Tag Archives: paradigm shift

birthday cake

What is essential? Reflections on my 40th birthday

11 Replies

With the world starting into 2021, I personally have also started into the 5th decade of my life. While I can’t say I am going through a midlife crisis, one obviously does reflect on what has been and what is still to come. One question I have asked myself is if we, who are in the midst of their lives now, are a lost generation. Grown up and educated in the system that is now unravelling and falling apart but tied to it an unable to change. Many of us recognise that things are unravelling; we understand that our way of life is the problem. Yet at the same time we are so strongly entangled into this current paradigm that we feel incapable to escape from its scripts, behavioural norms and measures of success. Indeed, we often don’t even see how our daily behaviours contribute to the perpetuation of the existing but failing paradigm. What does this mean? What can we still do?

Continue reading →

Why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work: podcast with Dr Toby Lowe

1 Reply

Last week we published the 7th episode of the Systemic Insight podcast (get it from Libsyn or Apple Podcast or you can also find it on Spotify). It features Dr Toby Lowe of Northumbria University and his work on why outcome-based performance management doesn’t work – and what to do instead. In this blog post, I’m sharing some quotes from Toby and some insights I took from the conversation.

The discussion in the podcast touches upon why outcome targets distort rather than enhance performance, why they lead to gaming becoming a rational strategy, and what the alternatives are for people who work in complex contexts. As outcome-based performance management is still the prevalent method to manage the performance in many fields, this discussion is highly relevant and pertinent.

This episode is packed with ideas and quite challenging thoughts! In this blog post I am bringing together a number of quotes from Toby and some comments from my side.

Continue reading →
change

How institutions change – and why nations fail

2 Replies

In my last post, I wrote about why institutions matter for economic development. I also highlighted that the theories of institutional economics and of complex systems actually come to very similar conclusions about how institutional structures, underpinned by basic beliefs or paradigms of how the world works, shape relatively persistent patterns of behaviour, which can be both beneficial for, or holding back development. In this post, I want to share a model that describes the dynamics of institutional change. It is largely based on Douglas North’s book ‘Understanding the Process of Economic Change’ [1], but uses the systems iceberg as a canvas. If you haven’t read my last post, I recommend you head over there and read that one first.

Continue reading →

Paradigm shift and the (non) future of schools

4 Replies

I want to share some of my Sunday reading and listening with you.

First a blog post by Dave Algoso on his blog “Find What Works”: in the article Kuhn, Chambers and the future of international development he talks about paradigm shifts from science to international development. This is interesting as I myself and many around me are saying that a paradigm shift is needed in international development that appreciates the complexities of the environments we work in. Algoso features two posts by Robert Chambers where he sketches out how such a new paradigm could look like (direct links here and here)

Secondly, a TED talk by Sugata Mitra about the future of schools and learning. His basic thesis: “schools as we know them are obsolete”. One quote that particularly struck me, as the language he uses is very much the one we use when talking about development from a complexity perspective:

… we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It’s not about making learning happen. It’s about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens.

Watch it yourself, it’s about 20 minutes: