When a new paradigm dawns, a percentage of our piers must be restructured. How can we know which relationships are not on the surviving side of paradagm shift? Can we just "let go" of relationships that have grown over the years, that have made us a lot of money? We all know the painful answer to these questions. Sometimes we don't admit to it.
We may also realize that we are a relationship that an associate has to let go. As the business world restructures itself over the next three years, some relationships will be lost, some pushed away. Most importantly, new relationships will be formed. These new relationships shall be the key to success in the new business world.
"Paradigm shifts
Paradigm shifts tend to be most dramatic in sciences that appear to be stable and mature, as in physics at the end of the 19th century. At that time, physics seemed to be a discipline filling in the last few details of a largely worked-out system. In 1900, Lord Kelvin famously stated, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement." Five years later, Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity, which challenged the very simple set of rules laid down by Newtonian mechanics, which had been used to describe force and motion for over two hundred years. In this case, the new paradigm reduces the old to a special case in the sense that Newtonian mechanics is still a good model for approximation for speeds that are slow compared to the speed of light.
Philosophers and historians of science, including Kuhn himself, ultimately accepted a modified version of Kuhn's model, which synthesizes his original view with the gradualist model that preceded it. Kuhn's original model is now generally seen as too limited. Making it almost seem like a parallel universe.
Kuhn himself did not consider the concept of paradigm as appropriate for the social sciences. He explains in his preface to "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that he concocted the concept of paradigm precisely in order to distinguish the social from the natural sciences (p.x). He wrote this book at the Palo Alto Center for Scholars, surrounded by social scientists, when he observed that they were never in agreement on theories or concepts. He explains that he wrote this book precisely to show that there are no, nor can be, any paradigms in the social sciences. Mattei Dogan, a French sociologist, in his article "Paradigms in the [Social Sciences]," develops Kuhn's original thesis that there are no paradigms at all in the social sciences since the concepts are polysemic, the deliberate mutual ignorance between scholars and the proliferation of schools in these disciplines. Dogan provides many examples of the inexistance of paradigms in the social sciences in his essay, particularly in sociology, political science and political anthropology.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn wrote that "Successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science." (p.12)
Kuhn's idea was itself revolutionary in its time, as it caused a major change in the way that academics talk about science. Thus, it could be argued that it caused or was itself part of a "paradigm shift" in the history and sociology of science. However, Kuhn would not recognize such a paradigm shift. Being in the social sciences, people can still use earlier ideas to discuss the history of science.
Paradigm Paralysis
Perhaps the greatest barrier to a paradigm shift , in some cases, is the reality of paradigm paralysis, the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking.
Examples include Galileo's theory of a heliocentric universe, the discovery of electrostatic photography, xerography and the quartz clock." (Wikipedia)
Are you stuck in Paradigm Paralysis? Can you choose your Paradigm Shift? Maybe it will just happen for you if you hope a lot...
