Paradigms
What is a Paradigm?
What connects people are their thinking patterns and the results they can achieve as a result. These thoughts reflect the ideas, images, and symbols created by our nervous system. The patterns of connections that give rise to these images are structurally determined from previous experience and how we are programmed to process them. Culture plays a major role in these habitual processes. They influence our way of being in a cultural context. Hence we behave differently at home than we do at work, yet we may not be aware of it as it becomes automatic and is “transparent” to us.
It is these processes that happen through deeper thinking that gives rise to the creation of paradigms. The patterns are shared by organisations and communities that reflect a particular worldview of how people relate and communicate. We understand the world through these shared patterns of thinking. They become the rules for the way things are done and said within predefined boundaries.
Shared Assumptions
Thinking is set with self-imposed boundaries to limit choice. This keeps life simpler because we share generalisation, whereas specifics create conflict through disagreement or misunderstanding. Assumptions consequently involve some deletions and distortions. For example, retailers and producers agree that having lots of choices is a good thing. But it can produce customer dissatisfaction when they feel they are missing out on something that could be better.
Thomas Kuhn is associated with the concept of paradigms. Making sense of things is dependent on the “frame of reference” or the ontological distinctions being made to see a different pattern. They are the presuppositions that guide our everyday decisions. This is how new paradigms create “breakdowns” that disrupt the flow of our lives. Dealing with these breakdowns can be a messy business because they can be triggered by considering detail that does not make sense to us until we accept a minimum standard of explanation. When too many anomalies are discovered the tensions cause the paradigm to break down and create space for a breakthrough that forms a new pattern from which a new paradigm emerges. But these new patterns may not be based on verifiable evidence.
What does this mean?
Paradigms are perceived to evolve as we adapt our behaviours to create new patterns of behaviour. But change isn’t always gradual. New patterns of thinking can suddenly appear from surprise events. They can be shifted overnight. New inventions, innovations and insights are a surprise because they are not just more of the same with a bit added or subtracted. Human Development happens in spurts. This means we may see patterns of change but cannot predict exactly what, where, when or why they happen when they do. So all thinking is not stimulated by breakdowns in the paradigms or internal language we use to describe them.
“A world perspective is a function of two factors. On the one hand it depends on on the material o experience, which is its foundation; on the other hand, it depends on the conceptual structures embedded in language. Whilst concepts and their meaning changes, the words remain the same.” – K. Ajdukeiwiczchange – World Perspective.
Embodied Connections
A paradigm is a shared representation of reality that can be observed in behaviour and decision-making to a point where we feel connected and can communicate through a shared understanding of what we say, feel and do. We believe it worked for us in the past so we trust in it to work again in the future. If we don’t follow the rules embedded in the paradigm we are considered to be “off message”.
The danger of paradigms is that set boundaries and leave us stuck in only considering what’s acceptable behaviour. There are no incentives to break the rules. We reach a stage of “lock-in” so we only tell bosses what they want to hear and let our ideas be their ideas. we say yes because we want approval and not to appear stupid. We need the comfort of dependency and so become more manipulative to gain favour. When a paradigm is well established it becomes difficult to imagine an alternative.
When a paradigm is well established it becomes difficult to imagine an alternative. We can feel stuck, unable to consider possibilities and so remain in a mood of resentment, resignation or anxiety. We become used to the prevailing pattern and so keep producing the same results from the same actions. Our life is being led from the outside-in.
Now What?
Life leadership is about breaking down paradigms that “have us” in the sense that we cannot create a pattern of our own choosing and suffer in the pattern that has us in its grip. We are having to break free from our cultural inheritance. We need to become more powerful observers of our own paradigm, as this shapes the results we are looking for. The thoughts and emotions are then shaped to produce the actions we perceive are needed to get those results that fit our paradigm or preferred way of being.
As the diagram above explains, the observer that we are is our Way of Being and shapes the paradigm we use to make sense of our thoughts and shape our ideas. Our emotions are generated by thought and shape the actions we feel able to make to deliver results that fit into our paradigm. So, to transform the result we have to change our paradigm or worldview so that different thoughts are generated. Each is a process of learning and change that enables us to make “ontological distinctions” that enable us to see different Ways of Being to get a different result.
This website introduces you to a range of ontological distinctions that can transform your way of thinking about what it means to be human.
References
Shifting the Patterns by If Price & Ray Shaw.Management Books 200
Navigating Complexity by Arthur Battram. Industrial Society 1998
The Unwritten Rules of the Game by Peter Scott-Morgan. McGraw Hill 1994.
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Harper 2005
The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. OUP Oxford 2000