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Paradigm Shift
In his highly successful book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effec tive
People, Stephen Covey so eloquently shares the notion of a
paradigm shift. This is the big “aha” moment where we realize that what we
have been doing all these years was fundamentally wrong and more
importantly that a new understanding can totally change our effectiveness.
Thomas Kuhn first introduced the term “paradigm shift” in his book,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Mr. Kuhn explains that at the core
of all science is the need to prove the current theory wrong and that
breaking with old beliefs and accepting totally new and different views of
the subject at hand causes nearly every scientific breakthrough. Indeed, as
you will learn from one of the principles of causation, the more we know,
the more we know we don’t know. Or to put it another way, the more we
know, the dumber we get. It is not the pursuit of existing knowledge that
makes us effective problem solvers, but the pursuit of understanding our
ignorance—to find answers to what we don’t know. And since the human
condition is wrought with complacency, ignorance, and arrogance, this
can be a hard pill to swallow.
I first discovered this problem with conventional problem-solving
methods in 1979 while working in the nuclear power industry and
investigating the incident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant. As
you may recall, they experienced a reactor core meltdown and released
a small amount of radioactive gasses to the local environment. I was
involved in an industry group trying to understand what went wrong and
to use the lessons learned from the event to make nuclear power even
safer than it was at the time. In the process of evaluating and performing
root cause analysis on the various failures that occurred at the Three Mile
Island Plant, I discovered that the problem-solving methods of the time
were grossly inadequate—and so began a thirty-plus-year journey of
studying human problem solving.
By first recognizing the failed strategies of the past, I began an evolution
of thought to a new paradigm about problem solving—a paradigm
shift that has the potential to fundamentally change the way humans
forever evaluate and solve human problems of all kinds. Being an analytic
by nature and an engineer by training, I was surprised to find that there were
no common or universally accepted fundamental principles of causation.
Most of the problem-solving processes, and certainly the most popular
ones, were people centric and subjective rather than principle based and
objective. In shock, I began doing research on human problem solving and
read many books, but did not find any evidence of fundamental principles
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