John is Scimitar's number one fan claiming that in a totally interconnected world it delivers the precise understanding of context and culture that successful risk management depends upon. He has used it pretty successfully in work on four continents. John's fascination with the interconnectedness of things is reflected in the trust space model that he and Aidan developed for their book. The power to understand and model trust is vital when it comes to making useful interventions in complex systems.

In former lives he trained as an aircraft engineering apprentice, fixed Vulcans in a number of locations and built EPOS systems sufficiently well to be NCR's European sales champion. He is a Beethoven devotee and is the proud inventor of cliché fiction - a kind of loosely themed, B-movie, sub-Chandlerian pulp - that he used to write six books equivalent to the great man's Opus 18 set of six string quartets. They were nowhere near of course and after the first two came out in 1999, the publisher - unaware of Scimitar's power - went bust.