Vancouver, British Columbia
May 15-17, 1996
Jim Harris, Management Consultant
Strategic Advantage, Inc.
Good morning.
I attend about 100 conferences a year, and at every one the word "paradigm" comes up. In business it's very much in vogue. Thomas Koon coined the term when he wrote about it academically in 1967 in his book Revolution of Scientific Thought. I'd like to explain it in a slightly different way because I can't understand a complex concept unless I have an illustration. Picture this situation:
You're at Heathrow International Airport, you just got off your morning flight, and you're very hungry because they didn't serve any breakfast. So you go off to the kiosk and buy a package of Walker's shortbread cookies, put it in your carry-on luggage, and venture back out into the airport.
The airport is very noisy and very crowded. You find the only free seat and sit down. After a minute, with your stomach just rumbling, you reach down into your bag and pull out your package of cookies. But the man next to you is staring at your cookies; his eyes are just riveted to your package. As you open the package and take the first cookie, his eyes follow your hand to your mouth. Then, without saying a word, he reaches over and grabs the next cookie. You have another cookie. He grabs the next one.
How would you describe this man? Obnoxious? Aggressive? A lout?
So this goes back and forth. You take a cookie, he grabs the next. This goes back and forth until there's only one cookie left. He reaches over and he grabs that last cookie, breaks it in half, gives you half, eats half himself, and then stands up and walks off. Obviously, his flight has been called.
This has been so upsetting for you, so unnerving--a strange man in the airport eating your cookies--that your stomach is just churning. You're very upset. You need some Alka-Seltzer and, of course, another package of cookies.
So you go back to the kiosk and buy another package of Walkers shortbread and the Alka-Seltzer. You pay for them and then go to put them in your bag. You open your luggage, look down, and see your package of cookies!
What had happened was that you had reached down by accident into the man's bag and had been eating his package of cookies. Now how would you describe that man? Generous? A poor communicator? Adaptable?
You see, a paradigm is the way we see the situation. We filter all our information through our paradigms. They determine our behavior. What we had at the kiosk there was a paradigm shift, an entirely new way of looking at that situation.
Now, imagine, while walking through the airport jiggling your luggage, the package of cookies has worked its way to the bottom of your carry-on, so that at the kiosk you don't see the original package. You put the new package in, unaware that there are now two packages in the bag.
Your flight is called, and you take your seat on the airplane. But can you believe who they seat you beside? The same man! They're about to serve lunch. What's your attitude? Imagine he's smiling. What do you think is going through his head right now?
Imagine he's frowning. What do you think?
It really doesn't matter what he does. You will find evidence in his behavior to support the paradigm, without even knowing it's going on.
Consider this scenario.
I've never been to Vancouver before and Carolynne is good enough to send me a map, only she unwittingly bought a bad map and then faxed me some instructions on how to get to the hotel from the airport. So when I arrive, I can make absolutely no sense of the directions. Not a single road corresponds to the map. I call the Carolynne at the hotel and say, "I am totally lost." Now, Carolynne has been successful because of her diligence, so, she gives me some advice, "Jim, try harder. You're just not applying yourself. Change your behavior; put your nose to the grindstone." So I take her advice and double my speed--and get lost twice as quickly.
So the second time I call her she detects, shall we say, an attitudinal problem and says, "Jim, I detect a bad attitude. That's your problem and it's preventing you from getting here." She asks me where I am and I describe the area. She says, "I happen to know a little book store there. I want you to go over and get some positive mental attitude audio cassettes. Once you change your attitude, you'll find your way here."
So I get the tapes, listen to them, and I've never been so positive in my entire life. I resume driving 120 miles an hour. I'm still lost, but now I don't care. I've adjusted myself to that reality.
Now, I'm not speaking against hard work and I'm not speaking against a positive mental attitude, but if the road map we have is incorrect, those things won't make a significant difference. A paradigm really is like a road map. Why? A road map is not the actual territory. A road map is a mental model, a visual representation, a paradigm of the underlying territory. If we can develop more effective paradigms of our relationship with our client, the professors and the students; with our colleagues and how we work as a team; and of the paradigm shifts that are occurring within society, those new maps will make more difference than working harder and longer with a positive attitude and less valid paradigms.
During Columbus' time everyone believed the earth was flat. But Columbus saw the world a different way; he saw it as being round and that by sailing west he could get east. The interesting thing to note is that reality remained constant. The world didn't change. What changed was the mental model in Columbus' head. As a result of seeing the world differently, he behaved differently and he got different results, which made him different than his colleagues. But it is difficult to be a paradigm pioneer. Imagine you are Columbus; do you think it's easy to recruit a crew?
In a bowl on each table are six little pieces of colored paper. I'd like you to pass them out. Do not read the sentence until everyone has one. Now turn it over and read it. When you're finished, turn the paper back over. It's a simple sentence--maybe an awkward one. We'll have a critique of it later. You just have to read it. I'll give you another second or two.
The sentence reads:
FUNDAMENTALLY FIRST IS THE LESSON THAT PERCEPTIONS OF MANY OF YOUR OWN EXPERIENCES FORM THE BASIS OF YOUR OWN REALITY.
I'd like you to look at that sentence again and count the number of letter f's.
Now, you all have different colors of paper, so you'll all have different answers. We expect that. How many people here saw two f's? How many people saw three f's? Four? Five? Six?
I want to let you know that everyone has exactly the same sentence. Go back and look at your sentence. There are six f's on everyone's sheet. If you're having trouble finding all six, try reading the sentence backwards. If you're still having trouble, talk to your neighbor.
Okay, I'd like your theories as to why 75% of us saw three f's.
(From the Audience): We ignore the little words. We pronounce the f in "of" as a v.
MR. HARRIS: Let me start with the first explanation. I can accept that you skipped over "of" the first time, but after you knew there were six f's on your sheet and were still saying, "There are not six f's," the speed-reading argument doesn't wash.
For the second explanation: you didn't know the purpose of this exercise when I asked you to read the sentence. So you developed an auditory paradigm of the sentence. Therefore, when your eye came to look at the sheet, even though your eye could physically see six f's, your ear caused you to only see register three. Other theories?
(From the Audience): The sentence was awkward.
MR. HARRIS: And you were caught up in trying to figure out what it meant. We try to throw you off when we use this exercise; it's purposely awkward. So you were thinking about the meaning. Other theories?
(From the Audience): The beginning of the word is more important than the end.
MR. HARRIS: You're right. Why do you think that is? You're on to something here. Look at the first two words in the sentence.
(From the Audience): They alliterate.
MR. HARRIS: "Fundamentally first." In the beginning, with the first two words of that sentence, we're taught to look for f sounds at the start of the words.
(From the Audience): We only need to look at the first part of the word to get the meaning, so we ignore the end.
(From the Audience): I think some of us thought something was up here, so if we found one or two of those short words, we thought we had found them all.
MR. HARRIS: It took you roughly 15 seconds to read that sentence. Imagine, as a human being, we can be conditioned in 15 seconds to not see 50 percent of that which is right in front of our own eyes. Imagine you now have 40 years of experience in library science. Do you think there might be a certain conditioning going on there that would prevent you from seeing things certain ways?
When I give this exercise to Brazilian executives, they get all six f's right away. I learned the first time. Why? Because in Portuguese o-f is pronounced "off." You see, they develop an auditory paradigm right away that allows them their success.
Paradigms are both our greatest security and our greatest weakness. Let's look at this idea of "ignore the little words."
Now, imagine you're the vice-president of sales and marketing for a firm that is a market share leader.
After just one year in the position, your sales have risen to the highest level ever, and you're justifiably proud. At this particular time, a tiny little competitor introduces a new product. But the product is a flop; it's panned in the media. Are you going to dedicate your R&D to it? No. And you're entirely justified because the product goes nowhere, whereas, by contrast, your sales continue to rise.
You're featured on the cover of Marketing magazine as executive of the year. You're justifiably proud. At this time the little competitor introduces a new version of their product, but, again, it's a flop. There is a marginal response from customers, but ten percent of zero is still zero. Are you going to focus on it? No. And again you're justified: the product absolutely languishes, whereas your sales break records. You now enjoy 75 percent of worldwide market share. That's dominance.
But, at this particular time the competitor introduces version three.
Do you know, this is a real life case study? You were VP of marketing for Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, and the tiny little competitor was a company called Microsoft that introduced a product called Windows 1.0 and it was a dog. Windows 2.0 was a dog. Windows 3.0 began selling at a rate of a million copies a month, beyond even Microsoft's wildest dreams.
Once you realized the shift had happened, it was here. But then you began a two-and-a-half year development cycle to bring out a product for this new platform. Do you know what Microsoft did as soon as you had a good, operating spreadsheet?
(From the Audience): They hopscotched up.
MR. HARRIS: Right. And how did they do that? They said, "We're selling the product as a suite." In other words, a spreadsheet isn't enough. They produced a word processor , a visual graphic package, and a mail package, bundled it all together and sold it roughly for the price of your spreadsheet. As soon as Lotus thought they were all caught up, they were left behind again.
Do you know what the market share story is now? Ninety percent of all applications are sold through suites and 90% of suite sales are Microsoft. They've totally decimated their opposition by always reinventing themselves.
You see, when a paradigm shift happens, the results can be slow but staggering.
Now, why do I cite this case? In hindsight, history is entirely predictable. A researcher at Palo Alto once said, "The future is entirely predictable, but few people predict it." I actually believe the future is not predictable. But what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that, in ten or 20 years, library science won't look very much like it does today. I don't know what form it will take, but it will be different. So the challenge is, are we going to lead or lag behind?
It was somebody in a research institution who created the World Wide Web, and it was a researcher in Palo Alto working for Xerox who created the first graphical user interface. Researchers have led change. So all the challenges that you face can be met by what is resident within this room: the knowledge, the skills, and the attitude to overcome those challenges. How do we unlock that potential to thrive in this time of uncertainty?
I recently rushed out of the house and forgot to take any American currency--I was giving a talk down in the South--and so I only had Canadian cash. Now, I'd like you to think back to what banking was just ten years ago. It was Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 3:00, only at my local branch. But now, with the introduction of technology, banking is anywhere, anytime, any currency.
The technology doesn't make the relationship between the bank and the customer more efficient, it enables a radically new relationship to occur. And I ask the question: Who is doing the work? I, the customer, am doing the work at the automatic teller. I paid $1 U.S. for the honor and privilege of doing the work myself, and, you know, I was profoundly grateful to the institution for allowing me to do so. Furthermore, if I can now get money anywhere, anytime, any currency, why do I need travellers' cheques? I don't. A bank is now a competitor of a travellers cheque company; when a paradigm shift happens, it changes the very nature of competition.
I would argue that your competition is not other libraries. Your competition is companies like IBM developing things called "open text" and "Yahoo." Your competition is Marc Andreessen, who created something called Mosaic and now Netscape, with search engines embedded right in the software. That's kind of frightening, but it's also kind of exciting.
Our success, our survival, is based on being able to shift. What is the nature of our products? We need to differentiate between form and function. What is the need of the customer in your case? I can't answer that, but you can.
Why do libraries exist? What is your mission? What is your purpose? If you want the hallmark of an excellent mission, it's one that inspires us. It's ennobling. It lifts the spirit. It's one based on service to our communities and it's far larger than ourselves.
I can't tell you what your mission is, either as individuals, as a profession, or as an association. It's up to each of us to discover our mission. But we need to have a mission; we need to have a sense of purpose which will direct us in our affairs. It's an empowering, liberating way of looking at life.
Thank you so much. I look forward to your questions.
MS. TAYLOR (Brown University): Thank you for such an inspirational presentation. A number of us here are managing in unionized environments. In my own situation, I work with a labor union that is extremely conservative and that tends to respond to a lot of change with the comment, "That's not in my job description," or, "There's no past precedent for doing it that way." We are trying to look at things differently and cooperate with our union staff, and I think the will is there with some people. I'm interested in what you have to say about working in that kind of environment.
MR. HARRIS: Well, I have a couple answers. First, Rosabeth Moss Kanter said, "To be successful in the future, companies will need to have the four `f's': fast, flexible, focused, and friendly."
Second, I would like to present you with a metaphor. The old metaphor was of the supertanker: a command and control structure, with one captain on the bridge and everyone else carrying out the orders. But imagine a supertanker of 100,000 tons going at 30 knots through the ocean. Peter Senge, in his book Fifth Discipline, asks, "The captain gives the order to turn the ship around 180 degrees. Who has the most power in this situation, the captain who gives the order, the engineer in the boiler room who's working the engines, or the chap at the helm who actually turns the wheel?" Senge's answer, "The architect of the ship."
You see, it's the architecture of the organization that determines performance. Instead of having 100,000 tons on one supertanker, let's imagine 100 small ships working as a fleet, each carrying 1,000 tons. Which of the two organizations meet Rosabeth Moss Kanter's criteria? Which is faster? The smaller ones. Which is more flexible? The smaller ones.
These paradigm shifts aren't either/or. We're not going to throw out our mainframes, but how are we going to marry the mainframe with the micro? How do we preserve the library of history and yet create the library of the future? These are the challenges.
The key difference between these two structures is that this one requires an infinite amount of communication. I enjoyed Dr. Strangway's definition this morning of communication as that which binds a chaotic organization together. Everyone can take their own direction, but they will not be effective as a group if they do that.
Back to the question of unionization. Which structure has greater potential in unleashing and fulfilling individual growth? Being a hired hand, or learning about responsibility, risk, trial, and reward of the market? Which one will allow people to develop, like Mazlow's hierarchy of needs, to their full potential, to actualize? The second.
Unions have typically thought that their security lay in rigid job structures. That was in the past, when the future was quite predictable and industries were quite stable. But today that no longer works: the more rigidly I stick to my current job description, the more insecure I become. Yet unions are in the business, in theory, of creating security for their members. So now we're getting into the learning paradox. I argue that everything that used to create security now creates the opposite. Now, the more power you give away, paradoxically, the more power you have. Everybody must know the mission; everybody must know the vision. If you have a hundred powerful people, that makes you a more powerful individual because you have a lot of horsepower under your organization.
Our security today, I argue, is based on only three things: our ability to learn, our ability to change, and our ability to accept or live happily amid uncertainty. The paradox is that what we fear most as adults is learning, changing, and uncertainty. Our security in the future is based increasingly on what we fear most.
I challenge you to think of a time in your life when you were most proud of your accomplishment. Upon reflection, I think you will find it's where you came across some challenge you didn't know how to overcome and through perseverance, hard work, positive mental attitude, talking to your friends, a little bit of reading, informal networking, you overcame that obstacle.
The demographics of our countries--and it's even more pronounced in Canada than in the U.S.--indicate that there is no longer any upward promotion. So organizations, to meet the challenge needs of the person, have to move the individuals laterally. The ladder has given way to the spiral. Before you go up a level, you have to go sideways four. But it means that, if I ever get laid off as an employee, I have not only four sets of skills which make me four times more marketable, but, more importantly, I know how to learn. That's my security, not the job title.
Find their interest, open the world to them. If we can explain that to our union members and frame it such that this is their security, not a threat, you can open a whole new world.
MS. PRESSER: On behalf of the Association, thank you, Jim, for giving us some things to think about in a different way.
It only remains for me to call the session to an end. Thank you very much.
Copyright © 1998 by Jim Harris