself is the primary cause of failure. (Given his evident dislike of this class of technologies, Dave Snowden will no doubt not like me saying this, but this is in fact an exact illustration of his own dictum that “every diagnostic is also an intervention” – in this case, an inherently destructive intervention.) Which, in practice, could well leave Iraq without any form of mass-scale streetside bomb-detection – which would not be a good outcome… yet an outcome that arises directly from the so-called ‘scientific’ investigation.

I’ve no doubt that the BBC investigators were unaware of these complexities or their impacts: but there are real and very serious ethical issues here, which they appear to have failed to understand at all. Religious fanatics like James Randi are beyond the pale, and beyond reason, of course; but given that the only real ‘fraud’ here is the fundamentally non-scientific nature of their investigation, and that the destruction of a dowsing-based capability may well cost far more lives than the inevitable human-based limits on the system’s reliability, I would certainly caution the BBC and others to be a bit more cautious next time of the consequences of their no doubt well-meant but potentially lethal actions.

After Dave Snowden started accusing everyone – especially me – of ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘psychobabble’ – I began to worry. What if he’s right? What if everything I do is just pseudoscience, caught up in a cult?

(Oops – another long one: better split it here with a ‘Read more…’ link)

I re-read Beyerstein’s list of characteristics of pseudoscience in Patrick’s Lambe’s post on “Is KM a pseudoscience?“, and started to worry even more. Here’s that list:

1. Isolation – failure to connect with prior and parallel disciplines
2. Non-falsifiability – no means to invalidate hypotheses
3. Misuse of data – leveraging data out of context or beyond validity
4. No self-correction, evolution of thought – often centred round a single ‘thought-leader’
5. Special-pleading – the claim that this is a special-case that can’t be measured in any other terms
6. Unfounded optimism – unrealistic expectations
7. Impenetrability – an over-dependence on complicated ideology and obfuscation, or bluster in place of debate
8. Magical-thinking – such as “the belief that good things will result from willpower alone”
9. Ulterior motives – particularly ulterior motives of a commercial kind
10. Lack of formal training – including certification schemes that link back to #4
11. Bunker mentality – such as complaints about being ‘misunderstood’ by others, and often linked to #5 and #7
12. Lack of replicability of results – especially replicability by others under controlled conditions

For example, I often work at the places where the IT-industry and consulting-industry converge, so I would need to test both of those against that list, putting a check-mark against any of the criteria that fail:

• #1? Check – not always, but way too often for comfort.
• #2? Check – ditto.
• #3? Check – often. Usually from myopia and questionable competence (“I guess we failed to take enough account of the human factors”: BPR), though occasionally from a rather more deliberate ‘sexing-up’ of the statistics to prop up the purported position (‘In Search of Excellence’ etc).
• #4? Check – often. (All those management fads…)
• #5? Check – again, too often for comfort. (Real business-case for IT-only KM or Enterprise 2.0, anyone?)
• #6? Check. (In fact rarely anything other than ‘unfounded optimism’ – at the start of a project, anyway.)
• #7? Check – lots.
• #8? Check – ditto.
• #9? Check. (Rarely anything else, perhaps? – BPR, anyone? ERP? the dot-com bubble?)
• #10? Check. (Look at most enterprise-architecture training, for example.)
• #11? Check. (It’s usually called ‘the IT/business divide’ – or worse, of course.)
• #12? Check. (Often we don’t want to replicate the results that we actually get…)

And so on, and so on. According to that review, it looks like almost the entire industry is based on little more than pseudoscience. Oops.

And we’ve already seen from Patrick Lambe that knowledge-management is perilously close to a pseudoscience too. Also ‘Oops’, I guess.

But what about Cynefin? Surely that can’t be a cult – especially given Dave’s position on pseudoscience and the like. Better go through that checklist again, just to make sure:

• #1: Isolation? Plenty of reference to cognitive-science and suchlike – but I don’t see any evidence of cognitive-science etc connecting back to Cynefin. Looks suspiciously like spurious science to me, then. Oops.
• #2: Non-falsifiability? References to ‘retrospective causality’ in the Complex domain look a bit questionable in this regard; likewise much of the definitions of the Complex and Chaotic domains, and the interactions therein. Oops.
• #3: Misuse of data? Ditto, it would seem. Oops.
• #4: No self-correction? There is a genuine community-of-practice here, but it seems often to be silenced by a single figurehead who claims to hold ‘the only real truth’ about the discipline. Oops.
• #5: Special-pleading? Tends to be very good about challenging ‘pattern-entrainment’ in others, but not so good at applying the same analysis to itself. Claims to be a ‘sense-making’ framework, but the only way to test the ‘sense’ that’s derived is in terms of the framework itself. Kinda circular, really. Oops.
• #6: Unfounded optimism? Probably. Best let that one pass as only a minor ‘oops’.
• #7: Impenetrability? Lots. There’s the ‘ganglionic cross‘ with its cryptic markings, and the insistent demand that all devotees acknowledge that there are five domains, not four; also near-religious wars as to what each of the domains ‘really means’. Oops.
• #8: Magical-thinking? All we really know is that Dave is almost obsessively against it – which by the usual psychological games probably means there’ll be lots. Complicated pathways between domains that somehow magically change things might be a good example. A bit uncertain, perhaps, but very likely to be ‘oops’.
• #9: Ulterior motives? Lots. Celebrity-status, serious-money consultancy-fees, training-fees (see #10), sales of software that can only be used by registered practitioners (see #10), and consumable-supplies that can only be purchased from the central organisation: sounds a bit like Scientology, doesn’t it? We’d have to be fair and remind ourselves that that applies to much of the IT-trade and consultancy-trade too, but even so that’s a really big ‘oops’.
• #10: Lack of formal training? Would-be practitioners generally need some serious consultancy-time under their belt, but the Cynefin training itself is defined, run, certified and validated only by the central organisation. In other words, worryingly circular and self-referential. Kinda sounds like NLP, doesn’t it? Oops.
• #11: Bunker-mentality? Probably not in most cases, but it’s notable that the figurehead has an unfortunate habit of fulminating about anything else that can’t be forced to fit within the preferred assumptions – such as denigrating Six Sigma as ‘Sick Stigma‘, and so on, regardless of where or how it’s used. So most practitioners probably okay, but the figurehead probably not. Oops.
• #12: Lack of replicability? Lots. By definition, pretty much anything in the nominal Complex or Chaotic domains is going to have limited replicability. (There’s good replicability in the Simple and Complicated domains, of course, but also no real need for Cynefin-style ‘sensemaking’ in those two domains, so we can’t really claim that one as a plus.) Just about any consulting-assignment will be in part unique, too, so again little to no replicability there, again by definition. Also, as Dave puts it, “every diagnostic is an intervention”, so the very act of enquiry changes the conditions of the experiment, impacting on any possible replicability. And if Cynefin experiments are only repeatable by Cynefin practitioners, and everything has to be assessed in Cynefin terms, it somewhat blocks the possibility of proper third-party ‘outside’ review – kinda like the worst of ‘armchair Freudianism’, for example. Another big ‘oops’.

So is Cynefin a cult? Apparently the answer is ‘Yes’, because according to Beyerstein’s criteria, it seems to fail the ‘pseudoscience’ test on just about every count. Almost the only place where it doesn’t fail, in fact, is in the two logic-based domains, Simple and Complicated, where Cynefin isn’t much use anyway. Either way, definitely ‘oops’.

[Brief note to Dave: yup, I'm well aware that that assessment above ain't exactly rigorous and peer-reviewed and the rest, but it's a darn sight more rigorous and honest than the cheap hatchet-job you tried to do on me over the past couple of days... yes, I am indeed still angry over that...]

But that result is kind of odd, because most of us find that Cynefin is a very useful tool in consulting practice – especially in dealing with what Cynefin describes as the Complex and Chaotic domains. Hmm. Seems like something doesn’t quite match up here, does it? And we’re left with two probable reasons for that mismatch:

• either Beyerstein’s criteria do test well for pseudoscience in areas where simple Newtonian-style logic applies, but tend to break down as soon as we hit anything closer to real-world chaos – so we’ll need something other than Beyerstein and the like to validate quality in those areas
• or the whole idea of ‘pseudoscience’ is a red-herring that can be used by superannuated academics to bully others and prop up some vain and misguided ‘mediaeval delusions’ of their own ‘superiority’, in areas where their putative expertise in formal ‘proof’ by definition can no longer apply, because by definition the ‘normal’ rules of replicability and the like are no longer reliable once we move into the Disorder, Complex or Chaotic domains

Both of these could be true, of course. But let’s be polite, and assume that it’s only the first of these: Beyerstein is probably useful in the Simple and Complicated domains, but we’ll need something else outside of that simplistic rule-based world.

But how can we tell when we’re outside of the rule-based world? And what can we use in place of Beyerstein and its ilk?

For the former, the key criterion is, once again, repeatability and replicability. In both the Simple and Complicated domains, there’s always an identifiable ‘right answer’, and if we do an experiment in the same way, we’ll always end up at the same results. (A few special-cases such as symmetries in complex-math give two or more ‘right answers’, but the set of answers in that case is still identifiable, so the basic principle remains sound.) In short, it’s repeatable, which means it’s also replicable. There are definable, straightforward (more or less!) and linear sequences of cause and effect, so if we don’t get the same right-answer under the same conditions, something’s wrong – hence falsifiability. Either true, or false: hence it makes sense to describe Cynefin’s ‘Simple’ and ‘Complicated’ as the two ‘truth’ domains.

In the other Cynefin domains, things get kinda messy. The Disorder domain is where we start, before we do any sensemaking, but it’s probably best to leave it out of this discussion for now. Yet in the other two domains – Complex and Chaotic - doing the same thing in the same way does not guarantee the same results. In the Complex domain, any apparent causality will at best become apparent only after the event (a context which Dave Snowden describes as ‘retrospective causality’); in the Chaotic domain, where everything is inherently unique in some way, even the concept of causality itself makes no sense, by definition. In effect, one way that we know we’re not in the ‘truth’ domains because it’s not repeatable. Clearly Beyerstein isn’t going to be much use to us here.

But there’s a nasty corollary that follows from this. If one test of the Complex or Chaotic domains is that it’s not repeatable, how can we tell the difference between that and plain ordinary bad-science in the ‘truth’ domains? – because that’s also not-repeatable too. Following the logic of this, we discover quite quickly that there’s no simple ‘truth’-based test that could distinguish between the two, because in both cases doing things the same nominal way may lead to different answers. Beyerstein in this instance would not only not be helpful, but could be actively misleading, always labelling the workings of the Complex domain as ‘wrong’ and therefore ‘pseudoscience’. Which it might be, or might not be, but there’s no way to tell: even the concept of ‘true’ versus ‘false’ doesn’t make much sense in that kind of context. Which is a problem.

But instead of trying to cling on to a notion of ‘true’ versus ‘false’ in a context where it won’t and can’t work, what does make sense is to use some concept of value. In other words, the test-criterion we need in the two ‘value’-domains Complex and Chaotic is usefulness, not ‘truth’.

Next question: what determines ‘usefulness’? By definition this is always going to be somewhat subjective and context-dependent – but that doesn’t mean that it’s a random free-for-all. Feyerabend’s anarchic dictum “anything goes” does indeed need to hold sway here, but it’s a disciplined ‘anything goes’ – a considered, functional form of anarchy, if you like (or even if you don’t). In turn, this brings us into the well-understood (if, by its nature, not necessarily well-defined) realm of quality-management. Which brings us to all those tools that Dave has so happily despised, such as Six Sigma and the like.

The problem – and again for some impenetrable reason Dave doesn’t seem to like this fact – is that each of these tools is context-dependent. Six Sigma, for example, is all about managing quality in terms of defects per million events: so it only makes sense to use Six Sigma if we have millions of exactly-identical events, which in practice places us in Cynefin’s Simple domain. If we’re not in the Simple domain, don’t use Six Sigma: simple, really. No need to make a song-and-dance about it and denigrate it as ‘Sick Stigma’, because it’s perfectly fine where it does work. Same with every other tool and technique: we switch between them according to context.

Within any given context, I’ve also found it useful to compare against a relatively simple yardstick of effectiveness. In my own practice, for the past decade or so, I’ve used a frame which describes effectiveness in terms of five distinct dimensions:

• efficient: makes the best use of available resources – typically the least wasteful use
• reliable: can be relied upon to deliver the required results, optimised over the required timescale
• elegant: aligns best with simplicity, clarity, ergonomics and other ‘human factors’
• appropriate: ensures that the delivered results are ‘on purpose’
• integrated: assists in bringing everything to work together as a unified whole

All of these need valid metrics: and in general, any appropriate metric will do – even if sometimes it’s just a 1-5 subjective scale, such as I use, for example, in my SEMPER organisational-capability diagnostic. Once again, in effect ‘anything goes’ here: the selection-criteria for metrics revolve around effectiveness, not ‘truth’.

And ‘truth’ approaches – such as Dave has so aggressively promoted in the comments to the previous post and elsewhere – really aren’t much help in deciding metrics and models here, because ‘truth’ only applies to part of the context, as we’ve seen above. True/false logic can’t lift itself by its own bootstraps: it can work within a set of assumptions and postulates, but it can’t be used to define or validate them. (Attempting to do so is known as ‘induction’, otherwise known as ‘cheating’ – or ‘pseudoscience’, of course.) So to make it work we have to jump up a step to a kind of ‘meta-level’, which, as I said in the previous post, might be called ‘nonrational’ or ‘arational’ or ‘metarational’, but I prefer to use the good old classic term ‘magical’. Which Dave doesn’t like, but that’s too bad, bluntly. (He also doesn’t like the alternate term ‘technology’, so he’ll just have to lump it, really.)

To help in deciding metrics and models and the like, we need to run the whole thing reflexively and recursively. (I’ve described in some depth how to do this in whole-of-enterprise architecture in my book Real Enterprise Architecture, if you’re interested.) The Cynefin frame is useful for this: we run it backwards, so to speak, to help us identify what needs to be handled in an appropriate manner for Simple, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic.

Even more useful than Cynefin for this, as mentioned in the previous post, is the frame that we developed for Disciplines of Dowsing. And as you’ll see from the two-page reference-sheet, the reason why it’s even more useful is that not only does it describes characteristic to help us identify which mode or domain we’re in, but also how to recognise when we’re losing discipline within that domain, and reasons and tactics to move from one domain to another. For example, if we’re in the ‘Scientist’ domain (i.e. Cynefin ‘Complicated’ domain), and we start getting emotional and defensive or aggressive about it, that warns us straight away that we’ve allowed ourselves to drift towards the ‘Priest’ domain (Cynefin ‘Simple’ domain), and either need to get the emotion out of it to return to the Scentist, or else intentionally switch to the Priest, or one of the other domains, as appropriate. The result is that we maintain discipline throughout the whole space – not solely in the ‘truth’ domains, as with Beyerstein and the like.

I’m well aware that dowsing and suchlike may feel a bit uncomfortable for some folks here, but unfortunately it’s the only example I have available right now. (There’s another variant in the Berg Time & Mind article, showing how to balance subjective disciplines in archaeological research with the more conventional ‘objective’ disciplines, but it’s essentially the same as in the reference-sheet.) Likewise the examples in the useful set of ‘seven sins of dubious discipline’ in the Disciplines book mostly relate to dowsing and archaeography. So if you’re working in knowledge-management or enterprise-architecture, for example, you’ll probably need to do some significant translation to make it work in your own work-context. But I assure that it is worth the effort: the result makes it a heck of a lot easier to work out what’s going on in a context –  especially the kind of dysfunctional, chaotic, blame-filled business-contexts that we so often have to deal with these days – because it helps to ensure that discipline of an appropriate kind is kept in play at all times.

So, to come back to the original question, is Cynefin a pseudoscience, a cult? Short answer, as we’ve seen above, is “probably not” – but you’ll probably need a little bit of magic to help you prove it!

Constructive comments and suggestions welcomed, of course – and many thanks for sticking with me this far on this.

(This has turned out to be an enormously long post – I’d better put a ‘Read more…’ link in here before continuing.)

This time the Tweet was from Cynefin creator Dave Snowden:

• snowded: NLP as Cargo-Cult psychology. Great paper http://jarhe.research.glam.ac.uk/media/files/documents/2009-07-17/JARHE_V1.2_Jul09_Web_pp57-63.pdf

The link points to a 7-page academic paper [PDF] by Gareth Roderique-Davies of University of Glamorgan, which purports to indicate that NLP (‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming‘ – a kind of self-hypnosis psychological tool) has no scientific basis, and is therefore ‘cargo-cult psychology’. I do take his point that there are some worrying flaws in NLP itself, and even more worrying flaws in many of the ways in which NLP is promoted and used these days. But I’ve seen this kind of ‘scientific’ review before, and I said so in my re-Tweet of Dave’s first message:

• tetradian: @snowded: “NLP as Cargo-Cult psychology. Great paper http://tr.im/IjbF ” <disagree: NLP has serious flaws but this is just a hatchet-job

The problem is that the reviewer is trying to assess NLP in conventional scientific terms – which makes no sense right from the start, though his world-frame would itself make it impossible to see why it makes no sense. (For enterprise-architects, by the way, this is the same underlying reason why IT-centrism or organisation-centrism is such a problem: the frame itself makes it impossible to see beyond the frame.) The title of Bandler and Grinder’s original book that defined NLP way back in the 1970s gives the reason why the scientific frame won’t work: it’s called The Structure of Magic.

Yup, that’s right: magic.

Most self-styled ‘scientists’ treat that word in the same way as IT-centric ‘enterprise’-architects treat business-architecture and beyond: namely a randomised, undifferentiated grab-bag of all the bits of reality (or business-reality, in IT-EAs’ case) that they don’t understand. And then complain that it’s a mess, and doesn’t make sense in their own chosen terms, and therefore doesn’t exist. Which is not exactly honest – and it’s certainly not helpful in practice, because magical-thinking is often the only way out of many everyday scientific, technological and business dilemmas and problems.

A small tale here. Everyone ‘knows’ that Isaac Newton was one of the world’s greatest scientists, yes? (Which he was, of course.) But not many people know that he was also interested in a great many other subjects, including religion, alchemy, astrology and much else besides: in fact he wrote more on alchemy, for example, than on all of his scientific studies put together. Edmond Halley, the then Astronomer Royal, was berating Newton for the latter’s studies of astrology: it was all nonsense, he said, ridiculous, utterly unscientific – or words to that effect, anyway. Newton’s short, sharp retort: “I have studied the subject, sir, and you have not!” End of conversation…

Which brings us back to NLP, and the structure of magic. As it happens, I have indeed “studied the subject, sir” – for more than forty years, in fact – and I guess most people reading this blog probably haven’t, so it might be useful if we do a quick tutorial here on the role and limitations of the scientific frame and mindset, and the contrasting role of magical-thinking. To do this I’ll pick up on another of today’s Tweets, from knowledge-management (KM) guru David Gurteen:

• DavidGurteen: Is KM a Pseudoscience? #KM http://www.greenchameleon.com/gc/blog_detail/is_km_a_pseudoscience/

This link points to an article by another key figure in KM, Patrick Lambe – much better thought-through and much more considered than the previous piece. Using a checklist from an article by Barry Beyerstein, he scores KM overall as having a score of only 5.4 out of 10 as a ‘rational endeavour’, and concludes that it is too close to a pseudoscience: “must do better”, he says.  But what that article misses, yet again, is the bald fact that trying to assess most of KM in scientific terms makes no sense. The only way we can make sense of it is via a magical approach.

(Yes, I know I still haven’t explained yet what I mean by “a magical approach” – give me a chance, I’m getting to that in a moment! )

Before we can look at magic, we need to understand science – as much for what it isn’t as for what it is. What it isn’t – as any competent scientist would admit – is “the answer to Life, The Universe, Everything”. Instead, it’s a particular body of knowledge, developed in terms of a specific set of methods and assumptions, and which can only make sense – or be useful and valid, rather – within a very specific set of constraints. Science has been extremely successful within those constraints - so successful, in fact, that many people fail to realise that by its own definitions it is not and cannot be successful outside of them. Therein lie many huge problems for KM, for enterprise-architecture and for many other disciplines – including magic.

This is perhaps best described in one of my all-time-favourite books, WIB Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation. First published in 1950, it’s been continually in print ever since, and remains one of the great classics of scientific research. I’ll have to quote from memory, as my copy is back in Australia, but his introduction starts like this:

Complex equipment plays a central role in the science of today, but it should never be forgotten that the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of the researcher.

Beveridge expresses concern that “perhaps not enough attention is paid to making the best use of it”. To this end he focusses on the actual practice of science, rather than solely on the end-products of that practice. Hence his book includes detailed descriptions and examples on strategy, hypothesis, the use of chance and intuition, and “the hazards and limitations of reason”. (Most of his examples come from his own field of biology and biochemistry, but they’re just as applicable to every other branch of science.) The summary in his chapter on reason is particularly important, though forgive me if I again have to quote from memory:

The origin of discoveries is beyond the reach of reason. The role of reason in science is to come afterwards, to review and reassess and to build a general theoretical scheme. … Most biological ‘facts’ are so uncertain that at best we can only reason on probabilities and possibilities.

And that last sentence remains just as true as ever, despite the advances of molecular biology and the like over the past half-century: the only certainty in science is that many things will always remain uncertain. But it’s all too easy to forget that fact: that’s where the problem starts.

It’s also all too easy to forget that ‘the scientific method’ depends entirely on its base-assumptions: it cannot be relied upon outside of their remit. For our purposes, the most important of these assumptions include:

• causality – all events are connected via cause/effect chains in a linear ‘arrow of time’
• repeatability – given the same conditions, all experiments and results must be repeatable by others
• falsifiability – every hypothesis must be framed in such a way as to enable its negation by experiment
• consistency – the results and hypotheses in each domain of science cannot contradict those of other domains of science

Within those constraints, science works extremely well – and likewise, usually, any technology based on that science. But it’s essential to realise that it only works within those constraints – and there are plenty of conditions where those assumptions break down. Repeatability and falsifiability will seem to make sense whilst we’re dealing with the mid-range of scales, but in fact they break down as we move more towards  the very small – down into quantum levels, as per Heisenberg’s Principle - or to the very large – where experimentation and repeatability are often inherently impossible (at least on the kind of time-scales that we live in!). The same applies as we move more towards unique events: chaos-mathematics makes the level of unpredictability more predictable, but does not reduce the unpredictability itself. Consistency also frequently breaks down between domains: last I heard, for example, the most likely theory of star-formation requires a universe much older than ‘permitted’ by the most likely theory of cosmology. And out at the fringes of science – particularly in nuclear physics – there are plenty of examples where any linear concept of causality will break down, and at times looks remarkably like traditional magic. For example, the old magical notions of ‘action at a distance‘, teleportation and telepathy are all ‘permissible’ in current quantum-entanglement physics, and in some cases have even been demonstrated in laboratory-experiment – even if only at quantum scales.

And there are plenty of real-world, everyday examples of where those assumptions will break down – especially in KM and the like, where we’re often dealing with contexts which, by definition, are either unique or near-unique. So complaining that KM might be considered by some to be a ‘pseudo-science’ is to miss the point, because there’s no way that it can be a ‘science’ in those formal terms above. Instead, to make sense of what’s going on, we may well need to turn to other approaches: science is one approach that we might use, but it’s not the only one.

Which, by a round-about route, brings us back to where we started, with Dave Snowden and the Cynefin framework. Starting from the unknown – what Dave describes as the domain of ‘Disorder’ – we have four distinct methods to ‘make sense’ of what’s going on:

• the Simple domain: apply rules to ‘categorise – sense – respond’
• the Complicated domain: apply algorithms and logic to ‘sense – analyse – respond’
• the Complex domain: apply guidelines and heuristics to ‘probe – sense – respond’
• the Chaotic domain: force change through action, to ‘act – sense – respond’

I know Dave can get ‘curmudgeonly‘ when we place these Cynefin domains in a simple two-axis frame, but in this case there’s one frame that aligns extremely well, and does add quite a lot to our understanding of Cynefin itself. These two axes are value versus truth, and inner (personal) versus outer (collective), which gives us four domains: inner truth, outer truth, outer value, inner value. These domains map almost exactly to those four main Cynefin domains and their sense-making tactics:

• ‘inner truth’: Simple domain – rules or supposed ‘universal truths’ that purport to apply to everyone, everything, everywhere
• ‘outer truth’: Complicated domain – algorithms and the like, often with multiple factors and complicated interactions and delays, but always amenable to causal analysis
• ‘outer value’: Complex domain –  use ‘seeds’ and experiments to probe into the context, to allow meaning to emerge
• ‘inner value’: Chaotic domain – any meaning that may be derived is context-dependent and probably personal only

(The chapter ‘Can’t we explain this scientifically?‘ in my 1990 book “Inventing Reality” likens each of these modes with a means to survive within a swamp: run too fast to sink; climb up a pole; weave a platform between a group of poles; or spread your weight on swamp-shoes. The advantages and disadvantages of each mode are summarised in some detail there: might be worthwhile to read that chapter now and then come back here.)

In practice we would – or should – usually switch between each of these modes, much as Beveridge implies in The Art of Scientific Investigation. But the key point here is that a ‘scientific’ approach – which depends on causality and logic – can only make sense in the two ‘truth’ domains. Trying to use ‘truth’ tactics in the ‘value’ domains is not a good move: we risk ending up with what Dave Snowden calls ‘pattern entrainment’, such that in effect we use a quasi-religious belief as a substitute for true science or sense – which is not a good idea. (For more on this, see, for example, Amory Lovins’ video on “How the practice and instruction of engineering must change“.). Which means that we need to use entirely different approaches in the two ‘value’ domains. We could use terms such as ‘non-rational’, ‘arational’ or ‘meta-rational’ for this, but we might as well use the term that already exists for this: magical.

Magical-thinking isn’t a mistake: it’s what we need to use in the two ‘value’-domains – or, in Cynefin terms, the Chaotic domain and, especially, the Complex domain.

This post has rambled long enough already, so I’d better not go into too much detail. But one of the key tactics here is to deliberately use beliefs as tools, especially in the Complex domain, using them as if they are true whilst still recognising that they may not necessarily be ‘true’ in absolute sense. In classic scientific terms, another name for this tactic is hypothesis, as contrasted with idea (Chaotic domain), theory (Complicated domain) and law (Simple domain). It’s what we do in most technology-development: for example, we might use ideas from science, but we might also use analogy, metaphor, serendipity or even images from a tarot-deck – what works is whatever happens to work. And the fundamental question here is not science’s ‘How does it work?’, but ‘How can it be worked?’ – not how do we make it more ‘true’, but how do we make it more effective, more efficient, reliable, elegant, appropriate, integrated.

(Incidentally, this is one of several reasons why using the term ‘applied science’ as a synonym for ‘technology’ is misleading and even dangerous, because we end up applying the wrong criteria to measure that technology’s value – assuming ‘technology’ in the original sense of ‘tekne‘, a body of knowledge and related practices rather the rather incomplete sense as ‘machines and stuff’. Another concern is that by purporting to be ‘science’, a usage of technology can also attempt to claim science’s status as ‘value-free’ – and hence supposedly not subject to the ethical and other value-constraints that, by definition, are actually the core of every technology. And magic too, for that matter . In this sense, technology and science are fundamentally different from each other, whereas technology and magic are fundamentally the same. In fact the only real difference between the latter is that magicians tend to be a bit more ‘way out’ in their choice of beliefs, especially when the technology is more about mind than matter.)

Whichever mode we use at any given time, the key to all of this is discipline. (This applies in magic as much as in any other technology: as the pseudonymous author of the influential SSOTBME put it, “all those boring meditation books are just the magical equivalent of a school chemistry primer”. But that’s another story… ) Which, finally brings us to why I wrote this post in the first place, because we need a disciplined approach not only to the use of each domain, but also to how not work work within each domain, and how instead to switch between the domains in an effective, intentional manner.

Most readers of this blog would know me as a specialist in whole-of-enterprise architecture. But my real interest, and real work, is in methodology and meta-methodology – the design of methodologies to suit each specific context and need. Behind that, what really concerns me is the process of developing skills as true skills capable of dealing with the complexities and chaos of the real world – rather than as glorified ‘trainings’ that are only usable in the safe, easy purported-predictability of the ‘truth’ domains. I’ve been engaged in this work for well over forty years: for example, one of the tools I developed that you may have seen is the Skills Labyrinth, a live-metaphor for the skills-learning process.

But one of my primary test-cases for this – mainly because it’s almost the closest I can find to a ‘pure’ interpretive-skill, with very little manual-skill and technical-knowledge required to get started – is what’s known in Britain as dowsing, the generic for ‘water-divining’ and the like. (Each country has their own term for this: Americans would know this as ‘water-witching’, for example, whilst Dutch might call it ‘wichelen’.) It’s a classic ‘magical’ skill, sufering – as so many do – from an overdose of idiots, and much-derided by self-styled ‘skeptics’ who rely only on ‘scientific’ theory rather than technological practice and hence don’t have any real grasp of what they so obsessively dismiss. (As it happens, we know a great deal about the physics, physiology and psychology of the skill: one key point we now know for certain is that there is no single mechanism involved, but rather a complex ‘weighted-sum’ merge of multiple mechanisms. Hence most of the classic means of scientific enquiry – “how does it work?” – make little sense, whereas technological enquiry – “how can it be worked – does indeed work well here.)

Worldwide, I’m actually better known as a writer on dowsing and related subjects than on IT or enterprise-architecture: my first book on this – nowadays known as The Diviner’s Handbook – was first published in 1976, translated into some dozen languages, has been in print continuously ever since, and is regarded as one of the standard reference-works on the subject (or learning-guide, rather, because that’s its real purpose). And I apply exactly the same rigour to my work in that field as I do to anything else: I insist on keeping myself, and others, strictly to the correct discipline in the appropriate domain. Which at times is not ‘scientific’, of course – but so what? If the ‘scientific’ mode is not appropriate in that part of the technology, don’t use it! Which is exactly the same principle as we need to apply in KM, or enterprise-architecture, or anything else that is inherently complex and in any way inherently unique, and hence where the usual constraints of ‘rational repeatability’ and the like do not and cannot always apply.

Hence yet another book of mine, co-authored with the archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, and published late last year, called Disciplines of Dowsing. (You can download the e-book version for free from the website, though please consider buying the print version if you’re going to use it in practice!) Parts of this work have also been published in the Berg peer-reviewed academic journal on archaeology, Time & Mind. In it we explore the application to dowsing practice of the same four approaches to sense-making and action, linked to Cynefin as above, and cross-linked to standard quality-improvement tactics such as kaizen, the Deming/Shewhart PDCA cycle, ISO-9000:2000 and reflective methods such as After Action Review. It’s the same principles, applied in a slightly different area to what most KMs and EAs might know, but otherwise no different at all. What is different – and which we haven’t seen anywhere else – is an explicit emphasis on how and when and why to switch between each of the disciplines. Which, in turn, we could – and, I would argue, we should – apply in turn to our other everyday work-domains such as KM and EA and the like.

There’s also a strong emphasis in the book on how to identify and avoid some all-too-common pitfalls, the ‘seven sins of dubious discipline’ such as the Hype Hubris, the Newage Nuisance and the Meaning Mistake. (‘Newage’ is perhaps a more accurate term for much of what purports to be ‘new age’: it rhymes with ‘sewage’, ‘the discarded remnant of what was once nutritious’… yup, I can be a cynic too! ). But the point here is that, again, there are exact equivalent of the ‘seven sins’ in every other kind of skill, including those in the sciences: for example, Roderique-Davies’ paper on NLP includes several all-too-obvious examples of the Meaning Mistake. If we don’t understand the limitations of science, and worry too much about seeming ‘unscientific’ or ‘pseudoscience’, we’re likely to end up damaging the quality of our skill and our results rather than improving it. In that specific sense at least, magic is real – and as Cynefin shows us, it matters just as much as science and the like to the quality and validity of our practice.

In addition to the e-book of Disciplines of Dowsing, there’s also a two-page reference-sheet that summarises the four sets of disciplines, and that’s perhaps more immediately usable in practice. (The material on the ‘seven sins’ is only in the book, though.) It’s written for dowsers, of course, but it doesn’t take much translation to apply it direct to KM, EA, software development or any other complex-domain skill. Download it, perhaps, and let me know how it works for you? And thence it might be worthwhile writing another version specifically for KM or whatever. Something different to play with, anyway.

A couple of years ago it was Mike Mepham, who worked with me for some years in the Wordsmiths days, back in the mid-1980s, and went on to fame amongst puzzle-fans as the person who brought the Sudoku craze to Britain. This time it’s a perhaps more famous friend, John Michell (see the obituary in the London newspaper The Independent).

The rather gushing obituary concentrates on his writings, and indeed it was his The View Over Atlantis – the ‘rather peculiar book’ that my parents brought home from a Bristol bookshop in 1969 – that really started me on my own earth-mysteries researches, building on previous schooldays-experiments with Tom Lethbridge’s work on dowsing. I’ll admit, though, that I found almost all his later work impenetrable to the point of incredulity – with the exception of a brilliantly acerbic little poem written in the aftermath of the unprovoked assault by police (the Battle of the Beanfield) at Stonehenge in 1985:

…but here’s the subtle dodge:
Stonehenge has now been proved to be / an old Masonic Lodge
…[so] they’re not just simple coppers / spoiling other people’s fun
they’re members of the Brotherhood / out worshipping the sun

But to me it wasn’t the writings that that meant so much: it was the man. One who saw the world through rose-tinted glasses – literally so. A cultured Etonian voice; a sculptured, elf-like face; a bird-like manner, quick, sharp, like a heron; an intense scholar’s intelligence balanced by bright wit and a warm, genuine inclusiveness – I was stunned when, at a book-launch of mine a few years back, he told me that he regarded me as one of his peers, because to me he had no real equal either then or now. An eccentric in the best sense of that term: one who stands aside from the usual centre, and applies that leverage to change the world.

I last met him a year ago, at the Megalithomania gathering in Glastonbury. (Reading the Megalithomania site, I’ve just realised I’m a bit late in this – John died almost a month ago, 24th April. His obit was in The Independent only yesterday, though, and that was the first I’d heard of it.) He’d always looked older than his age – back in the 60s and 70s he looked to be in his sixties at least, though I now realise he must then only have been in his mid-forties – but he was definitely looking old by then, yet still active, engaging, aware, alert to all the subtle nuances of ideas.

Yes, and a real ‘character’ too. The obit coyly states that he “joined the civil service as a Russian interpreter”, but it was more likely the intelligence-service, either MI5 or MI6: in other words, he was, bluntly, a spy – part of the same Cambridge clique that produced the double-agent Kim Philby. Yet though he may have come from the Establishment, he was certainly not of it: there is a happily apocryphal tale of him in one of his post-Cold War visits to Moscow, chatting to the security-guards at Vnukovno airport whilst rolling up a joint literally under their noses, lighting up and waving to them as he wandered out of the door surrounded by a cloud of that so-characteristic aroma. It undoubtedly never occurred to him to be concerned about its extreme illegality, and they probably never had a chance to notice: like the best of anarchists, he harmed no-one, yet he made up his own rules everywhere he went.

Oddly, I know almost nothing about his earlier life beyond his writings and research. The Independent obituary mentions his time at university and in the Royal Navy, but no mention of parents or childhood. In a very literal sense, he seems to have come from nowhere: it certainly felt like that when, as an awed, angst-ridden eighteen-year-old, I first met him in Glastonbury almost forty years ago.

Yet there’s a quote from him in the Independent obit that seems to sum up almost perfectly his life and his work:

The important discoveries about the past have been made not so much through the present refined techniques of treasure-hunting and grave-robbery, but through the intuition of those whose faith in poetry led them to scientific truth.

Life as poetry: that was John Michell. Like so many others, my own life has been enriched by his gifts and his presence: so my thanks, and fare you well.

Disciplines of Dowsing went off to press this afternoon – hooray!

The usual info-piece and book-blurb are already up on the Tetradian Books website; likewise the PDF e-book, which is now available for free download (though note that it’s a lot larger file than the others, weighing in at more than 2Mb). Physical books should become available on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and so on in a couple of weeks.

As for its purpose and so on, see my previous ‘Flat-out writing‘ post. The aim was to get it ready in time for the British Society of Dowsers’ conference at Cirencester on the weekend after next, and it looks like we’ll just make it.

More later, when I’ve had a chance to rest up a bit – this has been a solid slog for a fair few weeks. A lot to catch up on, too. Ah well… still feels like it’s been worth the effort, though.

This is the current draft for the cover of the new edition of my 1989 book The Dowser’s Workbook (also known as Discover Dowsing). The aim is that it’ll come out, together with Pendulum Dowsing, as the first in my new ‘Tetradian Alternate Realities’ series.

Again, as with Pendulum, it’s ready to go once the proof-copy comes back, so ready to launch together with Pendulum and the Grey House ’30th Anniversary Edition’ of Needles at my presentation at Megalithomania.
Turns out to be almost the same size as Pendulum – 132 pages rather than 128 – so will aim also retail at £9.95 inc. P&P. But again, should it go out at £8.95 instead? Comments / suggestions, anyone?

This is the current draft for the cover of the new edition of my 1989 book Elements of Pendulum Dowsing, to go out as the first in my new ‘Tetradian Alternate Realities’ series.

Editing and layout and the like are all complete; I’m just waiting on a proof-copy before sending it to press.

Still on track to launch at the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in mid-May.

Aim is to retail at £9.95 inc. P&P – perhaps a little high, for 128 pages, but hey, it is a classic, and (though I say it myself) still one of the best books out there… But should it go out at £8.95 instead? (It’s a POD book, so I can’t afford to do it for less – apologies! – though there will also be an e-book version soon.) Comments / suggestions, anyone?

The new edition has two new chapters:

• Looking back – a chapter-by-chapter review of changes (good, bad and sometimes outright ugly) in the earth-mysteries scene over the past three decades
• Looking forward – a review of some issues such as ‘newage’ and ‘golden-age’ myths that are crippling current research in the earth-mysteries field, and suggestions about which aspects of the domain seem most likely to yield worthwhile results in the next few decades

It’ll retail at £12.95. Order direct from Grey House via their website at www.greyhouseinthewoods.org/nest.htm – or pick up a copy at the launch at the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in May.

Support Your Local Friendly Earth-Mysteries Theorist – Buy Now!!

It’s available from Grey House – GBP7.95, http://www.greyhouseinthewoods.org/inre.htm

Publisher info is as follows:

Grey House in the Woods
PO Box 8211, Girvan, Ayrshire, KA26 0WA, Scotland
www.greyhouseinthewoods.org

Many thanks to Graeme Talboys, who’s struggled through the joys of system-crashes and many other trials and tribulations to get this out. (I don’t think words can express how much I admire his persistence in this – I feel greatly honoured that he’s worked so hard on this project, so please buy the book to thank him for me!)

This new edition extends the 1996 online edition with a new chapter, ‘Round The Bend’, which uses the twists and turns of the traditional labyrinth to describe the process of learning new skills. Beyond that I have made only a few minor edits, to correct date references and the like, and the two quadrant diagrams in Chapter 3 have been redrawn (the original 1986 printed book, for reasons which were never explained, had contained the rough drawings rather than the finished artwork provided). Otherwise the text is much the same as the 1986 original.

Enjoy?