Paradigm Shift

Paradigm Shift

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon last year, and I was going through my routine of browsing for books at my favorite bookstore. I came across a phrase, “Paradigm Shift, a term loved by management, but rarely understood by most managers”. An interesting statement, probably true to some extent. This nugget would have been forgotten, if it had not been for two news bulletins that I came across that day.

Sunday, the 6th of August marked the 15th anniversary of the publication of computer files credited as the start of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee who published these files, began the spread of computer interaction that has lead to the Web, as we know it.

There are now countless hundreds of million of people around the world using the Web for all sorts of reasons — commerce, communication, entertainment, education, info gathering. A friend of mine who came across this news bulletin remarked very candidly, “The Web represented a paradigm shift in exchange of information”.

Sunday, the 6th of August marked the 61st anniversary of another event, a tragic event that also resulted in a Paradigm Shift. Sixty one years earlier, the United States Air force, dropped the Atom bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima. That along with the next detonation in Nagasaki changed forever world power equations. Nuclear power changed the world and it was understood that “War between nuclear powers” would no longer have the victors and the vanquished, but in most probably total destruction on both sides.

So what is a Paradigm Shift?

Paradigm Shift is a term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It describes a change in the basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science.

Linguistically, the word paradigm comes from the Greek word παράδειγμα (paradeigma) which means "pattern" or "example". The word “paradigm” has also been used to refer to a class of elements with similarities. Therefore when there is a shift from the “pattern” or “routine” it becomes a “paradigm shift”.

Kuhn’s argument in his book: The structure of Scientific Revolution” is that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions", and in those revolutions "one conceptual world view is replaced by another”.

As we move forward we notice that the term “Paradigm Shift” is a concept or a theory to reflect change. The two events noted above are just that, events in time. However they mark a very clear change from one position of thought to another. That is what the Paradigm Shift is all about.