Tom Graves

The headline article in The Independent caught my attention this morning: ‘Head of bomb detector company arrested in fraud investigation‘. “This is an act of terrible betrayal”, wrote the Independent’s defence  journalist Kim Sengupta in a parallel piece – clearly an accurate comment given that the detectors in question failed to detect literally tons of explosives that were used to kill and maim hundreds in Iraq in a single suicide-bomb event, and all too many others like it.

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.)

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(Following up on the furore from my previous post – somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of course, but with a serious point.)

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)

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It started, as these things so often do, with a Tweet on Twitter.

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

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Spent part of last weekend at the annual conference of the British Society of Dowsers – the folks who do water-divining (’water-witching’ in the US) and similar skills. I’ve worked with them at various times over the past thirty or more years, and as writer I’m probably best known in that field, with some half-dozen books to my name on various aspects of the subject. But although I do know how to do it, and have done some useful work with it in my time, I wouldn’t describe myself as much of a dowser these days: more a theorist or methodologist, really. My real interest there is that it’s one of the best test-cases for identifying the processes by which people learn judgement and awareness – the key components that are common to every skill.

Being an ‘alternative’ field, dowsing does suffer from more than its fair share of kooks and flakey ‘New Age’ types, but at present there’s a much stronger emphasis on practicality, professionalism and discipline – hence my book on Disciplines of Dowsing that I co-authored last year with archaeographer Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, and a set of related articles (see summary [PDF]) that we wrote for the society’s journal, which was the reason why I was at the conference. An interesting bunch.

So for me it was no surprise to find some innovative ideas there – some of which were definitely relevant to other fields, including business-architecture and enterprise-architecture.

One which bridged the gap between dowsing and technical world was a lovely Google Earth ‘mashup’ by Hugo Jenks, linking traditional dowsing techniques to current GIS (geographical information systems) with a purpose-built embedded-controller and an ingenious software hack. One of the standard dowsing techniques uses a single horizontal rod with a vertical handle as a mechanical amplifier to highlight small hand-movements. Hugo had made up a version of this with twin sensors to record the deviation either side of straight-ahead (the dowsing ’signal’); he then fed this in real-time into a laptop which also had a GPS card to record position. A button on the dowsing-rod handle could also be used to trigger a GPS ‘waypoint’ marker to record specific key points of interest. With this array, he was then able to map the signal – again in real-time, if required – onto Google Earth, as a direct trace of response. A simple grey-scale indicated response-intensity, using a mid-grey as neutral, with white and black as the two extremes. The demonstrator video showed a clear mapping of below-surface structures on an archaeological site. Given the increasing use of dowsing in archaeology as a rapid non-destructive survey technique, this looks to be a really useful addendum to that toolkit – especially as this approach enables us to do away with the cumbersome stick-and-string survey-grid typical of many site-surveys, and also allows arbitrary granularity of search. Interesting.

Somewhat earlier I’d had a lengthy conversation with an engineer (whose name I forgot to record, much to my chagrin) about Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model – one of the cornerstones of systems-theory in organisations, that I reworked into a whole-of-enterprise ‘viable services model’ for my book The Service-Oriented Enterprise. This guy had done his Masters degree with Raul Espejo – Stafford Beer’s right-hand man on the Cybersyn whole-of-nation information-system in Chile in the 1970s – so was able to tell me a lot more about that ground-breaking work on organisational complexity.

Finally, an excellent conversation with an architect (Elizabeth Phillips or Catharine Fortlage, I think?) about physical architecture supporting organisational architecture, and the need to link the organisational silos or ‘tribes’:

Design the floor-plan to be like a wandering path through the jungle; each tribe has its own patch, its own personal space, yet there are shared ‘watering-holes’ – neutral spaces owned by everyone and no-one – where anyone from any tribe may meet any other.

This reminded me of some work we did a few years ago with state-police in Australia, where our brief from the executive was to create a metaphoric ‘totem pole’ to “unify the tribes” within the police-force itself. That conversation pointed me to the burolandschaft (literally ‘office-landscape’) movement of the 1950s; then to a really useful 1993 article – “A Vision of the New Workplace” – on the impact of management-theories such as Business Process Reengineering on office-design; and thence to ‘Origins of the Office’, another useful resource on working environments, office paradigms and interplay between management-theory and workspace, embedded in a website by architects Caruso St John for the Arts Council of Britain.

The moral of this story? Innovation and ideas can arise from anywhere, and the most useful ones often arise from unexpected places. As Louis Pasteur once put it, “in the field of research, chance favours the prepared mind”; if we only allow ideas to come from the expected places, we’re limiting our chances!

It’s both saddening and sobering to reach the age where close friends and colleagues start appearing in the Obituary columns in the national newspapers…

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.

A few days ago I had a last-minute request to present at the Metageum conference in London this weekend. (Don’t quite know how to categorise Metageum: kind of an earth-mysteries focus – Stonehenge and that sort of stuff, if you like – but with a much more solid and grown-up feel than the usual ‘New Age’ end of the market. Take a look at their website, anyway.) Address is Treadwell’s Bookshop, 34 Tavistock Street, London WC2 – just east of Covent Garden market in central London; I’ll be there on the Saturday (28th March).

Aim is to give a variant of the presentation I did for the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury last year, but this time with much more of an emphasis on the underlying disciplines that make it possible to get useful results in working with ‘alternate realities’ and suchlike – in other words, to bring it into line with the book Disciplines of Dowsing: the quest for quality that I co-wrote last year with Liz Poraj-Wilzynska, and which we’re currently adapting for archaeography and archaeology.

Looking forward to being at the conference, especially as some old friends such as Paul Devereux will be there. See you there too, perhaps?

At last finished our article for Time & Mind – final title is “‘Spirit of Place’ as process – archaeography, dowsing and perceptual mapping at Belas Knap“, and should be out in their July 2009 issue. (Many thanks also to editors Paul Devereux and Neil Mortimer for help in getting it completed in time.)

Probably the key idea there is a systematic methodoology for subjective investigation – mapping feelings, sensing and so on. Most of the illustrations we’ve used for this have been either in dowsing – as in Disciplines of Dowsing, which, like the Time & Mind article, I co-authored with Liz Poraj-Wilczynska – or ‘perceptual mapping’ for archaeography, which we described in Time & Mind. But it’s actually generic: with a few tweaks to customise to each context, it could be used for any type of subjective investigation.

In essence, we split the context across two axes – inner/subjective <-> outer/objective, and ‘value’ <-> ‘truth’ – to give four distinct modes or dimensions, which we label ‘Artist’ (inner value), ‘Mystic’ (inner truth), ‘Scientist’ (outer truth) and ‘Magician’ (outer value). The point is that the rules and tactics we need to use in each dimension can be inherently incompatible with those of the others; but we need all of them to make sense of the whole. The methodology describes how to handle this conceptual juggling-act.

There’s a two-page summary (somewhat dowsing-oriented) at http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/09/disciplines-ref/ , and a lot more detail (but even more dowsing-oriented) in Disciplines of Dowsing, at http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/09/disciplines/ .

But I’d be very keen to adapt this to other fields of subjective research, such as we’ve already done for archaeology and archaeography. Could apply it in futures, for example, or marketing, or knowledge-management, or any part of the sciences in general wherever feelings or sensings or subjective impressions play any active part.  If that’s likely to be of interest to you, perhaps get in touch?

Currently overdue (of course?) with an article for Paul Devereux, for his new formal journal Time & Mind (’The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture’). Working with my colleague Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, the aim is to present the same general ideas as in Disciplines of Dowsing, but for a more archaeology-oriented audience, and illustrated with much more of Liz’s work at Belas Knap.

The catch is that although the journal pushes the envelope a lot – with articles, for example, on sensory archaeology, Timothy Darvill’s Landscape & Perception studies at Preseli, and an excellent argument by Robert Henshaw on the need to think in terms of ritual ‘imprecision’ as well as astronomical precision when assessing archaeoastronomy – it’s still a much more mainstream, academic readership than that for which I usually write. Hence the need to do things the academic way. Hence, this morning, drowning in data…

• excavation reports from Belas Knap over the past hundred and fifty years (for example, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society for 1929-1938 – the main restoration of Belas was in 1929-1930, after being thoroughly wrecked in ‘excavations’ in the 1860s)
• all manner of assorted formal references
• rock art, archaeoacoustics, archaeography and deep mapping
• museum searches
• and, of course, all manner of ‘amateur’ sites – all of them interesting if sometimes a bit too much towards the ‘newage’ end of the scale

And that’s all in addition to my own stuff on methodology, and a couple of years’ work at Belas by Liz. And somehow I have to pull all of that together within the next two days, ’cause I’s already well overshot the nominal deadline, and that’s all the time I have left…

Wish me luck!

Prepared a handout on The Disciplines of Dowsing for the book-launch at the British Society of Dowsers conference this weekend, and realised it would probably be of more general use as well. You’ll find it up on the Tetradian Books website, at http://tetradianbooks.com/2008/09/disciplines-ref/ – free download in PDF format, as usual.

It’s a two-page (i.e. single-sheet) summary of the four ‘disciplines’ – Artist, Mystic, Scientist, Magician – as a useful ‘cheat-sheet’ for reference whilst working. The different perspectives and keyphrases that apply to each mode or discipline are listed under the following headings:

• mode’s role is…
• mode manages…
• mode responds to the context through…
• has decision-sequence of…
• use this mode when…
• you’re in this mode when…
• rules include…
• warning-signs of dubious discipline include…
• bridge to other modes with…

As with the book itself, the aim is to help boost the effective quality of work in dowsing and other subjective skills.

Share and enjoy, folks?

Another new book completed.

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.