Research and Development

Idevelop's Sarah Smith suggested the project and also became editor of the book, The book idea grew out of the cards, which never really sat that well with us. We looked into getting cards published and printed but decided that a book would be more effective (plus our huge egos were massaged by the thought of being published authors).

The development of the structure came about through Neil and I meeting up regularly and me asking him questions that came out of me simply not getting it. This forced him to examine in more detail how he did it and as he was able to articulate it I began to get it and he became clearer about what was going on, so we kind of met in the middle.

We were still sending out versions to ex Milton Club members and receiving feedback on our discoveries, which threw us back into research. Sometimes we thought we had it cracked, only to receive a comment from someone that sent us straight back to the drawing board. For this we have to thank Sarah Smith, Pauline Haynes, Tim Maude, Sue Beckett, Shone MacFarlane, Tom Smyth, Phil Miller, Reg Connolly, Steve Welsch and quite a few others on the way. Although Neil had been telling me something important about the process repeatedly it had failed to go in, until Tim e-mailed back one day and pointed out that he had realised that the 'How' element was the most important in learning how to loosen up. I realised that I was giving too much brain attention to the 'What' element of it, in terms of what you want someone to do, such as understand, comprehend, learn etc. When I concentrated on the 'How' element of it, such as easily, smoothly, wondrously etc, the penny finally dropped and I turned into a human Thesaurus.

Out of this grew the current format of 4 stages called 'Who', 'Moves', 'What' and 'How'. Imagine the many happy hours we have spent having discussions that sound like this "Yeah but why who? and when how who would use it, especially when what is what in that way"?

As a result of these bizarre conversation we got tranced out quite a bit when working on it, so we only worked in 2 hour blocks over the year or so that it took to complete and would break off to go for a curry and the inevitable 'Swift half' that followed. If you had been on an adjoining table at the 'Maharaj' in Taunton or the 'Ganges' in Bristol during that time you may well have thought that your co-diners had gone mad when listening in to our conversations.

We went for self-publishing through the Anthony Rowe company purely on economic grounds. When we looked into getting it published a frightening amount gets taken by publishers and distributors and frankly, if it isnt the next 'Da Vinci Code' nobody is going to bust a gut to promote it. So we sent it off to the printers before Xmas 2006 and by the time the kinks had been ironed out it finally saw the light of day in March 2007. Now we had to start learning how to teach it.