Now, a paradigm is something very important, and I will explain it in different ways. Your paradigm is the way you perceive the world. All in all, it is for you the same as water for fish. The fish do not know that it is in the water until it is removed from it.
Adam Smith also defined it this way: "The paradigm explains us how the world is and helps us predict its behavior."
Let's exemplify some paradigms.
- In Alaska native societies, the first night the visitor has to sleep with the woman of the amphitheater. Rejecting this invitation is considered an offense. "Do you find my death ugly? Are you afraid that I will get some disease?" Would say the native. But looking into the eyes of a woman in some Arab countries is considered a crime. So, what is the correct attitude? It depends on your paradigm.
- The citizens of ancient Rome when they went to dinner at someone's house and ate chicken pulled the bones backwards, and with that gesture they implied that their host was rich enough to have servants to clean the place. If we did it today, they would take us for crazy.
- Without going so far, in the United States, at sixteen the children of rich people have already had some employment, either at a gas station or as valets at any job, a situation that would be considered absurd in other countries. The American learns very soon to change paradigm, to be versatile. On average, he will change his profession five times during his life. And it will change city on thirteen occasions. That makes me think differently.
The knowledge of the paradigms is fundamental in the business world.
In 1979, the Swiss dominated the Watch Market, as they billed 90 percent of what was sold around the world. One day, a technician from one of the largest watchmaking companies in Switzerland presented his boss with a new model he had just invented: The electronic clock. The boss observed the prototype and said: "This is not a clock, it is not wound, it does not have springs or rubies". And then the Japanese and the Americans seized the market with the launch of the electronic clock.
What matters is not what happens to you, but the way you perceive it.
The Swiss went from having 90% of the market to only 15%. In just 3 years 50,000 workers lost their jobs in the Swiss watch industry. And the paradox is that the inventor of the quartz watch was Swiss. The problem is that when the paradigm changes, the previous knowledge is equated to zero: all the technology learned for years in the construction of mechanical watches did not serve much to produce the new watches. That's why it's so hard to change.
The moment we understand how to interpret paradigms, we can change our perception of the world.
In the following figure we present a problem:
It is about joining the nine points with four straight lines without lifting the pencil from the paper and without going through the same point twice. Try it, but you will not succeed unless you change the paradigm.
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Ah, but you have left the square !, you will say, but what square? Who told you that you could not leave the square? That is your paradigm. If we transfer this example to the business environment, the following situation occurs: I have to solve nine problems in four hours. Oh no! that's impossible. What if there were eleven problems? Well, yes. We can solve eleven problems, because the paradigm has changed. Paradoxical, right? The universe is paradoxical!.
When the paradigm changes, the possibilities multiply.
The problem is that people live within paradigms without knowing that they exist. It's like the fish in the water, as we said before. He only perceives that he lives inside the water when they take it out of it.
