Subject areaProcess and organisation
Also known asThomas S. Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn was the American philosopher and historian of science who in 1962 published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most cited books of the twentieth century.
The book argues that science moves forward in leaps more than by accumulation: for long periods a community works inside a paradigm, a shared set of theories, methods and legitimate questions, and Kuhn calls this phase "normal science".
When anomalies, the results the paradigm cannot explain, pile up, a crisis opens and a new paradigm replaces the old one: that is the scientific revolution, and the classic example is the shift from the Earth to the Sun as the centre of the system. This is why "paradigm shift" left the labs and entered business language. The useful lesson for anyone leading an organisation is that the old model holds out even against evidence, because it defines what people accept as evidence; much of the difficulty of change management follows from this.
An example
The case below is constructed, because the term does not yet appear in the articles. At a bank, the usual risk models stop explaining defaults in a new customer segment; for a while the exceptions are filed away, then someone proposes a different model and the debate, more than technical, becomes a debate about what counts as evidence.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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