Machine or Ecosystem. Which paradigm is influencing your choices?
Donella “Dana” Meadows was an American environmental scientist, educator, and writer best known for her books The Limits to Growth and Thinking in Systems. She has also been credited with this gem of a phrase…
“The highest point of leverage in which to intervene in a complex system is the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises”
A complex system can be anything from a human (we are most certainly complex!), an organisation, a community, a team, or pretty much anything that involves people interacting with other people. According to the dictionary, a mindset is a fixed attitude, disposition, or inclination. What the phrase above is essentially saying is that if you want to make improvements to a complex system, the best place to start is to influence the mindset that created the system. In other words, the mindset of the Leaders.
Chances are you have heard of various ‘mindsets’ before. There is Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset (as opposed to fixed mindset), Simon Sinek’s Infinite Mindset (as opposed to limited mindset), and this article from Forbes suggests a number of mindsets that will reshape the future of work. After spending a lot of time and energy looking into common mindsets and paradigms, we have identified two foundational mindsets that often prevail in the business world. Interestingly, they are largely at odds with each other. Let’s look at them now.
1. The world is like a machine.
This is a mindset that has influenced most of us in one way or another because it was the fundamental mindset of the Scientific Revolution through the 16th to 19th Centuries. This is the domain of people like Copernicus (Astronomy), Newton (Mathematics and Physics) and Descartes (Physiology and Psychology), with much attention being given to the scientific method of measurement, experimentation and observation. Universal constants such as the speed of light do not change, and ‘matter’ is always the priority. Adopting this paradigm means you probably see the world like a machine that is made up of parts that each perform a specific job. To understand something, break it down into smaller components and analyze those. Then reassemble the parts to create a better whole. Chances are you see the world as objective and reality is somewhat fixed in nature. You may also feel that there is an objective truth that can always be discovered by asking the right questions.
This is the mindset that has also influenced 20th century education, organisational design and leadership theory. People are parts of a machine and when a part breaks, it can be fixed or replaced. Cause and effect can be identified because generally speaking, there is a linear relationship between the two. It is also a mindset that has heavily influenced artificial intelligence applications which assume that it is possible to predict outcomes in the future. To someone with this mindset, terms like ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ are just functions of a material brain.
2. The world is like an ecosystem.
In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, science started to experience a sort of splitting of thought with the discovery of what is now called Quantum Mechanics. You can just type this term into Google if you would like to try and understand what it is all about, but the summary is that the building blocks of nature don’t behave as they should according to the machine paradigm. Every time a scientist discovers a new smaller particle, they analyse it only to find that it is made up of 99.9% empty space and those pesky protons and electrons don’t behave as they should (there is a thing called ‘quantum entanglement’ which sees particles communicating instantly with each other over long distances, which means they communicate faster than the speed of light!).
Whilst nobody really understands quantum mechanics, the implications are that the world probably doesn’t operate like a machine, that uncertainty and chaos are ever-present, and it is impossible to know everything about the state of a system at any one time. Not everything can be measured, and there is a lot of subjectivity to the way the world works. The fact that ‘matter’ is made up of mostly empty space is mind-boggling (yes, that rock that you tripped over is made up of mostly empty space at the microscopic level), and chances are you see the world as full of subjectivity and paradox where reality is necessarily objective.
If you identify with this mindset, you probably think that that whole cannot be understood by analysing the parts. An example is water made up of hydrogen and oxygen. You can’t understand the properties of water by understanding hydrogen and oxygen independently. And you can’t remove the wetness from water, it just isn’t possible. You probably believe that people can change, in fact, everything is constantly changing, and that the future is largely unpredictable but possible to think of in terms of probabilities. You are probably fascinated with terms like ‘consciousness’ and may even feel like the brain isn’t necessarily the only thing that matters to a person.
Is one mindset better than the other?
I don’t think it is necessarily fair to judge one versus the other, but it is important to know what is most influencing your choices. If you are a business leader, your team or organisation has probably arisen out of the mindset that most influences you, which influences every decision and choice. For example, do you believe that your team operates like a machine where you make all the decisions and they do the work, or do you believe that your team operates like an ecosystem where everyone interacts in mysterious ways and is unique in almost every respect?
Myself, if you asked me ten years ago I was definitely in the Machine camp and looking back I can see how my decisions and choices were heavily influenced by this mindset. This is extremely common because this is the prevailing mindset that influences almost everything that we know in business. The way we hire people, who we hire, the way we manage performance, the way we create jobs and organisational structures. It also heavily influences the way we collect and interpret data (especially employee surveys) and the way we interact with others (they are so annoying!).
I can also now see that I have made a personal transition having studied topics from Neuroscience to Quantum Mechanics to Ancient Philosophies in an Ashram in India. My prevailing mindset has evolved to now look at the world as an ecosystem where everything is connected in mysterious ways, not because it is a ‘better’ way to look at the world, it’s just one that now makes more sense to me. Where once I was probably more self-centred and focused on differences and separation, I now feel like I am part of a connected whole that is difficult to pinpoint where one part starts and another stops. It is the relationships between the parts rather than the parts themselves that is the priority.
If you feel like you are making a similar transition, you will already know it is a confusing time because it is easy to start questioning everything. Colleagues start to think you are going a little crazy when you raise ideas that don’t really make sense to them. My advice is to keep pushing through. And if you need help, you can always send me a message on Fllair.
- Date - September 17, 2021
- Author - jasonb"> jasonb
- Categories - Leadership
