The Emerging Paradigm

We previously wrote that we are living in a time of unprecedented and unpredictable change. And we noted that the impact of such a rapid pace of change on all of our human systems—families, schools, organizations, communities, governments—had become the focus of great interest and concern. Now, a decade later, we are beginning to comprehend that our task is not necessarily to adjust to rapid change. Rather, we face the reality of the necessity to shift the very ground of our previous beliefs that human behavior, like inanimate objects such as computers, could be programmed and made predictable. We recognize that we live in a world that is continuously unpredictable and emerging. Our task now is to recognize that “change” is the water we swim in and, more importantly, it is what makes life possible. Our task is to learn how to embrace this “reality” and to free ourselves from the idea that change is an object that can be managed. This reality requires a major shift in how we define and relate to “change;” which leads us to recognize the need for new ways of working within human systems as they cope with the reality of the idea that change is continuous, relentless, and accelerating!

“We’ve reached a Breakpoint!” George Land and Beth Jarman wrote in 1992 in their book, Breakpoint and Beyond. “Breakpoint change abruptly and powerfully breaks the critical links that connect anyone or anything with the past. What we are experiencing today is absolutely unprecedented in all of humanity’s recorded history. We have run into change so different from anything preceding it that it totally demolishes normal standards. It has swept us into a massive transformation that will completely reorder all we know about living in this world.”

We are also learning that, even though some ideas are surely transferable from one group to another, by far the strongest and most effective way to imagine our own future is to engage in continuous dialogue and exploration from an open and curious mindset. We are living in a time when our attachment to a process that was created in another time and place by people no longer present is obsolete and, often, destructive. Time and energy spent in convincing people that someone else’s “construction” is the best or most desired is giving way to the work of the future, which is to create environments that encourage individuals to engage with others to continuously create the “reality” needed for each circumstance as it emerges.

Will human beings continue to debate and even fight over what is right and wrong in any given situation? Or will the 21st Century be the beginning of our realization that with every breath we take and every conversation we have, we are creating a new reality! As Margaret Wheatley wrote prophetically in her book, Leadership and the New Science (1994): “There is no objective reality out there; there is only what we create through our engagements with others and with events. Nothing really transfers; everything is always new and different and unique to each of us.”

In 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote a mind-bending book called Future Shock in which he talked not just of change, but of the changing rate of change. Those born early in the 20th Century (our parents’ generation) have experienced change in both speed and kind unimaginable in all of human history. Toffler and others scanning and predicting the future were like modern prophets, seeing the waves of an emerging paradigm that would call all of what we “know” and “believe” into question.

Classical (Newtonian) mechanics is the science of how bodies move in our universe. The assumption is that the universe is a vast machine with interacting parts much like a clock. Each part has only a few properties and movements, determined by its mass and the forces acting on it. This view was articulated by the philosophers Descartes and Locke, during the time when philosophy and science were the same discipline, and scientifically by Galileo. The key concepts are space, time, mass, forces, and particles. Anything else, such as consciousness, has remained outside the realm of physics altogether.

Newton’s work and that of his predecessors led to the scientific paradigm that has dominated our view of what is real for several centuries. Frederick Taylor’s early theories of “scientific management” came out of that paradigm, applying the image of a machine to a human system. When studies of the importance of human behavior in organizations began to be developed by social scientists in the 1940s (most notably by Kurt Lewin and his colleagues, Ken Benne, Leland Bradford, and Ron Lippitt, who in 1947 founded the National Training Laboratory, now known as the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science), it was often assumed that one could measure human behavior using the methods of the natural sciences. It was assumed that human behavior was governed by the same principles as the material world: cause and effect, natural hierarchy, force exerted to cause movement, and individuals as separate and isolated “parts.”

Wheatley (1994) describes the impact of this thinking on our behavior and on our organizations.

“Each of us lives and works in organizations designed from Newtonian images of the universe. We manage by separating things into parts; we believe that influence occurs as a direct result of force exerted from one person to another; we engage in complex planning for a world that we keep expecting to be predictable; and we search continually for better methods of objectively perceiving the world. These assumptions come to us from 17th-Century physics, from Newtonian mechanics. They are the base from which we design and manage organizations and from which we do research in all of the social sciences. Intentionally or not, we work from a worldview that has been derived from the natural sciences.

“Scientists in many different disciplines are questioning whether we can adequately explain how the world works by using the machine imagery created in the 17th Century. … In the machine model, one must understand parts. Things can be taken apart, dissected literally or representationally (as we have done with business functions and academic disciplines), and then put back together without any significant loss. The assumption is that by comprehending the workings of each piece, the whole can be understood. The Newtonian model of the world is characterized by materialism and reductionism—focus on things rather than relationships and a search, in physics, for the basic building blocks of matter.” (p. 8)