Being a creative person, I studied design to make the world better… only to realise that great ideas and designs often falter because we hold ourselves back by the way we think. I had to study philosophy to understand what is limiting us. And then I left my own design work behind to study the practices expert creatives (like top design professionals) have developed to get past these roadblocks. Having discovered how they can create new frames, time and time again, it has become my mission to empower other people to do this – not only on a project level, but taking these practices to the organizational sector and societal transformation.
In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.
That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one."
The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!
A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were-and still are. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. And fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Kuhn challenged long-standing…
I very much resonate with the way Schon describes a professional field not in terms of knowledge or skills, but in terms of practices: our approaches to the problems we face.
And each approach implies a framing of the situation… (where a "frame" is a way of seeing, thinking, and acting). Understanding your own frames and those of others creates deep insight into what is actually going on.
Becoming a "reflective practitioner" is immensely empowering.
A leading M.I.T. social scientist and consultant examines five professions,engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy, and town planning,to show how professionals really go about solving problems.The best professionals, Donald Schoen maintains, know more than they can put into words. To meet the challenges of their work, they rely less on formulas learned in graduate school than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. This unarticulated, largely unexamined process is the subject of Schoen's provocatively original book, an effort to show precisely how "reflection-in-action" works and how this vital creativity might be fostered in future professionals.
We are not just caught in our own frames; the very language we use to deal with the world can hold us back.
Words and the hidden metaphors behind them really shape our thinking, for better or for worse. Understanding this gives you a "sixth sense," a sensitivity to HOW people talk about issues that reveals where they are coming from.
People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors…
We strive for meaning in our lives. Ford neatly inquires into the different ways we as humanity have developed to achieve this.
He probes into these different "thinking systems," not only asking what is important to them and how they work, but also looking into what they ignore.
This is not only very insightful, I feel it has made me a much more flexible thinker.
In "The Search for Meaning: A Short History", Dennis Ford explores eight approaches human beings have pursued over time to invest life with meaning and to infuse order into a seemingly chaotic universe. These include myth, philosophy, science, postmodernism, pragmatism, archetypal psychology, metaphysics, and naturalism. In engaging, companionable prose, Ford boils down these systems to their bare essentials, showing the difference between viewing the world from a religious point of view and that of a naturalist, and comparing a scientific worldview to a philosophical one.Ford investigates the contributions of the Greeks, Kant, and William James, and brings the discussion up-to-date…
This book made me realise how limited I am in trying to achieve change.
The authors show 5 completely different change strategies, and not only do they show/illustrate how they can work, each in their own way, but they also explain the misunderstandings that arise when people with different strategies try to work together.
Incredibly recognizable – the kind of book you would like to hug, and at other moments you want to throw it through the room in frustration.
"A good balance between theory and practice . . . it definitely fills a void in the [lack of] texts in the area and the change literature in general . . . a good fit for my graduate class on 'Managing Organizational Change.'"
-Anthony F. Buono, McCallum Graduate School of Business, Bentley College
"Like Gareth Morgan's Images of Organization, this book is a superb blend of theory and practicality. It demystifies chaos and paradox, and it encourages the understanding of organizational dynamics from multiple perspectives. It is refreshing to read a book that presents diverse theories and interventions so even-handedly."…
We are not solving our problems anymore. There is a mismatch between our normal ways of approaching problems and the new open, complex, dynamic and networked challenges facing us today. Traditional strategies (‘innovation-as usual’) are failing, because deeper change is needed. We will need to think and act very differently. This book offers the fundamentally different logic and the organisation to do so. It shows HOW to create space for the deep change we need.
