Ryan J. A. Murphy
Paradigms are widely recognised as fundamental forces of systems and sources of systemic change. Systemic designers are told to that paradigms (and the ability to transcend them) are the most powerful leverage points for strategic changemaking. Paradigms are therefore legendary in systemic design — and yet they are also somewhat mysterious and mythological! Not only do we lack clear and robust methodologies for designing paradigm shifts, but we also lack a pragmatic and elegant understanding of what paradigms even are, what they are made of, where they come from, and how they change.
To design for paradigm change, then, I sought to develop a model of paradigms that answers these research questions. In this paper, I present the initial results of this work: a dual model of paradigms that defines paradigms both as the tacit beliefs someone holds about how a system works (and how they should work with it), and as the matrix of language, models, and exemplars through which someone manifests their beliefs to interact with the system. I show how this duality implies that paradigms are themselves a system, and critically, this implies that they are a false leverage point.
This work was sparked by two coalescing previous contributions: a modern critique of leverage theory and a new view of social change through the lens of quantum theory. I sought to re-examine Donella Meadows’s famous conceptualization of paradigms as leverage points through this new perspective on changemaking. To do this work, I developed a transdisciplinary design synthesis methodology that combines the reframing, concept mapping, and insight combination of Kolko’s design synthesis with Weick’s disciplined imagination for theory building. In this paper I also share the basics of this methodology for future transdisciplinary theory-building work.
Keywords: paradigms, systemic change, leverage, quantum, strategy