Prophets of Empathy

The text discusses the collapse of conceptions, akin to paradigms, drawing parallels with Thomas Kuhn's ideas on scientific revolutions. It highlights how organizations, like scientific communities, operate within paradigms that sometimes require transformation. Leadership must navigate these paradigm shifts effectively, avoiding the role of a prophet of doom, and instead fostering empathy and constructive change.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Colig Experience episode where we delve into bold insights, experimentation

(00:10):
and groundbreaking leadership strategies.
Today, we're exploring the collapse of conceptions, drawing parallels to historical and scientific
paradigm shifts and uncovering how leaders can drive impactful, organisational change.
Let's dive in.
The disaster of October 7th brought back the collapse of a conception to our lives in

(00:32):
a chilling replay of the Yom Kippur War failure.
Of course, collapsing conceptions are not an Israeli invention.
Recent and distant history is full of examples of such conceptions.
We're not great experts on conceptions, but we think we can say two things about them
with reasonable confidence.

(00:52):
The first is that it's very difficult, even impossible, to live without conceptions that
guide our decision making.
The second is that conceptions are ultimately destined to collapse at some point.
Conception.
Someone who dealt with this topic in a very different context was Thomas Kuhn.
Kuhn, originally a physicist, then a historian and philosopher of science who lived in the

(01:18):
20th century, didn't use the term conception.
He preferred the term paradigm.
Kuhn didn't invent this term, but he undoubtedly gave it its modern meaning.
There are probably those who know how to distinguish between conception and paradigm, but this
is less important for our purposes.
Just go with the flow.

(01:40):
Kuhn argued that science doesn't develop linearly, continuously from one scientific
discovery to another, in an infinite sequence.
In his view, the history of scientific development is divided into periods of normal science
dominated by scientific paradigms.
For instance, for 2,000 years astronomy developed around the paradigm that the sun revolves

(02:04):
around the earth.
Between one period of normal science and another, science undergoes a scientific revolution
that changes the dominant paradigm, for example, that earth revolves around the sun.
After the scientific revolution came another period of normal science, in which science
focused on developing a new paradigm.

(02:26):
The book Kuhn published, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is considered one
of the most significant books written about science in the 20th century.
You might ask what's so special about his idea that makes it so significant?
What's the unique message that emerges from the book?
The complete answer to this question is beyond our scope.

(02:50):
For the purpose we've gathered, we'll address two points Kuhn raises in the book,
relevant to organizational life.
The two points we'll mention are related to the period when a scientific revolution
developed.
The first point he raises regarding the scientific revolution is that when a new paradigm is
born, it creates a new scientific language.

(03:13):
Therefore, scientists who embrace the new paradigm cannot maintain a meaningful dialogue
with those who cling to the previous paradigm.
This might sound strange to those who think the scientific activity is objective.
After all, science should, at least ostensibly, have tools to examine new theories.
Well, that's not the case.

(03:35):
Kuhn claims that scientific inquiry is not as objective as we might like to think.
It contains many components of subjective perceptions and beliefs.
What changes in a period of scientific revolution are our perceptions and beliefs about reality,
and therefore a scientific dialogue is almost impossible.

(03:56):
This leads us to the second point we wanted to address.
Kuhn explains that a revolution occurs when the scientific community accepts the new paradigm
and abandons the previous one.
Who is this scientific community?
How does it abandon one paradigm and adopt another in its place?
This process is vague and unclear, but its result is not in doubt when it ends.

(04:21):
We may not be able to pinpoint the exact moment when the scientific community adopted quantum
theory, but it's clear that a scientific revolution took place in the early 20th century, at the
end of which quantum theory was established as the center of a new scientific paradigm.
In a sense, organizations undergo a process similar to Kuhn's.

(04:43):
They operate most of the time within some agreed-upon paradigm, but sometimes undergo
a transformation to a new paradigm by choice or necessity.
What does the organizational paradigm include?
It includes the organization's perceptions, beliefs and basic assumptions, its norms,
its goals and objectives, and many more things.

(05:07):
The match between the paradigm it adopts and the conditions in which it operates will
determine the organization's success and prosperity.
A classic example, familiar to many, is the startup that has gone through two or three
funding rounds and grown from an organization of 10-20 employees to one with 150 employees.

(05:29):
From a small organization, it has become a less small organization.
From a poor organization, it has become one with a few pennies in its wallet.
From an organization that primarily served investors, it has become one that also serves
customers.
We witnessed this firsthand when working with a mid-sized software company that grew from

(05:52):
30 to 200 people in 18 months.
The engineering leadership continued to operate as if they were still a small team where everyone
knew each other and could make decisions informally in the hallway.
This caused massive communication breakdowns when they started having multiple product teams
working in parallel across different time zones.

(06:12):
We helped them reshape their decision-making paradigm to include formal documentation of
architectural decisions, cross-team review processes, and explicit communication channels,
a painful transition for many of the original engineers who valued the earlier, just-talk-to-each-other
approach.
Such a change is a paradigm shift that poses a critical risk to the organization, because

(06:37):
if it fails to adopt a new paradigm that suits the new conditions, it may become irrelevant
or, as in many cases, spend a lot of energy and resources to achieve very few results.
Kuhn says a paradigm changes when the community accepts the new paradigm.
What would Kuhn say about the organizational equivalent of this process?

(07:01):
Not every time someone in the organization thinks they need to move to a new phase, change,
or adopt a new paradigm, their position is accepted.
Not every time change is needed, does the organization actually manage to change?
Sometimes, part of the organization undergoes a process and changes, adopting a new paradigm.

(07:25):
But other parts don't.
In such situations, Kuhn's first point comes into play, the difficulty of establishing a
common language between those on opposite sides of the scientific revolution.
It's difficult, perhaps impossible, Kuhn would say, to create a dialogue between those
with different paradigms.

(07:46):
So, what happens in an organization that's in the process of transitioning between paradigms?
There will be those who are the first to identify and adopt the new paradigm and those who remain
resistant to change.
Others will observe what's happening from the fence and choose, as always, the winning
side.

(08:07):
We saw this dynamic unfold dramatically in a biotech company we advised.
The R&D leadership recognized they needed to transition from a pure research organization
to one that could successfully take products through clinical trials and regulatory approval.
Half the organization embraced new rigorous documentation practices and regulatory focus

(08:30):
development while long-time researchers resisted what they saw as bureaucracy that would stifle
innovation.
The two groups literally couldn't understand each other's concerns, exactly the language
barrier Kuhn described.
The resolution only came when the CEO created a hybrid model with separate operating procedures

(08:52):
for early-stage research versus late-stage development projects.
In parentheses, we'll say the situation is more complex than I've described.
The new paradigm is not something external to the organization that some adopt and others
reject.
The organization itself is what creates the organizational paradigm.

(09:17):
Close parentheses.
This point is the source of much of the suffering and frustration we hear from managers.
They tell us about the need they identify to perform an organizational transformation,
or in our words, they identify that their organization needs to adopt a new organizational
paradigm, but they fail to recruit partners for the move.

(09:41):
They are alone.
Some of them walk around the organization like prophets of doom, trying with all their might
to save it from itself, but to no avail.
They continue explaining the situation and its implications to everyone.
But no one listens.
This is exactly what Kuhn was talking about, or at least what he would have talked about

(10:03):
if he had been discussing organizational transformation rather than scientific revolutions, the lack
of a common language, a dialogue of the deaf, and speaking of prophets, it's worth learning
from the experience of the prophets in the Bible.
If you check, you'll discover that almost no prophet preached to the people to change

(10:24):
their habits, and they listened to him.
The prophets left behind an essentially moral and historical legacy.
Still, by the test of results, they failed.
In an organizational context, we believe there's no place for the role of a prophet of doom
who sticks to their truth until water comes out of the rock.

(10:45):
This leadership style might suit other contexts, with emphasis on might, but it has no place
within organizations for the simple reason that being a prophet of doom means giving
up the position of influence over what happens in the organization, and that's not an option
for leaders.
Even when the risk involved in avoiding a change in the organizational paradigm is critical

(11:09):
for the organization, and perhaps especially in such situations, the role of leadership
is to create the maximum possible impact.
The ability to impact the environment is the essence of the leadership position, and no
leader in an organization has the right to give it up.
There is no place for prophets of doom in organizations.

(11:31):
Prophets of empathy, on the other hand, are invited to apply.
That wraps up our discussion on how the collapse of conceptions and organizational transformations
mirror paradigm shifts, highlighting the vital role of empathetic leadership in overcoming
communication barriers.

(11:53):
Stay tuned for more updates.