How Paradigms Fall

There is a pattern to how new ideas come into a society.

We live in a world where we experience multiple and often competing worldviews daily. Certain leadership assumptions about the world’s workings are behind every political or business strategy. Many of these strategies are being created in real time as we strive to navigate the disruption we are experiencing in this pandemic, combined with the social protests against systemic racism—a system, I might add, where benefits and burdens are not widely shared.

Although it seems unexpected, several experts have predicted our current situation. For example, Thomas Kuhn’s iconic work The Structure of Scientific Revolution (now in its 50th-anniversary edition) and Joshua Cooper Ramo’s more recent book The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks discuss the patterns that occur when a paradigm shift is about to happen. These patterns are relevant to our current situation and worth examining more closely.

Moving from one paradigm to another

When paradigms show initial signs of failing or shifting, there are usually some very loud supporters of certain ideologies who do not want to see that the world is changing. This can be seen during the fall of an aristocracy, for example, or at the advent of industrial age economics. During these times, new ideas are usually suppressed, denied, or ridiculed.  I’m paraphrasing the quote, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win, ” as representative of this pattern. (Side note: this is often attributed to Gandhi but was uttered by trade union activist Nicholas Klein in 1918.)

The conflict between those people clinging to old ideas while others strive to evolve and adapt to the new paradigm causes immense pressure.  Some hug tightly to existing forms, while others acknowledge that the current paradigm no longer accurately describes a new landscape. As this happens, a new narrative emerges that is much more descriptive of this landscape, with its newly linked networks, strengthened connections, and expanding interdependent systems. Those who see and understand this shift are the ones who benefit the most as they accelerate their adaptive capacity to meet the changes happening in their external environments. Those who deny the shift do so because they have usually benefited from the old paradigm and don’t want the world to change.

Joshua Cooper Ramo provided an example of this pattern when he described a visit to the War College after the Iraq war, where he learned how the enemy’s ground network tactics shocked military leaders. The generals had gone to war with superior might, equipment, and training, expecting to win if not easily, then swiftly. Instead, they ran into a landscape that did not operate by their existing rules on how war was meant to be waged. Encountering this new paradigm, they had to shift their worldview radically and rapidly adapt every lesson learned in battle to their current situation.

Patterns in Nature

Over the past 4.5 billion years, Nature has demonstrated patterns that emerge when it is ready to let go of a form that no longer serves the higher purpose of the system. Another way of saying this is that within the adaptive cycle, Nature demonstrates its fluidity by letting go of forms that no longer serve function. A human system that has been sustained for a long time also often stops adapting to changes in the external environment. As the human system holds tighter to its forms, it becomes rigid. We can see that clearly as people start holding even more tightly to the status quo and try to strengthen the forms holding the old paradigm in place. This accelerates the inevitable collapse because this attempt to “hang on” disconnects the organization from the changes occurring in the external environment. (This may remind you of some patterns happening today, but I’ll let you draw your conclusions.)

Signs a paradigm is failing

As living systems experts, we watch carefully for common indicators that shifts are about to happen or may already be happening. Some of these include:

• Rigidity. Right before the adaptive cycle releases the status quo, there is increased rigidity in the ideology of the current paradigm. This rigidity of holding onto the traditional worldview or paradigm and refusing to see the emergent paradigm can happen in many different sectors, from education to science to the military, etc. Noticing the frequency, energy expenditure, and intensity of the rigidity of ideology has helped me predict when we are getting closer to the collapse of one paradigm.  It’s also helped me see when we are beginning a cycle of rapid adaptation toward something else.
• Increased resistance. Another sign that a system is about to transform itself is the level of resistance and the sheer power applied to asserting the old paradigm. That force increases as we get closer and closer to the failure of the old paradigm.
• Volume. Right before the old paradigm falls, voices and the old forms that hold it in place get much louder.  This is another sign that something new is trying to form to help the system transform and evolve.

Nature, of course, doesn’t resist like human systems do. Nature adapts and moves forward, as in major weather events like fires, earthquakes, or hurricanes that help reset the ecological system.  Nature has a beautiful ability to let go of forms that no longer serve its function and purpose. Nature is a system that regenerates itself, designed to evolve when forms no longer support the life of future generations. It “resets”  by letting go of the status quo and exploring the next iteration in its evolution.

On the other hand, humans tend to fall in love with the forms we build around ideas, programs, and structures. We generate laws that hold old forms of power and privilege in place. Within organizations, we create structures and processes that hold hierarchies and compensation models in place long after their usefulness has disappeared. Nature would see these laws, structures, and processes as things that can and should be removed so that the system can continue to evolve and transform.

Today, we are witnessing similar patterns and tensions that happen when an old way of thinking is replaced by the new. For those who are seeking to recreate a more restorative and regenerative society, we can take heart that underneath the rhetoric and power, a new way is most certainly coming into being. Just like Nature, human systems are required to evolve and transform to survive.