Leadership During a Paradigm Shift

By Kathleen Harnish McKune

“When a paradigm shifts, everybody goes back to zero,” Joel Barker, futurist. I remember when I first heard this phrase. It was the early 1990’s and I was just completing my internship with Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality management movement in Japan and then here in the U.S.

A paradigm shift had occurred then as U.S. manufacturing raced to change its approach to quality and employee engagement. A paradigm shift has occurred again today. COVID was the catalyst.

The workplace is forever changed and so is the workforce:

● Remote working is here to stay.
● Workforce shortages are at unprecedented levels.
● Employees want and require a more balanced life.

My experience then is the same as now – when a paradigm shifts, everything changes, and we must reinvent and redesign or be left behind.

How? What is old is new again. The same core principles apply today as they have in earlier paradigm shifts:

● Leadership sets the direction and truly believes in empowering all voices.
● Those closest to the work are brought together to look at how to redesign our work.
● Thinking is informed by data, customer voices and people’s experiences.
● Facilitative leaders bring process expertise to the table.
● Those doing the work bring their subject matter or content expertise to the table.

People thinking and taking action together to reinvent and redesign our methods, our approaches, our contexts to how work gets done is needed:

● New insights inform our earlier approaches.
● Co-designing with the customer speeds up reinvention.
● Learning collaboratives speed up knowledge acquisition.
● Data analysts help us uncover the meaning in the data.
● Facilitative leaders at all levels bring the methods and tools that ease the way for people to think and take action together.

Reinvention and redesign are needed when a paradigm shifts. Uncovering the edges of innovation in the What, the Why and the How of work is where we need the thinking power of all of those in your organization.

If you understand the What and the Why, TeamTech can help you with the How. Contact us to learn more.