Managing Change:

Knowing People

Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts

The Two Sets of Interactive Mental Models and Their Evolution

By Vadim Kotelnikov, Inventor & Founder, Ten3 BUSINESS e-COACH – Innovation Unlimited, 1000ventures.com

"The future ain't what it used to be."  – Yogi Berra 

Two Interactive Mental Models1

  1. Paradigms – external to you; shared; a universally accepted model providing the context for understanding and decision-making in a particular field

  2. Knowledge Structures – internal to you; individual; the way you think and what you think about. "When new information is compatible with your knowledge structures it is accepted, when it does not mesh with your pre-conceived ideas or past experience it receives little consideration, is distorted or ignored."

Three Types of Managerial Responses to a Paradigm Crisis

When Existing Organizational Structures and Management Systems are No Longer Able to Perform Effectively

  1. Improving Existing Structures: to try harder, to do more and do it faster using the same structures and practices. "But if we always do what we have always done, we will always get what we have always got - and poor performance delivered more quickly at greater effort is still poor performance."1

  2. Denial and frustration

  3. Radical Change: the best way out of the problem is to create or adopt a new way of doing things. This new way will require new patterns of outside-the-box thinking.

Paradigms

 

A paradigm is a system of thought based on a central fundamental premise. Paradigms underlie our understandings of the physical sciences as well as the foundations on which virtually every other significant factor of everyday life is based.

Paradigms are central to human culture. They are learned, taught, passed on and often serve to define membership in a culture or subculture. "The passing of paradigms within a society is, in effect the process of acculturation and socialization. Paradigms influence how we govern ourselves, how our public institutions are configured and operate, our economic systems and institutions, the structures of our organizations, and how we manage people and other resources. Even though an individual can accept and internalize a paradigm, the paradigm itself remains an external model."1

Paradigm Crisis and Paradigm Shift

 

Paradigms describe a basis for anticipation of specific events; they do not deal with values per se. When an existing paradigm no longer adequately explains or predicts relevant phenomenon and no replacement has been a paradigm crisis takes hold.

"The only way a paradigm crisis can be resolved is by replacing an old, no longer adequate paradigm with a new and different one that explains and predicts better than the original, a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts do not involve simply slight modifications to the existing model. They instead replace and render the old model obsolete."1

To adopt a new paradigm you need to start thinking differently, outside the box. "Throughout history significant paradigm shifts are almost always led by those at the fringes of a paradigm, not those with a vested interest (intellectual, financial or otherwise) in maintaining the current paradigm, regardless of its obvious shortcomings."1

 

Bibliography:

  1. "Thinking Outside the Comfort Zone", Jerry Sentell, 2003