#Social paradigm shift how to#
I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”Ĭan you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?” So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed. Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. People were sitting quietly-some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. Let us join Covey’s experience in his words: Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others. But whether they shift us in positive or negative directions, whether they are instantaneous or developmental, paradigm shifts move us from one way of seeing the world to another. Not all paradigm shifts are in positive directions. And a constitutional democracy was born, unleashing tremendous human energy and ingenuity, and creating a standard of living, of freedom and liberty, of influence and hope unequaled in the history of the world. Then a different paradigm was developed-government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The traditional concept of government for centuries had been a monarchy, the divine right of kings. The United States today is the fruit of a paradigm shift. But as soon as the germ theory was developed, a whole new paradigm, a better, improved way of understanding what was happening, made dramatic, significant medical improvement possible. In military skirmishes, more men were dying from small wounds and diseases than from the major traumas on the front lines.
Until the germ theory was developed, a high percentage of women and children died during childbirth, and no one could understand why.
The scientific world was revolutionized by the Einsteinian paradigm, the relativity paradigm, which had much higher predictive and explanatory value. The Newtonian model of physics was a clockwork paradigm and is still the basis of modern engineering. Suddenly, everything took on a different interpretation.
But Copernicus created a paradigm shift, and a great deal of resistance and persecution as well, by placing the sun at the center. Kuhn shows how almost every significant breakthrough in the field of scientific endeavor is first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with old paradigms.įor Ptolemy, the great Egyptian astronomer, the earth was the center of the universe. The term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s as though a light were suddenly turned on inside. The more bound a person is by the initial perception, the more powerful the “Aha!” experience is. Perhaps the most important insight to be gained from the perception demonstration is in the area of paradigm shifting, what we might call the “Aha!” experience when someone finally “sees” the composite picture in another way.
(This literature is a copycat extraction of Stephen R Covey’s thoughts on Paradigm Shift in his famous book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
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