Foreword
I first came across the ‘Fundamental Design Method’ during the course of our Systematic Innovation ‘death by a million tools’ scouring of the planet for problem solving tools and strategies. The discovery happened almost three years ago now. Or rather that’s when I first became conscious of the name. I say this because, as we gradually dug deeper into the FDM story, it became apparent that maybe I’d known about Ted Matchett’s work for rather longer. It turned out that I’d spent much of my working life in the great man’s wake. He too had done his apprenticeship and worked as an engineer at Rolls-Royce, and he too had worked at Cranfield. He had also taught what was to become the Fundamental Design Method at both places. Not that either of the esteemed institutions had made me conscious of either his or the FDM name. Which, thinking about it, is probably typical of both. When you think you’re the best in the world at something – an opinion people at both organisations very quickly have implanted into them – it is sometimes difficult to credit your success to a mere individual. I worked at Rolls-Royce for fifteen years, for example, and often found myself having to hide Edward DeBono and TRIZ books lest either upset the way that things were supposed to be done. But now I look back on the underlying philosophy of both places, it seems clear to me that the signs of FDM were everywhere. Just not by name.
Given my no doubt biased view that the Rolls-Royce ‘way of doing things’ is still the global benchmark against which everything else needs to be measured, the connection between FDM and what Rolls-Royce had taught me, this immediately pushed FDM up the ‘death by a million tools’ research priority list. Having made this decision, however, the immediate new problem was how to get a hold of information about the method. Internet searches quickly revealed one or two tantalising glimpses – one of which intriguingly came from a paper by TRIZ Masters Boris Zlotin and Alla Zusman – but virtually nothing of any substance reared its head. Amazon Marketplace didn’t help much either, although I did manage to find a (staggeringly expensive) copy of one of Ted’s books, Journeys of Nothing in the Land of Everything after a few fruitless months of searching. Alas, intriguing as this book is, it did little to help explain what FDM was all about. Or how it might contribute to the Systematic Innovation story.
The trail might easily have gone cold at this point were it not for Tony Blake. I’ve worked with Tony several times at the Centre for Management Creativity in Malham over the years, and we even wrote a paper together about ten years ago about ‘logo-technology’. Another coincidence it turns out because here was another piece of work strongly connected to Mr Matchett. When I finally made the connection, Tony was very quickly able to put me in touch with Ted’s partner, Brenda Matchett. Who, it turned out, lived about fifteen miles from my home.
Brenda very kindly spent time lending me copies of Ted’s material, allowing me access to his (wonderfully eclectic) library and filling me in on the history of a man I now think of as someone who had the – in my opinion – terrible bad luck of being too many years ahead of his time.
When I first came across Genrikh Altshuller and TRIZ back in 1991 I was similarly shocked and amazed. TRIZ can lay claim, I believe, to be the world’s biggest study of creativity and innovation. Which is probably not so surprising given that the research took place over the course of over 40 years with the full-time help of dozens of Altshuller acolytes. What has shocked and amazed me about FDM is that in many ways it has made the same discoveries as have emerged from all of those hundreds of person-years of TRIZ research. Except the whole thing emerged from the head of just one man. And, moreover, in many areas, I would have to say the thinking was some way ahead of even the best of TRIZ.
As it transpires, there were many similarities too between Altshuller and Matchett; both were born in the late 1920s (Altshuller in 1926; Matchett in 1929), and both sadly passed away in 1998. Both, too, were passionate about understanding how the world worked and how to help others to solve problems more effectively. Altshuller famously held the view that the most significant revolutions are caused by powerful new ideas. He also maintained that the economic and ethical well-being of a society depends largely on the proportion of creative individuals in that society. A creative individual, according to Altshuller, is someone who pursues a major noble goal. To achieve this goal, the creative individual must be able to think innovatively, i.e., analytically, holistically and independently.
Sadly, as Altshuller’s research moved from the study of patents and technology into this more complex world of the creative individual and ‘How To Become A Genius’, one would have to conclude that his findings were – at best – flawed and inconclusive. Matchett, on the other hand, perhaps because of the less restricted society he found himself a part of, was able to explore more and consequently has considerably more to teach us. The series of four books The Road to True Professionalism (1994), The Core of True Genius (1996), The Sophiagenic Discipline (1997) and Creative Action (1998) serve to prove just how far Ted was ahead of the rest of the world in his thinking. Without ever being aware of another of our favourite pieces of research, Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamics, for example, the first of these four books effectively uses Spiral Dynamics furthest edges (thinking levels seven and eight for the SD initiated) as merely its start point. These four books, however, are a story for another day. The Fundamental Design Method book was actually the last one Ted Matchett wrote. As Harry Gadd’s foreword to the original edition of the book makes clear, despite Matchett becoming ill, Gadd pushed for Matchett to write up an overview of the Method that had been evolving and developing for over 40 years. The book that resulted – the one you are now holding – although it contains many of the ideas found in the quartet that preceded it, comes across as very much the easy entry into what The Road To True Professionalism concludes can only ever really be a life-long journey.
That said, anyone expecting this to be an ‘easy ride’ is going to be disappointed. There are no easy rides in Ted Matchett’s world. Rather what we get is a text that offers a profound insight into the creative mind. Read the book once and readers will no doubt be rewarded with a host of useful nuggets. Read it twice and you will begin to see the world very differently. Make the book a regular companion – as Matchett intended – and the world will never be the same again. Integrate it with other methods – like the aforementioned TRIZ and Spiral Dynamics – and things could get really start to get interesting. ‘Making Media-plus-Matter Meaningful in time it’ in so many words.
Ted Matchett really was a man ahead of his time. My belief, in the quest to get his books back in circulation, is that his time has now – finally – arrived. The doubt in my mind is that we are all of us, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, awash with information. None of us seemingly has time to really understand anything before being enticed, like ADHD hummingbirds, to the next brightly coloured, nectar-filled flower. A promise that invariably turns out to deliver nothing but the same-old-same-old; the triumph of presentation over content. The market for meaning is infinite. My hope is that this search for meaning will lead more of us to the humble wisdom of a man who, for the first time in a long time, is someone with something genuinely meaningful to say.
Darrell Mann
Bristol
October 2009.
