We bring partnerships alive to the particular risks and opportunities that they face, and help people to build the relationships they need to manage them.

John Smith

There's not much that I know for sure. I know that risk management works. (And that, in risk management, Scimitar works best of all.) I know also that everything is interconnected so that context is everything. (A long time working in Africa taught me how comparatively wealthy I am while a short time reading five years' worth of my MP's expenses taught me how comparatively poverty-stricken I am.) Context is the key to risk management .

I used to be a failed writer. At present though I am engaged in risk managing the world. I have been for some time, truth be told. Being powerless, this is not managing in any practical sense, of course, more simply risk assessing or analysing, I suppose. (Naturally, the world doesn't know this, and cares even less. But, as I say, context is everything, and someone has to do it. I mean, look at swine flu, carbon footprints, UK constitutional reform and the Swat valley.) I know that anyone who hopes to intervene successfully in complex systems and doesn't understand the trust space is going to fail. (An Antelope contribution to twenty-first century civilisation is to show how interventions in complex systems can succeed.) One of the ways things are made complex is by distorting trust. This is why the world is dominated by brands (of all kinds - everything's a brand or it's nothing). And, while I'm OK with say Mont Blanc pens and Euthymol toothpaste, if I wasn't doing everything possible to trash brands as nasty as Sky and Virgin, I'd really be falling down on the job .

Before drawing up a Scimitar-based action plan to save the world, the planet itself, even, I look at the context in terms of the trust space. (This is the piece of work I'm most proud to have been involved, along with Aidan, in developing. I currently have it refined to a space bounded by face, fear, conformity and compliance. This enhances its power so that, in its way, the trust space sets the context for context. A meta-context, I could claim.) I look at the world through trust space-shaped glasses. And what a wonderful vista I get .

I sometimes wonder if some of the world's great thinkers - apart from Aidan, who I know does - used a tool like the trust space. Marx, for example, must have had a similar world-view of risk management to decide that 'all that is solid melts into air'. Paul Krugman certainly had when he set down his first law of dealing with Dubya's administration: 'don't expect things to make sense in the terms in which they're presented'. (For me, this is confirmation of POSIWID's effect on the world.) That rings a risk management bell - particularly when you hear the words 'if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide' or, when you hear the NRA saying 'it's people who kill people, not guns' .

Don't expect things to make sense in the terms in which they're presented, use the trust space instead. That's probably my motto .

Ownership of knowledge - or in my opinion, the distortion of trust implied by ownership of knowledge - has long exercised my poor old brain. It still does. When I was younger, in a fit of pique over what I heard some pretentious 'owner' saying on my car radio about Beethoven, books and crosswords - all stuff I care deeply about and all totally beyond ownership by anyone - I invented cliche fiction to prove he was wrong. This was to be my vehicle for telling the world, through the words of my alliterative cliche hero, the reflective detective, Fred Felix, about stuff they may not have come across yet. Stuff like Charles's Law, melons, barcode scanning systems, orchids, compost, Yip Harburg's lyrics, Gresham's Law, Doris Day and lots, lots more. It worked for a while and I loved it. But I gave up and became a failed writer when, deep in explaining, in Chapter nine, why NASDAQ actually ought to stand for Now Act Stupid Don't Ask Questions - my Cassandra's attempt at warning the world of the perils of a financial system in which I foresaw bonuses being paid in Zee (for zero) bills which, while they had no face value, could be readily traded in the newly created Z-bill market - the whole of the US economy collapsed overnight leaving me bouncing my metaphorical basketball along with all my cliche characters. The ball's still somewhere, wordlessly in mid-bounce, along with book. Along with cliche fiction itself, too. A paper basketball won't bounce very well on reality's hard floor .

So life trumps art again, cliche fiction dies, real-life cliches rule and the ownership of knowledge is back in the cliche'd hands of the guys currently killing the country so that the City can survive its latest crisis .