The New Paradigm Approach
The New Paradigm approach has a number of characteristics:
 | New Paradigm consultants treat organisations as complex systems, similar in many ways to living organisms. Traditional consultants, on the other hand, tends to look at organisations as machines. |
| New Paradigm consultants see themselves as working with clients to help them bring about change within organisations from the middle out. Traditional consultants more often act as if they were engineers, bringing expert solutions from their 'tool kit' of processes and procedures. |
| Because the new paradigm is holistic we are concerned with helping to bring the whole person to work. We believe that people will be more creative if they are not required to leave parts of their lives at home because some feelings are not 'appropriate' at work. Nothing is taboo—if it is appropriate to speak of emotions or love or spirituality in the workplace then we will (if it isn't, then we won't). New Paradigm consultants believe that people work better and more flexibly if they are acknowledged and respected. Traditional consultants often act as if people were simply rational economic units to be utilised or bribed or discarded. |
New Paradigm consultancy is different for clients too. In fact, in some ways it may seem more difficult. Traditional consultancy offers reassurance ("Trust me, I'm a consultant...") together with apparently well-researched approaches to bring change to your organisation. Of course, everyone knows that the vast majority of change programmes fail to deliver anything like the promised outcomes (most of them are never completed) yet somehow people carry on with them because there seems no alternative.
New Paradigm consultants offer an alternative. We know that change programmes often run aground because people fail to buy in. So we offer approaches which build involvement and consensus. We know that organisations are complex and that it is impossible to predict the outcome of change programmes. So we work in different ways, using insights from the developing theories of complex systems being developed in a wide range of disciplines including physics, biology and the life sciences. (See Culture & Complexity and Emergence in Organisations for an example of this approach.)We also believe that it is the relationships between people which are key to organisational performance. Working to help people connect better—that is, more richly and creatively—is the key to bringing about organisational change, adaptation and improvement. (The Soft Edge notes give some indication of our thinking in this area.)