Now I drew the ideas from various readings

The Times today reported on a research project at the University of Rosetta Stone Portsmouth which has established that the best way to catch a person telling a lie, is to get them to repeat their story backwards. The argument is that it is more stressful to tell a story backwards and more difficult to get things right, unless you are relating real events. The article reminded be of an established Cognitive Edge method, provided further evidence for my concern to separate story telling from narrative patterning and finally frustrated me about research in social systems. For more read on .. Many years ago I created a technique, The Future Backwards, as an alternative to scenario planning based on this principle. Its fairly easy to game scenario planning. You create stories going forwards in time to cover possibilities. Now if you have strong opinions about what should happen, then it is easy to influence the evolution of a scenario that will support your Rosetta Stone Software proposed actions. Its also easy to describe how the past led to the present in such a way as to vindicate your view of history. We found that by getting people to construct history in reverse that they explored more possibilities and were more open to novel discovery. We also found that tracing a future state of heaven or hell backwards to a point in the past, not the present, people opening up a wider range of possible futures and were less possessive about those future time streams than in scenario planning.You can read about the method, and use it without charge (subject to a commons license) using this resource. Now I drew the ideas from various readings in the cognitive sciences which indicated that reverse time flow was harder, and disrupted what would otherwise be entrained processes. I find it ironic (and I must admit to envy) that Portsmouth managed to get someone to pay then ￡136K to discover something already know in another discipline. Its nice to have additional proof, but it also shows up the need for greater trans-disciplinary awareness and research practice.practice.I think this is also a pointed for my strongly made point about the different between story telling and narrative work. To tell a story has a double meaning in english and the negative version is the most common. Far better to gather self-interpreted anecdotal material. Its far too easy for dominant players, or Italian Learning Software manipulative facilitators to engineer the story they want people to hear.