Geoff, I really appreciate the energy you’re bringing to this, and your desire to help the paradigm come into focus. I suppose part of why I see it differently is because I’ve lived through a smaller-scale paradigm shift in the field of project leadership.
From implementing project control systems in the 1970s to helping shape PMI’s strategy after it acquired our business in 2013, I witnessed—and in a modest way, helped nudge—a profound shift in how people thought about “projects.” The change didn’t happen through ideological battles or clean breaks—although there were plenty of those as well. It unfolded through layered tensions, conflicting principles, and evolving contexts. Old and new were—and still are—entangled.
I see something similar in how the story of the so-called “scientific revolution” has been challenged by non-Eurocentric history. It turns out, even our narratives of radical clarity and rupture were always more interwoven, relational, and context-bound than we’d been taught.
I think we can’t just compare all these different paradigm shifts and say they can work the same way. I don’t think the two examples you have given here are particularly similar. What you are describing certainly applies to the PMI paradigm shift, but the scientific revolution was much more theoretically-driven than that. However messy the process was, the shift itself was driven by a very explicit ideological battle over certain ideas, classic examples being Galileo with respect to heliocentrism and Giordano Bruno with respect to free thought and speech. These people changed the world by standing up for what they knew to be true and/or morally right – Galileo sacrificed his freedom to this end, and Bruno sacrificed his life. This was all about clarity – it was about drawing a line because a line needs to be drawn.
You can say exactly the same about the rise of Christianity, which was brutally suppressed by the Romans precisely because it drew certain lines – in this case a rejection of certain Roman ideas about religion and morality, especially the Christian refusal to recognise the Emperor as divine. Christianity only triumphed because generations of early Christians refused to be intimidated into compromising on their red lines.
So when I hear calls for sharp definition and exclusion, I understand the impulse—but I also feel the risk. From where I stand, the “blur” isn’t failure or fear of upsetting the old guard. It’s an honest reflection of the entanglements we’re all still metabolizing.
I’m not against focus—but I’ve learned that focus that emerges through relationship and mutual learning often lands deeper than focus enforced through boundary-drawing.
But again, how can this possibly apply to growth-based economics? What possible justification can there be for continuing to operate under the assumption that growth-based economics can provide a theoretical basis for making decisions about how to run the world?
There is no “mutual learning” about this. I don’t have anything to learn from true believers in growth-based economics, just like I don’t have anything to learn from Jonah’s materialistic theories about what minds are and how they work. I have already learned that these are ways of thinking about the world which aren’t any use for anything at all, because they are based on false premises.
Terry…we’re in this mess because something has gone badly wrong. We cannot find our way out of it unless we diagnose the problem accurately and figure out a solution which will actually work. That is the paradigm shift.