How and why we behave is a funny old thing.
Here are some cracking sources of information ... some focus on the psychology (the individual mind) and some on the social (the space we operate in); and some on the psycho-social (the interplay between the two).
I'm of the view that we have the understand this all by understanding the connections between the two. And the impact they have, even (especially when) we don't realise it ...
As Malcolm Mcluhan says: "We're not sure who discovered water. But we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish".
We simply don't see the water we swim in. The paradigmatic water, that just feels like "normal". Except it's just one version of the truth, and that's the bit the feeds our presumptions - without us even realising it.
And the thing is, we need to challenge our presumptions. The firecracker mind of Donella Meadows got it. She set out 12 ways of changing systems. And the final "lever", the most difficult to do but by far the most impactful, is just that. She says, of that most powerful lever:
The mindset of paradigm out of which the system arises.
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. There is a difference between nouns and verbs. Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can “own” land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems ....
... You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.
She was a wise, wise, woman. And she was talking about the human condition, and how habit, and change, are profoundly irrational and deeply psychologically complex. (You can usually tell she was very wise as no-one knew what she was talking about when she tried to explain at the time. ;) ) Want to know more? Click here: Donella Meadows: Leverage Points
And here are some more of those fabulous paradigm challengers we love who are talking about the psychology of change:
The mindset of paradigm out of which the system arises.
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. There is a difference between nouns and verbs. Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can “own” land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems ....
... You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.
She was a wise, wise, woman. And she was talking about the human condition, and how habit, and change, are profoundly irrational and deeply psychologically complex. (You can usually tell she was very wise as no-one knew what she was talking about when she tried to explain at the time. ;) ) Want to know more? Click here: Donella Meadows: Leverage Points
And here are some more of those fabulous paradigm challengers we love who are talking about the psychology of change:
