The Paradigm Trap – Part 1

Some time ago I watched a documentary, available on Netflix, titled Is Genesis History? The premise is that time, not geology, is the paradigm through which one should view the history of earth.  The documentary presented evidence that the layers of sedimentary rock around the world, including in the Grand Canyon, points to a catastrophic event that happened in a very short period of time, not to eons of geological time, to create those layers.  Similar evidence, according to the documentary, in biology and natural history point to the same thing, not to the Darwinian evolution of species.  The presenter concludes that Genesis is, indeed, history and the Great Flood actually happened, a catastrophic event that changed the history of the world and, indeed, changed the physical world, very rapidly – in months, maybe days, not eons.

The evidence given is persuasive.  Yet, I struggle to accept.  That could be because the evidence given was not sufficient to override that which supports geological change over eons and the evolution of species.  But it could also be because I live inside the evidence of one paradigm which makes it exceptionally hard to recognize another paradigm.  As Thomas Kuhn explained in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), science is less about evidence, and more about interpretation of evidence.  Evidence is interpreted based on the interpreter’s paradigm.  Paradigms can blind us and changing our paradigms can open up new ways of looking at things. 

In many organizations, and for many leaders, performance improvement is rooted in a paradigm of a continual process over time – continuous improvement, which is primarily incremental improvement.  Yet, given the overwhelming changes in operating environments (globalization, technological innovation, shifting centres of global power, and more), there is no time for evolutionary growth – leaders need revolutionary change, a catastrophic event that transforms the organization in profound ways.

A key element of this is moving from an organization as a mechanistic entity, which is something of an oxymoron, given that the term ‘organization’ is rooted in organic.  Leaders who shift to seeing their organizations as systems have the basis for changing their change paradigm. So one paradigm shift can lead to another.

For sure, there’s probably few leaders who don’t recognize their organizations as systems – yet many of those same leaders continue to use reductionist thinking – the thinking of the Industrial Age and before, including Taylorism – to foster change in their organizations through a lens of performance improvement/continuous improvement.  Reductionist thinking is not wrong, in and of itself, yet it is insufficient, by a long way, in creating the kind of change so often needed in organizations today.  That is transformational change.

Transformational change is something that transforms – not merely improves.  Almost invariably, it is change at the systems level, and it requires systems thinking.  Systems thinking is the opposite of reductionist thinking.  Reductionist thinking works in complicated systems, where each issue or need can be reduced to an underlying problem, the problem solved, and thus the change initiated.  It is cause and effect thinking.  If this, then that.

The problem is that organizations are not complicated systems – they are complex systems, and complex adaptive systems at that, that are also open and social.  Reductionist thinking is not going to generate change in such a system because, by definition, the problem changes rapidly, and so the solution generated no longer fits the problem.

To break this down, an open system is one that interacts with its external environment, both influencing and influenced by.  A closed system doesn’t – such as an old-fashioned wind-up watch, which keeps time regardless of what the weather is like, what’s happening around the person wearing the watch, etc.  An organization is open – it interacts with markets, economy, social and political events, customers, and more.

A social system is one in which people live and/or work.  Clearly, an organization is a social system, subject to all the foibles that come with us all being human beings.  That is why so much of leading is about people relationships and leadership is a psychological construct.

Both of these system types mean an organization is dynamic, with constant change churning constantly as the default, not something initiated by leaders.  This is particularly relevant to that other system property, of being a complex adaptive system.  More on this in Part 2 of this series, but basically it means that there are myriad variables within the systems (and in the external environment), all interacting in ever-changing ways and combinations.  Prediction is not possible.  That has profound implications for leading change, the focus for Part 2 of this blog.

For Part 2, see https://kieranpatrick.com/the-paradigm-trap–part-2-building-a-celtic-organization/(opens in a new tab)