List of Government-Funded Projects

The Government funded Projects come from a number of different types of organisation. There were two major sources:-

The MOD (Ministry of Defence)

The psychology research section of the Royal Navy originally became interested in our work because we sounded sensible. But they continued to offer us contracts over some 20 years partly because we were not that expensive, and more importantly our analysis of the issues, and the results that concerned them, mostly continued to surprise and impress them. Also we understood and used the early internet.

The POST OFFICE (Royal Mail)

The results that we produced as we introduced our ideas and methods into two trial offices were sufficiently successful; to attract the attention of a director in the main London office, which lead to us having continuing funding whilst we implemented our techniques into both the country wide mail delivery services and Parcel Force. Despite the scope and success of our project work; the senior directors never did really understand what we were doing; and eventually moved on. But not before we had invented and developed many of the ideas, techniques and research techniques reported on this site.

Other Sources

Smaller sources included quite a number of what were called “Industrial Training Boards”. Again the opportunities were interesting, and offered a wide range of very different situations. The problem was the opposite to ones above; the central government office people were very keen; but the members of the individual Training Boards mostly needed immediately visible results, and did not have time to understand our new-fangled ideas and techniques.

The Education and Research Funding Departments of the government were useful, but different: because although they seemingly changed their names after each election; they basically used academics as assessors and advisers. We were initially lucky in having Marie Jahoda, a very well known psychologist as our early sponsor. (Also she was married to a government minister!). And later we seemed to get grants on the basis of our earlier work. The problem was that despite our efforts to get our results taken up and used more widely; we were ‘only in Brunel!’ so we never had more than one visit from these sponsors; and his purpose in our industrial training project, seemed to be to protect his earlier work from all these “clever new technical devices” which he certainly did not believe we had invented and developed on our own.

List of abbreviations used: