Friday 6/25.We were in a conversation at Gennova this morning about trends that point more and more toward the shift to networked based organizations and worldviews. Tim Andrews (former CTO of Viant) reminded us of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I read over a dozen years ago. I don’t think that anyone who has read this book has a problem with the word “paradigm,” except that it became so inappropriately overused back then that people now shy away from it.

Tim mentioned it in the context of how values are shifting and how some of us of a certain age feel caught between a world that was strictly hierarchical and the fluid world and adaptability of those people currently in their early twenties — “the paradigm shift always takes several generations.”

The key metaphor in Kuhn’s book was that of a scaffolding, large and intricate structures that hold beliefs about what is scientifically “true.” As evidence mounts against the beliefs in that structure, the scaffolding weakens, but sustains assaults for a very long time. It is only after the complete structure has fallen and a new one rises to take its shape, that we can see the path behind and see all the indicators. For now, we each see only some part of it, feel some part of the pain of busting out of this old skin.

Around the time of my reading this, a cartoon in the New Yorker showed a party-hatted, tuxedo’d drunk charging into a room saying, “It’s the New Year! It’s Coming In!” That’s one for the ages, so to speak.