Release 13

HR Best Practice: “HR’s most important and needed strategic Role – Transforming people’s paradigms (Mental Models) and teaching them a New set of skills”

In the last release, we discussed about the most pressing need for management viz. adopting and thoroughly believing a new Model of people. We have seen the need of going beyond only extrinsic motivation to tapping people’s great hidden power of intrinsic motivation, their will and volition.

In this release, we will see another challenge before management and especially before HR of transforming peoples mind sets (mental models, paradigms) and outdated beliefs about the way the world and enable people to learn a new set of skills – skills that will enable them to create balanced lines and whole brain organization.

In the last release, we have also seen the trap in applying Maslow’s hierarchy of people’s needs and how the model can be modified for the 21st century environment. We have argued for the inversion of the pyramid and stated that the need for meaning is primary. This is become what separates man from the animal is its distinctive spiritual nature (self awareness, in particular) and this fives man an infinite power if developed. The spiritual needs don’t go away if neglected.

The need to shift paradigms:

Many people are familiar with the word paradigm, but few really understand it. Some people think it means a mental model or a mind set, some use it as thought it is just a new idea or a set of ideas, a set of habits, a style or even a set of traditions or prejudices, our world – view, etc A paradigm does include all these thinks, but it is much more.

Our paradigm, used in the proper souse first defined by American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn in ‘The structure of scientific Revolution ‘is the whole conceptual framework embracing our most deeply held unconscious assumptions and values. It is the thinks we take for grated in any situation. Like a pair of glasses that we wear to focus our visual world, our paradigm focuses on the whole of our mental and emotional reality. It determines our expectations, frames the questions reality. It determines our expectations, frames the questions that we will ask, and structures our approach to what we do. Paradigms are so deep that they even determine what we will see. When people who lived in the Middle Ages went to the curvature of the seashore, for instance, they literally did not see the curvature of the horizon. To us it’s obvious become we know (we have the paradigm) that the earth is round, but they know the earth was flat! So a curved horizon would have made no souse to them, they had no categories to see it, and thus they didn’t see it. Paradigms, thus determine our expectations, frame the questions we ask, and structure our approach to what we do.

We can’t help having paradigms. Indeed, we need them. They are literally wired into our brains.

So that we have the concepts and categories necessary to digest our experience.
Philosophers and neuroscientists used to think that we are hard wired born with certain neural connections that frame our experience from birth and remain us through out our lines. This view was accompanied by the notion that we have a limited learning horizon related to aging and that beyond a certain age (about eighteen) our capacities diminish. But today we know this is not true.

Today neuroscience teaches that from the moment of conception until the end of life itself we have the constant of capacity to grow new neural connections. When we come into the world of infants, we come with very little of our brain wired up. We are born with sufficient neural connections to regulate our breathing, our body temperature and the beating of our heart, but everything else is pure potentiality. What diet we will be fed what language we will need to speak, what social and practical skills we will need to learn, what concepts we will need to form – all these are uncertain at the moment of birth. So the infant’s brain is poised at the edge. Chaotic instability in its initial neural firings enables the brain to adapt to allow the brain to rewire itself as it evolves with experience.

Infants and children lay down new neural connections – wire their brains – of necessity and at a rapid rate. They have to construct their world. Older people may be able to get by on the experience of their first 18 yrs. Of life, may be able to sleepwalk through life it is tempting to do so because growing new neural connections requires energy and can be painful when we think creatively, the brain used more energy than the whole rest of the body. But we are definitely, given condemned to be sleepwalkers. Given a motivation, given an opportunity, given a crisis, we can and do grow new neural connections at any age. Experiment has shown that people well into their nineties still have the capacity to rewire their brains.

Thomas Kuhn wrote about paradigms to describe how scientists work. We usually think of science as very revolutionary, “at the edge”. But Kuhn pointed out that most normal science in very conservative. Most scientists work from within a paradigm and most of their experiments are done to validate that paradigm. New ideas are not welcome and are treated first as anomalies. It is only when the anomalies, the things that won’t fit the old paradigm, mount up that revolutionary science takes over. Revolutionary science changes that the old way of looking at thinks won’t work. But such revolutions are painful. The necessary casualty is our whole way of looking at things.

We need a paradigm to function at all, but the danger is that we can get trapped inside our paradigm. Then new thinking becomes impossible. This is the paradigm paradox “science can not be changed from within its old paradigm, neither can business.
The pressing need before the business today is how to change profoundly and quickly. For HR people to be change masters, resolution of paradigm paradox is critical. We will continue the discussion in the next release.

Article by: Prof. Khambete