![]() ![]() They reject experiments and ostracize experimenters who are at odds with it. Kuhn calls this "normal science." The community of scientists forms a culture around the paradigm. The experiments that count as useful are the ones that support the paradigm, and this typically involves refining and extending it. Within a paradigm, science is determined in a way that is consistent with the paradigm. In fact, most science took place within the context of a broad, tacit, explanatory framework that he called a "paradigm." The Aristotelian system that theorized that the sun revolved around the earth is an example of a paradigm. Instead, Kuhn found that knowledge building in science was a process that was marked by occasional great lurches forward. ![]() ![]() What Kuhn found in science plays out in business every day. However, when Kuhn looked closely at what actually happened, he found that this could not be further from the truth. Before Kuhn's work, the prevailing view of knowledge building in science was that it was a linear process centered on the so-called "scientific method." According to the traditional view of this process, scientists posit hypotheses, test them, and in this way, build knowledge. This book grew out of Kuhn's research on the history of science. This book is a staple at the doctoral level in business schools, but it rarely appears on airport bookshelves, and it is not about business at all. When I am asked for material to read on managing paradigmatic change, I respond with a very unlikely source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by the late Thomas Kuhn. Managing paradigmatic change is fundamentally different from managing incremental improvements to the existing business. It has the potential to create major new value and to renew a company, but it is very difficult to accomplish in the absence of a business crisis. Paradigmatic change is very important in business. This led GE's top management to initiate a culture shift that challenged managers who asked for capital for particular projects to return in a few weeks with a proposal to spend twice as much to really change and improve their businesses. ![]() On the other hand, the smaller projects yielded respectable but lower returns, as managers invested in "tuning up" their existing business processes, resulting in only incremental change. It turned out the reason was that the larger projects created fundamental improvements in ways of doing business, producing paradigmatic change. It found that really large investments had much higher returns than smaller investments. Several years ago, General Electric completed an important internal study in which it analyzed a number of projects, and related return on investment to project size. The real difficulty lay in getting the managers involved to change their longstanding way of doing business, and accept the new system. She was finding that defining a new system for linking the company with its vendors was an intellectually challenging, but solvable, problem. My correspondent was involved in trying to reframe her company's basicīusiness practices. She noted that, to her surprise, the "hard" issues are relatively easy to solve, but the "soft" issues are the hardest to overcome. I recently received an e-mail from a former student who is working on changing the supply chain of a major company. ![]()
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