In this episode, we explore how it can sometimes be so useful to revisit our rhetorical roots…
This past weekend I had a delightful re-encounter with a part of my history that, on the surface, I haven’t worked in for several decades now, but has actually been a core foundation for so much of my aptly-named ‘career’.
(A quick translation-note: in British-English, ‘career’ is not only a noun, representing one’s work-history, but is also a verb, ‘to career’, roughly equivalent to the US-English verb ‘to careen’. That point may be relevant to what follows below.)
So yes, my career has indeed careered - often careering wildly not only between different disciplines and business-domains, but careering across wide swathes of the world as well. And yet throughout almost everything I’ve done, there’s one theme that threads through them all, and that I’ve found myself returning to in so many different ways, from so many different directions. TS Eliot perhaps described that latter point best, in that well-known quote from the poem ‘Little Gidding’, the last of his ‘Four Quartets’:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
That common theme, for me, is sensing and sensemaking. My rhetorical roots, so to speak.
That one theme has come up in, yes, just so many different ways. Anyone who knows my history would recognise it in my work on all manner of different skills. For example, it’s the underpinning for all the development that I did on desktop-publishing back in the 1970s and 1980s; on methods for resolution of social-violence, in the 1990s; and on enterprise-architectures and the like, over the past couple of decades. It’s everywhere, in everything that I’ve done.
I can’t pick an exact start-point for my work on this, though I can find traces of it even from in my schooldays, way back in the 1960s. But the place where it first came out in a formal sense was in the development-work that I did at London’s Royal College of Art, almost fifty years ago now, for my MA thesis on ‘Design for the education of experience’. And the connection with what happened this weekend was about the skill that I used my test-case for the research: dowsing.
(US folks would probably know it as ‘water-witching’; in German, French and Spanish it’ll often be some variant of radiestesia; most languages will have their own term for it. The term itself doesn’t matter: the point is that the underlying skill, or some variant on it, is known pretty much everywhere around the world.)
Anyway, as part of the work for the thesis, I wrote a book about dowsing:
…and also used the design and structure and illustration and language-style of the book itself as a demonstrator for the underlying research on ‘design for the education of experience’:
It was my first published book. It actually went on to become something of an international bestseller, sold worldwide, and translated into at least half a dozen other languages. And although these days it has a different title and different publisher and a more conventional book layout, it’s never been out of print in the now almost half-century since its first release. Not bad going, really: especially so given that I was just 24 years old at that time.
Of course, you’re welcome to dismiss dowsing itself as crackpot-stuff if you wish. And there is, yeah, an awful lot of utter nonsense spouted about it: I won’t question that at all. Yet there are also a fair few people - more serious people, we might say? - who do use it to get real, practical results. The guy I met at my farmer-friend’s place last weekend was one of those: he’s in his mid-eighties now, and over the past sixty years or so has used his dowsing again and again to find water-sources out in the back-end of the outback and elsewhere, using methods much the same as those shown in Russell Crowe’s 2014 film ‘The Water-Diviner’. So yeah, there’s an awful lot of rubbish and flat-out stupidity around dowsing and its ilk: but behind it, and every other skill, there’s something else that’s very real.
Not the mere surface stuff, but the skill itself.
Sensing what’s going, in whatever way we can; making sense of that world; and doing something useful with it.
Sensing, and sensemaking.
Rinse and repeat, for as long as we need.
That was the core of my work, back then. And it still is. A different field, these days, but still the same underlying idea.
The phrase I used in the thesis was ‘methods, mechanics, approaches’, which in itself perhaps doesn’t explain all that much. (I’ll go into the detail some other time if anyone wants me to do it: if so, perhaps let me know?) The key point is that to get good results when working on just about anything in the real-world, you’re going to need some kind of consistent method. In turn, that will usually need some kind of skill, and some solid discipline behind that skill, too. Which is where this gets complicated…
There are two classic ways to get people to learn skills: teach a prepackaged method, or find a master to watch and learn from. But a prepackaged method will make all sorts of assumptions about the context, and probably won’t work anyway unless what you’re dealing with is strict physics and chemistry and nothing else. And there may be no master available - or it may be too new for there to be anyone with master-level skills to even exist as yet. If that’s the case, then what do we do?
People learn through experience: hence why that thesis-title of ‘design for the education of experience’. To make it work, what we have to do is split apart the bits of the skill that are the same for everyone, everywhere - the ‘mechanics’ - versus the bits that are specific to the person and/or the context - the ‘approaches’. And once we’ve done that, we can then recombine dynamically those ‘mechanics’ and ‘approaches’ into for a method that will work for that specific person in that specific context. That’s why skills-methods can sometimes be very different indeed from one person to another, one context to another - and yet, if we do it right, we can reliably end up with the same overall result with different people in different contexts.
That’s what all of this was about.
So why did I choose dowsing as my test-case? It’s because dowsing is very close to what I call a ‘pure skill’. The ‘mechanics’ bit of the skill is so simple that, these days, it takes most people maybe a couple of minutes or so to learn all the basics for dowsing that they would ever need. All of the rest, however, is about the ‘approaches’ bit: focus on the sensing and sensemaking in a disciplined way, and build the skill from there. And that part, unfortunately, isn’t so quick: we can usually get some useful results pretty much straight away, but to do it reliably and well in every type of context may well take years of hard-won practice and experience…
(That’s true for every skill, by the way: not just weird skills like dowsing, but every skill. It’s just that most skills have a lot more ‘mechanics’ to them than dowsing does.)
That’s what that book was about.
And also why it was such a pleasure to see someone else putting that into practice at my friend’s place last weekend. Sense and sensemaking, done in a quiet, disciplined way.
Living in a country where water is becoming an extremely scarce resource I have been privy to a few borehole projects where Dowsing was utilised to pinpoint the area where the best opportunity could be found to access a water source.
There may be an upswing in this skill when climate change results in a reduction of rainfall as we fail to reduce GHG emissions.