Hi Gene Bellinger,
Your question about how we get the blind to see allows me to refer you to
my favourite management writer, Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933). She was a
classically trained scholar whose writings unfortunately were swamped by
those of Frederick Taylor and his disciples. Here is what she had to say:
>The difficulty with all revolutions is this: the leaders think that they
can substitute new ideas for old before they have changed the action
tendencies, habit systems, of people. As this cannot be done, revolution
after revolution fails. The first thing a normal class of revolutionists
should be taught is that behaviour must be changed through experience,
that it cannot be changed through the impact of ideas. (Creative
Experience, 1924)
and again:
>You can often get a specious consensus on the intellectual level which in
virtue of the prestige of verbal agreement arrests the activity of your
mind, but the only real consensus is that which arises on the motor level.
The theory of consent rests on the wholly intellectualist fallacy that we
think with our 'minds' and we don't...how often we see cases where we have
not been able to persuade people, by our most careful reasoning, to think
differently, but later, by giving them the opportunity to enter on a
certain course of action, their 'minds' are therby changed. (Creative
Experience, 1924)
So this (as well as Kuhn's work plus that from other fields by people like
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge (paleology) and Stuart Kauffman
(complexity)) suggests that it takes experience working at the 'edges' of
the old paradigm to discover a new one. Perhaps with some people the
experience can be vicarious, as with Einstein's famous thought experiment
when he imagined himself riding a beam of light. In mature organizations
the problem becomes how do we create the appropriate contexts in our
heavily boundaried organizations, 'open patches' with permeable 'fractal'
boundaries, where (carefully selected) people can experiment and learn
across many scales? I think that this is what 3M has done historically
(allowing people to spend 15 % of their own time on private projects for
example) in combination with creative destruction of their core products
(e.g. by insisting that 30% of sales come from products less than 4 years
old).
Incidentally you can get a modern anthology of Follett's work, entitled
"Mary Parker Follett -- Prophet of Management", edited by Pauline Graham
and published by HBS Press in 1995.
David Hurst,
Speaker, Consultant and Writer on Management
-- DHurst1046@aol.com