Paradigms : Business of Discovering the Future, The

Customer Reviews

One of the most important concepts in the book is what Barker calls "paradigm pliancy": "the purposeful seeking out of new ways of doing things. It is an active behavior in which you challenge your paradigms [ie the status quo, assumptions and premises] by asking the Paradigm Shift Question: What do I believe is impossible to do in my field, but if it could be done, would fundamentally change my business?" Have you asked this question? Do you realize that one or more of your competitors may have already asked that question?

Although the book's subtitle is "The Business of Discovering the Future", the fact remains that (back to Drucker) the challenge is to identity and then measure the degree of probability of various contingencies...many of which may have already occurred or are now in process.

Barker asserts that every organization must anticipate and then innovate to achieve excellence in an age during which change is the only constant. He suggests that there are five components to "strategic exploration": Understanding influences which shape our perceptions, divergent thinking which enables us to consider more than "one right answer", convergent thinking which enables us to integrate data while prioritizing choices, mapping which reveals pathways from the present to the future, and finally, imaging which (with words or drawings or models) documents what is learned during the process of exploration.

This is a business "classic" which will continue to be relevant so long as leaders of organizations remain hostage to assumptions and premises which are either already obsolete now or will soon become so. What about yours?

Barker's concept that the most difficult problems in business are waiting for someone to come around and break all the rules and infuse new life into an organization and rewrite the procedural bible. And as soon as that is running smooth, a new paradigm is up for the offing. Along the way Barker even comes up with his own paradigm for the paragraph with these scant gems (mind you they are complete paragraphs)--

"It won't work that way next time around."

and the ever-succinct--

"The answer--Switzerland."

While he is busy rewriting the rules of English composition, Barker takes the time to hail the Japanese TQM revolution economic miracle and the eventual dominance of paradigm breaking e-publishing. The Asian market turned out to be not necessarily infallible and I can't remember the last time I wanted to read an entire book on a computer screen or LED screen. But such is the hazards of a futurist, that your future predictions can be steam-rolled ten years down the line by armchair pundits gazing through 20-20 hindsight binocs. It's not fair, but a warning is out there Barker's book is dated.

The ideas are good and well enough...don't turn a blind eye to innovation, seek out the voice in the wilderness, listen to outsiders, quality, quality, quality. But there are timeless books like Robert Pirsig's, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," that do much the same but cry out with skill and art through the lens of a story. Barker's work is thinnish, wanting for the meat and potatoes and grist of a bright idea worded well.

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