Power of the Paradigm

by Don Harkey

I was driving home the other night when I witnessed an accident. The van 2 cars in front of me turned left on a green arrow. Suddenly, the front of the van exploded and another car sped through the intersection narrowly missing the lightpost and costing about 100 yards on the median of the road. Amazingly, everyone walked away from the accident. In the van was a mother and her young son (maybe 8 years old). In the car was 3 people. The first person got out of the car and ran away. The other two stood by the car because one of them was cut up with abrasions all over his body.

As witnesses came together, the story began to become clear. The van was simply heading home. The car had been chasing another car and had been driving on the shoulder of the road passing vehicles at speeds well above the 50 MPH speed limit. It was amazing that no one was killed. Now the man stood by his car, bloody and in pain, watching people gather around trying to comfort the young boy and his mother. A woman who apparently knew the man stopped her car and asked what happened. "That woman pulled in front of me.", he said.

It is one of those moments that from my perspective seemed absurd. I don't know who the guy was chasing, but here he was surrounded by witnesses watching a family stand by their totaled minivan and all he could think about was why the lady had the gaul to turn her car on a green arrow and not watch for vehicles running red lights from the shoulder. She was obviously out of line!

This really shows the power of the paradigm. In my world, I feel bad when I don't see someone in time to let them pull onto a busy road from a parking lot. I'm not a saint (at least the road thing doesn't qualify me), but that is my paradigm. This guy was so far away from that paradigm, we would have difficulty understanding each other.

Within an organization, a paradigm quickly forms and it is extremely hard to break. It is hard not only because change is difficult, but because it is hard to see outside of the paradigm.

Paradigms are not always bad. In a company that breeds character and service, employees do not even dream of cheating. However, in a company that needs to change, they often do not even dream of changing. Changing requires learning which means stepping outside of your comfort zone. It is important to keep on learning so that you can take opportunities to step outside of your paradigm and identify when change is needed and when it is not.

The Paradigm Paradigm

by Don Harkey

I recently read an article (reference: RIP My Dear Saturn) by Mike Micklewright, a former engineer for Saturn in the mid-1980's. Mr. Micklewright was involved with Saturn from its early days as an attempt to split from the GE culture and learn from the likes of Edwards Deming and Toyota.

One of my favorite stories from the article (actually, there are 2 articles) concerns the design of the "repair lot" for the new Saturn facility in Tennessee. GE had laid off some of its employees and forced Saturn to hire them on. This mixed new culture with old and the impact was a paradigm shift back toward "old school". GE facilities had a repair lot that was used when cars came off the line needing repairs. The lots were (and probably still are) huge.

GE Engineers wanted to build a lot that would be plenty big to hold all of the cars that needed to be repaired. After all, why would you want to run out of space, right? Seems like it makes sense.

Saturn Engineers followed the Toyota model and didn't want to build a repair lot at all. The repair lot represented a failure in the process that needed to be immediately investigated and repaired.

The "compromise" was that they built a repair lot 1/2 the size of a normal GE facility. As the author pointed out, this was an absurd "lose/lose" compromise since the lot would not be big enough for the GE model and since the existence of the lot would all but kill the Saturn (Toyota) model.

The point of this story is simple. Paradigms are very real. I have heard people say that they had the word "paradigm". This is largely thanks to some past management movements where managers tell employees to "shift their paradigm". Organizational paradigms are often set at the top of the organization and most fiercely followed by management.

You cannot "shift" out of a paradigm. Everyone lives in a paradigm and every organization has one. Thinking outside of it is difficult, but it is critical for long term survival.