Have you ever wondered why things that look like proven facts to you don’t look like facts to someone else? Or even more painful, have you ever wondered how you could have been so blind in the past to something that seems obvious to you now? In 1935 a physician/biologist named Ludwig Fleck wrote Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. In it, he explores the idea that even the perception of a scientific fact is dependent on the current “thought style” which is developed and maintained within a group of people and institutions.
So what does this have to do with organizations in the digital age? A lot, actually. As large shifts occur in the ways that we communicate, manage, market, construct our identities, contradictions to the prevailing thought styles begin to arise. Some organizations are increasing profits by opening up their innovation processes, and by allowing customers to co-create value. Some CEO’s are turning out to be powerful and transparent marketers. Gamers and amateur crafts makers are being studied by the National Science Foundation because they are so good at teaching, learning and innovation. A teenager with a Twitter or YouTube account can attract more attention than a million-dollar ad campaign.
Why do so many of us question, resist, or even ignore facts like this? One explanation is that we are each at one of the five stages of resistance that new ideas often go through, when facts start to contradict our existing thought styles. I’ve included Fleck’s original stages here in bold, each one followed by a short idea of how it may be playing out today in organizations in the digital age:
- A contradiction to the system appears unthinkable – It is hard for many of us to imagine that scientists could possibly be out-innovated by crafters, and can’t think of a way that a teen can out-market a professional marketing team
. - What does not fit into the system remains unseen – because what we see is determined in large part by what we are trained to pay attention to, many of us are unaware of the fact that thousands of future leaders are honing real strategic skills in World of Warcraft, or that tools with silly-sounding names like Twitter, Facebook, etc. can be used in the pursuit of very serious goals
. - If a contradiction is noticed, it is kept secret, or.. – i have not seen a lot of examples of this (perhaps because it is harder to see things that are kept secret), but perhaps you know of examples? If so, please share in the comments below
. - Laborious efforts are made to explain an exception in terms that do not contradict the system – many of us will go to great lengths to explain the popularity of things like social media as a result of a rise in narcissistic tendencies, or anti-social impulses, because the existing thought style conceives of non-face-to-face interactions as impersonal, and also sees public sharing of ideas as something that is often reserved for public officials or “real” celebrities
. - Despite legitimate claims of contradictory views, one tends to see, describe, or illustrate circumstances that corroborate current views – in one email conversation between Ohio State doctoral student Aryn Karpinski and some colleagues at Indiana University, she stated emphatically that the popular media had skewed the results of her research to suggest that somehow Facebook actually contributes to lower grades in college students. MSNBC’s headline, for example, read “Facebook use can lower grades by 20 percent, study says,” a claim that was not evident in any way from the study.
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