The Best Managers Know How to Navigate A Paradigm Shift

by Rod Collins

 

The term paradigm shift has been so overused that, for many of us, the phrase is nothing more than the latest jargon used by leaders whose actions rarely match their words. As tends to happen with jargon, the term has been so over-applied and misused that it has become trivialized. As a consequence, when a real paradigm shift happens, it often remains hidden in plain sight. This becomes particularly problematic for managers struggling to maintain business continuity because these transformational events invariably disrupt established business models. This was a painful lesson the managers in the newspaper industry learned when their failure to recognize that their businesses were in the grasp of a paradigm shift became an irrevocable competitive disadvantage.

In 1995, software engineer Craig Newmark created an e-mail distribution list to notify fellow software developers of social events in and around San Francisco. As a newcomer to the Bay Area, Newmark thought this list of fellow geeks might be a good way for him to quickly build a community of friends and contacts and escape the sense of isolation that often accompanies a move to a new town. While Newmark intended the list to be a vehicle to broadcast social gatherings, serendipity took the budding Internet community in a very different direction when the growing list of subscribers began using the mailing list for general advertising postings. In particular, people who were looking to fill jobs discovered that the list was a great way to connect with job seekers possessing the skills they needed. In early 1999, as the popularity of the powerful classified advertising tool began to explode, Newmark was able to quit his regular job and work full-time running a new company he called Craigslist. Over the next few years, what began as a tool for meeting people became the deadliest competitor the newspaper industry had ever encountered when one of the industry’s primary revenue sources rapidly evaporated. A new business model for classified advertising had emerged and had completely disrupted the conventional way of doing business. Because its managers failed to recognize the paradigm shift, the reign of the newspapers as the kings of classified advertising was gone forever.

When a paradigm shifts occur on a large social scale—as is the case today with the sudden and rapid emergence of the Digital Age—there is a period of time when both the fading and the emerging mindsets coexist. This coexistence is rarely smooth because large-scale paradigm shifts, by their nature, are highly disruptive. As a practical matter, this time of transition creates unique and unprecedented challenges for many managers because they find themselves caught between two worlds. On the one hand, because they work closely with younger workers who, as digital natives, are fully versed in digital technology and its new ways of thinking and acting, managers intuitively grasp—even though they may not fully understand—that the world is rapidly changing. On the other hand, these managers must continue to please a corps of senior executives who are essentially digital strangers and who remain fully invested in the old ways of Industrial Age thinking.

The successful managers in today’s transitioning times are those who know how to skillfully navigate between these two worlds. They are the digital immigrants who, like the younger digital natives, are very conversant in digital technology. However, unlike their younger colleagues, the new technology is not hard-wired into their natural thinking. Thus, rather than being second nature—as is the case with the digital natives—the digital immigrant’s relationship with the new technology is more like a second language. Because these managers are proficient in understanding the ways of thinking and acting in both the old and the new worlds, they have an important role to play in guiding their organizations through the unprecedented challenges that accompany a large-scale paradigm shift. As digital immigrants, they are uniquely positioned to transition their organizations from old to new ways of thinking by translating the realities of our new digital world into language that their senior leaders can understand and act upon. In our rapidly changing times, whether or not companies in other industries escape the fate of the companies in the newspaper industry will likely depend upon how adept their digital immigrant managers are at navigating their organizations through a very real paradigm shift.

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).