The power of paradigms and how to adopt effective ones.

Featuring the secret to facilitating enduring change, Mary Poppins and what not to do with mashed potato.

Image credit: Roland Steinmann

[This post is based on the CAREER-VIEW MIRROR podcast episode 120 Side Mirror: The Power of Paradigms published on 12 June, 2023]

Hello fellow Enablers,

I remember being in the science lab at school, with its long banks of wooden work benches, complete with sinks and gas taps for the Bunsen burners. At the front of the lab was a blackboard where the teacher would write explanations and homework assignments.

To me, it seemed that the light was not quite right. The sun shining in through the window made it difficult to read and I'd asked my classmate next to me what it said.

At that point it never occurred to me that I was short-sighted and needed glasses. When it came to my eyesight, it was what I was used to and I had nothing to compare it to. Not consciously, but subconsciously, I just assumed that other people saw the world literally as I did.

It was over 40 years ago that I got my first pair of glasses, and I can still remember going out into the garden at home and just looking up at the trees. I was blown away by being able to see individual leaves where before I'd just seen a mass of green.

Paradigms: What they are and what they do.

Paradigms are like lenses through which we view the world. We adopt them as we go through life, often without realising it. We pick them up from our parents, our peers, our teachers and leadership figures or perceived sources of authority, and I say perceived sources of authority, because our view that certain authorities can be trusted is a paradigm in itself.

Once we've adopted a paradigm, whether consciously or not, it tends to remain in our minds as the lens through which we view anything in its particular area of influence.

For example, if someone's paradigm is that a plant-based diet is healthier and kinder to animals and the environment, every time they look at a restaurant menu or go food shopping or are offered something to eat, they'll filter out dishes containing meat and fish. Alternatively, if their paradigm is that without animal protein they cannot meet their nutritional requirements, they'll choose options that offer plenty of that.

That particular example is unusual in that those are both conscious choices. Many of our paradigms are less deliberately adopted and less overt.

I like to think of paradigms like lines of code or scripts that have been uploaded to our brains, often without our active consent. We don't tick a box first, they just worm their way in and run quietly in the background, often unnoticed and yet having a significant effect on our thoughts, actions and outcomes.

The reason their impact is so significant is that the way we see the world dictates the thoughts that we have, the actions that we take and, consequently, the results that we get.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are. - Stephen Covey

Covey’s See-Do-Get model

I first became aware of this when reading the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen Covey writes about paradigms in the Foundation chapter.

His circular See-Do-Get model illustrates how the way we see the world steers what we do. Those actions have a direct impact on the outcomes or results that we get and those results tend to reinforce our paradigms.

If my paradigm (how I See the world) is that my team is incompetent, I am likely to treat them as incompetent. Influenced by that paradigm I may micromanage them, refrain from developing them, and avoid delegating tasks that might help them grow.

As a consequence of what I Do, they may well become wary of me and avoid taking initiative for fear of getting it wrong, feel stifled by my overbearing approach and struggle to perform at a high level.

That underperformance is what I will Get and it will also reinforce my belief that they are incompetent.

Displacing paradigms intentionally or by chance.

Paradigms that we have adopted carry on affecting our actions and results indefinitely, whether we are aware of them or not, unless something comes along that causes them to be replaced by an alternative paradigm.

Again, that may not be a conscious decision on our part. We might be exposed to some new information that displaces our previous paradigm.

When my wife and her siblings were growing up in the UK, they had a live-in nanny.

At this point I’d like you to pause momentarily and capture the interpretation that your brain served up to invent additional context around this piece of information. Extrapolating from that data, what image did your brain choose to conjure up to accompany that line of text?

A common paradigm in the UK might well be that having a nanny is a sign of relative affluence. Perhaps it conjures up images of Mary Poppins! That particular paradigm can probably be backed up with statistics on the household wealth of families with nannies.

It's not unreasonable to conclude from my first statement that my wife's family had a nanny because they were affluent, like the family in Mary Poppins.

It's not unreasonable, but it would be entirely incorrect.

The reason they had a nanny was that my wife's mother passed away when my wife was 17 and her siblings were 15, 8 and 9 months old, so her father needed full-time help with his children.

Some people may experience a slight paradigm shift on hearing the second statement. If so, this is illustrative of paradigms at work in the background, influencing thoughts without us even noticing.

What makes paradigms so darned influential?

Two aspects give paradigms incredible power over us:

1. They're always running in the background, unnoticed until challenged, and

2. they influence every thought, action and result that happens downstream.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by influencing every thought, action and result downstream.

I'm your manager and I ask you to take a package over to my boss, who's based a couple of hours drive away. I say it's important to get it there quickly. The paradigm I'm instilling in you by that statement is it's important to get it there quickly.

How might that affect your downstream actions?

You'll most likely leave as soon as possible. You may take a certain route based on speed rather than distance. You may be tempted to exceed the speed limit. You may take a little more risk overtaking or pulling out of junctions. Perhaps you won't stop for coffee or a break en route.

As you can see, there are many downstream decisions that you'll make based on the paradigm that it's important to get it there quickly.

Consider how many of your actions would be affected if, instead, I’d said it was important to get it there safely.

Covey says if we want to make deep, meaningful changes that endure, we need to be operating at the level of paradigms. Rather than tell you to obey the speed limit and be careful pulling out of junctions, and giving you hundreds of other action level instructions, if I help to instil in you the paradigm that this needs to be done safely, you'll make all the appropriate decisions and act accordingly yourself, effortlessly and without me needing to be there.

Effective paradigms elicit effortless action!

I say effortlessly because one of the beauties of working at the level of paradigms is that thoughts and actions resulting from viewing situations through our paradigms are effortless. They might still be wrong, but they're effortless!

If I told someone from the UK that my wife grew up with a nanny, they wouldn't need to put any effort into coming to the incorrect conclusion that she had an affluent childhood. Their brain would serve up that conclusion immediately and with zero conscious effort, having viewed my statement through the lens of their paradigm about people who had nannies in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The bit I want to focus on here is nothing to do with nannies and affluence or otherwise. It's about the impact that paradigms have on countless downstream thoughts and actions, and therefore the power of working at the level of paradigms when it comes to changing our behaviours with the least effort.

As humans, it's incredibly beneficial for us to be able to identify our paradigms and evaluate the extent to which they're serving us or holding us back. That way, we can then make a conscious effort to adopt more effective paradigms.

Do try this at home.

Let me give you some more examples of paradigms that I've adopted over the years and that have worked for me.

One of my paradigms about being a father is that my role is to make sure that, by the time my children leave home, they're well equipped to tackle the challenges that they're likely to face as an adult.

Anything I do for my children that they could do for themselves is robbing them of an opportunity to practice in a safe environment. It's not just about the opportunity to practice the task, it's the confidence that comes from having completed the task by themselves. If I get too involved, they won't gain confidence from having done it.

By adopting that paradigm, I'm positioning myself to notice opportunities that arise for my children to practice skills that they're going to need to adopt when they're older and fending for themselves.

Similarly, as a manager, anything I do that could, with a bit of intentional delegation, be done by one of my team and counts as a development opportunity for them is robbing them of that opportunity to grow in skill and confidence. It's also robbing my organization of time that I could have spent doing something that only I can do.

One of my paradigms as the leader of a business is that I should be spending my time on tasks that only I can do. Everything else should be delegated to others. If I focus on developing my people, the list of tasks that only I can do will get shorter and I'll have more time to focus on each of those tasks where I am adding the most value to the business.

I'm sure you can appreciate how, once you've embraced those paradigms, it's a lot easier to consistently make decisions that are aligned with developing your children and your people. You can't be around to oversee and manage the countless decisions and actions that our children and the people we manage take in a day. If we were, our lives and theirs would also be awful.

If we can instil in them effective paradigms, their thoughts, actions and results will be governed quite effortlessly by those paradigms. Get the paradigms right and the results will take care of themselves.

Richard Branson shares a paradigm that if you look after the employees, they will look after your customers and your customers will look after your business. Once that's understood, any decision regarding employees will be influenced by the paradigm that looking after employees is good for business.

This doesn't mean mollycoddling them. Looking after employees can mean delegating more appropriate work to them so that they learn new skills, remain engaged and continue to grow.

When conflicting paradigms collide.

When I get it wrong, which I do, it's often possible to identify that an alternative, less effective paradigm has been operating behind the scenes, causing me to have thoughts and take actions that lead to poorer outcomes.

For example, if my child comes to me and appears to be suffering or overwhelmed by a situation, I might struggle to operate through the lens that my role is to let them practise whilst they're in a safe environment.

An alternative paradigm might take over in the moment.

Perhaps I also have a paradigm that it's my responsibility to take care of my kids and protect them.

With this paradigm in the driving seat, I might almost involuntarily grab the wheel, so to speak, and take charge of a situation because it serves me to do so.

It makes me feel better for a moment. It makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing as a parent, when maybe I've overreacted and what was actually needed was some empathic listening, some gentle reassurance, some coaching and, if requested or appropriate, some helpful suggestions.

The same applies to me as a manager or leader, when faced with an employee who seems to be struggling.

Once I accepted that our thoughts, actions and results are so heavily influenced by our paradigms, it wasn't difficult for me to shift my focus from people's specific actions and results and onto trying to discover their underlying paradigms and bring those to the surface.

Using See-Do-Get in reverse to reveal paradigms at play.

I mentioned Covey's See-Do-Get model earlier in this post. As paradigms are often hidden even from ourselves, the way I tend to use this model is in reverse. When we start to look at how this conceptual model can help us in reality, the most visible component is typically the result or the outcome.

When I was 17, I went on holiday in France with a French friend, his sister and her friend. We were self-catering in an apartment. They asked me to reheat some potatoes from the previous day.

What I served up, the result or outcome, were sort of mashed potatoes, but they were runnier than usual and pink / purple in colour. When my friends (not unreasonably) questioned me on what I'd done to the potatoes, I explained that I'd put some red wine in with them…

My paradigm was: French people like cooking with wine.

After all, didn't they give us coq au vin, (literally chicken with wine) and boeuf-bourguignon or burgundy beef?

Now, when someone serves up a result that is the equivalent of my purple runny potatoes, as long as the best version of myself is parenting or leading on that day, I'll suppress my dismay and, coming from a place of curiosity, calmly explore with that individual what the underlying paradigm might have been that caused them to have the thoughts they had and take the actions they took that led to their version of Chateau Potato.

More often than not, the root cause is not stupidity or malice on their part, but a genuine misunderstanding, a lack of experience, poor communication or a lack of awareness of the bigger picture that meant they were operating from an ineffective paradigm.

Facilitate deep and lasting change.

I'd like to invite you, next time you're faced with an ineffective result, to see this as an opportunity to use the See-Do-Get model in reverse. Explore what actions you or someone else involved took to get this result and then go back further to identify, if you can, the underlying paradigm.

If you can do this and replace it with a more effective paradigm, you'll be making a change that will affect all of the downstream thoughts, actions and outcomes going forward.

By operating at the level of paradigms, you'll be able to facilitate deep and lasting change.

Thank you,

Andy